Foot Philippa (b.1920), British philosopher who exerted a lasting influence on the development of moral philosophy in the second half of the twentieth century. Her persisting, intertwined themes are opposition to all forms of subjectivism in ethics, the significance of the virtues and vices, and the connection between morality and rationality. In her earlier papers, particularly ‘Moral Beliefs’ (1958) and ‘Goodness and Choice’ (1961), reprinted in Virtues and Vices (1978), she undermines the subjectivist accounts of moral ‘judgment’ derived from C. L. Stevenson and Hare by arguing for many logical or conceptual connections between evaluations and the factual statements on which they must be based. Lately she has developed this kind of thought into the naturalistic claim that moral evaluations are determined by facts about our life and our nature, as evaluations of features of plants and animals (as good or defective specimens of their kind) are determined by facts about their nature and their life. Foot’s opposition to subjectivism has remained constant, but her views on the virtues in relation to rationality have undergone several changes. In ‘Moral Beliefs’ she relates them to self-interest, maintaining that a virtue must benefit its possessor; in the (subsequently repudiated) ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’ (1972) she went as far as to deny that there was necessarily anything contrary to reason in being uncharitable or unjust. In ‘Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?’ (Oxford Journal of Legal Studies, 1995) the virtues themselves appear as forms of practical rationality. Her most recent work, soon to be published as The Grammar of Goodness, preserves and develops the latter claim and reinstates ancient connections between virtue, rationality, and happiness.
See also ETHICS, HARE, VIRTUE ETHICS.
R.Hu.