Reading group: Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (2001), from plants and wolves to people

I coached rugby for thirty years, and every season there was one boy who never tackled. He was fast, he scored, and the team was worse for having him. I never had the words for what was wrong with him beyond “he's not a team player”. Then a friend gave me Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness, and on the first pass I thought: she has the words.

Foot's claim, as I understand it so far, is that moral goodness is a kind of natural goodness, the same kind of goodness we mean when we say a plant has good roots or a wolf is defective if it will not hunt with the pack. Facts about what a living thing needs, given the kind of thing it is, are facts. So some moral evaluations are factual too. That puts her on the realist side, but without any special non-natural properties.

The book is short. Proposed pace:

Week 1. The opening chapter, where she explains why she is abandoning the way meta-ethics had been done.

Week 2. The chapters on natural norms in plants and animals, and the move to human beings. She draws on Michael Thompson's work on how we describe life-forms.

Week 3. Practical rationality and happiness. This is where I expect the hardest arguments.

Week 4. The closing chapter, where she takes on Nietzsche's immoralism.

I am a retired schoolteacher, not a philosopher, so I will be asking basic questions. Anyone is welcome, and if someone wants to defend Nietzsche against her in week four, all the better.