Someone once told me that the average number of readers of a philosophy article is about six. That is a particularly depressing thought when one takes into account the huge influence of certain articles. When I think of, say, Gettier's article on knowledge, or Quine's ‘Two Dogmas’, I begin to wonder whether anyone is ever likely to read anything I write. Usually the arguments of these very influential articles have been subjected to widespread analysis and interpretation. The case of Elizabeth Anscombe's ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’, published in 1958, is something of an exception. That article has played a significant part in the development of so-called ‘virtue ethics’, which has burgeoned over the last three decades in particular. But there has been less close attention to its arguments than one might have expected.

Anscombe's first sentence is: ‘I will begin by stating three theses which I present in this paper’. Let me start with three of my own. The first is that historical and philosophical analysis throw some doubt on her main thesis, which concerns the moral concepts. Second, I shall suggest, we appear to have more in common, ethically, with Aristotle and the Greeks than Anscombe—and certain other writers, such as Alasdair MacIntyre and Bernard Williams—believe. Finally, however, I shall conclude that Anscombe's strategy of examining the moral concepts before using them in moral theory is helpful, and that the application of that strategy to the very notion of morality itself supports something closer to the ‘consequentialist’ position she attacks in her paper than to her own.