Why Elizabeth Anscombe Called Harry Truman a Murderer
The Pamphlet That Called the U.S. President a Murderer
In 1956 Oxford University decided to award an honorary degree to Harry S. Truman, the former president of the United States. The philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001) was outraged. She wrote a short, fierce pamphlet called Mr. Truman’s Degree and read it aloud to a university audience. Her charge was blunt: Truman was a murderer.
She did not mince words. “Choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder,” she wrote. The atomic bombs dropped on Hiroshima and Nagasaki had killed tens of thousands of civilians — ordinary people who were not soldiers, not fighting, and not supplying the war effort. Truman had authorized those bombs. Anscombe argued that the only reason killing those civilians seemed necessary was that the Allies insisted on an unconditional surrender. That demand, she thought, was a mistake, but even a military goal could not make deliberately killing the innocent anything but murder.
Her protest was not just about history. It raised a question that would occupy her for decades: What makes an action really a murder, and what makes it something else? To answer that, she said, you have to understand one thing above all — intention.
Anscombe had already lived an unusual life by then. Born in Ireland, she converted to Roman Catholicism as a teenager, studied classics and philosophy at Oxford, and became a close friend and student of Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–1951), the famously difficult philosopher. She later translated much of his work into English. She married the philosopher Peter Geach, had seven children, and never stopped thinking about what it means to act on purpose.
Murder, Killing, and the Secret of Intention
Most people agree that killing is sometimes wrong and sometimes not — a soldier defending a city, a police officer stopping a violent attack. But Anscombe wanted to know what makes a particular killing murder. Her answer was not that murder is “unjust” or “wrong,” though it is both. She thought the description “murder” already contains the reason why it is wrong, and that reason lives inside the structure of the act itself.
The crucial difference, she argued, is between what you intend and what you merely foresee. If you choose to kill innocent people as a means to your goal, that is always murder. You are aiming at their deaths in order to get something else — an enemy’s surrender, for example. By contrast, if you do something else that you know will kill innocent people but you are not aiming at their deaths, the case is different. The action might still be wrong, but it isn’t automatically murder.
Anscombe gave a medical example. A doctor can give a dying patient a medicine to relieve terrible pain, knowing that the medicine will also make the patient die a bit sooner. The doctor’s aim is to comfort, not to kill. The death is foreseen but not intended. That is not murder. But dropping a bomb on a city to terrify the enemy into surrender intends the deaths of the civilians as the very means of achieving that effect. That structure, she insisted, makes the act murder whether the war is just or not.
This way of thinking is often called the Doctrine of Double Effect. Anscombe believed the doctrine had been badly misunderstood. Many people claimed you could “direct your intention” away from the bad effect just by telling yourself a story. A bomber might say, “I’m only intending to end the war, not to kill innocents.” Anscombe found that absurd. Intention is not a private thought you can rewrite at will; it’s something that shows up in what you actually do and why.
Why Anscombe Declared “Modern Moral Philosophy” a Dead End
In 1958 Anscombe published a paper that shook English-speaking philosophy. “Modern Moral Philosophy” made three startling claims. First, she said, moral philosophy was useless right now, and would stay useless until philosophers had a much better understanding of human psychology — especially of action, intention, pleasure, and wanting. Second, moral philosophers should stop using words like “morally ought,” “moral duty,” and “morally wrong.” Those terms, she argued, only make sense if there is a lawgiver (such as God) who commands you. In a secular world that no longer believes in such a commander, saying “you morally ought to do X” is like playing a game of chess when nobody agrees on the rules. Third, she claimed that almost every famous English moral philosopher since Henry Sidgwick had ended up agreeing, in practice, that killing the innocent could sometimes be right.
That last point was especially sharp. Anscombe noticed that even philosophers who thought of themselves as defenders of moral rules — not just utilitarians — had come to accept that you might have a duty to kill one innocent person to save many. She traced this to a change in the idea of responsibility. Sidgwick had defined intention so broadly that you were said to intend every single consequence of your action that you could foresee. If you are equally responsible for intended and merely foreseen results, then letting five people die feels just as bad as killing one person yourself. So why not kill one to save five?
Anscombe invented a new word for this way of thinking: consequentialism. Originally, she used it to name the view about responsibility, not a view about what makes actions right. But she saw how the two were linked. If you are responsible for everything you foresee, then the only thing left to care about is how things turn out — and that, she thought, is a deep mistake. The mistake rests on a false understanding of what it is to act intentionally.
She did not think we should give up on living good lives or opposing terrible actions. You don’t need a finished moral theory to know that punishing an innocent person is unjust. But doing philosophy about morality, she said, ought to wait until we grasp what intention really is. So she set out to build that understanding herself.
The Shopping List That Unlocks How We Really Act
Anscombe’s most famous book, Intention, begins with a puzzle. If you see a man moving his arm up and down, you might be seeing someone pumping water, or exercising, or making a shadow on a rock. The same physical movement can be described in many ways, but only some of those descriptions are intentional. How do you tell which ones?
She offered a thought experiment. Imagine a man going around town with a shopping list. If his wife gave him the list, it works like an order. If he wrote it himself, it is an expression of his intention. Now suppose the things he actually buys don’t match the list. In the wife’s case, the mistake is in the man’s performance — he bought the wrong things. In the detective’s case (if someone were following him and making a record), the mistake would be in the record. The list and the record have different jobs. An intention, like an order, is supposed to make the world fit it. A record is supposed to fit the world.
This simple example uncovers something huge. When you act intentionally, you have a special kind of knowledge of what you are doing — Anscombe called it practical knowledge. You don’t need to observe yourself or get a report to know you are reading this paragraph. You know it in the doing. That knowledge is not about an inner mental state floating alongside your movements. It is your grasp of a real order among the descriptions of your action: you are moving your arm because you are pumping water because you are supplying the house.
Intention, then, isn’t a hidden feeling. It’s the “because” that links the ways your action can be truthfully described. When someone asks you “Why are you doing that?” and you give a reason that points to something future, past, or interpretive, you are showing that what you’re doing is intentional. And if you genuinely didn’t know you were doing it, it wasn’t.
You Are What You Do, Not What You Tell Yourself
Why does all this still matter? Because every day you face moments where the description of what you’re doing makes all the difference. You say something harsh to a friend. You tell yourself you were only being honest, or that you intended to help. But Anscombe’s philosophy pushes back. If the structure of the act shows that your words were chosen as a means to make them feel small, then that’s what you intentionally did — even if you had a good further aim in mind. You can’t undo the intentional nature of an act by thinking about it differently afterward.
Anscombe used a sharp example from her own life. As a Catholic, she believed that using contraception during sex was a different kind of act from simply timing intercourse to avoid pregnancy, even though both might aim at limiting family size. Why? Because the act itself changes when you deliberately make it unable to lead to conception. She compared it to writing a forged check to donate to charity: the further aim (helping the needy) is good, but it doesn’t turn forgery into an honest act. The act you chose remains what it was.
This way of thinking can feel uncomfortable. It means you can’t always separate “what I did” from “what I meant to do” simply by pointing to your feelings. The world of action has a structure, and you are responsible for the descriptions under which you act. That idea — that honesty about intention is the beginning of real moral thinking — is one of Anscombe’s lasting gifts.
Think about it
- If someone drives a car knowing the journey will add pollution that harms people’s lungs, but they just want to visit a friend, are they responsible for harming those people in the same way as someone who deliberately blows smoke in a stranger’s face?
- Can you think of a time when you told yourself you “didn’t mean to” upset someone, but looking back you realize upsetting them was part of your plan? How can you tell the difference?
- Is it ever possible to be completely certain of your own intentions, or do we sometimes fool ourselves? What would Anscombe say you need to examine to find out?
