Natural Goodness

Foot's late, compact statement of an ethical naturalism she calls "natural normativity". She argues against the view, shared by emotivists and their successors, that moral judgements express attitudes rather than state facts. Her claim is that moral goodness is a kind of natural goodness, the same pattern of evaluation we use for living things. Drawing on Michael Thompson's idea of "Aristotelian categoricals", such as "the wolf hunts in packs", she shows that what counts as a sound or defective plant or animal depends on the life form of its species: a free-riding wolf is defective as a wolf. Human beings are evaluated in the same way, but our life form is rational, so the virtues are what humans need as practical reasoners and members of communities. Foot also revises her earlier views on practical rationality, discusses the relation between happiness and the good human life, and ends with a reply to Nietzsche's immoralism.

It is the clearest statement of neo-Aristotelian naturalism in ethics and shows how moral goodness might be as objective as the health of a living thing.