Philippa Foot (1920–2010) was one of the most influential British moral philosophers of the twentieth century and a central figure in the revival of virtue ethics. Educated and long based at Oxford, she also taught for extended periods in the United States. Her intellectual career amounts to a sustained challenge to the non-cognitivism and emotivism that dominated post-war Anglophone metaethics: against the thesis of a radical separation between fact and value, Foot sought to show that moral judgements have cognitive content and are rooted in facts about human life. Her work culminates in the neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism of Natural Goodness (2001). She was also a figure of civic conscience: she was among the founders of Oxfam, the organisation devoted to fighting hunger and poverty.
Key Concepts
- The trolley problem (“The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect”, 1967): Foot introduced the thought experiment that would become ubiquitous in contemporary ethics, originally to examine the doctrine of double effect and the distinction between killing and letting die — not as a mere puzzle.
- Critique of hypothetical imperatives (“Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives”, 1972): against Kant, Foot argued that moral requirements do not have the force of categorical imperatives independent of the agent’s desires; later, however, she partly revised this position, seeking to ground moral normativity on different terrain.
- Rejection of the fact/value dichotomy: throughout her work, Foot contested the Humean and emotivist claim that no legitimate inference runs from “is” to “ought”, maintaining that evaluative concepts such as virtue and vice are tied to facts about the human good.
- Virtues and vices (Virtues and Vices, a 1978 collection): the virtues are corrective dispositions that steer the agent against temptations and deficiencies characteristic of human nature; they are beneficial both to the agent and to the community.
- Natural goodness (Natural Goodness, 2001): moral goodness is a species of natural goodness, assessable in relation to the characteristic life-form of the human species — just as one assesses whether an oak or a wolf is “doing well” according to what is proper to its kind. Here Foot draws on the notion of “Aristotelian categorical propositions” developed by Michael Thompson.
Influenced by
- Aristotle — ethics of the virtues and flourishing
- Thomas Aquinas — practical naturalism
- Elizabeth Anscombe — friend and interlocutor; “Modern Moral Philosophy”
- Ludwig Wittgenstein — through the philosophical climate of Oxford
Influenced
- Alasdair MacIntyre — the virtue revival
- Rosalind Hursthouse — neo-Aristotelian virtue ethics (On Virtue Ethics)
- Martha Nussbaum — Aristotelian naturalism and flourishing
- Michael Thompson — dialogue on the notion of life-form
Works
Foot’s reputation was first established through seminal articles, later gathered in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1978), a volume that includes “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect” (1967) and “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (1972). Her only properly systematic book, Natural Goodness (2001), presents the mature version of her ethical naturalism. Further essays were collected in Moral Dilemmas and Other Topics in Moral Philosophy (2002).
See also
Aristotle, Elizabeth Anscombe, Martha Nussbaum