Elizabeth Anscombe - Renaissance or Back to the Dark Ages?

G.E.M. Anscombe, friend and executor of Ludwig Wittgenstein, and outspoken Catholic moraliser, is having a renaissance in the U.S. Anscombe famously opposed homosexual acts and a whole range of other common sexual practices because they were 'unapt for generation'. Well, apart from the fact that Elton John may have produced a counterexample, her moral standpoint is pretty ridiculous. Let's hope her followers focus on her work on intention rather than her moralising. Read more...

Comments

[Joseph Yarbrough]

Could your introduction of this article be more negative? The nomenclature is, I believe, "Middle Ages", unless one needs be pejorative. "Moraliser"? I believe one says "ethicist" unless one means to say she was a scold with whom we disagree. And you're honestly citing Elton John as a counterexample to the "view" that homosexual acts are unapt for reproduction?! I could see one saying many things about Sir Elton, but not that he had managed, for the first time in the history of the species, to reproduce with a male.

[Nigel Warburton]

I don't think Elton John has revealed the nature of the sexual act that led to his son's conception, nor who the genetic father is, but it is not impossible that the mode of sperm extraction involved his male partner (and, of course, eventually, the surrogate mother).

Nigel

[Joseph Yarbrough]

Either you should say that Anscombe's view was discredited long ago (and so the remark here is otiose) because, by the same means as Sir Elton's baby, a man masturbating all by himself can reproduce or else agree that Elton's baby is not a counter-example to the sort of thing Anscombe had in mind when she spoke of a (homo)sexual act.