Moral Practices and Anscombe’s Grocer

Abstract

G. E. M. Anscombe’s grocer¹ teaches moral philosophers a valuable lesson, namely, that there is no need to appeal to anything beyond the facts when considering what is morally important. No appeals to a mysterious realm of evaluative meaning are necessary. If a customer orders potatoes, and the grocer delivers them to him, the grocer is justified in saying that the customer owes him for the potatoes. There is little point in the philosophers’ protest that we cannot derive an ‘ought’ — that he owes the grocer for the potatoes — from an ‘is’ — that he ordered the potatoes and that the grocer delivered them — since the example illustrates the artificiality of the thesis. It will not do either to say that the facts only hold within certain social institutions, since the facts have their meaning within the institution of buying and selling. The grocer can say that the man owes him money on the basis of the above facts, in the context of the above institution. Certain things have happened: a man has ordered potatoes and had them delivered; other things follow: he owes the grocer for the potatoes. This is not a new theory, but a familiar story. The umpire raises his finger and the batsman walks, the jury decides and a sentence is pronounced, the priest pronounces and the man and woman are married, etc. All these facts have their meaning within certain institutions, but they do not describe these institutions; that is not what they tell us.