ETHICS and predicative terms In the case of a predicative term like ‘red’ one can know what it is for an X to be red without knowing what an X is The case is not the same with attributive terms like ‘large’ or ‘false’ ‘Good’ and ‘bad’, Geach says, are always attributive, not predicative If we say of an individual A that he is good simpliciter, we really mean that he is a good man, and if we call some behaviour good, we mean that it is a good human action It is therefore folly to look for some property called goodness, or some activity called commending, which is always present when we call something good In ‘Assertion’ (1965) Geach showed that the meaning of ‘good’ could not be explained in terms of commendation, because in many contexts we use it without any intention of commending ‘Good’ can be predicated, for instance, in if-clauses Someone who says ‘If contraception is a good thing, then free distribution of condoms is a good thing’ need not be commending either contraception or the free distribution of condoms Of course, ‘good’ may on occasion be used to commend, but this does not mean that its primary meaning is not descriptive Geach’s wife, Elizabeth Anscombe, wrote an influential paper in 1958, ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ This was a frontal attack not only on Hare but on the whole of Anglophone moral philosophy since the time of Sidgwick Its first paragraph proclaims a resounding thesis: The concepts of obligation and duty—moral obligation and moral duty, that is to say—and of what is morally right and wrong, and of the moral sense of ‘ought’, ought to be jettisoned if this is psychologically possible; because they are survivals, or derivatives of survivals, from an earlier conception of ethics which no longer generally survives, and are only harmful without it (ERP 26) Aristotle has much to say about the virtues and vices, but he has no concept answering to our term ‘moral’ It was Christianity, taking its moral notions from the Torah, that introduced a law conception of ethics Conformity to the virtues and avoidance of the vices henceforth became a requirement of divine law Naturally it is not possible to have such a conception unless you believe in God as a lawgiver; like Jews, Stoics and Christians But if such a conception is dominant for many centuries, and then is given up, it is a natural result that the concepts of ‘obligation’, of being bound or required as by a law, should remain though they had lost their root; and if the word ‘ought’ has become invested in certain contexts with the sense of ‘obligation’, it too will remain to be spoken with a special emphasis and a 246