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Philippa Foot

Philippa Foot was a British moral philosopher, long associated with Somerville College, Oxford, and later the University of California, Los Angeles. She helped revive…

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1920 – 2010 · Oxford; Los Angeles

Traditions: Analytic

Schools: Virtue ethics (modern)

Philippa Foot was a British moral philosopher, long associated with Somerville College, Oxford, and later the University of California, Los Angeles. She helped revive virtue ethics and argued against non-cognitivism that moral evaluation is a kind of natural evaluation: goodness in human beings is assessed as goodness in other living things is, by reference to the life-form of the species. She also introduced the trolley problem in a 1967 paper on abortion and the doctrine of double effect.

Key ideas

  • Natural goodness: moral judgements evaluate human beings as members of a living kind, as we judge a plant or a wolf.
  • Moral words cannot take just any content; their meaning ties them to human good and harm.
  • The virtues are beneficial dispositions that humans need in order to live well.
  • Cases like the trolley problem test the moral difference between doing and allowing, and between intending and foreseeing harm.

Major works

  • "The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect" (1967)
  • Virtues and Vices (1978)
  • Natural Goodness (2001)

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