Philippa Foot

Philippa Ruth Foot FBA (/ˈfɪlɪpə ˈfʊt/; née Bosanquet; 3 October 1920 – 3 October 2010), an English philosopher, was one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, inspired by the ethics of Aristotle. Her work in the 1950s and 1960s sought to adapt Aristotelian ethical theory to a contemporary world view and so competitive with such theories as modern deontological and utilitarian ethics. Some of her work was crucial to the re-emergence of normative ethics within analytic philosophy, especially her critique of consequentialism and of non-cognitivism. This appears in continuing discussion of an example of hers referred to as the trolley problem.[1] Foot's approach was influenced by the later work of Wittgenstein, although she rarely dealt explicitly with materials treated by him. She was a granddaughter of American President Grover Cleveland.[2]:354

Philippa Foot

FBA
Born
Philippa Ruth Bosanquet

(1920-10-03)3 October 1920
Owston Ferry, England
Died3 October 2010(2010-10-03) (aged 90)
Oxford, England
Alma materSomerville College, Oxford
Era20th-century philosophy
RegionWestern philosophy
SchoolAnalytic philosophy
Aretaic turn
Aristotelianism
Main interests
Ethics, philosophy of mind
Notable ideas
Trolley problem, modern revival of virtue ethics

Personal life and education

Born as Philippa Ruth Bosanquet, Foot was the daughter of Esther Cleveland (1893–1980) and Captain William Sidney Bence Bosanquet (1893–1966) of the Coldstream Guards of the British Army. Her paternal grandfather was the barrister and judge, Sir Frederick Albert Bosanquet, Common Serjeant of London from 1900 to 1917. Her maternal grandfather was the 22nd and 24th President of the United States, Grover Cleveland.

Foot was educated privately and at Somerville College, Oxford, 1939–1942, where she obtained a first-class degree in Philosophy, Politics and Economics (PPE). Her association with Somerville, interrupted only by government service as an economist from 1942 to 1947, continued for the rest of her life. She was a lecturer in philosophy, 1947–1950, fellow and tutor, 1950–1969, senior research fellow, 1969–1988, and honorary fellow, 1988–2010. She spent many hours there in debate with G. E. M. Anscombe, who persuaded her that non-cognitivism was misguided.

In the 1960s and 1970s Foot held a number of visiting professorships in the United States – at Cornell, MIT, Berkeley, City University of New York. She was appointed Griffin Professor of Philosophy at the University of California, Los Angeles, in 1976 and taught there until 1991, dividing her time between the United States and England.[3]

Contrary to common belief, Foot was not a founder of Oxfam and joined the organization about six years after its foundation. She was an atheist.[4] She was once married to the historian M. R. D. Foot,[5] and at one time shared a flat with the novelist Iris Murdoch.[6] She died in 2010 on her 90th birthday.[7]

Critique of non-cognitivism

Foot's works of the late 1950s were meta-ethical in character: that is, they pertained to the status of moral judgment and speech. The essays "Moral Arguments" and "Moral Beliefs", in particular, were crucial in overturning the rule of non-cognitivism in analytic approaches to ethical theory in the preceding decades.

The non-cognitivist approach may already be found in Hume, but it was given its most influential analytic formulations in works of A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and R. M. Hare. These writers focused on abstract or so-called "thin" ethical concepts such as good and bad and right and wrong. These were supposed to have a special practicality or link to action that allegedly could not hold of a 'matter of fact'. The non-cognitivists thus argued that the corresponding expressions are not employed to affirm something true of the thing in question, but rather, to express an emotion or (in Hare's case) an imperative. It is clear that the form of an imperative can apply to any description of action irrespective of content. Thus 'morality' and 'the facts' are simply independent of each other.

This sort of analysis of abstract or "thin" ethical concepts was tied to a special partitioning account of more concrete or "thick" concepts, such as "cowardly", "cruel", or "gluttonous." These attributes obviously don't swing free of the facts. Yet they carry the same 'practicality' that "bad" or "wrong" do. They were supposed to combine the particular non-cognitive "evaluative" element championed by the theory with the obvious, "merely descriptive" element. One could detach the evaluative force by employing them in an 'inverted commas sense' as one does in attempting to articulate thoughts in a system one opposes, by e.g. putting "unmanly" or "unladylike" in quotation marks. Then one has purely 'descriptive' or 'factual' expressions applying to actions of men and women respectively. In employing such expressions without the distancing quotation marks we superadd the non-cognitive extra of "and such action is bad."

Foot's purpose was to criticize this distinction and the underlying account of thin concepts. Because of the particular way she approached the defense of the cognitive and truth-evaluable character of moral judgment, these essays were crucial in bringing the question of the rationality of morality to the fore.

Practical considerations involving "thick" ethical concepts – but it would be cruel, it would be cowardly, it's for her to do, or I promised her I wouldn't do it – move people to act one way rather than another, but they are as much purely descriptive as any other judgment pertaining to human life. They differ from thoughts such as it would be done on a Tuesday or it would take about three gallons of paint, not by the admixture of what she considers to be any non-factual, attitude-expressing "moral" element, but by the simple fact that people have reason not to do things that are cowardly or cruel.

Her lifelong devotion to this question appears in all periods of her work.

Morality and reasons

"Why be moral?" – early works

It is on this question – the "why be moral?" question (which for her may be said to divide into the questions "why be just?", "why be temperate?", etc.) – that her doctrine underwent a surprising series of reversals. In "Moral Beliefs," she had argued that the received virtues – courage, temperance, justice, and so on – are typically good for their bearer. They make people stronger, so to speak, and are conditions of happiness. This holds only typically since e. g. the courage of a soldier might per accidens be exactly his downfall, but is nevertheless in some sense essential: possession of sound arms and legs is good as well, though damaged legs might perchance exclude one from the conscription that brings one's contemporaries to their deaths. People thus have reason to act in accordance with the canons of these virtues and avoid cowardly, gluttonous and unjust action. Parents and upbringers who want the best for children will steer them accordingly. The "thick" ethical concepts that she emphasized in her defense of the cognitive character of moral judgment were precisely those associated with such 'profitable' traits, i.e. virtues; this is how such descriptions differ from randomly chosen descriptions of action. The crucial point was that the difference between "just action" and "action performed on Tuesday" (for example) was not a matter of superadded "emotive" meaning, as in Ayer and Stevenson, nor a latent imperatival feature, as in Hare. It is just that justice makes its bearer strong, and thus that we have reason to cultivate it in ourselves and our loved ones by keeping to the corresponding actions. Foot must thus face the threat posed by Nietzsche and the Platonic immoralists: perhaps the received so-called virtues in fact warp or damage the bearer. She suggests that modern and contemporary philosophers (other than Nietzsche) are afraid to pose this range of questions because they are blinded by an emphasis the 'particular just act' or the particular courageous act rather than the traits that issue in them, and it seems that an agent might come out the loser by one of these particular acts. The underlying putative virtue is the object to consider.

"Why be moral?" – middle works

Fifteen years later, in the essay "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives", she reversed this when it came to justice and benevolence, that is, the virtues that especially regard other people. Although everyone has reason to cultivate courage, temperance and prudence, whatever the person desires or values, still, the rationality of just and benevolent acts must, she thought, turn on contingent motivations. Although many found the thesis shocking, on her (then) account, it is meant to be, in a certain respect, inspiring: in a famous reinterpretation of a remark of Kant,[8] she says that "we are not conscripts in the army of virtue, but volunteers";[9]:170 the fact that we have nothing to say in proof of the irrationality of at least some unjust people should not alarm us in our own defense and cultivation of justice and benevolence: "it did not strike the citizens of Leningrad that their devotion to the city and its people during the terrible years of the siege was contingent".

"Why be moral?" – later work

Her book Natural Goodness attempts a different line. The question what we have most reason to do, is tied to the idea of the good working of practical reason. This, in turn, is tied to the idea of the species of an animal as providing a measure of good and bad in the operations of its parts and faculties. Just as one has to know what kind of animal one is dealing with in order, for instance, to decide whether its eyesight is good or bad, the question of whether a subject's practical reason is well developed, depends on the kind of animal it is. (This idea is developed in the light of a conception of animal kinds or species as implicitly containing "evaluative" content, which may be criticized on contemporary biological grounds; although it is arguable, even on that basis, that it is very deeply entrenched in human cognition.) In our case, what makes for a well-constituted practical reason, depends on the fact that we are human beings characterized by certain possibilities of emotion and desire, a certain anatomy, neurological organization, and so forth.

Once this step is made, it becomes possible to argue for the rationality of moral considerations in a new way. Humans begin with the conviction that justice is a genuine virtue. Thus, the conviction that the well-constituted human practical reason operates with considerations of justice, means that taking account of other people in that sort of way is "how human beings live together." (The thought that this is how they live must be understood in a sense that is compatible with the fact that actual individuals often do not – just as dentists understand the thought that "human beings have n teeth" in a way that is compatible with many people having fewer). There is nothing incoherent in the thought that practical calculation that takes account of others and their good might characterize some kind of rational and social animal.

Similarly, of course, there is nothing incoherent in the idea of a form of rational life within which such considerations are alien; where they can only be imposed by damaging and disturbing the individual person. There is nothing analytic about the rationality of justice and benevolence. Rather, human conviction that justice is a virtue and that considerations of justice are genuine reasons for action, is the conviction that the kind of rational being that we are, namely, human beings, is of the first type. There is no reason to think such a kind of rational animality is impossible, so there is no reason to suspect that considerations of justice are frauds.

Of course, it might be suggested that this is precisely not the case, that human beings are of the second kind, and thus that the justice and benevolence we esteem are artificial and false. Foot would hold that considerations of machismo and lady-likeness are artificial and false; they are matters of "mere convention," which tend to put one off of the main things. That being how it is with justice, was the position of the Platonic "immoralists" Callicles and Thrasymachus, and that being how it is with benevolence, was the view of Friedrich Nietzsche.

In the case of Callicles and Nietzsche, this apparently is to be shown by claiming that justice and benevolence, respectively, can be inculcated only by warping the emotional apparatus of the individual. Foot's book ends by attempting to defuse the evidence Nietzsche brings against what might be called, the common sense position. She proceeds by accepting his basic premise that a way of life that can only be inculcated by damaging the individual's passions, filling one with remorse, resentment, and so forth, is not true. She employs exactly the Nietzschean form of argument against certain forms of femininity, for example, or exaggerated forms of acceptance of etiquette. Justice and benevolence, she claims, however, "suit" human beings, and there is no reason to accept the critique of Callicles or Nietzsche in this case.

Ethics, aesthetics and political philosophy

Nearly all Foot's published work relates to normative or meta-ethics. Only once did she move into aesthetics – in her 1970 British Academy Hertz Memorial Lecture, Art and Morality, in which certain contrasts are drawn between moral and aesthetic judgements.

Likewise, she appears never to have taken a professional interest in political philosophy. Geoffrey Thomas, of Birkbeck College, London, recalls approaching Foot in 1968, when he was a postgraduate student at Trinity College, Oxford, to ask if she would read a draft paper on the relation of ethics to politics. "I've never found political philosophy interesting," she said, adding, "One's bound to interest oneself in the things people around one are talking about,' with the implication, quite correct, that political philosophy was largely out of favour with Oxford philosophers in the 1950s and 1960s. She still graciously agreed to read the paper, but Thomas never sent it to her.[10]:31–58

Selected works
  • Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy. Berkeley: University of California Press; Oxford: Blackwell, 1978 (there are more recent editions).
  • Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001.
  • Moral Dilemmas: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002.
  • Warren Quinn, Morality and Action, ed. Philippa Foot (Introduction, ix–xii), Cambridge : Cambridge University Press, 1993.
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See also

References
  1. Philippa Foot, The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect Archived 24 August 2019 at the Wayback Machine in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978) (originally in the Oxford Review, No. 5, 1967).
  2. Zack, N., The Handy Philosophy Answer Book (Canton, MI: Visible Ink Press, 2010), p. 354.
  3. Hursthouse, Rosalind (28 November 2012). "Philippa Ruth Foot, 1920–2010" (PDF). Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy. XI. pp. 179–196. ISBN 9780197265307. Archived from the original on 5 December 2016.
  4. Voorhoeve, Alex (2003). "The Grammar of Good. An Interview with Philippa Foot" (PDF). The Harvard Review of Philosophy. XI: 32–44. ISSN 2153-9154. OCLC 25557273.
  5. Eilenberg, Susan (5 September 2002). "With A, then B, then C". London Review of Books. 24 (17): 3–8.
  6. Grimes, William (9 October 2010). "Philippa Foot, Renowned Philosopher, Dies at 90". The New York Times. Retrieved 25 April 2014.
  7. "Philippa Foot obituary". The Guardian. 5 October 2010.
  8. Critique of Practical Reason, Book 1, Chapter 3, "[W]e pretend with fanciful pride to set ourselves above the thought of duty, like volunteers.... [B]ut yet we are subjects in it, not the sovereign,"
  9. Virtues and Vices, p. 170.
  10. Hacker-Wright, J., Philippa Foot's Moral Thought (London: Bloomsbury Publishing, 2013), pp. 31–58.
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