Elizabeth Anscombe and the Difference Between What You Do and What You Foresee

A protest about a degree

In 1956, Oxford awarded an honorary degree to former U.S. president Harry Truman. Elizabeth Anscombe, a philosopher at the university, protested. Her objection was not that Truman had made a costly decision during a war. It was that the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki had deliberately killed civilians, and that no calculation of lives saved could make such killing permissible. She set out her case in a pamphlet called Mr Truman’s Degree.

That protest is often remembered as a display of moral certainty. It was also an argument about intention: what a person chooses to do, as distinct from what they know will happen. Anscombe thought that distinction was indispensable to ethics. Without it, we cannot adequately describe the action we are trying to judge.

What counts as an intentional act?

In her 1957 book Intention, Anscombe asks us to pay attention to the descriptions under which an action is intentional. Someone turning a tap may know they are filling a kettle. They may not know that a damaged pipe is also flooding the room below. Both events follow from their movement; only one is what they are doing intentionally.

The difference cannot always be found by looking at the movement itself. We ask why the person acted, what they knew, and how the result figured in their plan. “Why?” is not merely a request for a cause, like asking why a window cracked. It can be a request for the agent’s reason: the purpose that makes this movement intelligible as an action.

This does not mean people can choose an innocent-sounding description and escape responsibility. A person who puts poison in someone’s drink cannot insist that they intended only to pour a liquid. Anscombe’s point is that an act may have several true descriptions, and we need to establish which of them the agent knowingly acted under.

Intended harm and foreseen harm

Consider two attacks on a military target. In one, the attackers aim to destroy the target while knowing that nearby civilians may die. In the other, they aim to kill civilians in order to frighten an enemy into surrendering. The civilian deaths matter morally in both cases. But in the second, those deaths are part of the chosen means; in the first, they are a foreseen consequence of the chosen means.

That distinction does not automatically excuse the first attack. The risk might be reckless, the target insignificant, or another course available. Nor does it make intention easy to identify. A person’s stated aim may conceal the role that a harmful outcome actually plays in their plan. The distinction asks a demanding question rather than supplying a convenient defence: what must happen for this plan to succeed as planned?

For Anscombe, deliberately killing innocent people could not be justified by pointing to a desirable result. Her argument against honouring Truman rested on her judgment that civilian deaths in the atomic bombings were not merely an unwanted effect. They were part of the means chosen to force an end to the war. Readers may dispute that account or her absolute prohibition, but neither dispute can be settled by noting that the war ended.

Why consequences were not enough

Anscombe gave a name to a tendency she opposed: “consequentialism.” In her influential 1958 essay Modern Moral Philosophy, she criticised the view that an action’s rightness can be settled by comparing its expected results with those of the alternatives. On such an account, she argued, there may be no kind of act one must refuse to perform, whatever benefits it promises.

Her challenge was not that consequences are irrelevant. They help explain why we act, what risks we impose, and whether our plans are reasonable. Her objection was to treating them as a complete moral account. If intentionally killing a civilian and risking a civilian’s death in an attack on another target can be described simply as two ways of producing outcomes, a morally important difference has disappeared before deliberation begins.

Anscombe also thought modern philosophers had inherited talk of moral “obligation” from a conception of divine law they no longer shared. She urged them to investigate concepts such as intention, justice and human flourishing rather than assume that familiar words already gave them a sound ethical theory. Secular philosophers need not accept her diagnosis; they can offer other accounts of obligation. But her insistence on examining the concepts used in moral judgments remains difficult to dismiss.

An argument that resists easy use

There is a danger in making the intended–foreseen distinction too neat. In war, medicine and public policy, decision-makers often know precisely who is likely to be harmed. Saying that harm was “not intended” cannot erase that knowledge. Nor can a good intention make a bad decision harmless. Anscombe’s work requires scrutiny of an agent’s plan, not deference to an agent’s preferred account of it.

The reverse danger is to collapse everything a person foresees into everything they intend. If a surgeon knows an operation will cause pain, it does not follow that causing pain is the purpose of the operation. The pain still calls for justification and mitigation. But treating it as identical to the surgeon’s aim makes it harder to explain either the procedure or the obligation to reduce its harm.

Anscombe was unusual in bringing this exacting analysis of action to a public controversy over state violence. Her philosophical work did not make the Oxford protest an eccentric interruption of an otherwise abstract career. The protest put a question from that work under pressure: when someone claims to have acted for a good end, what, exactly, did they choose to do to reach it?

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