Philippa Foot (1920-2010) was one of the greatest moral philosophers of the 20th century, but she insisted that she was “not clever at all” and “very uneducated.” She was greatly influenced by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, whom she described in an interview as “more rigorously Catholic than the Pope,” but she herself was a card-carrying atheist. She was also one of the founders of Oxfam, a life-long socialist, and the grand-daughter of U.S. President Grover Cleveland. To the public, she is best known for her formulation of the trolley problem, a moral dilemma which she first raised in a now-famous essay. The recent death of such a great philosopher should make us pause and ask: what did she live for? Foot finally revealed what drove her in an interview in 2003: a life-long quest to show that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. Throughout her academic life, she was passionately opposed to subjectivism in ethics. The story of how she got into moral philosophy is a fascinating one:
“I’ll tell you a bit of biography. During the war I went to London to work as an economist as war work, and then I came back and started to work on philosophy. I was just really getting going on moral philosophy when the photographs and films of Belsen and Birkenau came out, and it’s really not possible to convey to people who are younger what it was like. One would have said such a thing on that scale could not happen, human beings couldn’t do this. That was what was behind my refusing to accept subjectivism even when I couldn’t see any way out. It took a long time and it was only in the last fifteen or twenty years that I managed it. But I was certain that it could not be right that the Nazis were convinced and there was no way that they were wrong and we were right. It just could not be.
“That’s why I could never accept Charles Stevenson, say, whose emotivism implies that in the end that you simply express one attitude and I express another… That is what has driven all my moral philosophy.”
(Excerpt from an interview with The Philosophers’ Magazine, originally given in 2003 and republished on October 6, 2010.)
Foot made several attempts to answer the question “Why be moral?” on rational grounds, and in this post, I’d like to discuss her last and most systematic attempt. In 2001, Foot wrote a book called Natural Goodness. She has given an account of the central thesis of her book in interviews. What I propose to do is quote a few choice excerpts and then throw the floor open to readers. Do you think Foot’s naturalistic ethics succeeds in establishing that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong?
Foot on natural goodness
“I’m explaining a notion that I have called ‘natural goodness’. An admired colleague of mine, Michael Thompson, has said of my work that I believe that vice is a form of natural defect. That’s exactly what I believe, and I want to say that we describe defects in human beings in the same way as we do defects in plants and animals. I once began a lecture by saying that in moral philosophy it’s very important to begin by talking about plants. This surprised some people!
“What I believe is that there are a whole set of concepts that apply to living things and only to living things, considered in their own right. These would include, for instance, function, welfare, flourishing, interests, the good of something. And I think that all these concepts are a cluster. They belong together.
“When we say something is good, say one’s ears or eyes are good, we mean they are as they should be, as human ears ought to be, that they fulfil the function that ears are needed for in human life… There’s nothing wrong with our eyes because we can’t see in the dark. But owls’ eyes are defective if they can’t see in the dark. So there’s this notion of a defect which is species-relevant. Things aren’t just good or bad, they’re good in a certain individual, in relation to the manner of life of his or hers or its species. That’s the basic idea. And I argue that moral defects are just one more example of this kind of defect.
“So let’s take plants. A plant needs strong roots, and in the same sort of way human beings need courage. When one is talking about what a human being should do, one says things like, “look, he should be able to face up to danger in certain circumstances, for his own sake and for the sake of others.” But this is like saying, “an owl should be able to see in the dark, should be able to fly” or “a gull should be able to recognize the sound of its chick among all the cacophony of the cliff.” And if you think of it in this way then you’re not going to think that there’s a gap between facts and evaluation – between description of facts, such as ‘owls hunt by night’, that’s a description of fact, and another description, such as ‘that owl’s got weak eyesight; it’s doesn’t seem to be able to manage in the dark’. These are the central notions. And that’s why I thought we should start moral philosophy by talking about plants.”
(Excerpt from an interview with Philosophy Now magazine, originally given in Autumn 2001 and published in August/September 2010.)
Foot on deriving an “ought” from an “is”
“Practical rationality is taking the right things as reasons,” says Foot, “so ‘the child is hungry’ is a reason to feed it, and ‘smoking will kill you’ is a reason for not taking up smoking.”
“From the fact that human children are not born able to do things, from this fact that they are born helpless, I get an ought: that they are to be looked after. Human beings need to look after children. That’s an example of an is that gives an ought….”
“So I’m really talking about a general concept of ‘good’ that applies to plants, animals and human beings. You can’t understand what I mean when I say I think it is acting badly to break a promise until you first understand that ‘good’ is used of living things in a particular way. It’s not like ‘oh good’ which is speaker relative and it’s not like ‘good vacuum cleaner’ either, which really depends upon the interests of people who use these things. But it belongs only to living things.
“So first I identify this very general sense of good then I try and explain it by its relation to the particular way in which things of that kind, living species, need to do just to survive. You’re defective if you don’t do that. A hedgehog that ran from a predator would be defective, a deer that made itself as small as possible would be defective… It’s an objective fact that a fleeing hedgehog would be a defective hedgehog.”
(Excerpt from an interview with The Philosophers’ Magazine, originally given in 2003 and republished on October 6, 2010.)
Foot on how an “ought” can exist independently of our desires
To show that a person’s own present desires and wishes are not needed to generate an ‘ought’ Foot introduces the example of a teenager who we say ought not to start smoking. “The teenager might query our ought, but wouldn’t they be wrong? We take it as a reason and that’s what the ought is saying: that they do have a reason to stop. They might say ‘I don’t care now’ and they are rejecting your ought, but they’re wrong because they do have a reason to stop. This case makes it easier to see that there is something strange about thinking that an ought depends on feeling, desire or whatever. Right now they don’t have any such feelings and doesn’t that destroy the idea that an ought, a value, needs a desire?”
This may seem an irrelevant example because the decision to smoke or not smoke is does not seem to be a moral but a prudential one. “Prudence, as wisdom, is a virtue you know,” she retorts. “It’s a very modern thing to try and distinguish the moral.”
(Excerpt from an interview with The Philosophers’ Magazine, originally given in 2003 and republished on October 6, 2010.)
Foot on Nietzsche
“In my book [Natural Goodness] I take Nietzsche on. I say, ‘Look, what you’re suggesting might be possible for some race of beings, but not for humans. I know you think that if only people will read you and believe you, human beings will become quite different, but I don’t believe a word of that. You want to judge actions not by their type, by what is done, but by their relation to the nature of the person who does them. And that is poisonous.” When we think of the things that have been done by Hitler, Stalin, Pol Pot, what we have to be horrified at is what was done. We don’t need to inquire into the psychology of these people in order to know the moral quality of what they did….It’s wrong-headed to leave aside, as he does, the question of what human beings as such need, or what a society needs in the way of justice, fastening instead on the spontaneity, the energy, the passion of the individual agent…'”
(Excerpt from an interview with Philosophy Now magazine, originally given in Autumn 2001 and published in August/September 2010.)
I should add that while Foot insisted that some moral norms were grounded in human nature, she also recognized that other norms were culture-relative. I would also urge readers to have a look at this interview she gave to The Harvard Review of Philosophy in 2003.
And now I’d like to ask readers: what do you think of Foot’s ethics? Can we build an ethic on the foundation of natural goodness?