ETHICS Elizabeth Anscombe and Peter Geach, the most intellectually formidable philosophical couple of the twentieth century special feeling in these contexts It is as if the notion ‘criminal’ were to remain when criminal law and criminal courts had been abolished and forgotten (ERP 30) It is true, as philosophers have said since Hume, that one cannot infer an ‘ought’—a moral ‘ought’—from an ‘is’; but that is because this ‘ought’ has become a word of mere mesmeric force, once the notion of a divine lawgiver has been dropped The most significant practical result of this, Anscombe maintained, is that philosophers have all become consequentialists, believing that the right action is the one with the best possible consequences Every one of the best-known English academic ethicists ‘has put out a philosophy 247