Anscombe Invented a Word to Win an Argument

G.E.M. Anscombe published 'Modern Moral Philosophy' in the journal Philosophy in January 1958, and the paper introduced the word consequentialism into the philosophical vocabulary. She did not mean it as a compliment.

Anscombe's argument was that any moral theory which judges acts solely by their consequences is incoherent — not just wrong, but built on a category error. She traced the problem to modern philosophers who had abandoned the concept of moral law while keeping the vocabulary of moral obligation. Without a lawgiver, she argued, words like 'ought' and 'duty' become empty shells. The consequence-focused theories she criticized were, in her reading, the residue of Christian ethics after God had been removed from the picture.

She coined 'consequentialism' to name this cluster of views she found philosophically confused. The term was a diagnosis, not a description a proponent would choose.

What happened next is one of philosophy's more ironic outcomes: the philosophers she was attacking adopted the word themselves. Utilitarians and their allies found 'consequentialism' a perfectly serviceable label. It had precision, it captured the family resemblance between related theories, and it gave a clean target for debate. Within two decades the term was standard in every ethics textbook, carried with no hint of the polemical weight Anscombe had given it.

Anscombe herself was a devout Thomist Catholic who believed ethics needed to be rebuilt around virtue and practical reason. Her 1958 paper is now considered foundational to the revival of virtue ethics in analytic philosophy — which means the woman who named consequentialism is also partly responsible for its most persistent rival.