In "Modern Moral Philosophy," Elizabeth Anscombe charged that Sidgwick's failure to distinguish intended from merely foreseen consequences of an action counted as a very bad degeneration of thought. Sidgwick's failure is endemic to contemporary normative models of decision and choice. There are three components to rational decision making on these models: what the agent wants the prospective actions or policies under consideration and what the agent expects will happen as a result of taking specific action or adopting specific policy measures. The prospective actions are often modeled as lotteries across possible outcomes. Choice on any lottery-based model or representation is choice among probability distributions. Participants in contemporary risk assessment studies do not make decisions in the way suggested by these models. Instead, the participants deploy a distinctive form of estimating the future. I advance a series of considerations meant to motivate the claim that the form of estimating the future at issue for participants of risk assessment studies may be sound, even when the content of their practical judgment is dubious. The form belongs equally to ethics and to practical reason and tracks Anscombe's remarks about moral responsibility.

In urging a return to Aristotle, Anscombe sets us a task that she does not know how to complete. Her bafflement should set constraints on interpreting the essay. I argue that Anscombe's complaints against neo-Kantianism and social contact were of a piece with her sense that virtue-centred ethics presented serious philosophical challenges. The problem becomes clear when we notice that accounting for just interaction requires that various agents act from a single source. The uniformity cannot rest on an accidental convergence of individuals (hence, cannot be built up, person by person). Nor can it be a simple matter of the internalization of social norms. Neo-Aristotelians taking their cue from Anscombe seek that source in our species. But even after we have rejected empiricist accounts of our species, the hard work of explaining how something of virtue belongs to our kind remains to be done.