A Doutrina do Duplo Efeito na Ética da Guerra de Elizabeth Anscombe

BIO
Pedro Erik Arruda Carneiro holds a master’s degree in Economics and a doctorate in International Relations, both from the University of Brasilia.

ABSTRACT
Elizabeth Anscombe is part of a quartet of contemporary Oxford philosophers, with Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Warnock. She is known for her defence that there are moral absolutes that prevent the killing of innocents and for the recovery of virtue ethics in contemporary philosophy. Philosophers of mind and action see in Anscombe’s book Intention an alternative to the causal explanations of agency and perception that tend to dominate analytic philosophy, an alternative based on Wittgenstein’s philosophy, which she translated and commented on, as his literary executor. My project centres on her research and reformulation of the traditional Doctrine of Double Effect, in particular its application to just war and nuclear attack, but Anscombe’s political philosophy, ethical philosophy and analysis of intention are intertwined. Her major works on war raised political, ethical and intentional questions, since wars are imminent political and ethical issues and what has come to be called the Doctrine of Double Effect is a powerful analytical tool for assessing the intent of an action. In 1957, Anscombe published her most renowned book, Intention. The previous year, Anscombe had written the pamphlet Mr Truman’s Degree, about the award of an honorary doctorate by Oxford University to former US president Harry Truman. In 1958, her influential article ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’ was published. And in 1961 she published her well-known article on war, ‘War and Murder’. All these articles, the book Intention, deal with the ethical difficulties related to the nuclear bombing of Japan during the Second World War. The thesis analyses Anscombe’s ethical-political thought, starting from her influences (Wittgenstein, Aquinas and Aristotle, in particular) and analyses how Anscombe’s thought developed in terms of the Doctrine of Double Effect, which underpinned all her writings on war.