Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays (St Andrews Studies in Philosophy and Public Affairs)

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This is an excellent edition. It assemble texts that can't be found in other known books from the same author

This collection of essays by Anscombe covers human life, action, moral philosophy, and applied ethics. In the section on human life, the essay "Analytical Philosophy and the Spirituality of Man" features her property dualism. She points out that no activity of any bodily part is thought. Yet, nor has anyone observed thought being a bodily activity. Thinking about concepts is not a physical activity but of mental manipulation. In "Human Essence", Anscombe suggests that human essence as expressed by language comes from thinking humans that use language. What made such intelligent human beings that use language must be intelligent being(s) but not humans to avoid infinite regress of explanation. In "Were you a zygote" it is an interesting essay that suggests a zygote can be a human substance without being a human. A human being is a different substance than a zygote. This distinction offers a human life to manifest as different substances in different phases, and each regime is a different life. I don't know if she realises the implication of this approach in personal identity. In the second section of the collection, they are essays on action by first considering Chisholm on agent causation. In that essay, Anscombe answers Chisholm's question of what is left over if we subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm. It would be I undertook to make my arm go up. But that undertaking is not identical to physiological activities in the arm. Hence there must be some agent causality that is not even-event causality. In the "Causation of Action", Anscombe suggests the causal histories of human dealings at a macroscopic level is not determined by any specific chain of microscopic events. So it is a view against any radical physical determinism that affects human actions. In the third section, it is a collection on ethics or moral philosophy. It includes Anscombe influential essay "Modern Moral Philosophy" which jump started modern analytic moral philosophy. In this essay, she suggested it was not profitable to do moral philosophy at the time without a proper understanding of philosophy of psychology and the concepts of moral obligation and duty. She offered a survey of different understanding of obligation or the notion of ought, to include ought as the need or good for something, e.g., plants need water; as law like obligation as in divine command theory; as contractual obligation, as norm in a human being with proper virtues for action (virtue theory) , and as obligation to do what is just. This essay is a lucidly written analysis of these notions of obligation and their relations. In "Good and Bad Human Action", Anscombe develops further her view on action as it applies to moral action. She suggests a moral action is voluntary and is a morally good or bad action qua human action that was good or bad to exercise some virtue or vice. It is to be distinguished from a mere action by a human that has no moral intent or just accidentally produce some good or bad effects. This is foundational essay for presenting moral acts. In "Action, Intention, the Double effect", Anscombe raises the importance of an action under different descriptions. For her, something is good if it is good by being good in every respect (or description), bad by being bad in any of the human action. So badness resulted from accidental action is not human action since it is involuntary, and the act was not human action. This reasoning applies to the double effect according to which prohibition against bad action does not cover harm as a side or double effect. There is also an essay on the definition of murder which suggests the wrong ness of murder cannot just be from a legal provision but from murder as wrong qua the nature of the action. This collection is a useful collection to understand Anscombe moral philosophy and includes some hard to find essays on her views applying to specific issues

The choice of essays in this collection is very good. It's comprehensive, and many of the pieces were previously published in journals or proceedings that are not widely accessible, so it's great to have these more easily accessible. Moreover, the pieces themselves are of great quality. The book, qua collection of essays, is excellent (and would get a five star rating). The book, qua kindle book, however, is terrible (and this is what the 1-star rating reflects). Not only are there no "real page numbers," but there isn't even a proper table of contents. The Kindle book's tables of contents consists of links to the Preface, Index and the three major divisions that occur in the book. That is, the Table of Contents does not contain a link (and does not even list) the individual chapters within the major three divisions, which is obviously the whole point of a table of contents. Some of the producers of Kindle books who cut the corners by not including a proper Table of Contents - e.g. those who produced the Kindle Book for Michael Thompson's Life and Action or the Hornsby edited collection Essays on Anscombe's Intention (both of which you can compare with, e.g. Peter Watson's Ideas: A history, which has been produced correctly) - aim to placate readers with a surrogate, namely, a page you can navigate to which contains an in-text link to the various chapters. This is poor practice, frustrating for (and insulting to) the reader, but it at least gives you a (second rate) way to navigate to each individual sections. The producers of this Kindle book have not even done that. So you have no way at all to navigate directly to each chapter of the book other than by searching for the title (which usually produces many hits, and anyway, is slow), or by page flipping. (It is a great shame to indirectly tarnish Anscombe's work with this 1-star rating, but as Amazon provide no way to comment separately on the quality of production of Kindle books, there is little else that can be done. I offer it as a warning to other Kindle owners, and in the hope that the producers of the book will take note and update the book, at which point I will replace it with a review which contains that 5-star rating that Anscombe's work merits.).