The Natural: An Interview with Philippa Foot
Interview by Julian Baggini
This article was originally published in Issue 21 of
The Philosophers' Magazine.
What is it that makes Philippa Foot one the best and most important moral philosophers
of our age? Is it because she possesses a razor-sharp mind and the kind of analytic
skill that enables her to dissect an argument at twenty paces? Not according to
Foot. "I’m not clever at all," she says. "I often don’t find arguments
easy to follow." Is it her great scholarship? "I don’t read a lot,"
she confides. Is it because of the sheer volume of her output? Not when the hardback
editions of her three published books would take up only two inches of your shelf
space. Is it because she reflects the broader zeitgeist of contemporary ethical
theory? Not when she has stood so resolutely opposed to the popular tides of "expressivism"
and the dogma of the is/ought gap, of which more later.
What makes Foot stand head and shoulders above almost all her peers is that her
writing is thoughtful, insightful and is never about anything which is not important
or interesting. Her work bears the hallmark of many of philosophy’s best in that
the reader can always gain something valuable by reading it, even if she profoundly
disagrees with its conclusions.
Remarkably, Foot was already octogenarian when her first ever monograph, Natural
Goodness, was published last year. This book represents the culmination
of a lifetime of thought in ethics, which has been brought together in two collections
Virtues and Vices (containing essays from 1958-1977) and Moral Dilemmas
(1977-2001). The intellectual route to Natural Goodness can be traced through
the two collections, but the book represents the first ever bringing together of
the various threads of her work into a mature, single vision of morality.
One way of getting a first grip on Foot’s ideas is to start with her claim that
morality begins with a recognition of the objective needs human beings have, needs
which are of the same kind as those of plants and non-human animals. This is what
"natural goodness" means: "What any living thing needs for its particular
life," as she puts it. "Not individual needs – these could be anything
such as a way out of prison – but what a living thing of that species needs given
the habitat it lives in, which is much more determined for plants and other animals
than it is for human beings."
Foot thus bases her ethics on a recognition that facts about the world provide reasons
for action. "That children are born helpless and have to be taught to learn
language and so on," she explains, "means already that children have to
be looked after."
Crucially, these reasons are "objective and have nothing to do with preferences:
some people love children and some people hate them. That doesn’t make any difference."
To those unfamiliar with recent moral philosophy this might seem unobjectionable,
obvious even. But in fact it represents a direct challenge to two dogmas of ethical
theory: the so called "is/ought gap" and what Foot calls the "speaker-relative"
account of moral judgement. Take the is/ought gap first. Those who maintain the
existence of this gap – which is probably the majority of philosophers since Hume
first described it in the eighteenth century – say that we can never derive any
moral conclusions from merely descriptive facts. So, for example, from the fact
that someone is suffering it can never follow logically that they ought to be helped.
In order to get from the fact to the moral judgement you need to add something else,
a general moral principle, for example, that suffering ought to be relieved. But
this principle too cannot be derived from the facts alone.
How does Foot then bridge this gap? "I’ve just done it in this discussion,"
she says. "From the fact that human children are not born able to do things,
from this fact that they are born helpless, I get an ought: that they are to be
looked after. Human beings need to look after children. That’s an example of an
is that gives an ought."
This move can appear baffling, because it just seems to be a denial of the is/ought
gap rather than a genuine counter-example. That is to say, someone who believes
in the is/ought gap will just reply that the ought doesn’t logically follow. A person
who says that they know children are born helpless and need help but they don’t
see why they ought to give it may be morally culpable but their logic is not at
fault.
Foot, however, is not one ever to say something patently ridiculous, and to understand
why her reply satisfies her and many of her admirers we need to consider her account
of practical rationality: how we reason with regard to action. Here, Foot borrows
a novel move suggested by her late friend and colleague Warren Quinn, to whom Natural
Goodness is dedicated. Quinn’s thought is that you need a conception of
goodness in order to undertake practical rational deliberation at all: it is "a
necessary condition of practical rationality".
"Practical rationality is taking the right things as reasons," says Foot,
"so ‘the child is hungry’ is a reason to feed it, and ‘smoking will kill you’
is a reason for not taking up smoking."
Compare this to the alternative orthodox view, which rests on an assumption that
prudential self-interest is unproblematic as a reason for action, but to do anything
other than for self-interest presents a problem for practical rationality. Foot,
in contrast, argues that practical rationality of all descriptions has to start
by taking something as a reason for action and there is no logical reason why prudential
self-interest is more of a reason to act than the needs of a child.
Her view can be summed up in the idea that moral reasoning is about practical rationality
that recognises the existence of objective human needs as reasons for action. What
Foot thinks most significant about this is that it stands opposed to what she calls
speaker-relative accounts of ethics found in theories such as emotivism, prescriptivism
and subjectivism. She explains the contrast between her view and the speaker-relative
one in some detail.
"Emotivism, expressivism and so on (all of them I lump together) think that
there is something special in a moral judgement in the way that there is something
special about an order. It’s a special bit of language, like an avowal or a wish,
or a greeting, although it isn’t any of those. These philosophers all ask, ‘What
must the circumstances be for a moral word to be used by a speaker? What must he
desire, what must he want others to do, what must he feel?’
all of which are questions about the speaker. That is the right kind of question
to ask about an order or a greeting, but I don’t think that that sort of account
is right for morality at all. I say that what we’ve got to dig out in order to understand
a moral judgement is a particular use of the word ‘good’, and that is nothing to
do with what the speaker wants. It’s not dependent on conditions in the speaker,
so mine is not a speaker-relative account.
"So I’m really talking about a general concept of ‘good’ that applies to plants,
animals and human beings. You can’t understand what I mean when I say I think it
is acting badly to break a promise until you first understand that ‘good’ is used
of living things in a particular way. It’s not like ‘oh good’ which is speaker relative
and it’s not like ‘good vacuum cleaner’ either, which really depends upon the interests
of people who use these things. But it belongs only to living things.
"So first I identify this very general sense of good, then I try and explain
it by its relation to the particular things which beings of that kind, living species,
need to do just to survive. You’re defective if you don’t do that. A hedgehog that
ran from a predator would be defective, a deer that made itself as small as possible
would be defective. That doesn’t mean that just by chance it might not be the one
that survives but nevertheless that’s not the way in which a deer defends itself.
"I’m moving in upon this quite alternative account which has no truck with
conditions in the speaker. And when we’re thinking about plants and animals we’re
not worried about objectivity at all. It’s an objective fact that a fleeing hedgehog
would be a defective hedgehog."
To show that a person’s own present desires and wishes are not needed to generate
an ‘ought’ Foot introduces the example of a teenager who we say ought not to start
smoking.
"The teenager might query our ought, but wouldn’t they be wrong? We take it
as a reason and that’s what the ought is saying: that they do have a reason to stop.
They might say ‘I don’t care now’ and they are rejecting your ought, but they’re
wrong because they do have a reason to stop. This case makes it easier to see that
there is something strange about thinking that an ought depends on feeling, desire
or whatever. Right now they don’t have any such feelings and doesn’t that destroy
the idea that an ought, a value, needs a desire?"
This may seem an irrelevant example because the decision to smoke or not smoke is
does not seem to be a moral but a prudential one. "Prudence, as wisdom, is
a virtue you know," she retorts. "It’s a very modern thing to try and
distinguish the moral." Critics risk missing the point of Foot’s approach if
they bring with them the presumption that, if we talk about reasons for action,
there are going to be fixed points at which we suddenly will move from the factual
to the prudential and then into the moral. On Foot’s view, that doesn’t happen.
"Absolutely," she agrees when this is put to her. "Human beings are
defective if their sight is bad so they can’t see other human beings or recognise
faces, for instance. But they’re also defective if they don’t look after their children.
But the thought people have is, ‘Ah but now we’ve gone to the moral because it’s
not just about keeping oneself alive it’s keeping one’s children alive’."
Foot argues that her view provides an objective morality. That rings alarm bells
for many contemporary ethical theorists who think the idea of an objective morality
is an outmoded dream. The objectivity is provided by the fact that human needs are
real, regardless of our desires or preferences. So what about the objection that
what is needed for a human life doesn’t seem to be something you could hope to get
an objective answer to in the way that you can for a plant, for example, simply
because humans have a range of different desires, motivations, interests and so
on?
"We live in different cultures. The habitat is much more varied than it is
for other living things, and the conditions in which human beings can live given
their ability to make clothes, and houses, heat and so on, is obviously much greater,"
she replies. "And given we are emotional beings, we have a whole lot of very
subtle interests: the family is not just for reproduction, people want different
things and there are different cultures. But that is not in favour of subjectivity
at all. It only means that you’ve got to differentiate. Certain things are absolutely
certain – that the young are helpless and so are the old – they don’t just die suddenly,
they get ill and infirm and need help. These are facts for all human beings. They
don’t do well being very lonely. When Freud said that love and work are the only
two real therapies I think that he said something quite generally true about human
beings.
"So neither the fact that there is a differentiation in the detail of what
is needed in a particular society, culture of even climates; nor the fact that things
are not going to be cut and dry makes for subjectivity. If it moves towards relativism
it’s just a kind of cultural relativism. It isn’t basic relativism as beloved by
first-year students."
Foot is confident that differentiation is sufficient to accommodate the variety
of human preferences and that only "irreconcilability in principle" would
threaten her objective framework. Difficult cases pose no such threat. "It
doesn’t matter in the least that there is not an answer to every question."
But she cannot see any compelling examples of such irreconcilability. "The
idea that because people have different preferences you can move to the conclusion
that there must be a radical breakdown of discussion about good and bad action –
that’s exactly what I deny and can’t let past. Some people care about art and some
people don’t. Some people want public money spent one way and some people don’t.
You don’t conclude ‘so subjectivism’."
Some of Philippa Foot’s closest philosophical friends have been Roman Catholics.
The late Elizabeth Anscombe, her colleague and inspiration, was one, as are the
Dummetts. Foot herself, however, is a "card-carrying atheist". I asked
her about the role of fundamental, non-philosophical convictions in the formation
of philosophical beliefs.
"Both Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Dummett are much, much better philosophers
than me," she says. "You can be a jolly good philosopher and still not
be in their league. I once asked Michael, ‘What happens when your argument goes
one way and your religious belief goes the other?’ And he said, ‘How would it be
if you knew that something was true? Other things would have to fit with it.’ That
I take it is the clue, that they think they know that and could as little
deny it as that I am talking to someone now."
In her own case, she carries with her a fundamental conviction of another kind.
"I’ll tell you a bit of biography. During the war I went to London to work
as an economist as war work, and then I came back and started to work on philosophy.
I was just really getting going on moral philosophy when the photographs and films
of Belsen and Birkenau came out, and it’s really not possible to convey to people
who are younger what it was like. One would have said such a thing on that scale
could not happen, human beings couldn’t do this. That was what was behind my refusing
to accept subjectivism even when I couldn’t see any way out. It took a long time
and it was only in the last fifteen or twenty years that I managed it. But I was
certain that it could not be right that the Nazis were convinced and that there
was no way that they were wrong. It just could not be.
"That’s why I could never accept Charles Stevenson, say, whose emotivism implies
that in the end that you simply express one attitude and I express another. Sure,
there’s all that about finding out the facts and so on, but in the end it is that.
I was just not going to swallow that, in spite of really only being able to chip
away at it. That is what has driven all my moral philosophy."
It would be hard for a young philosopher starting out today to have a career like
Foot’s, since there is now so much pressure on them to publish as much as possible.
"I didn’t ever have to publish," admits Foot. "In fact in those days
I think people asked those who published a lot why they did so. One had a job for
life and a college stood behind one."
Foot’s work could only have come out of this kind of environment where thoughts
are given time to gel and develop. Whereas a lot of papers published in philosophy
today are good at the mental gymnastics, they don’t necessarily get at the nub of
the issue. There’s a certain perceptiveness in Foot about what is at stake and what
is important. Is that mode of philosophising under threat from the way that academic
philosophy is going now, when people have to produce more and more quickly?
"Yes, I think so," says Foot, "with these awful official reviews
there’s much too much out. Philosophy is also going in a slightly technical direction,
I think. I couldn’t have done that. I’m not clever at all. I have a certain insight
into philosophy, I think. But I’m not clever, I don’t find complicated arguments
easy to follow."
Foot also shows a healthy disregard for the need to show a wide command of the current
"literature" on any given subject. "I can’t remember all these books
and all their details. I think I’ve done philosophy through discussion and reading
just a few great things over and over again. I couldn’t tell you about some philosophers,
such as Spinoza. I’m very uneducated really. But one learns from one’s pupils, graduate
students and I learned from marvellous colleagues at UCLA."
Foot talks fondly of her long conversations with colleagues such as Elizabeth Anscombe
("She must have been putting to me the questions that Wittgenstein put to her.
Practically every day we talked for hours. I was incredibly lucky.") If she
feels fortunate then so must her interlocutors, since she is a generous and insightful
discussant.
"It’s a very peculiar and rather painful way of doing philosophy," she
says, "because I really am terribly ignorant about much philosophy, I have
a terrible memory and I don’t do it in quite the way clever people who have very
good memories and are splendid scholars do it."
For which we should say, thank goodness for that, since Foot’s distinctive approach
has yielded one of the most distinctive and valuable contributions to contemporary
moral philosophy.
Selected works of Philippa Foot
Virtues and Vices (Oxford University Press, 1978)
Natural Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001)
Moral Dilemmas, (Oxford University Press, 2002)