Abstract
This paper traces the evolution of Philippa Foot’s way of thinking about moral issues, going beyond her particular opinions and philosophical positions to examine her methodology. Guided by a continuous struggle against the limits of what moral philosophy sees as a legitimate statement, her work is much more coherent than the author herself seems to have thought.
Philippa Foot looked for a natural raison d’être to morality – one that would ensure its reality – without always being sure what “natural” means. Her work evolved around this theme across three distinct periods. To begin, she was simply a realist. Then, she drew close to David Hume and his refusal to give a definitive and universal foundation for morality. Finally, she ended her philosophical work by adopting Neo-Aristotelianism. Her contribution to moral philosophy was twofold. Her first philosophical stances were made in dialogue with expressivism to advance a metaethics. She later moved on to practical ethics, or rather a general reflection on the variety of normativities engaged in difficult life decisions. While sympathetic to this struggle, the present text will not simply follow all the choices made by Foot. It may indeed be the case that contemporary moral philosophy cannot, and should not, propose such wide-ranging conceptions. Working on the grammar of morality means working on its conceptual errors, its flawed definitions, and its unacknowledged presuppositions rather than providing a general anthropology, which requires a different methodology. Moral philosophy as grammar should probably concentrate the critical work. The practical consequence of this effort leads to elucidating the decisions made on a case-by-case basis as much as possible.
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Notes
- 1.
But apparently this kind of particularism can be compatible with an approach through virtues: according to Constantine Sandis, “the most promising understanding of virtue ethics is a particularist one” (Sandis, 2021), where particularism is understood in the sense that was given to it by Jonathan Dancy (Dancy, 2004).
- 2.
A recent article takes up Foot’s humean stances in a very interesting way, choosing to ignore the criticisms that the philosopher herself later addressed to this work (Woods, 2019).
- 3.
Donald MacKinnon “is rather like Bernanos’s country priest – he carries his love for people & his mistrust of himself almost to the edge of insanity.” (Conradi, 2002, sec. 8.8)
- 4.
During the Second World War, Michael Foot was an officer for the Special Air Service (SAS). Indeed, his life and work can be assembled as “Soviet espionage, Churchill, the Special Operations Executive, resistance and military history” (Robertson, 1999), and his subsequent scientific work in the field of the history of the Second Wold War pursued these initial engagements (Foot, 1968).
- 5.
Cf. the novel The Nice and the Good illustrating some aspects of this friendship (Murdoch, 1968).
- 6.
Richard Hare’s prescriptivism, another dominant position in British moral philosophy of that time, was also rooted in emotivist epistemology and thus suffers from an analogus weakness.
- 7.
Bernard Williams introduced the adjectives thick and thin to talk about moral concepts, the former being concepts with both descriptive and evaluative potential (“chaste”, “courageous”), and the latter purely evaluative (“right”, “good”). This distinction is commonly attributed to Williams, but it appears for the first time in Foot’s writings, notably in her paper “Moral Beliefs” from 1959; see (Foot, 2002a; Williams, 1985).
- 8.
Or so she thought. For an extensive discussion of the driver’s difficult choices, see (Kamm, 2016).
- 9.
The title of this paper, “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?”, alludes to a founding text of the contemporary intuitionist tradition, published nearly a century before (Prichard, 1912).
- 10.
Other interpretations of this passage of Aristotle are possible. Martha Nussbaum suggests for example that it was not necessarily nature, but rather the impossibility of making choices regarding the conduct of one’s own life that should be considered one of the main reasons why slaves could not, according to Aristotle, be seen as likely to achieve happiness (Nussbaum, 2001, 348).
- 11.
“As regards the individual nature, woman is defective and misbegotten, for the active force in the male seed tends to the production of a perfect likeness in the masculine sex; while the production of woman comes from defect in the active force or from some material indisposition, or even from some external influence; such as that of a south wind, which is moist, as the Philosopher observes (De Gener. Animal. iv, 2). On the other hand, as regards human nature in general, woman is not misbegotten, but is included in nature’s intention as directed to the work of generation. Now the general intention of nature depends on God, Who is the universal Author of nature. Therefore, in producing nature, God formed not only the male but also the female.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Pars, q. 92: “The production of the woman”)
- 12.
“[I]t happens that something which is not natural to man, either in regard to reason, or in regard to the preservation of the body, becomes connatural to this individual man, on account of there being some corruption of nature in him. And this corruption may be either on the part of the body—from some ailment; thus to a man suffering from fever, sweet things seem bitter, and vice versa—or from an evil temperament; thus some take pleasure in eating earth and coals and the like; or on the part of the soul; thus from custom some take pleasure in cannibalism or in the unnatural intercourse of man and beast, or other such things, which are not in accord with human nature.” (Aquinas, Summa Theologiae, Prima Secundæ Partis, q. 31: “Pleasure considered in itself”)
- 13.
For “a Kantian amendment to Foot’s naturalism”, that explains that we can think of going well in a way that would be “timelessly said and universal, yet still dependent on our nature as rational animals”, cf. (Hacker-Wright, 2013, 126–127).
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Zielinska, A.C. (2022). Philippa Foot’s Quest for Nature in Moral Philosophy. In: Le Jallé, E., Benoit, A. (eds) Thinking with Women Philosophers. Logic, Argumentation & Reasoning, vol 30. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-12662-8_5
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