Causality and Determinism: Elizabeth Anscombe’s Middle Way

In her mid-century book on ethics, Intention, Elizabeth Anscombe famously takes the middle way between the two standard modern approaches to ethical theory—deontology and utilitarianism—by returning to the medieval tradition of virtue ethics.

In her work on causality, Anscombe similarly opposes the modern dichotomy between causal determinism (Hobbes) and an outright denial of causality (Hume). In doing so, she shows that medieval theories of causality might be better equipped to deal with contemporary issues like quantum mechanics than any modern theory is.

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