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The lectures on this podcast are organized by university students at Temistic Institute chapters around the world.

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So, like any talk I give, it's not on the main philosopher I study, Elizabeth Anscom.

I'm going to start by talking about Elizabeth Anscombe, who has a very famous paper.

She published in the 1950s called Modern Moral Philosophy,

in which she wants to encourage a revitalization of a certain both Aristotelian and Tomistic

approach to moral philosophy over and against what she saw as the dominant strains of ethical

thought that had become prominent in really the philosophy of ethical work as it developed

in the UK since Sidrick. And one really distinctive thing, she thought, was the way in which

this new approach to ethics denied the existence of what we might call moral absolutes,

denied that there is any type of action, whether that be lying or theft or the intentional

killing of the innocent, which are simply in virtue of the kind of action it is, absolutely ruled

off, ruled out as a possible action, wrong, no matter what the consequences would be. She contrasted

this with what she regarded as

consequentialism, a term that has somewhat drifted in meaning since she coined it originally in the

50s, but that essentially involves the claim that an action could, no matter what the nature

of the action is, be justified if the consequences were serious enough. Now, to give you a sense for how this has continued,

even to today, a contemporary Deontologist whose work is quite good, Seth Lozor, he's out in Australia

right now, he published a recent article in which he explains his choice for not discussing

absolutist theories of deontology, and he says, I know of only one deontological philosopher working on ethics of harm who professed to be an absolutist.

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