Tell the True Story of Your Action (Anscombe)
Interrogate how you narrate your actions to take real responsibility
- Difficulty
- Moderate
- Time to result
- ~ongoing to results
- Steps
- 5
- Confidence
- 60%
Elizabeth Anscombe's insight is that moral evaluation of an action hangs on how the action is described. The same event admits multiple true-seeming stories: arriving late to a meeting can be narrated as 'the traffic was terrible and I tried my hardest' (which excuses) or 'I slept in and did not leave time for traffic' (which takes responsibility). Because the description carries the moral weight, self-examination becomes a discipline of auditing your own narration. Following Anscombe and Bernard Williams, you deploy 'morally thick concepts' — virtue terms like generosity, laziness, or anger — to interrogate the stories you tell. The diagnostic question is whether you always cast yourself as the hero; if so, the stories cannot all be true, which prompts you to retell them accurately and to examine your intentions honestly. The output is not a better story about yourself but the true one.
Origin
Paul Blaschko draws this from the mid-20th-century virtue ethicist Elizabeth Anscombe's work on human action, plus Bernard Williams's notion of 'morally thick concepts', used in the responsibility chapter of The Good Life Method.
Core principles
- 01How you describe an action determines whether you are taking responsibility for it
- 02The same act can be narrated to excuse you or to hold you accountable
- 03Morally thick concepts (virtue terms) are the tools for interrogating your stories
- 04Stories that always make you the hero almost certainly are not true
- 05Agency and responsibility are exercised in the description, not just the deed
How to run it
- 1
State the action plainly
Name what you actually did, from a small act like arriving late to a complex pattern of behaviour with people you care about.
- 2
Catch your default narration
Notice the story you instinctively reach for. Does it excuse you ('traffic was so bad, I tried my hardest') or hold you to account ('I slept in, I did not care enough')?
Pro tip The excusing version usually arrives first and feels effortless — that is the tell.
- 3
Apply a morally thick concept
Use a virtue term — generosity, honesty, laziness, anger — to interrogate the account rather than relying on thin words like 'good' or 'bad'.
- 4
Run the hero test
Ask whether your stories always cast you as the hero. If they do, they cannot all be true, which signals self-serving narration.
Watch out A pattern of hero-stories is evidence of avoidance, not virtue.
- 5
Retell it accurately
Rewrite the account as the true story, then ask what it reveals about your character and intentions going forward.
Pro tip The aim is the accurate story, not a flattering or even a self-flagellating one.
In the wild
Blaschko shows up late. He can tell the story as 'the traffic was so bad and I tried my hardest', which excuses him and casts him as someone who cared about the right things and simply got unlucky. Or he can say 'I slept in, I did not leave time for traffic, I took a risk, and here I am', which takes responsibility. The facts are identical; the description determines whether agency was deployed rightly or wrongly.
→ The same event yields either evasion or accountability depending purely on how it is narrated.
Common mistakes
Always being the hero of your story
If every account you give makes you the hero, they cannot all be true; the pattern itself is evidence of self-serving narration rather than accurate self-knowledge.
Using thin moral words
Judging actions only as 'good' or 'bad' gives you nothing to interrogate; without thick virtue terms you cannot see what the story is actually doing.
Is it for you?
Best for
Anyone wanting an honest read on their own agency and character rather than a comforting self-image.
Not ideal for
Situations where the facts are genuinely outside your control and no self-narration would change the outcome.
From the transcript
“it really depends how we describe or how we tell the story uh of our action right a lot of things hang on that”
“using what williams calls uh morally thick concepts like virtue terms like generosity uh to interrogate and ask questions about the stories that we're telling”
“am i telling stories that always make me the hero right and if so are they true it doesn't seem like they could possibly be…”
From the episode
A Philosopher's Guide To The Good Life - Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko - #419
Meghan Sullivan & Paul Blaschko