Virtue, Moral knowledge and ‘Connaturality’ - An illuminating notion or an obscure and confused idea

John Haldane (Baylor University, University of St. Andrews)

Famously in ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ Anscombe proposed an alternative to familiar consequentialist and deontological theories suggesting that we would do better to return to an ethics of virtue. In MMP, however, she did not obviously engage issues to do with the ontology and epistemology of ethics. But there are hints in other pieces of a distinctive kind of knowledge of good and bad which she sometimes speaks of as ‘mystical’. In posthumously published writings this matter becomes more apparent where she discusses ‘knowledge by connaturality’. She refers in this connection to Aquinas. He draws a distinction between two kinds of knowledge: that got through theoretical, discursive, inferential reasoning (‘per modum cognitionis’ or ‘per rationis inquisitionem’) and that acquired through experiential awareness (per notitia experimentalis). What she says is somewhat obscure (and confused) but the issue connects interestingly with John McDowell’s discussion of virtue-knowledge (eg in ‘Virtue and Reason’). I will explain and discuss these matters raising the question are what they (Anscombe, Aquinas and McDowell) offer illuminating notions or obscure and confused ideas?