The woman who bested C.S. Lewis in an Oxford debate

And C.S. Lewis changed his mind. Her 105th birthday is coming up.

March 18 will be the 105th birthday of the Irish moral philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe of Oxford, a staunch Catholic who famously debated C.S. Lewis and managed to get him to rethink his ideas on miracles. She also famously defended the view that the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were intrinsically evil as they were attacks on noncombatants.

“For men to choose to kill the innocent as a means to their ends is always murder, and murder is one of the worst of human actions ... In the bombing of [Hiroshima and Nagasaki] it was certainly decided to kill the innocent as a means to an end. And a very large number of them, all at once, without warning, without the interstices of escape or the chance to take shelter, which existed even in the ‘area bombings’ of the German cities [which, incidentally, Anscombe also condemned].”

In effect, she accused Pres. Harry Truman of committing mass murder. In opposing Oxford’s decision to grant Truman a degree, she argued “If you do give this honor,” she asked rhetorically, “what Nero, what Genghis Khan, what Hitler, or what Stalin will not be honored in the future?” As a Catholic and a Thomist, Anscombe vehemently opposed much of the consequentialism many take for granted today. Indeed, she would have pointed out that the logic employed by the US in the mass destruction of noncombatants is the same logic that terrorists use today. Anscombe was not a pacifist. However she defended the idea that there are moral rules that must govern the conduct of war in order to avoid injustice. Much of her thinking on the morality of human actions and the importance of intention have shaped Catholic moral philosophy today.

(From a Facebook post by Michael Valenzuela Fsc)

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