I am no scholar of Elizabeth Anscombe, but I really enjoy her 1958 essay “Modern Moral Philosophy.” There’s so much rich provocation in her thesis that:

…it is not profitable for us at present to do moral philosophy; that should be laid aside at any rate until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking.

— “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophy 33:14, January 1958

What makes this such a great provocation is that it tees up one of my own interests, which she treats as a second thesis but really seems logically to precede the first: we ought to jettison the language of obligation, duty, and “ought” from our moral lives, because they have a metaphysical and theological root that we don’t really share, and provide instead a psychological foundation for morality. (For a good accessible introduction to Anscombe’s argument, see this overview.)

It does seem true that there is a great deal of baggage in the ways that we think about moral life that is a holdover from a medieval Christian worldview. If we are no longer entirely devoted to that worldview then we need to provide a new framework. In large part the debate about free will and determinism is still infected by anxieties from Christian theology about predestination, sin, and salvation. The concepts of “ought” and “may” are imbued with a sense of a “moral law” set down by a “moral sovereign:” a world-authoring deity who has the authority to command us. At the same time, many other cultures without a Christian worldview nonetheless seem to have a concept of obligation or duty.

Modern secular moral frameworks can at least superficially look like they require a divine juridical concept of a sovereign legislator and judge with the power to punish those who transgress His law with tortures and confinements. The divine throne is empty, but it holds the structure together. That image deserves a second look: an entire civilization organized around an absent authority, unable to either fill the seat or dismantle it. What goes in its place varies. The contractarian just-so story is that in a democracy every citizen is a co-legislator and co-executive guided by his or her own reason and moral common sense. But of course, some views predominate, and one candidate for replacing the entire worldview of Christian theology is psychology, the scientific study of the human mind.

Anglo-American secular moral philosophers are also deeply Christian, and Western, in ways that become clearer when you study Chinese, Indian, African, and ancient Greek philosophy. Because the standard way to ask the questions of moral philosophy is “What should I do?”, the answers tend to focus on the intentions behind your action or the consequences of it. But then they strip out the eternal soul and its afterlife, they strip out the omniscient solution to Plato’s invisibility ring, they remove the easy Thomistic mapping between natural law, moral law, and human law, and they leave us wondering if our own minds can even be trusted to correctly report “what we should do.” The “law conception of ethics” doesn’t work so well when you get rid of the legislators, the judge and jury, and the punishments too. “Conscience” and “guilt” seem weak without all that: the Western moral framework has replaced God the loving and vengeful Father with Jiminy Cricket, a cartoon character from a Disney movie about a puppet that comes to life.

The Standard Alternatives Don’t Work

Anscombe takes these problems up in a kind of speedy frustration, finding each one wanting for our current era. Her particular disdain for Kant’s account of maxims is I think especially important: Kantian morality is almost incomprehensible once you realize that as “strangers to ourselves” we very rarely know what we are doing, and so we very rarely can be sure of what principle we are acting upon, and then know further whether it could coherently be universalized. The secular modern thinker is left asking what it would mean to have a moral version of mens rea when we also know that we are psychologically prone to self-justification, backdating judgments, and ignorance of our own true intentions.

But Anscombe’s retreat to virtue is also instructive, given what we have learned since 1958 about the weaknesses of personality psychology and the dominant nature of context and circumstance over persistent character traits. We know that few people are particularly predictable over time and circumstances, and that often the most decisive predictor of our behavior is our environment, not our carefully cultivated goodness.

The Aristotelian conception of character and virtue seemed to suggest that it was not something that everyone could aspire to: that through bad luck, immoderation, cowardice, and bad judgment we would mostly all fail to find the right role models, practice hard, overcome adversity, and choose the right goals for ourselves. This has often seemed unfair to people raised on democratic and egalitarian values, and so modern American stories about “character” and “grit” and “resilience” all ignore luck and the contextual factors that make the cultivation of character in Aristotle’s sense possible. It’s not remarkable when you think about it, but the major virtue theorists have tended to be aristocrats, and they have tended to be focused on how the wealthy and powerful can teach their children the things they need to know to wield inherited privilege sustainably. (This seems as true of Confucius as it does of Aristotle.)

Community, Institutions, and the Question That Won’t Go Away

I choose to derive a different lesson from the psychological research: community matters. Family matters. Institutions matter. We know from all sorts of histories and psychological research that if those groups are cruel, or racist, or genocidal, then we are likely to be cruel, racist, and genocidal too. So getting the institutions right matters.

But from whence comes this “getting it right”? Have I smuggled in a bit of “what should we do?” from the outdated moral philosophy of a more Christian era? Perhaps. The question is whether psychology, on its own terms, can supply what the old moral frameworks supplied, or whether it just smuggles the same furniture back in under new names.

Psychology’s Trinity

If Anscombe is right about our need for a moral framework that is written anew with an eye on the philosophy of psychology, then it behooves us to think clearly about the undergirding of that discipline. What are the concepts and ideas that psychology substitutes for God, and sin, and the divine law?

I think there are three, and the theological parallels are not accidental:

Pathology and deviance replace sin. Where the Christian framework identified transgressions against divine law, psychology identifies deviations from statistical and functional norms. The sinner becomes the patient, the confessor becomes the therapist, and the threat of hellfire becomes the threat of institutional confinement and social exclusion. The structure is the same: there is a standard you must meet, and failure to meet it exposes you to coercive consequences.

Happiness and autonomy replace salvation. Where the Christian framework promised beatitude as the ultimate end of a rightly ordered life, psychology promises subjective well-being and self-determination. Self-reported life satisfaction stands in for the state of grace, and the therapeutic restoration of agency replaces the soul’s redemption. The good life is still the goal; we’ve just traded eternal bliss for a favorable score on the Satisfaction with Life Scale.

Biases and heuristics replace original sin. Where Christian theology held that we are fallen creatures whose nature is fundamentally corrupted, cognitive psychology holds that we are systematically irrational creatures whose judgment is fundamentally unreliable. We are strangers to ourselves, prone to self-deception, moved by forces we cannot see. The doctrine of total depravity becomes the doctrine of bounded rationality. In both cases, the conclusion is the same: you cannot trust yourself.

Each of these deserves scrutiny.

Pathology and Deviance

Without belaboring the arguments of Thomas Szasz, Michel Foucault, Ian Hacking, and the Mad Pride movement, the idea that deviations from the norm are treatable conditions rather than the result of human diversity has to be the single most important story in psychology over the twentieth century. The confinement of millions of “deviants” (literally those who deviate from norms) or “misfits” (literally those who do not fit properly in their economic and social role) is a story of human suffering that continues, in altered and criminological form, to this day. Just as right and wrong once derived their authority from God’s threat of hellfire, mental illness and pathology derive their real meaning and stigma from the threat of institutional confinement and social and economic exclusion.

The idea that there are still places where teenagers are locked up and “treated” for their deviant behavior, so long as the parents approve, fills me with dread and outrage. The fact that we don’t always confine the mentally ill but we have a series of social practices that exclude and demean them fills me with rage. This is not a post about my feelings, but it is a post about whether we might have become too comfortable with the common sense view that having distinctive psychological features marks one out as different and potentially justifies treatment and mistreatment with varying levels of consent. The fact that we internalize these norms and effectively stigmatize what makes us special worries me in much the same way: those judged abnormal can now find relative respite in the “normal” world if they’re willing to build themselves an asylum in their heads. Perhaps this is provocative, but I think it is also true.

Happiness and Autonomy

Here’s a simple reductio: positive psychologists study happiness through self-reporting. If we have any reason to think people are not particularly insightful into their own mental states, the whole edifice wobbles. And we have many such reasons. Anscombe’s discussion of the incoherence of the conception of pleasure is roughly parallel, but the quickest way to see the problem is this: if our goal is to increase pleasure and happiness, why are we so worried about the addictive drugs that seem to target pleasure directly? The answer we give is that we care about autonomy, not just pleasure; that psychologists want to restore the agency their addicted clients have lost. But we are less likely to endorse the second-order volitions (the desires they want to have) of someone who has different values than us, and the state still reserves massive coercive power for drug users whose pursuit of happiness takes unapproved forms. (Research on the “true self” confirms this: we attribute authenticity to the desires we approve of and treat the rest as alien impulses.) Our conceptions of agency and freedom aren’t coherent enough to bear the weight psychology places on them.

Biases and Heuristics

So then we are thrown back on the more fundamental thought that people are strangers to themselves: that while we often know what we are doing, and can be forced to give reasons for it, those reasons are often not the true reason, and in any case we do not know what it is that what we are doing does, what effects it predictably has beyond the ones we’re willing to own. The modern heuristics and biases literature under Kahneman and Tversky has been fascinating and important, but it owes a great deal to the older Freudian theories of the Unconscious and its drives, and it leaves much in Freud and Jung that we should perhaps excavate again.

What Remains

After we have imbibed the suspicion of humanity’s self-justifying psychology, what is left? How can we continue our practices of praise and blame, reward and punishment, befriending and shunning, loving and parenting and choosing, if we don’t have a principle to guide us, a reason to trust our guts, or a divine guide to shine a light on our sinful nature and lead us out of the darkness of doubt?

The goal of moral philosophy should perhaps become to provide a framework for our moral lives that is structured around soul-searching, storytelling, and individual encounters with normativity. When we start with our practices and let the metaethical concepts bubble up from those, we’ll encounter vestiges of religious and legal traditions, but we’ll also realize:

Our moral lives are not generally organized hierarchically, from the bottom up or the top down, with some grand principle at the base or some supreme authority at the pinnacle.

Our moral lives are assembled out of the lessons we have learned and the projects we have set for ourselves given the people we have loved and respected and the communities of which we are loyal members. (I’ve written elsewhere about how prejudices function as crystallized judgments in this sense: heuristic instruments for living in a world whose every relevant detail cannot be fully known in advance.)

Given all the evidence that principles can be ignored or perverted, what ends up mattering for moral life is whose name you put in that familiar bumper-sticker, “What would Jesus do?” It’s odd that there is so little moral philosophical attention to our paragons of virtue and goodness, since they play such a big role in our actual moral lives. We might ask this a bunch of different ways: Whose approval are we explicitly or hypothetically seeking? Whose life story are we trying to emulate? Who are the Disney villains we’re trying to avoid becoming, and what is their signature vice?

The Existentialist Inheritance

These questions point toward a tradition that took the empty throne seriously and refused to pretend it could be refilled. The existentialists understood that once you strip away the divine legislator, you don’t get a tidier secular version of the same system. You get radical freedom, and with it the vertigo of choosing who to become without cosmic authorization.

This is where the three psychological substitutes fail most clearly. Pathology, happiness, and cognitive bias are all ways of avoiding the confrontation with freedom that the death of God actually demands. They replace one set of external authorities with another: the clinician, the well-being researcher, the behavioral economist. The empty throne stays furnished.

Existentialism, for all its mid-century baggage, got something right that neither Anscombe’s Aristotelian revival nor the psychological establishment has adequately addressed: the moral weight falls on the individual’s encounter with meaning, and that encounter cannot be delegated to any science. The search for meaning, the liberatory possibilities of art and narrative, the oppressive structures of modern life under capitalism and bureaucracies, the opportunities and crushed hopes for revolutionary change: these are the conditions under which we actually form our moral lives. Psychology can describe some of these dynamics, but it cannot prescribe our response to them.

The question I started with was Anscombe’s: can we do moral philosophy without first having an adequate philosophy of psychology? I want to end with a related but different question. Once we have that philosophy of psychology, and we see clearly what it can and cannot do, what then? The existentialists thought we would need to confront freedom, absurdity, and the irreducible responsibility of choosing. The paragons and role models, the stories we tell about who we are and want to become, the communities whose approval we seek: these are not substitutes for moral philosophy. They are its proper subject matter, once we stop pretending that the throne was ever occupied.