- Lived:
- 1919–2001 · Limerick, Oxford, Cambridge
- Tradition:
- Analytic philosophy; Wittgenstein's school; Catholic moral thought — and the founding of modern action theory and the revival of virtue ethics
- The Big Idea:
- To understand morality you must first understand action — what it is to do something intentionally, "under a description," for reasons — and once you understand that, whole stretches of modern ethics collapse and Aristotle comes back to life.
- If you remember one thing:
- She stood up in Oxford in 1956 to oppose an honorary degree for the president who ordered Hiroshima and Nagasaki, on the ground that choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is murder — whatever the consequences — and then spent the rest of her career building the philosophy that argument needed.