'Foot stands out among contemporary ethical theorists because of her conviction that virtues and vices are more central ethical notions than rights, duties, justice, or consequences - the primary focus of most other contemporary theorists. This volume brings together a dozen essays published between 1957 and 1977, and includes two new ones as well. In the first, Foot argues explicitly for an ethic of virtue, and in the next five discusses abortion, euthanasia, free will/determination, and the ethics of Hume and (...) Nietzsche. The final eight essays chart her growing disenchantment with emotivism and prescriptivism and their account of moral arguments. All the essays embody to some extent her commitment to an ethics of virtue... Foot's style is straightforward and readable, her arguments subtle, ingenious, and some of them important.' Choice. (shrink)

Philippa Foot has for many years been one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy. Long dissatisfied with the moral theories of her contemporaries, she has gradually evolved a theory of her own that is radically opposed not only to emotivism and prescriptivism but also to the whole subjectivist, anti-naturalist movement deriving from David Hume. Dissatisfied with both Kantian and utilitarian ethics, she claims to have isolated a special form of evaluation that predicates goodness and defect only (...) to living things considered as such; she finds this form of evaluation in moral judgements. Her vivid discussion covers topics such as practical rationality, erring conscience, and the relation between virtue and happiness, ending with a critique of Nietzsche's immoralism. This long-awaited book exposes a highly original approach to moral philosophy and represents a fundamental break from the assumptions of recent debates. Foot challenges many prominent philosophical arguments and attitudes; but hers is a work full of life and feeling, written for anyone intrigued by the deepest questions about goodness and human. (shrink)

Moral Dilemmas is the second volume of collected essays by the eminent moral philosopher Philippa Foot, gathering the best of her work from the late 1970s to the 1990s. It fills the gap between her famous 1978 collection Virtues and Vices and her acclaimed monograph Natural Goodness, published in 2001. In this new collection Professor Foot develops further her critique of the dominant ethical theories of the last fifty years, and discusses such topics as the nature of moral judgement, practical (...) rationality, and the conflict of virtue with desire and self-interest. Moral Dilemmas, alongside her other two books, completes the summation of her distinctive and lasting contribution to twentieth-century moral philosophy. (shrink)

One of the reasons why most of us feel puzzled about the problem of abortion is that we want, and do not want, to allow to the unborn child the rights that belong to adults and children. When we think of a baby about to be born it seems absurd to think that the next few minutes or even hours could make so radical a difference to its status; yet as we go back in the life of the fetus we (...) are more and more reluctant to say that this is a human being and must be treated as such. No doubt this is the deepest source of our dilemma, but it is not the only one. For we are also confused about the general question of what we may and may not do where the interests of human beings conflict. We have strong intuitions about certain cases; saying, for instance, that it is all right to raise the level of education in our country, though statistics allow us to predict that a rise in the suicide rate will follow, while it is not all right to kill the feeble-minded to aid cancer research. It is not easy, however, to see the principles involved, and one way of throwing light on the abortion issue will be by setting up parallels involving adults or children once born. So we will be able to isolate the “equal rights” issue and should be able to make some advance... (shrink)

Philippa Foot; V—Moral Beliefs, Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society, Volume 59, Issue 1, 1 June 1959, Pages 83–104, https://doi.org/10.1093/aristotelian/59.

La théorie du langage adoptée par Latour dans ses enquêtes tourne le dos au « linguistic turn » et revient à une conception « descriptive » du langage. Cet article vise à questionner cette hypothèse à partir d’une enquête sur son rapport au langage. L’absence de référence à la théorie des actes de langage constitue un point d’entrée à ce questionnement.The theory of language adopted by Latour turns away from "linguistic turn" and comes down to a "descriptive" conception of language. (...) This article seeks to question this hypothesis from a survey of its relationship to language. The lack of reference to the theory of speech acts constitutes a starting point to the issue. (shrink)

Analyses in detail the accounts given respectively by Locke and by Hume of the mental factors such as pleasure, pain, uneasiness, and desire, which they see as causing all human actions. Foot argues that this enterprise was misconceived. Philosophers should no more try to describe a mechanism underlying acting on a reason than a mechanism underlying believing on a reason. Practical and theoretical reasoning are here on a par, the first issuing in action and the second in belief.

The human resource manager treads a fine line in seeking to reconcile the values of the organisation with professional values about the ethical management of people. This paper seeks to explore this ambiguity. The research findings suggest that the extent to which HR professionals can influence organisational ethics is dependent on the culture and structure of the organisation, as well as on the status and credibility of the HR specialists themselves. In the main there is little evidence that their influence (...) is significant. (shrink)

In some jobs, the correlation between effort and output is almost zero. For instance, money managers are primarily paid for luck. Using a controlled lab experiment, we examined under which conditions workers are willing to put in effort even if the output is determined by pure luck. We varied whether the employer could observe the workers’ effort, as well as whether the employer knows that earnings were determined by luck. We find that, workers believed that the employer will reward their (...) effort even if their effort does not affect earnings. Consequently, workers work harder if the employer could observe their effort. Moreover, even when the employer only saw earnings and not effort, workers labored harder if the employer did not know that earnings were determined by luck. (shrink)

Whilst there is a growing volume of literature exploring the ethical implications of organisational change for HRM and the ethical aspects of certain HRM activities, there have been few published U.K. studies of how HR managers actually behave when faced with ethical dilemmas in their work. This paper seeks to enhance the foundations of such knowledge through an examination of the influence of organisational values on the ethical behaviour of Human Resource Managers within a sample of charities in the U.K. (...) and the Republic of Ireland. A qualitative research design is adopted utilising semi-structured interviews. Findings highlight ethical inconsistency in people management in the charity sector arising from the clear application of strong and explicit organisational values to external client groups but their limited influence on people management strategies and practices within the organisation. Many of the ethical issues faced by HRM professionals in both countries arise from this inconsistency. In their handling of ethical dilemmas, the HRM professionals exhibit a combination of a care ethic and a concern for justice but it is also clear that in situations of management intransigence, a desire to be conscience driven often gives way to a contingent approach. Whilst respondents considered it inappropriate for the HRM function to be the conscience of the organisation, it is seen to have a key role in providing management with advice on ethical action. However, the ability of HRM to influence ethical behaviour is highly dependent on the status of the function within the organisation. (shrink)

This essay is a continuation of one Foot had written ten years earlier under the title ‘Moral Realism and Moral Dilemma’. Foot attacks Ruth Marcus’ notion that some moral dilemmas involve circumstances in which one is guilty whatever one does: being ‘damned if one does something and damned if one doesn’t’. Foot's opposition to Marcus’ thesis rests on the argument that the guilty feelings one may experience when coping with some serious moral dilemma do not imply that one is indeed (...) guilty. She expands this argument in order to attack Bernard Williams’ thesis that such feelings of guilt show that there are cases of ‘inescapable wrongness’. Re‐thinking the nature of moral dilemmas, Foot denies the existence of cases that involve inevitable wrongdoing. (shrink)

Foot criticizes G. E. Moore's anti‐naturalism and the subjectivist or non‐cognitivist theories influenced by Moore, such as emotivism, prescriptivism, and expressivism. Foot traces the roots of non‐cognitivism to a desire‐based, egoistic interpretation of David Hume's practicality requirement, i.e. that morality is necessarily practical. Foot eschews this interpretation of Hume's requirement for an alternative, cognitivist, notion of practical rationality that nevertheless still meets this requirement. Foot also denies that moral evaluation is opposed to descriptive statements, or matters of fact, as the (...) non‐cognitivists argue; it has to do rather with facts about a particular subject matter, i.e. human life. Her main argument, which she will pursue throughout the book, is that the grounding of a moral argument is ultimately in these facts, or in what Elizabeth Anscombe refers to as ‘Aristotelian necessities’, i.e. the moral virtues; and thus the evaluation of the human will should be determined by facts about the nature of human beings and of the life of our species. (shrink)

Successful tutoring depends in part on child tutors’ ability to recognise and interpret accurately signals of misunderstanding by their tutees. Age- and gender-related differences were investigated in a study which exposed 80 children to a video-recorded episode involving a target child receiving ambiguous instructions in her attempts to move a model car along a designated route on a playmat roadway from one destination to another. The results showed that explicit, general and facial modes of displaying puzzlement by the target child (...) were judged as equally powerful expressions of degree of puzzlement, but 8-10 year olds judged the target child as significantly more puzzled than did 7 year olds. Older children were also more likely to attribute the puzzlement of the target child to the ambiguous instructions than to her verbal or facial expression of puzzlement. Girls were generally more accurate than boys in judging facial expressions and less likely than boys to give wrong or alternatively ambiguous responses when given the opportunity to correct the video-recorded ambiguous instructions. The results throw some light on the developing sensitivities of boys and girls in recognising and attributing failures of understanding by other children. (shrink)

Foot considers the view that practical rationality is nothing but the pursuit of happiness, which constitutes an objection to the account of practical rationality developed in the preceding chapters. Foot considers the different ways happiness is predicated of human beings, distinguishing happiness as humanity's good from enjoyment and contentment. She argues that the common view that happiness is a state of mind, detachable from beliefs about special objects, is in error because happiness does not have the same logical grammar as (...) words like excitement or pleasure. Foot concludes that happiness is a protean concept, appearing in many different forms; however, happiness may be thought of as humanity's good in such a way that combining happiness with wickedness is ruled out a priori. This understanding of happiness as humanity's good is close to Aristotle's eudaimonia, insofar as it means operation in conformity with the virtues; as Foot understands the term, happiness is the enjoyment of good things, meaning the pursuit and attainment of right ends. (shrink)

Foot discusses Nietzsche's immoralism in the light of the foregoing account of moral evaluation. She begins with a preliminary account of Plato's response to immoralism in the first two books of the Republic. Foot distinguishes three theses in Nietzsche that may be called ‘immoralist’: the denial of free will, the attack on Christian or ‘pity’ morality, and the denial of intrinsic badness in acts; she discusses only the latter two. Regarding the attack on Christian morality, Foot argues that Nietzsche got (...) the facts about human life wrong; regarding the claim that an act was right or wrong only in relation to the nature of the person who performs the act, Foot argues that this is a poisonous doctrine that has no sound basis in psychology. She concludes that Nietzsche's revaluation of all values might be valid for a different species, but cannot be valid for human beings. (shrink)

Moral Dilemmas is the second volume of collected essays by the eminent moral philosopher Philippa Foot, gathering the best of her work from the late 1970s to the 1990s. It fills the gap between her famous 1978 collection Virtues and Vices and her acclaimed monograph Natural Goodness, published in 2001. In this new collection Professor Foot develops further her critique of the dominant ethical theories of the last fifty years, and discusses such topics as the nature of moral judgement, practical (...) rationality, and the conflict of virtue with desire and self-interest. Moral Dilemmas, alongside her other two books, completes the summation of her distinctive and lasting contribution to twentieth-century moral philosophy. (shrink)

Dewi Z. Phillips has argued that moral considerations must override other considerations. The author distinguishes ‘evidential’ from ‘verdictive’ moral considerations, arguing that only the latter are in any sense overriding.

Discusses the question of the objectivity or subjectivity of moral judgments, hoping to illuminate it by contrasting moral and aesthetic judgments. In her critical assessment of the nature of moral judgments, Foot concludes that some such judgments (as e.g. that Nazism was evil) are definitely objective. The concept of morality here supplies criteria independent of local standards, which function as fixed starting points in arguments across local boundaries, whereas, by contrast, aesthetic truths can ultimately depend on locally determined criteria. More (...) problematic is the apparently different relation of moral and of aesthetic judgments to rational choice. Individuals may have no reason to choose what is beautiful, but we think that they must always have reason to choose what is morally right, which raises one of the most difficult problems in moral philosophy. (shrink)

This article seeks to provide insights into appropriate FDA oversight of nanotechnology. This commentary identifies limitations in the methodology employed and concludes that the analysis would be stronger with a more in-depth institutional dimension based on administrative law and political science research.