Practical Truth, Ethical Naturalism, and the Constitution of Agency in Anscombe’s Ethics
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Abstract This chapter argues that Anscombe’s moral philosophy can be understood as an Aristotelian version of constitutivism, according to which ethical norms are norms that are constitutive of human action and enable us to enact our flourishing. On Anscombe’s views, someone who acts well normally brings it about that they make some things true of what they are doing, including making it true that they are acting well. This requires having the virtues and a true conception of what it is to act well. The virtues enable the virtuous agent to correctly construe situations and structure their appetites such that they are not impeded in acting well. A fully committed vicious agent may have a harmonious psychology, but they will still be impeded in their agency, Anscombe holds, through not being able to make it true that they are acting well. The chapter argues that Anscombe’s commitments enable her to respond to objections recently raised to the very idea of an Aristotelian constitutivism by Christine Korsgaard.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.004 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.004 | 0.034 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.006 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.005 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".