Philippa Foot
1920–2010, Oxford
Virtue ethics; analytic moral philosophy
There is a moral difference between doing harm and allowing it.
“The question is whether it is permissible to do what will cause the death of one in order to save five.”
The life
Granddaughter of the American president Grover Cleveland, raised in Yorkshire and educated at home before going to Somerville College, Oxford. She worked as an economist during the Second World War and returned to Oxford to teach philosophy.
She was part of an extraordinary cohort of women (Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch) who arrived while most male undergraduates were away at war and who together mounted the most sustained attack on mid-century emotivism. Midgley later wrote that it was much easier to think together than alone, and that the absence of the men had made the conversation possible.
Foot said that seeing the footage from Belsen in 1945 made non-cognitivism about ethics unbearable to her: if moral judgements were only expressions of attitude, there was no sense in which the camps were wrong rather than merely disapproved of. She spent the rest of her career trying to make room for moral facts, culminating in Natural Goodness at the age of eighty-one. She co-founded Oxfam.
What shaped the ideas
Mid-century Oxford was dominated by non-cognitivism: the view, from Ayer and Hare, that moral statements express attitudes or prescriptions rather than state facts. Anscombe's 1958 'Modern Moral Philosophy' had argued that the whole apparatus of moral obligation was a survivor of a divine-law framework nobody still believed, and proposed returning to the Aristotelian vocabulary of virtue.
Foot's trolley case belongs to this project, and its origin is routinely forgotten: it appears in a 1967 paper about abortion, testing whether the doctrine of double effect can do the work Catholic moral theology asked of it. The case was designed to isolate a variable in a live and painful debate, not to entertain undergraduates.
Core arguments
- 01
Doing versus allowing
Killing and letting die are not morally equivalent.
Our duties divide: negative duties not to harm are stringent, positive duties to aid are weaker and more easily outweighed. This is why you may not carve up one patient to save five, but need not bankrupt yourself to save one. Consequentialism cannot register the distinction, and Foot's contention is that our judgements reliably do.
- 02
The trolley case
Identical outcomes can receive different verdicts, so outcomes are not all that matters.
Divert a runaway trolley and one dies instead of five; push a man off a bridge and the arithmetic is the same. Nearly everyone accepts the first and refuses the second. Since the numbers are held fixed, something else is doing the work, whether the person is used as a means, or whether the agent redirects an existing threat rather than initiating one.
- 03
Against non-cognitivism
Moral judgements are not merely expressions of attitude.
You cannot commend just anything as a virtue. 'Clasping your hands three times an hour is good' is not a coherent moral claim, because there is no account of what it does for a creature like us. The concepts are constrained by facts about human beings, which means they carry cognitive content.
- 04
Natural goodness
Moral evaluation of humans is the same kind of judgement as calling an oak healthy.
We say a wolf that will not hunt with the pack is defective, and this is a plain judgement about the kind of creature it is. Human beings are creatures whose form of life involves reason, cooperation and language; a person who cannot keep a promise is defective in the same sense. Ethics is grounded in facts about our form of life, not in sentiment or divine command.
Commonly got wrong
- She did not invent the trolley problem as a puzzle. It was one page of a paper on abortion, built to test a specific principle.
- Trolley cases are not decision procedures. Their job is to reveal that our principles are not what we said they were, which is why their artificiality is a feature.
- 'Doing and allowing' is not the claim that letting die is fine. It is the claim that the two are not the same, and that the difference needs explaining rather than dismissing.
- Natural goodness is not the naturalistic fallacy. She argues that evaluation is already built into biological description of a species, not that 'ought' is derived from 'is' by inference.
Works
'The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect' 1967
Where the trolley first appears, in a paper about something else entirely.
'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' 1972
An attack on Kantian categorical obligation that she later partly retracted.
Virtues and Vices 1978
The collected essays that put virtue ethics back on the analytic agenda.
Natural Goodness 2001
The mature statement, written at eighty-one.
'The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect'. It is short, and the trolley is on the first page doing a job.
Why they still get taught
The revival of virtue ethics as a serious analytic option, a case that has generated an entire research literature in philosophy, psychology and now machine ethics, and a demonstration that moral realism could be defended without either God or intuitionism.
Chapters
- The Trolley Problem · Ethics at the Edges