Philippa Foot

Quick Facts

• Full name: Philippa Ruth Foot, born Philippa Ruth Bosanquet
• Lived: 1920-2010
• From: England; long associated with Oxford and UCLA
• Main field: moral philosophy
• Best known for: the revival of virtue ethics, the trolley problem, criticism of noncognitivism, and the idea of natural goodness
• Main works: Virtues and Vices, "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect", Natural Goodness, and Moral Dilemmas

The Big Question

Can morality be objective without turning it into a mysterious extra fact, a divine command, or a mere expression of approval?

Foot's answer was that moral judgment is rooted in the kind of living beings humans are. We are rational, social, dependent creatures who act for reasons. Calling someone unjust, honest, cowardly, or kind judges how that person thinks, chooses, and lives as a human being.

In One Minute

Philippa Foot changed twentieth-century ethics by taking character seriously again. She argued that ethics should not start only with rules, consequences, or the logic of words like "right" and "wrong." It should ask what makes a human life go well or badly.

Her central thought was simple but demanding: virtues are human excellences. Courage, justice, honesty, charity, and practical wisdom help us respond well to fear, need, temptation, conflict, and dependence. Vices are defects in those responses. Her trolley problem made the point vivid: saving five rather than one is not the only issue. We also need to ask whether harm is intended, whether someone is used as a tool, and what a good person may do.

What They Taught

Foot taught that moral goodness is a kind of human goodness. That does not mean "whatever is natural is right." Cruelty and laziness are common enough, but they are still defects. Her point was that we judge living things by their form of life. A plant needs nourishing roots. A bird needs wings that let it move as a bird. A human being needs thought, speech, trust, care, learning, friendship, and choice.

This led Foot to reject noncognitivism: the view that moral sentences express attitudes, commands, or prescriptions instead of truths or falsehoods. On that view, "cruelty is wrong" works more like "cruelty, no!" than like a claim that can be supported by facts. Foot thought this made moral language too private and cut it off from human good and harm.

Her reply was to look at "thick" moral words. A thick moral word is both descriptive and evaluative. "Cruel" describes a kind of action and condemns it. "Courageous" praises danger faced for a worthwhile end. A reckless driver may be fearless, but that is not courage, because courage includes judgment about what is worth facing fear for.

Foot's virtue ethics grows out of this. A virtue is a stable excellence of the will: what a person notices, cares about, desires, and is ready to do. A charitable person sees need as a reason to act. If basic first aid is easy to learn and often needed, refusing to learn it may show a defect in charity.

A vice is a settled defect in the will. Cowardice is not just feeling fear. Everyone feels fear. Cowardice is letting fear control choice when something important calls for action. Injustice is not just one unfair act. It is a defect in how a person recognizes what others are owed.

In Natural Goodness, Foot developed this into ethical naturalism. Ethical naturalism says that moral truth is connected to facts about human life, not sealed off in a separate moral realm. Her version is natural goodness or natural normativity: goodness and defect judged in relation to a living thing's form of life. This does not reduce ethics to survival or reproduction. Humans can rationally choose celibacy, risk, sacrifice, art, friendship, or resistance to tyranny. Our good includes practical reason: the ability to ask what is worth doing and to criticize our own desires.

This explains her resistance to simple utilitarianism. Utilitarianism judges actions by their overall consequences, usually by how much happiness or welfare they produce. Foot thought consequences matter, but they are not the whole story. It can matter whether I kill someone, let someone die, intend a harm, foresee a harm, violate a right, or fail in charity.

Key Ideas With Examples

• Virtue: stable excellence of character and will. Honesty supports trust, promising, and shared life.
• Vice: stable defect of character and will. Greed bends judgment toward taking, hoarding, and ignoring what others deserve.
• Natural goodness: goodness judged by a living thing's life-form. Good roots are good for a plant; good practical judgment is good for humans.
• Natural normativity: norms of flourishing and defect in living things. A broken wing is a defect in a bird; a corrupt will is a defect in a responsible human agent.
• Ethical naturalism: moral truths grounded in facts about human life. "Cruelty is bad" is not a floating preference; cruelty attacks need, trust, and vulnerability.
• Thick moral concepts: moral words that describe and evaluate at once. "Cowardly" describes a response to danger and condemns it.
• Practical reason: thinking about what to do and why. Risking a friendship for a trivial thrill is bad reasoning about what matters.
• Double effect: harm intended as a means differs from harm foreseen as a side effect. Strong pain medicine that may shorten life is not the same as aiming at death.
• Trolley problem: a runaway trolley will kill five unless turned toward one. The case asks why intention, rights, and the structure of action matter.

Major Works

• "Moral Arguments" (1958) and "Moral Beliefs" (1959): early essays against emotivism and prescriptivism. Moral words have public criteria connected to human good and harm.
• "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect" (1967): introduces the trolley case and tests whether intention changes what may be done.
• "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives" (1972): asks whether moral "oughts" always give reasons to every rational person. A hypothetical imperative is an "ought" that depends on an aim, like "buy a ticket if you want to travel." Foot later softened this view.
• Virtues and Vices (1978): her classic essay collection on virtue, moral belief, practical reason, euthanasia, double effect, and consequences.
• "Euthanasia" (1977): defines euthanasia as killing for the person's own good, then asks when death can really be a good for that person.
• Natural Goodness (2001): her mature book. Judgments about virtue and vice have the same broad shape as judgments about goodness and defect in living things, with human reason at the center.
• Moral Dilemmas (2002): later essays on moral realism, killing and letting die, action, outcome, and virtue.

Why It Matters

Foot made virtue ethics respectable again in modern analytic philosophy. She showed that talk about character can be precise and tied to ordinary cases.

She also gave moral realism a plain path. Moral realism is the view that some moral claims can be true. Foot did not base that on strange non-natural properties. She argued that human lives go well or badly through courage, justice, honesty, friendship, and practical wisdom.

Her trolley problem exposed the limits of moral bookkeeping. Five lives versus one life sounds simple until we ask how the one is killed, whether the harm is intended, and whether a person is being used as a tool.

Her work still matters in medicine, war, dependency, promise-keeping, self-respect, and the ordinary work of becoming less cowardly, cruel, greedy, or careless.

Proponents, Critics, and Opponents

Foot's closest intellectual setting was Oxford analytic philosophy. Elizabeth Anscombe was especially important for her method and for the turn back toward intention, action, and virtue. Foot is often grouped with Anscombe, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch as a philosopher who pushed ethics back toward character and moral psychology.

Her deepest ancient source was Aristotle. Like Aristotle, she links ethics to human flourishing and excellence of character, but she works inside modern debates about language, reasons, rights, and action.

Judith Jarvis Thomson turned Foot's trolley case into a large literature on rights and permissible harm. Later virtue ethicists and ethical naturalists used Foot's natural goodness as an alternative to subjectivism and purely consequence-based ethics.

Her main opponents were noncognitivists such as emotivists and prescriptivists, who treated moral judgments as attitudes or prescriptions rather than truth-claims. She also opposed G. E. Moore's non-naturalist goodness and criticized simple utilitarianism. Against John Stuart Mill-style utility thinking, she insisted that justice, intention, rights, and virtue cannot always be reduced to best outcome.

Critics press hard questions. Kantians worry that Foot makes morality depend too much on human nature instead of rational duty. Utilitarians worry that her distinctions can block life-saving consequences. Other critics ask whether "the human life-form" is too vague or smuggles in contested ideas about normality. Foot's answer is that human nature does not settle every dispute automatically. It gives moral argument a place to start.

Related Pages

• Aristotle
• Elizabeth Anscombe
• Judith Jarvis Thomson
• Utilitarianism
• G. E. Moore
• J. L. Austin
• John Stuart Mill
• Analytic Philosophy