Death of a grande dame: can we build morality on the foundation of natural goodness?
Philippa Foot (1920-2010) was one of the greatest moral philosophers of the 20th century, but she insisted that she was “not clever at all” and “very uneducated.” She was greatly influenced by the philosopher Elizabeth Anscombe, whom she described in an interview as “more rigorously Catholic than the Pope,” but she herself was a card-carrying atheist. She was also one of the founders of Oxfam, a life-long socialist, and the grand-daughter of U.S. President Grover Cleveland. To the public, she is best known for her formulation of the trolley problem, a moral dilemma which she first raised in a now-famous essay. The recent death of such a great philosopher should make us pause and ask: what did she live for? Foot finally revealed what drove her in an interview in 2003: a life-long quest to show that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong. Throughout her academic life, she was passionately opposed to subjectivism in ethics. The story of how she got into moral philosophy is a fascinating one:
“I’ll tell you a bit of biography. During the war I went to London to work as an economist as war work, and then I came back and started to work on philosophy. I was just really getting going on moral philosophy when the photographs and films of Belsen and Birkenau came out, and it’s really not possible to convey to people who are younger what it was like. One would have said such a thing on that scale could not happen, human beings couldn’t do this. That was what was behind my refusing to accept subjectivism even when I couldn’t see any way out. It took a long time and it was only in the last fifteen or twenty years that I managed it. But I was certain that it could not be right that the Nazis were convinced and there was no way that they were wrong and we were right. It just could not be.
“That’s why I could never accept Charles Stevenson, say, whose emotivism implies that in the end that you simply express one attitude and I express another… That is what has driven all my moral philosophy.”
(Excerpt from an interview with The Philosophers’ Magazine, originally given in 2003 and republished on October 6, 2010.)
Foot made several attempts to answer the question “Why be moral?” on rational grounds, and in this post, I’d like to discuss her last and most systematic attempt. In 2001, Foot wrote a book called Natural Goodness. She has given an account of the central thesis of her book in interviews. What I propose to do is quote a few choice excerpts and then throw the floor open to readers. Do you think Foot’s naturalistic ethics succeeds in establishing that there is such a thing as objective right and wrong?
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