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Philippa Foot (1920–2010)

Foot revived virtue ethics in analytic philosophy and developed the most distinctive contemporary defence of natural teleology: the argument that moral evaluation is structurally continuous with the evaluation of living things. A good root system is one that serves the plant’s life; a good hunting strategy is one that gets the wolf its prey; good human action is action that serves distinctively human flourishing. The evaluative structure is the same across all cases — an organism or a part or an activity is good insofar as it performs the function that its life-form requires. The argument, developed in Natural Goodness (2001), is a direct engagement with Aristotle’s ergon claim: that there is a human function, and the virtues are the excellences that fulfil it. Foot also introduced the trolley problem (1967), the thought experiment that became the most discussed example in modern moral philosophy.

Life

Born 3 October 1920 in Owston Ferry, Lincolnshire, England. Her mother Esther was the daughter of Grover Cleveland, the twenty-second and twenty-fourth President of the United States. Educated at Somerville College, Oxford (BA in philosophy, politics, and economics, 1942). She studied alongside Iris Murdoch and Elizabeth Anscombe; all three became central figures in the mid-century reaction against emotivism and prescriptivism in moral philosophy.

Fellow and tutor in philosophy at Somerville College, Oxford (1949–69). Foot’s engagement with Wittgenstein’s later philosophy — particularly the insistence that meaning is use and that philosophical problems arise from conceptual confusion — came primarily through Anscombe, Wittgenstein’s student and translator, who was Foot’s close friend and philosophical interlocutor throughout her career. Anscombe’s “Modern Moral Philosophy” (1958) — the paper that declared moral philosophy should be suspended pending an adequate philosophy of psychology and that coined the term “consequentialism” — was the proximate catalyst for the revival of virtue ethics that Foot’s work carried forward.

Foot’s earlier meta-ethical work established her reputation before the natural-goodness programme. “Moral Beliefs” (1958) and “Moral Arguments” (1958) argued against emotivism — that moral terms are content-constrained by the facts they describe, not mere expressions of attitude. “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives” (1972) took a Humean position, arguing that moral demands are conditional on the agent’s desires rather than categorical. Foot later repudiated this position in Natural Goodness, where moral evaluation is grounded in the life-form rather than in the agent’s motivational set — a reversal that is part of what makes the mature view legible.

Visiting appointments at Cornell, MIT, the University of California at Berkeley, and UCLA. Griffin Professor of Philosophy at UCLA (1976–91), while retaining her Somerville fellowship. She divided her time between Oxford and Los Angeles until her death. Died 3 October 2010 in Oxford, on her ninetieth birthday.

The trolley problem and moral philosophy

“The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect” (1967). Foot introduced the scenario that became the trolley problem: a runaway trolley will kill five people unless a bystander diverts it to a side track where it will kill one person. Is it permissible to divert? Most people say yes. But in a variant — a surgeon can kill one healthy patient and use the organs to save five dying patients — most say no. The asymmetry is the problem: why is it permissible to redirect a threat but not to create one, when the numbers are the same?

Foot proposed that the distinction tracks the doctrine of double effect: diverting the trolley does not intend the death of the one person on the side track (the death is a foreseen but unintended side effect of saving five), while the surgeon intends the death of the patient (the death is the means to saving five, not a side effect). The trolley problem was taken up and transformed by Judith Jarvis Thomson, Peter Unger, and a generation of moral philosophers; it has since migrated into cognitive science, experimental psychology, and artificial intelligence ethics. Foot herself regarded the problem’s later career as somewhat disconnected from the moral-philosophical context in which she raised it.

Natural goodness

Natural Goodness (2001) is Foot’s mature philosophical statement and her most original contribution.

The structure of evaluation. Foot argues that the evaluation of human action is structurally continuous with the evaluation of plants and animals. We evaluate a plant’s root system by whether it serves the plant’s life — whether it draws up water, anchors the plant, nourishes it. We evaluate a wolf’s hunting behaviour by whether it serves the wolf’s life — whether the pack coordinates effectively, whether the chase strategy brings down prey. In neither case does the evaluation depend on human interests or conventional standards; it depends on the life-form of the organism. A good root system is one that serves the life of a plant; a bad one fails to do so.

The human case. Human virtues — courage, justice, temperance, practical wisdom — are evaluable in the same way: they are the dispositions that serve distinctively human flourishing, where “flourishing” is understood in terms of the human life-form. A courageous person is good as a human being in the way that a well-rooted oak is good as a tree. The evaluation is objective — grounded in the facts about what the human life-form requires — and naturalistic — it does not appeal to supernatural properties, non-natural moral facts, or conventions.

The Aristotelian inheritance. The argument is a direct rehabilitation of Aristotle’s ergon argument: that there is a human function (ergon), and the virtues are the excellences that fulfil it. Foot’s innovation is to embed the ergon claim in a broader evaluative framework that applies to all living things, not only to humans — making the human case an instance of a general pattern rather than a metaphysical anomaly. The philosophical ancestor closest to Foot’s position (though developed independently) is Michael Thompson’s work on life and action, which provides the formal framework of “natural-historical judgments” — generics about what members of a species characteristically do — that Foot draws on in Natural Goodness.

Where Foot stops

The natural-goodness argument depends on the claim that there is a determinate human life-form — a set of characteristic human needs, activities, and excellences — that grounds moral evaluation. Bernard Williams objected that the human case is disanalogous to the plant and animal cases: plants and wolves have narrowly specified life-forms, but human beings are characterised by cultural variability, self-interpretation, and the capacity to choose among radically different ways of life. There is no single human ergon that plays the role the root system plays for the plant. Whether the variability undermines the natural-goodness framework or is accommodated by it — whether “human flourishing” is specific enough to ground moral evaluation or so broad as to be empty — is the central dispute in Foot’s reception.

The framework is naturalistic in a specific sense: it grounds moral evaluation in facts about the human life-form. But the kind of facts it appeals to — “humans characteristically live in communities, use language, raise children, reason about means and ends” — are natural-historical generics, not empirical generalisations. The generic “wolves hunt in packs” is true even though many individual wolves do not. Whether natural-historical generics have the evaluative force Foot claims — whether “humans characteristically do X” supports “a human who fails to do X is defective” — is contested. Critics argue that the inference from generic to evaluative is an instance of the naturalistic fallacy; Foot argues that the inference is constitutive of how evaluation works for living things and that the “fallacy” is a prejudice of Humean meta-ethics, not a real logical error.

Key works

See also: Aristotle · Williams (Bernard) · MacIntyre