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)

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)

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)

According to Schopenhauer’s compensation argument for pessimism, the non-existence of the world is preferable to its existence because no goods can ever compensate for the mere existence of evil. Standard interpretations take this argument to be based on Schopenhauer’s thesis that all goods are merely the negation of evils, from which they assume it follows that the apparent goods in life are in fact empty and without value. This article develops a non-standard variant of the standard interpretation, which accepts the (...) relevance of the negativity thesis but rejects that the argument assumes that life’s goods are all empty and valueless. Instead, it argues that whatever value negative goods might possess, they do not have the kind of value to compensate for positive evils. This involves additional development of the negativity thesis and a defence of it against objections from Byron Simmons (2021). (shrink)

The aim of the book is to determine the category to which the moral evaluation of human actions belongs. This involves making certain distinctions in the logical grammar of evaluations. Drawing upon Peter Geach's distinction, argues that ‘predicative’ adjectives and ‘attributive’ adjectives are logically different: a predicative adjective, such as ‘red’, operates independently of any noun to which it is attached, whereas an ‘attributive’ adjective, such as ‘good’, depends radically on that which is said to be good. The general thesis (...) is that moral judgement of human actions and dispositions is one of those genres of evaluation that is characterized by the fact that its objects are living things. (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.

In the heady days of 2011–2012, when Barack Obama was in his first term and the Patient Protection and Affordable Care Act heralded a golden future, medical anthropologists and activists had reason to be excited. Their country was about to take—so they believed—the greatest single step in the right direction since LBJ’s “Great Society” welfare spending program. It was in this climate that Inhorn and Wentzell’s collection of essays was published, and the optimism of the times shines through many of (...) the essays.The harsh reality is that at the end of 2012 Obama was re-elected, and after a painful deadlock the health insurance legislation known as “Obamacare” was pushed through. What followed has not turned out quite the way anyone expected and has driven an initial and unprecedented tidal wave of disapproval of the Obama presidency. Reading Medical Anthropology at the Intersections is therefore a sobering lesson in how a week can be a very long time in politics and a year a positive etern. (shrink)

'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)

I have asked that this article should be reprinted in the volume dedicated to Elizabeth Anscombe because it in particular reflects throughout my great indebtedness to her. I remember, as long ago as the late 1940s confidently referring to ‘the difference between descriptive and evaluative reasoning’ in one of the many discussions that we began to have from that time on. She, genuinely puzzled, simply asked, ‘What do you mean?’.

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.

Philippa Lang - Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity: Doctors and Philosophers on Nature, Soul, Health and Disease - Journal of the History of Philosophy 45:1 Journal of the History of Philosophy 45.1 151-152 Muse Search Journals This Journal Contents Reviewed by Philippa Lang Emory University Philip van der Eijk. Medicine and Philosophy in Classical Antiquity: Doctors and Philosophers on Nature, Soul, Health and Disease. Cambridge-New York: Cambridge University Press, 2005. Pp. xiv + 404. Cloth, $95.00. This immaculately (...) edited volume usefully collects ten significant articles by van der Eijk, together with one chapter based on other previously published material. They appear here slightly revised,.. (shrink)

The problem I am going to discuss here concerns practical rationality, rationality not in thought but in action. More particularly, I am going to discuss the rationality, or absence of rationality of moral action. And ‘moral action’ shall mean here something done by someone who believes that to act otherwise would be contrary to, say, justice or charity; or again not done because it is thought that it would be unjust or uncharitable to do it. The question is whether in (...) so acting, or refusing to act, this person will be acting rationally, even in cases where he or she believes that not only desire but self-interest would argue in favour of the wrongdoing. (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)

In what Arjun Appadurai has dubbed the ‘colonial imaginary’ issues of femininity, and who possessed it, were of prime importance. An orientalizing sociology sought to distinguish, and indeed to fix, differences between metropolitan and indigenous women as a rhetoric of hierarchy which secured proper and western femininity to white women. One critical route which colonial commentators and authorities took to produce that knowledge was to measure women's proximity to the practice of prostitution, a means which permitted discussion and judgement of (...) racialized sexualities as well as of proper models of feminine behaviour. This article will explore the ways in which the new sociology of the Victorian period, wielded in a colonial context, served to separate women through race-based ideas of sexual behaviour and sexual order. It will deal with British India in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. (shrink)

This paper is about the rationality of moral action, and so about a problem that is as old as Plato but which still haunts moral philosophy today. It is about the rationality of following morality; of refraining from murder or robbery for instance, and being faithful in keeping contracts and promises, even where this seems to be against our interest and contrary to what we most desire. The problem of the rationality of morality arises most obviously over such actions and (...) therefore has to do particularly with the virtue of justice, because it is here that self-interest and morality often seem to clash. Then reason may represent itself as on the side of self-interest and the fulfilment of present desire; so unless it can be shown that acting justly is a necessary part of practical rationality, cynics like Thrasymachus will always say that there is no good reason to pass up an advantage for the sake of acting justly, and plenty of reason not to pass it up. (shrink)

Within the historiography of early modern science, trust and credibility have become synonymous with genteel identity. While we should not overlook the cultural values attached to social hierarchy and how it shaped the credibility of knowledge claims, this has limitations when thinking about how contemporaries regarded the origins of that knowledge and its location in different types of workers and skillsets. Using the example of seamen in the circles of the Royal Society, this article employs the category of experience, and (...) by extension expertise, to illustrate how recognized forms of knowledge and skill acted as routes to credibility and authority in early modern science. It argues that, within the experimental community, the seaman’s authority derived from their direct experience of novel and remote phenomena and the cumulative effect of their wider experience. The accumulated experience they acquired from frequent practice, observation, and exposure translated into a form of “expertness” that rendered seamen trustworthy and credible observers and thinkers. The gentlemanly trust model does not accommodate nor acknowledge the ways the seaman’s direct and accumulated experience (and that of many other professional groups) were recognized and valued in inquiry and discourse. The article therefore sets out a new model for understanding trust, credibility, and authority in early modern science that can take us beyond a restrictive mono-model that locates trust in one sociocultural category to highlight the multiple, and sometimes competing, claims to epistemological authority. (shrink)

This essay is an expansion and refinement of the key ideas and distinctions that Foot advances in ‘Killing and Letting Die’. Here, she defends two morally relevant distinctions: firstly, that between ‘what we do’ and what ‘we allow to happen’ and secondly, what we aim at and what we only foresee as the result of what we do. Utilitarianism as a moral theory is, Foot claims, at fault in overlooking these important distinctions. She describes cases in which although it would (...) be thought permissible to let one person die if we could then save a greater number, we should be outraged by the idea that we could kill one person in order to save them. Moreover, the impermissibility of even allowing one person to die deliberately in order to use the body to save others shows that the distinction between doing and allowing must be supplemented by the distinction between direct and indirect intention. Foot therefore argues that Utilitarianism is a deficient moral theory in that it overlooks these complexities of agency. This mistake came from the attempt to ground all moral judgements in purely causal relationships to better or worse ‘states of affairs,’ and in the latter part of the essay Foot calls into question the whole idea of ‘good states of affairs from a moral point of view’ that Utilitarians suppose to stand as the one foundation of all moral judgements. (shrink)

Arthur Schopenhauer (1788-1860) is now recognised as a figure of canonical importance to the history of philosophy. Schopenhauer founded his system on a highly original interpretation of Kant's philosophy, developing an entirely novel and controversial worldview guided centrally by his striking conception of the human will and of art and beauty. His influence extends to figures as diverse as Fredrich Nietzsche, Ludwig Wittgenstein and Iris Murdoch within philosophy, and Richard Wagner, Thomas Hardy, Sigmund Freud, Thomas Mann, Samuel Beckett and Jorge (...) Luis Borges outside it. The Schopenhauerian Mind is an outstanding, wide-ranging collection that explores the rich nature of Schopenhauer's ideas, texts, influences, and legacy. Comprising 38 original chapters by an international team of contributors, the volume is organised into five clear parts: Knowledge and Reality Aesthetics and the Arts Ethics, Politics, and Salvation Before Schopenhauer After Schopenhauer. The Schopenhauerian Mind covers all the key areas and concepts of Schopenhauer's philosophy, including fields omitted in previous studies. It is essential reading for students of nineteenth-century philosophy, Continental philosophy and philosophy of art and aesthetics, and also of interest to those in related disciplines such as literature and religion. (shrink)