Philippa Foot

1920-2010 · English · Ethics, Metaethics, Virtue Ethics, Philosophy of Action

Morality just cannot be subjective in the way that different attitudes are subjective.

When news of the Nazi concentration camps reached Oxford in 1945, Philippa Foot could not accept what dominant moral philosophy was saying. If morality was merely the expression of attitude — as Ayer, Stevenson, and Hare maintained — "we are right and the Nazis are wrong" was just a stand-off of feelings. That intolerable conclusion became the engine of her career. A fellow at Somerville College Oxford, she later divided her time between Oxford and UCLA.

Topics Philippa Foot addresses

• virtue ethics
• natural goodness
• the trolley problem
• the doctrine of double effect
• moral subjectivism
• noncognitivism
• moral realism
• intended versus foreseen consequences
• hypothetical imperatives in morality
• the rationality of morality
• natural normativity
• Aristotelian categoricals
• practical rationality
• the descriptive-evaluative distinction
• virtues and vices
• courage
• temperance
• wisdom
• species-typical goodness
• the grammar of goodness
• reasons for action
• the human form of life
• Anscombe's influence
• the Aristotelian inheritance

Converse with Philippa Foot on Symposium. Every reply is grounded in Philippa Foot's own writing and cites the page it came from. The corpus is public-domain text.