Agent skill

Elizabeth Anscombe

by K-Dense-AI in K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

Applies the rigorous analytic and moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (British analytic philosopher, virtue ethics, Intention).

MITAuto-check passed

Install Elizabeth Anscombe

skills CLI
$ npx skills add K-Dense-AI/mimeographs --skill elizabeth-anscombe -a claude-code

Project install by default; add -g for ~/.claude/skills/.

GitHub CLI
$ gh skill install K-Dense-AI/mimeographs elizabeth-anscombe --agent claude-code

Project scope by default; add --scope user for a personal install. Needs GitHub CLI 2.90.0 or later (public preview).

Manual copy
$ git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/mimeographs.git skills-src && mkdir -p .claude/skills && cp -r skills-src/mimeographs/elizabeth-anscombe .claude/skills/elizabeth-anscombe && rm -rf skills-src

Use ~/.claude/skills/ instead of .claude/skills for a personal install. The folder must contain SKILL.md.

Claude Code skills documentation · loads skills from .claude/skills/

Facts

Skill name
elizabeth-anscombe
GitHub stars
129
Token cost
~1.4k tokens
SKILL.md length
735 words
Files
72 (incl. references)
Skills in repo
60
Repo updated
First seen
Licence
MIT

At a glance

Applies the rigorous analytic and moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (British analytic philosopher, virtue ethics, Intention).

  • Works in 3 steps: Observe the event or action. → Ask the agent: "Why are you doing that?" → If they answer "I didn't know I was…
  • Analyzing human action
  • SKILL.md covers Core principles, How Elizabeth Anscombe reasons, Applying the frameworks and Anti-patterns she pushes against, plus 1 more section
  • Instructions only: no scripts, shell commands, URLs or credentials in SKILL.md

What it does

Elizabeth Anscombe is an agent skill from K-Dense-AI/mimeographs. Applies the rigorous analytic and moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (British analytic philosopher, virtue ethics, Intention). Reach for this skill whenever Claude encounters moral dilemmas, ethical trade-offs, questions of intention vs. foresight, or consequentialist/utilitarian reasoning. Use it when analyzing human action, culpability, the doctrine of double effect, or the meaning of "ought" and obligation. It is especially useful for cutting through vague moral language by demanding precise psychological…

Its SKILL.md is about 1.4k tokens, which your agent loads only when the skill is triggered. The skill folder holds 74 other files, including reference files (for example `AGENTS.md`, `_workspace/agents_output.e584bd6c.json` and `_workspace/clustered_corpus.e584bd6c.json`).

The repository describes itself as: Ready-to-use agent skills that clone the thinking of founders, philosophers, and scientists into your agent. Generated with K-Dense-AI/mimeo. The licence is MIT.

When your agent uses it

  • Analyzing human action
  • The doctrine of double effect
  • The meaning of ought and obligation

Example prompts

  • “Use the elizabeth-anscombe skill to apply the rigorous analytic and moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (British analytic philosopher, virtue…”
  • “/elizabeth-anscombe”

Workflow steps

3 steps, taken from the first numbered list in SKILL.md.

  1. Observe the event or action.
  2. Ask the agent: "Why are you doing that?"
  3. If they answer "I didn't know I was doing that," it is not intentional under that description. If they give a reason or future end, it is…

What it can do on your machine

Read from SKILL.md and the folder at commit a38f5fc. It shows what the files ask for, not the result of running them.

  • Tool permissions

    Pre-approves nothing: there is no allowed-tools line, so your agent's usual permission prompts apply.

    From allowed-tools in the SKILL.md frontmatter.

  • Runs code

    No scripts in the folder and no shell commands in SKILL.md.

    From the folder's file list and the shell code blocks in SKILL.md.

  • Network

    No URLs in SKILL.md.

    From URLs in SKILL.md, links to its own repository left out.

  • Credentials

    Names no API keys, tokens, secrets or passwords.

    From names ending in _API_KEY, _TOKEN, _SECRET, _KEY or _PASSWORD in SKILL.md.

Context cost

Elizabeth Anscombe loads about 1.4k tokens when it runs, and up to ~5.3k if it reads all its reference files. Until then it costs about 155 tokens; SKILL.md has 735 words of instructions outside code blocks.

Always · name and description, kept in context so the agent knows when to use it
~155
When it runs · the whole SKILL.md, loaded when a task matches
~1.4k
With references · SKILL.md plus every file in references/, read only if the agent opens them
~5.3k

Estimates: characters ÷ 4, the usual rule of thumb; real counts depend on the model's tokenizer. Scripts and assets cost tokens only if the agent reads them.

Safety

Auto-check passed

The automated check found no risky patterns in SKILL.md.

Automated static check — not a guarantee. Review scripts before installing. It scans the text of SKILL.md for risky patterns (piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files, hidden Unicode, destructive commands); files beside SKILL.md are not scanned.

SKILL.md

The full file from K-Dense-AI/mimeographs at commit a38f5fc, republished under its MIT licence (© K-Dense-AI). 735 words, ~1,418 tokens.

Download SKILL.mdSave it as .claude/skills/elizabeth-anscombe/SKILL.md (or your agent's skills folder). This skill also uses 71 other files; get the full folder from GitHub.
name
elizabeth-anscombe
description
Applies the rigorous analytic and moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (British analytic philosopher, virtue ethics, Intention). Reach for this skill whenever Claude encounters moral dilemmas, ethical trade-offs, questions of intention vs. foresight, or consequentialist/utilitarian reasoning. Use it when analyzing human action, culpability, the doctrine of double effect, or the meaning of "ought" and obligation. It is especially useful for cutting through vague moral language by demanding precise psychological descriptions of actions and rejecting the idea that good ends justify evil means.

Thinking like Elizabeth Anscombe

Elizabeth Anscombe was a formidable British analytic philosopher who fundamentally reshaped action theory and virtue ethics. Her signature intellectual move is demanding clarity on the philosophy of psychology before allowing any moral judgments to proceed. She refuses to evaluate whether an action is "right" or "wrong" until she has precisely defined what the action is, under what description it is intentional, and what institutional facts make it intelligible.

Anscombe is fiercely anti-consequentialist. She rejects the modern tendency to weigh human lives in utilitarian calculus, insisting that the objective structure of an action matters more than the agent's private "direction of intention" or desired outcomes.

Reach for this skill whenever you're analyzing moral dilemmas, ethical trade-offs, questions of culpability, or the nature of human intention and agency.

Core principles

  • Moral Philosophy Requires Psychology: Suspend moral judgments until you have an adequate philosophy of psychology; you cannot evaluate an action without understanding motive and intention.
  • Abandon Secular 'Moral Oughts': Drop terms like "moral obligation" in secular contexts, as they are meaningless survivals of a divine law framework and only exert unjustified psychological force.
  • Absolute Prohibition on Murder: Never choose to kill the innocent as a means to an end, regardless of the consequences; the objective structure of the act cannot be excused by "good" ends.
  • Action Under a Description: Evaluate human actions based on specific descriptions, because an action might be intentional under one description (pumping water) but not another (poisoning the inhabitants).

For detailed rationale and quotes, see references/principles.md.

How Elizabeth Anscombe reasons

Anscombe begins by interrogating the action itself. She asks, "Why are you doing that?" to determine if an action is intentional under a specific description. She dismisses vague, "thin" moral concepts like "right" and "wrong," preferring "thick" descriptive concepts like "just," "unjust," or "cowardly." She completely rejects the idea that a good outcome can retroactively justify an intrinsically evil act.

When analyzing how knowledge relates to action, she uses The Shopping List (Direction of Fit) to distinguish between theoretical records (which must match reality) and practical intentions (where reality must be made to match the intention). She also relies on the concept of Brute Facts to show how actions only make sense within specific institutional contexts. For her full catalog of mental models, see references/mental-models.md.

Applying the frameworks

The 'Why?' Question of Intention

Use this to determine if an action, under a specific description, is actually intentional.

  1. Observe the event or action.
  2. Ask the agent: "Why are you doing that?"
  3. If they answer "I didn't know I was doing that," it is not intentional under that description. If they give a reason or future end, it is intentional.
Show full SKILL.md (288 more words)Show less
Doctrine of Double Effect

Use this to evaluate actions that have both good intended effects and bad foreseen side effects.

  1. Ensure the action itself is not intrinsically forbidden (e.g., murder).
  2. Ensure the bad effects are merely foreseen, not intended as a means to the end.
  3. Ensure the likely good consequences outweigh the bad.

For the full catalog of her frameworks, see references/frameworks.md.

Anti-patterns she pushes against

  • Consequentialism: Judging an action solely by its outcomes, which inevitably leads philosophers to justify murder for the "greater good."
  • Secular 'Moral Oughts': Attempting to enforce a moral law without a law-giver, which renders ethical language meaningless.
  • Misusing 'Direction of Intention': Using private mental gymnastics to excuse forbidden acts (e.g., claiming you only "intended" to end a war while dropping a bomb on civilians).
  • Equating Causation with Necessitation: Assuming causality requires a universal, exceptionless rule, rather than simply the derivativeness of an effect from its cause.

How to use this skill in conversation

When the user presents an ethical dilemma, a trolley problem, or a question about human agency, channel Anscombe's rigorous analytic lens. Do not impersonate her. Instead, surface her frameworks by name. For example, if a user tries to justify a harmful action by its good results, apply her critique of consequentialism and note that "Elizabeth Anscombe argues that choosing to kill the innocent as a means to your ends is always murder." If the user is confused about whether an action was deliberate, introduce the concept of "Action Under a Description" to help them see that intention is not a blanket state, but tied to specific descriptions of the event. Always push the user away from vague "oughts" and toward thick, descriptive virtues and precise psychological realities.

© K-Dense-AI, MIT. Rendered from Markdown: HTML in the file is shown as text, images as links, and headings moved down two levels. Raw file

Files

SKILL.md and 71 other files (references) in mimeographs/elizabeth-anscombe of K-Dense-AI/mimeographs.

  • SKILL.md
  • AGENTS.md
  • _workspace/agents_output.e584bd6c.json
  • _workspace/clustered_corpus.e584bd6c.json
  • _workspace/discovery/books.json
  • _workspace/discovery/essays.json
  • _workspace/discovery/frameworks.json
  • _workspace/discovery/interviews.json
  • _workspace/discovery/letters.json
  • _workspace/discovery/papers.json
  • _workspace/discovery/podcasts.json
  • _workspace/discovery/ranked_sources.e584bd6c.json
  • _workspace/discovery/talks.json
  • _workspace/distilled/src_001.e584bd6c.json
  • _workspace/distilled/src_003.e584bd6c.json
  • _workspace/distilled/src_005.e584bd6c.json
  • _workspace/distilled/src_009.e584bd6c.json
  • _workspace/distilled/src_010.e584bd6c.json
  • … and 54 more

Open the folder on GitHubat commit a38f5fc

Compare with similar skills

Elizabeth Anscombe next to the 5 skills that share the most tags, products or categories with it. Stars are the repository's; “used in” counts other GitHub owners with a copy.

Elizabeth Anscombe compared with similar skills
SkillStarsUsed inTokensAuto-checkLicenceRepo updated
Elizabeth Anscombe this skillK-Dense-AI/mimeographs129—~1.4kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Analytics Trackingalirezarezvani/claude-skills28k1 repos~3.8kAutomated safety check: PassMIT
Analyticsgetsentry/sentry46k—~2.5kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
Debugging MCP AnalyticsPostHog/posthog40k—~7.6kAutomated safety check: PassCustom licence
Opik Analytics Instrumentationcomet-ml/opik22k—~4.4kAutomated safety check: PassApache-2.0
Telemetry AnalyticsOpenHands/OpenHands91k—~305Automated safety check: PassMIT

Similar skills

  • Analytics Tracking

    alirezarezvani/claude-skills

    Set up, audit, and debug analytics tracking implementation — GA4, Google Tag Manager, event taxonomy, conversion tracking, and data quality.

    28k GitHub starsUsed in 1 repo~3.8k tokens
    Data & AnalyticsAuto-check passed
  • Analytics

    getsentry/sentry

    Official

    Instrument and discover analytics events in Sentry's frontend UI.

    46k GitHub stars~2.5k tokensUpdated yesterday
    Frontend & DesignAuto-check passed
  • Official

    Debug, support, and build PostHog MCP Analytics — product analytics for MCP servers (the @posthog/mcp and posthog.mcp SDKs plus the mcpanalytics product).

    40k GitHub stars~7.6k tokensUpdated yesterday
    Agent WorkflowsAuto-check passed
  • Shows how to add product analytics events to Opik's frontend, Java backend and Python SDK, all reporting through Segment to PostHog with an opik_ name prefix.

    22k GitHub stars~4.4k tokensUpdated yesterday
    Data & AnalyticsAuto-check passed
  • Telemetry Analytics

    OpenHands/OpenHands

    This skill should be used when the user asks to "add tracking", "add a PostHog event", "change telemetry consent", "instrument onboarding", "debug analytics", or changes telemetry.ts…

    91k GitHub stars~305 tokensUpdated today
    DevOps & CloudAuto-check passed
  • Analytics

    Nexus-JPF/note-companion

    When the user wants to set up, improve, or audit analytics tracking and measurement.

    870 GitHub starsUsed in 7 repos~2.2k tokens
    Marketing & SEOAuto-check passed

More from K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

All 60 skills in this repo
  • Albert Hofman

    K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

    Applies the epidemiological reasoning and population-health frameworks of Albert Hofman (Harvard epidemiologist, Rotterdam Study).

    129 GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Andrew Carnegie

    K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

    Applies the strategic, philanthropic, and operational frameworks of Andrew Carnegie, founder of Carnegie Steel.

    129 GitHub stars~1.5k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Anne Wojcicki

    K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

    Applies the strategic frameworks and mental models of Anne Wojcicki, co-founder and CEO of 23andMe.

    129 GitHub stars~1.5k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aristotle

    K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

    Applies the frameworks of Aristotle (ancient Greek philosopher, logic, ethics, metaphysics, 384-322 BCE) to decision-making, ethics, and analysis.

    129 GitHub stars~1.6k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Aviv Regev

    K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

    Applies the computational biology and AI-driven reasoning of Aviv Regev (computational biologist, Genentech, single-cell genomics).

    129 GitHub stars~1.4k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Auto-check passed
  • Bill Gates

    K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

    Apply the mental models of Bill Gates, co-founder of Microsoft and philanthropist.

    129 GitHub stars~1.5k tokensUpdated 1 mo ago
    Auto-check passed

Questions about Elizabeth Anscombe

What does Elizabeth Anscombe do?

Applies the rigorous analytic and moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (British analytic philosopher, virtue ethics, Intention). Elizabeth Anscombe is an agent skill from K-Dense-AI/mimeographs. Applies the rigorous analytic and moral philosophy of Elizabeth Anscombe (British analytic philosopher, virtue ethics, Intention).

When should I use Elizabeth Anscombe?

Elizabeth Anscombe fits situations like: analyzing human action; the doctrine of double effect; the meaning of ought and obligation.

How do I install Elizabeth Anscombe in Claude Code?

Run `npx skills add K-Dense-AI/mimeographs --skill elizabeth-anscombe -a claude-code`. Or copy the skill folder (mimeographs/elizabeth-anscombe in K-Dense-AI/mimeographs) into .claude/skills/elizabeth-anscombe in your project. Claude Code loads it when a task matches its description.

How do I install Elizabeth Anscombe in Codex?

Run `npx skills add K-Dense-AI/mimeographs --skill elizabeth-anscombe -a codex`. Or copy the skill folder (mimeographs/elizabeth-anscombe in K-Dense-AI/mimeographs) into .agents/skills/elizabeth-anscombe in your project. Codex loads it when a task matches its description.

Can I use Elizabeth Anscombe in Cursor, Gemini CLI or GitHub Copilot?

Cursor, Gemini CLI, GitHub Copilot and OpenCode also load SKILL.md folders. With the skills CLI, run `npx skills add K-Dense-AI/mimeographs --skill elizabeth-anscombe -a cursor` (or -a gemini-cli, github-copilot or opencode for the others). To copy it by hand, put the folder in .cursor/skills/elizabeth-anscombe, .gemini/skills/elizabeth-anscombe, .github/skills/elizabeth-anscombe and .opencode/skills/elizabeth-anscombe in your project.

What does Elizabeth Anscombe need to run?

SKILL.md names no scripts, command-line tools or credentials: Elizabeth Anscombe is instructions for the agent only.

Does Elizabeth Anscombe access the network?

SKILL.md contains no URLs. Any network use would come from the scripts or tools the agent runs. This is read from the text; nothing was executed.

Is Elizabeth Anscombe safe to install?

Our automated static check of SKILL.md found no risky patterns, such as piping downloads into a shell, reading credential files or hidden Unicode. It is not a guarantee. Review the folder before installing.

What licence does Elizabeth Anscombe use?

Elizabeth Anscombe is published under the MIT licence (the repository's licence). It allows redistribution, so the full SKILL.md is shown on this page.

How many tokens does Elizabeth Anscombe use?

About 1.4k tokens (SKILL.md is roughly 5.7k characters). Agents keep only the skill's name and description in context until a task matches; then they load SKILL.md in full. Its references folder adds about 3.9k tokens, read only when the agent opens those files.

What are the alternatives to Elizabeth Anscombe?

Skills that share tags, products or a category with Elizabeth Anscombe: Analytics Tracking (alirezarezvani/claude-skills, 28k stars), Analytics (getsentry/sentry, 46k stars), Debugging MCP Analytics (PostHog/posthog, 40k stars) and Opik Analytics Instrumentation (comet-ml/opik, 22k stars). The comparison table on this page puts their stars, adoption, token cost, safety result and licence side by side.

Who maintains Elizabeth Anscombe?

K-Dense-AI (a GitHub organization) maintains it in K-Dense-AI/mimeographs, which has 129 GitHub stars. The repository holds 60 skills in this directory. The repository was last updated on August 18, 2026.

Source: K-Dense-AI/mimeographs on GitHub. Facts on this page come from the repository at the commit we read; the author's words are quoted as theirs.