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Miss Anscombe on Sidgwick's View of Humility

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  30 January 2009

John Wardle
Affiliation:
University of Newcastle upon Tyne

Extract

In her well-known paper ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ (Philosophy, 1958) G. E. M. Anscombe makes the following assertion: ‘he [Sidgwick] thinks that humility consists in underestimating your own merits—i.e. in a species of untruthfulness’. I should like to show that this is not so.

Type
Discussion
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy 1983

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References

1 Textual note: seven editions of The Methods of Ethics appeared between 1874 and 1907 (all subsequent reprints have been, to the best of my knowledge, of the seventh). I have examined copies of each edition and found that Sidgwick made no significant alteration to his account of humility. In preparing this note I have used a 1930 reprint of the seventh edition.