Thinking About What We're Doing: The Philosophy of G.E.M. Anscombe

Imagine you’re in the lunchroom at school. Someone spills their tray, and a friend says, “I didn’t mean to do that.” But another kid across the table whispers, “Yeah, right. They totally did it on purpose.” How do you tell the difference between something someone does on purpose and something that just happens? And does it actually matter?

Now imagine something bigger. A president signs a piece of paper, and thousands of people who weren’t soldiers die in an explosion. Did the president kill them? Was that murder? What if he didn’t want them to die, but he knew they would? Does that change anything?

These are the kinds of questions that obsessed a philosopher named Elizabeth Anscombe. She lived from 1919 to 2001, and she had a habit of asking uncomfortable questions that other people preferred to avoid. She publicly called Harry Truman a murderer for dropping atomic bombs on Hiroshima and Nagasaki. She got arrested for protesting at abortion clinics. She once wrote a paper that, according to some accounts, completely crushed C.S. Lewis in a debate. She was a Catholic who smoked cigars and wore pants when women were expected to wear dresses. She was, in short, not someone who let other people tell her what to think.

But her real legacy isn’t just her controversial opinions. It’s the work she did trying to understand something deceptively simple: what does it mean to do something intentionally?

The Puzzle of Intention

Here’s a strange thing philosophers noticed. You can describe the same action in many different ways, and whether you’re doing it intentionally depends on which description you pick.

Suppose you’re at a water pump, moving your arm up and down. You’re also pumping water. You’re also providing water to the house. You’re also annoying the neighbor who wanted to use the well. You’re also making a funny shadow on the wall behind you. Now: which of these are you doing on purpose?

Probably you’re pumping water on purpose. You’re moving your arm on purpose. You might be providing water to the house on purpose. But are you annoying the neighbor on purpose? Maybe not. Making that shadow? Almost certainly not.

But here’s the weird thing: it’s the same arm movement in all cases. The physical event is identical. What makes some descriptions “intentional” and others not?

Anscombe thought this question was urgent, not just as an abstract puzzle but because real moral questions hang on it. If a bomber pilot says “I didn’t intend to kill civilians — I just intended to destroy the factory,” is that a real distinction or just an excuse? If a doctor gives a dying patient a huge dose of painkillers, knowing it will stop their heart, is that murder or not? It depends, Anscombe thought, on what’s really going on with intention.

How to Tell If Something Was Intentional

Anscombe had a clever method for figuring this out. Ask someone “Why are you doing that?” and pay attention to what they say.

Some answers show the action wasn’t intentional:

“I didn’t know I was doing that.” (If you’re tapping your foot and don’t realize it, you’re not tapping it intentionally.)
“I just noticed I was doing it.” (If you suddenly realize you’re humming a song, you weren’t humming it on purpose.)
“I have no idea why.” (If you’re scratching an itch, you might not have a reason.)

Other answers show it was intentional:

“To get water for the house.” (A future goal.)
“Out of curiosity.” (An interpretation of what you’re doing.)
“Because they started it.” (A reason involving something past.)

But the really interesting case is when someone answers “No reason.” Interestingly, Anscombe thought this could still be intentional. Sometimes you just do something for no reason at all — like wiggling your toes — and you still mean to do it.

Practical Knowledge

Here’s another clue. When you’re doing something intentionally, you usually know what you’re doing without having to observe yourself. You don’t need to look in a mirror to know you’re reading this article. You don’t need to check your reflection to know you’re scratching your nose. You just know.

This is different from how you know other things. You know it’s raining outside because you see the rain through the window. But you know you’re reading intentionally in a completely different way — not by observing, but from the inside. Anscombe called this “practical knowledge.” It’s the knowledge you have of what you’re doing, not because you noticed it happening, but because you’re the one making it happen.

This gets technical, but here’s what it accomplishes: it shows that intention isn’t just a mental event happening alongside your physical movements. It’s something that shows up in how you relate to what you’re doing. Your knowledge of your own actions is special — it’s the knowledge of someone who’s directing what happens, not just watching it unfold.

The Shopping List Example

To make this vivid, Anscombe gave a famous example. Imagine a man walking around with a shopping list. Now, there are two ways this list could work.

First way: his wife gave him the list. It’s an order. The list says what he should buy.

Second way: a detective is following him, writing down everything he buys. That list is a record. It says what he did buy.

Now, here’s the key: suppose there’s a mistake. The list says “butter” but the man bought margarine. Where’s the mistake?

If it’s his wife’s list (an order), the mistake is in what the man did. He bought the wrong thing. The list was right.

If it’s the detective’s list (a record), the mistake is in the list. The detective wrote down the wrong thing. The man bought margarine, so the detective should have written “margarine.”

Same words on the paper. Same event in the store. But the direction of the mistake flips depending on whether the paper is an intention or a record. This shows that intention has a special relationship to action: when you intend something and it doesn’t happen, the failure is in the action, not the intention.

The Big “No” to Truman

So why did all this matter to Anscombe? Because she thought her contemporaries had a dangerously confused picture of intention, and this confusion let them justify terrible things.

In 1956, Oxford University decided to give Harry Truman an honorary degree. Anscombe was furious. She wrote a pamphlet arguing that Truman was a murderer. Here was her reasoning:

The bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki killed tens of thousands of civilians — people who weren’t soldiers, who weren’t fighting. They were “innocent” in the relevant sense (not guilty of anything). Truman ordered the bombing in order to end the war quickly. He knew civilians would die. He chose to kill innocent people as a means to his end. And that, Anscombe said, is always murder.

Some people defended Truman by saying: “He didn’t really kill anyone. He just signed a piece of paper.” This sounds absurd, but it raises a real question: what counts as doing something? If you sign a paper that causes death, did you kill?

Other defenders said: “If that’s murder, then wouldn’t it also be murder to bomb enemy soldiers while they’re sleeping? They’re not harming anyone at that moment either.” This also sounds tricky, but Anscombe thought it missed the point. Soldiers are combatants; they’re part of the war effort. Civilians are not.

What really bothered Anscombe was a third kind of defense. Some people said the bombing wasn’t murder because Truman didn’t intend to kill civilians — he only intended to end the war. The civilian deaths were just an unfortunate side effect he foresaw but didn’t want.

This is where Anscombe’s work on intention comes in. She thought this defense was nonsense. If you bomb a city knowing civilians are there, and you do it in order to force surrender, then the civilian deaths aren’t just a side effect — they’re part of your plan. You’re using those deaths as leverage. The fact that you don’t like it doesn’t make it unintentional.

The Bomb in the Classroom

To see why this matters beyond war, think about a thought experiment some philosophers love. There’s a classroom of students, and a bomb is hidden somewhere. You’re the teacher. A student asks a question. If you answer it, the bomb will explode and kill everyone. If you refuse to answer, nothing happens. But the only way to save everyone is to kill one innocent person as a “warning” to the bomber — and then the bomber will disarm the bomb.

Most people have an intuition that killing one innocent person to save many is wrong, even if the consequences are terrible. But some philosophers (called consequentialists) say: of course you should kill the one. Their reasoning goes like this: you’re responsible for the deaths of the many if you don’t act, just as much as if you had killed them yourself. So you might as well kill the one and save the five.

Anscombe thought this reasoning depended on a mistake about intention and responsibility. Just because you can foresee that people will die doesn’t mean you’re intending their deaths. If you refuse to kill the innocent person, and the bomb goes off, did you kill those students? No. The bomber did. You didn’t intend their deaths; you just couldn’t prevent them. This distinction — between what you intend and what you merely foresee — was absolutely essential to Anscombe.

”Modern Moral Philosophy” — The Essay That Changed Everything

In 1958, Anscombe published a paper called “Modern Moral Philosophy” that basically told her fellow philosophers to stop what they were doing. It had three main claims:

First: doing moral philosophy is pointless until we understand psychology better. We don’t really know what actions are, what intention is, what wanting is, what pleasure is. How can we decide what’s right and wrong if we don’t even understand the basic building blocks?

Second: philosophers should stop using words like “morally right,” “morally wrong,” “moral obligation,” and “moral duty.” These words, she argued, only make sense if there’s a moral lawgiver — like God — who commands us. If you don’t believe in that, then talking about “moral obligation” is like talking about what’s “illegal” on a desert island with no laws. It’s empty.

Third: all the major English moral philosophers from Sidgwick onward basically agreed on the important point — that killing innocent people can sometimes be justified. Anscombe found this horrifying.

This paper basically invented a whole new approach to ethics called “virtue ethics,” though Anscombe herself didn’t develop it. She was too busy working on the philosophy of psychology she said we needed first.

The Puzzle of “I”

One of Anscombe’s most mind-bending papers was called “The First Person.” In it, she argued for something that sounds obviously false: the word “I” doesn’t refer to anything.

Think about it. When you say “I am hungry,” you seem to be referring to yourself. But how? You’re not referring to your body, because you could lose a limb and still be “I.” You’re not referring to your name, because someone could have the same name as you. You’re not referring to your memories, because you could lose your memory and still be you.

Descartes thought “I” referred to a thinking substance — a soul or mind separate from the body. But Anscombe didn’t believe in immaterial substances. So what’s left?

She argued that “I” doesn’t work like other referring words. When John Smith speaks of his brother James Robinson without knowing they’re related, he’s referring to James. But when John Smith speaks of himself, there’s something special going on — he can’t be mistaken about who he’s referring to. No one can say “I am hungry” and be wrong about who they mean.

This special immunity to error, Anscombe thought, shows that “I” isn’t really referring at all. It’s doing something else — maybe indicating a special kind of self-awareness without actually pointing to a thing.

This is still one of the most debated papers in philosophy. Even philosophers who love it aren’t sure they understand it. But it shows Anscombe at her most creative: taking something we take for granted and showing how strange it really is.

Why It Matters

Anscombe’s work doesn’t give you easy answers. But it changes how you think about questions you might have assumed were simple.

When you do something, what are you really doing? When you know what you’re doing, how do you know? When you say “I,” what do you mean? These aren’t just academic puzzles. They’re the background to every moral choice you’ll ever make.

The next time someone says “I didn’t mean to,” or “That wasn’t my intention,” or “It was an accident,” you might pause. What do those words actually mean? And does the person using them know what they’re talking about?

Anscombe thought most people didn’t — including many professional philosophers. She spent her whole life trying to figure it out, knowing she might never fully succeed. That’s what made her, in her own strange way, a model of intellectual honesty. She didn’t pretend to have answers she didn’t have. She just kept asking better questions.

Key Terms

Term	What it does in this debate
Intention	Picks out which descriptions of an action are done on purpose, as opposed to what merely happens or is accidental
Practical knowledge	The special kind of knowledge you have of your own intentional actions — you know what you’re doing without observing yourself
Consequentialism	A view Anscombe rejected, which says you’re equally responsible for what you intend and what you merely foresee as a side effect
Intentional object	What you’re perceiving or aiming at under a particular description — which may or may not actually exist materially
Moral obligation	A concept Anscombe thought only makes sense if there’s a moral lawgiver commanding us; otherwise it’s nonsense

Key People

G.E.M. Anscombe (1919–2001): A fiercely independent British philosopher who wore men’s clothes, smoked cigars, opposed contraception, and argued that Harry Truman was a murderer. She wrote brilliantly about intention, action, and the word “I.”
Harry Truman: U.S. president who authorized the atomic bombings of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Anscombe publicly opposed Oxford giving him an honorary degree.
C.S. Lewis: The famous Christian writer and author of The Chronicles of Narnia. Anscombe debated him and, according to some accounts, demolished his argument against naturalism.
Ludwig Wittgenstein: A hugely influential philosopher whose lectures freed Anscombe from some bad philosophical assumptions she had as a student. She later became his translator.

Things to Think About

You’re playing video games. You know your character is running and jumping, but you also know you’re just pressing buttons on a controller. Are both descriptions true? Is one more “real” than the other? Are you intentionally running and jumping, or intentionally pressing buttons?
A friend tells you something embarrassing about another kid. You believe them. Later you find out it wasn’t true. Were you wrong to believe them? Or was the mistake in what they said, not in your trusting? How do you decide when to believe someone?
Anscombe thought killing innocent people intentionally is always wrong, even if it saves many more lives. Do you agree? What if you could press a button that would kill one person but save a thousand? Does it matter whether the one person dies as a means to saving the thousand, or as a side effect?
When you say “I,” what are you talking about? It’s not your body (because you could lose parts). It’s not your name (because you could change it). It’s not your memories (because you could forget them). What’s left?

Where This Shows Up

Law and courts: When lawyers argue about whether someone intended to commit a crime, they’re dealing with exactly the questions Anscombe raised. The difference between murder and manslaughter hinges on intention.
Medicine: Doctors sometimes give pain medication that might shorten a patient’s life. Is this murder? The distinction between intending death and merely foreseeing it — which Anscombe insisted on — is central to medical ethics.
Everyday arguments: When someone says “I didn’t mean to hurt you” after doing something hurtful, you have to decide whether the hurt was part of what they were doing or just an accidental side effect. This isn’t just psychology — it’s a philosophical question about action.
Video games and virtual reality: As games become more realistic, questions about what you’re really doing when you press buttons get stranger. Are you intentionally killing someone in a game? Or intentionally pressing a button that happens to represent killing? The answer isn’t obvious.