In Our Time - Philippa Foot

Episode Date: June 13, 2024

Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, Philippa Foot (1920 - 2010). Her central question was, “Why be moral?” Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, Foot spent her life working through her instinct that there was something lacking in the prevailing philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s which held that values could only be subjective. Could there really be no objective response to the horrors of the concentration camps that she had seen on newsreels, no way of saying that such acts were morally wrong? Foot developed an ethics based on virtues, in which humans needed virtues to flourish as surely as plants needed light and water. While working through her ideas she explored applied ethics and the difference between doing something and letting it happen, an idea she illustrated with what became The Trolley Problem.With Anil Gomes Fellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, University of OxfordSophie Grace Chappell Professor of Philosophy at the Open UniversityAnd Rachael Wiseman Reader in Philosophy at the University of LiverpoolProducer: Simon Tillotson In Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio ProductionReading list:Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford University Press, 1978)Philippa Foot, Moral Dilemmas (Oxford University Press, 2002)Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001)John Hacker-Wright, Philippa Foot's Moral Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013)Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women Are Up To Something (Oxford University Press, 2021)Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Chatto, 2022)Dan Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press), especially ‘Virtue Ethics in the Twentieth Century’ by Timothy (now Sophie Grace) Chappell

BBC Sounds, music, radio, podcasts. This is in our time from BBC Radio 4, and this is one of more than a thousand episodes you can find on BBC Sounds and on our website. If you scroll down the page for this edition, you can find a reading list to go with it. I hope you enjoyed the programme. Hello, Philippa Footh, 1920 to 2010,

was one of the most significant philosophers of the 20th century, and her central question was, why be moral? dominant philosophy in her youth argued that whether something was morally good or bad was subjective, and to her mind this had nothing to say on the horrors of the concentration camps. Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, Foote spent her life working through that instinct, developing an ethics based on virtues, in which humans need virtues to flourish, as surely as plants need light and water. We need to discuss the ideas in life of Philippa Foote are Anil Gomes, fellow and tutor in philosophy,

at Trinity College University of Oxford, Sophie Grace Chapel, Professor of Philosophy at the Open University, and Rachel Wiseman, reader in philosophy at the University of Liverpool. Rachel, how did Philippa Foot start out in life? Philip of Foot was really, came from a very privileged background. She was brought up in a 16-bedroom mansion in Yorkshire, and she had a life that was in many ways extremely privileged,

horse riding, hunting, fishing, shooting, all those things. But on the other hand, she always felt, I think, that her childhood was slightly deprived. So she had more connection with her nanny than with her mother. Her education was extremely sparse. She was home-tutored by a series of governesses who, she thinks, didn't teach her anything. And she was brought up in a kind of milieu where there was no expectation that girls would be educated and really the kind of ambitions that her mother had for her was that she would marry well.

So she was educated in all the fineries of etiquette and how a young woman should behave, but not really educated further than that. She was very lucky, though, because her very last governess told her, you know what, you could go to university, and she thought, yes, this is my chance to escape. So she decided to really cram for it.

And she did. She studied really, really hard for a couple of years. And she was offered a place to study PPE at Oxford. And when she was choosing a college, she said that she was told that Somerville College was very intellectually snobby, but not socially okay. And she said, good, that's the one for me, because she wanted to escape that sort of social snobbery that she'd been brought up in. Who did she meet at Oxford that influenced her? So she arrives at Oxford in 1939, September 1939, so just as the war is starting. And the scene at Oxford is extremely disordered.

Most of the men are away. And the colleges, the women's colleges are being taken over at nursing stations and hospitals. So there's a lot of disruption going on. One result of that is that she gets her philosophy tutorials from a kind of mix of conscientious of and refugee scholars. And one who's particularly important to her is Donald McKinnon, who was a theologian and a philosopher. And she would later say that he created her.

So he teaches her, I think, a certain attitude toward philosophy, which takes it very seriously and sees sort of wrestling with questions about morals and goodness of deep fundamental importance to humans. She also made some friends about her own age, didn't she? Yeah, yeah. So she meets Iris Murdoch, the novelist and philosopher, Elizabeth Anscombe, who goes on to be a really important philosopher, and Mary Midgely, who goes on to be a sort of animal ethicist and public philosopher.

And those four form a little kind of gang, I suppose, of undergraduates. All of them are taught by McKinnon, and they're all trying to figure out what philosophy is and what morality is in the context of the war. Now, when she graduates with a first from Oxford in 1942, she goes into war work. She gets a job at Chatham House in London, and she goes and lives in London with Iris Murdoch,

and they have a really colourful war full of romance and drama and all sorts of things going on there. And then after the war, she comes back to Oxford, and she speaks there about what it was like to come back, to Oxford at the end of the war, just as news of the Holocaust was coming into British newspapers. Thank you very much. Anil, we mentioned that the dominant idea of the time was to do with subjectivity. Can you develop that? Sure. So the dominant ethical theories at the time that Foote would have found in Oxford were ethical theories which wanted to draw a really big distinction between the facts and the values.

So some of our statements describe the world. So if we say there are four people in this room, that's a claim about the world, that it describes how things are. That expresses a fact. But the ethical theories of the time thought that our ethical judgments were not like that at all. They were subjective as opposed to objective. They express our values, they express our approval or disapproval of things. But we shouldn't think of them as describing the world in the way that ordinary judgments do.

So a couple of places that Foote would have found this. One is in A.J. Air, who's wonderful book in the, the 30s called language, truth, and logic was all about trying to draw a distinction between those claims which make sense and those claims which don't make sense. What makes sense to whom and on what grounds? So he wanted to say that any claim which can be verified, any claim which can be checked, that's a claim which makes sense. What does it mean by claim?

So make a judgment. So a statement about the world. Statements about the world can be checked, they can be verified. They are sensical. They make sense. Statements which don't make sense, which can't be verified, those are all just nonsense. and we should get rid of them. Now, ethical judgments didn't look like they could be verified in the same way that...

Can you give an example of a few ethical, non-verifiable judgments? Say the claim that breaking promises is wrong. That's a claim which Air thought is not trying to describe the world at all. When I say that breaking promises is wrong, all I'm doing is expressing my disapproval of breaking promises. So he wanted to say there are the claims which express the facts. They make sense. They can be verified.

And then there are the ethical claims, which are just ways of expressing our values, ways about expressing our approval or disapproval of certain situations. So one implication of that picture is that there's no such thing as getting it right in morality. There's no such thing as a truth claim in morality. There can be a truth claim about how many people there are in the room, how many buses there are in London, those kind of claims which can be verified. But there's no truth or falsity about whether breaking promises is wrong.

If I say breaking promises is always wrong and you say, sometimes it's all right to break promises. All we're doing is expressing our different values. It's not that one of us is right and one of us is wrong. There's a clash of values, but not a disagreement about the facts. How did she take that on then? I mean, it works with your simple example. Breaking promises is wrong.

How did she push that until it became part of the rum of her thought for the next 30, 40 years? Well, as Rachel was saying, news of the Holocaust was just coming into Oxford at the time. So straightaway foot was thinking, there's got to be something wrong about this picture. This picture makes it sound as if there's no getting it right. So if you're disagreeing with the Nazis about something, you can agree on all the facts, but you just express your different values. It's not the case that one of us is getting it right and one of us is getting it wrong.

So you can't say Nazis are bad. That's right. You can't say... Why can't you say Nazis are bad? Because the facts are different from the values. I mean, I can say that and it's expressing my values. But if someone else says the Nazis are good, they're expressing their values. We're not really disagreeing.

about anything. All we're doing is expressing different values. And so right from the start, foot wanted to find ways about trying to push her that distinction to see whether, is it really true that everything can be put into the category of facts or values? And one of the first things she starts to think about are words, concepts, ideas, which don't seem to naturally fit into one or the other. So a lovely example of hers, which maybe came from her upbringing the Rachel was talking about, is the example of rudeness. So if I say to you that Rachel, was behaving really rudely last night. That looks like it's in valuation. It's a little bit like evaluating Rachel. In some sense, I'm tutting my head at her. But it's also responsive to the facts

of the situation. You can't call just anything rude. So if it turns out that I was wrong about the facts, I might have to withdraw my claim that Rachel was acting rudely. So rudeness looks like this interesting case, which isn't neatly fit into the facts or the values. And this was the start for foot at thinking maybe this distinction between the facts and the values can't be as cleanly made as her opponents like to do. Sophie Grace, Philip Avoyd had a circle of friends Cyrus Murdoch, Mary Magidel, Elizabeth Anscombe, among them. How did they influence her at first? They influenced her in lots of ways because one thing that they all shared was this concern that Anil's been talking about with the fact value distinction. And they influenced her to look at

it and to challenge it. This was something that had been coming from a male-dominated Oxford, and there was a lot of it as I was saying had to do with language, truth and logic, that particularly programmatic and tub-thumping book. And there's this idea that you've got a bare atomic world of facts on the one side and of existential agents on the other inserted into this world and making supreme sovereign choices. And there are lots of ways in which Anscombe, Foote, Midgley and Murdoch all challenged this. One way to start challenging that dichotomy is to think about something Anil said a minute ago. Little anecdote here.

I was once in a meeting where there were three academics and the department secretary sitting in the room and someone else looked into the room and said, oh, so there are only three of us this week. And the secretary didn't count as a person to him. So even saying how many people there are in the room, it looks like a solid statement of fact. actually it has values and presuppositions built into it. Do secretaries count as people or not? Or to take another Vanuels examples, suppose you're thinking about buses. And someone looks out of the door of a bus and says to someone who's trying to board it, there's no room on the bus. That sounds like a straightforward factual statement. But in the southern American states,

before civil rights, it wasn't just a factual statement at all. So facts and values seem to be intertwined in all sorts of ways. As philosophers whom Murdoch, at any rate, was probably very interested in him because of her interest in Sartre, philosophers like Foucault were saying that the very notion of a fact derives from our power structures. What we count as a fact expresses our ideology, our place in the world, and that kind of thought, in a very different way from Fruco, in a very Oxford way, very much permeated the kind of thought that, all of the sort that, all four of them developed in their careers. And Philippa Foot is a very good example of that.

And cases like rudeness and pride that we can talk about, she goes into the close analysis of words. And this is a very Oxford thing to do. And it comes from two places in particular. And one of them is J.L. Austin, one of whose essays is called How to Do Things with Words. All of his work is about doing things with words. It's about close attention to the particulars of our language.

And the other is Wittgenstein, who talks, famously about what we do with words in our lives, about the language games as they're called. That often suggests a kind of lack of seriousness to them. But language games are something very serious. They're the structure of our reality. Foot had two works on morals in late 1950s. Can you tell the list of more about what she's developing here? In moral arguments and moral beliefs, those two essays from the late 50s,

she is talking about the close analysis of words. words like pride and rudeness and danger and other kinds of language that we use, what she's taking aim at is this Atkins and the Void versus existential hero picture of the world. And Foote says, that can't be right. And you can show that that can't be right by looking at the way that value and fact are intermeshed in perfectly ordinary words like dangerous. Not just anything can be dangerous. I can't say that microphone there is dangerous and just leave it at that.

It's not just up to my sovereign choice, whether that microphone is dangerous. For it to be dangerous, it has to threaten some sort of harm to creatures like me, to human beings. If it doesn't threaten any harm, then people who hear me say that it's dangerous and maybe shudder in my fear of it will say, what on earth are you talking about? What do you mean, Sophie Grace? How is it dangerous? And it's that question. How is it dangerous? Looking for an explanation.

of how these value statements connect not just with our sovereign choices, but also with the way the world is, also with the facts. That's the project in those two essays. Rachel, we've said Ford's goal was to ask why immoral. She seems to run into difficulties in 1971 with the work on hypothetical imperatives. What was going wrong? As Sophie Grace has been saying, in the early work, her aim is really to show that there are objectives,

criteria for the application of moral terms. So if I say something is courageous or unfair or cruel, it's not up to me to just apply those words as I want. There's public standards for the application of those words. So that gives those moral judgments a kind of objectivity. So it's not just up to the individual to choose what's cruel. There are objective standards. Now what happens in this very famous and much-discussed paper of hers in the 70s, is she starts to worry that that's, is that enough to get morality on an objective footing? And the worry is something like this. What if Sophie Grace comes along and says, well, yes, it's cruel. I agree about that. But I don't care. Okay. So she's got, if you like, the objectivity of moral judgment. But the worry is,

does that give everybody a reason to act morally? And that's the question that she's really addressing in that paper. So one kind of thing that philosophers have often thought is that there's something really special about the kind of aughts that are knocking around when we're talking about morality. And what's special about them can be seen by comparing or by thinking about how those, Orts, moral aughts, connect up with the person's desires with their projects or plans or interests.

So if I say to you, Melvin, it's raining, you ought to take an umbrella. And you say, but I don't care about getting wet, then that ought just collapses. There's nothing now that you should do. It doesn't link up with your interests. But if I say, Melvin, you ought to keep your promises and you say, well, I don't care about keeping promises. It looks like you still ought to do that, otherwise you're contravening morality in some way. So philosophers have got very used to this idea that there's something about moral oughts that is, if you like, resistant to or independent of what people's interests and desires are. And in that paper, Philippa Futt basically argues that that's a mistake, that actually the question of

whether or not one has a reason to do what's courageous or benevolent or just depends on what desires you have. So if you say, I don't care about justice, I don't care about doing what's kind or doing what benefits another person, then you just don't have any reason to do it. Now, this sounds like it's going to be catastrophic for morality because we want morality to bind us, particularly in cases where we're not interested. So we want to be able to say, well, look, even if it's really inconvenient to you to keep your promise, you still ought to keep it. So people were very, very upset about this idea of Philippa Foote's, that there's objective moral judgment, but somehow it's not enough to give us all reasons to follow it.

Now, Foot in that paper has this really lovely ending where she says, Don't panic about that, right? Just get rid of this idea that morality needs the backing of this kind of big capital O ought. And in a way, that's something a little bit like what Elizabeth Anscom would argue. And she said, instead, let's think of ourselves as an army of volunteers for morality. We've banded together. We love justice. We love truth.

And, you know, just as people can devote their lives to the love of their family, or the love of music or the love of all sorts of things, why not think of us virtuous people or moral agents that's all banded together voluntarily out of a love of justice or benevolence or of fellow feeling? So for a lot of people, this is a really disturbing move. And Philippa Ford, although she really defended it for a long time, later came to think that this was a disgraceful thing to say

and turned her back on that view. But it took her a long time to put in place the kind of background, if you like, that would allow her to do that. Thank you. Anil, would you be able to call the following decade her wilderness years? What can we say about the way she turned to applied ethics, euthanasia, etc?

It feels a little bit mean to call them her wilderness years, but there is a truth in that, which is she gets to the position that Rachel has said at the end of this paper about hypothetical imperatives. And she's now reached a view in which there are kind of our objective facts about what's good and what's courageous and what's just. And yet people don't have a reason to be courageous or good or just. And that feels like it's an odd place to be, but she can't quite see how to get out of it. And so what she does is turn to applied ethics and medical ethics and start to work on problems in those areas

until she can figure out the right kind of background to make progress on that why be moral question. In terms of her work in applied ethics, one of the things which I think is interesting and important about it is how it's actually quite continuous with the rest of her work. So she wants to bring in considerations about the virtues, which were so important when she was thinking about courage and justice and so on, two topics in applied ethics. So when she's writing about the permissibility of euthanasia, one thing she does is say, well, look, killing someone is often an affront to justice. Justice is the virtue which deals with what is rightfully yours. that if I take your life, then I have taken something which belong to you. But killing is often also an affront to charity. So think of charity as that virtue which is concerned with the good of other people.

When you're acting out of charity, you're acting for the goodness of someone else's life. So killing is often actually an affront to charity as well as justice. But once we realise that both justice and charity are in play here, there can be cases where they point in different directions. So if it turns out that there are cases where someone's life, is no longer good for them anymore, when it would be bad for them, then charity might speak in favour of ending that life. But of course, if the person doesn't want you to end their life, then justice would tell against the ending of the life. So what she does is draw upon our

ordinary talk about the virtues to show how this can be used to draw a distinction between voluntary and involuntary euthanasia to make sense of some of our ordinary ways of thinking about euthanasia by thinking about how they connect up to virtue theoretically. terms such as justice and charity. And one thing which is interesting about how work in applied ethics is, I mean, especially if you read contemporary applied ethics, you're used to there being a big headline judgment at the end. There's a ruling where they say, and you ought to give all your money to charity, or and

you ought to stop the AI coming and wiping us all out. Foote's papers on applied ethics don't do that. They never end with this command for you to go and do something. They're much more in the spirit of looking at our ordinary moral thinking and trying to help us think through these problems. It's a very different way of doing applied ethics. Thank you. Sophie Grace, listeners may well have heard of the trolley problem, which emerged about this time. Can you tell listeners what this is and why it's important and what you did about it? Well, the trolley problem is a way of teasing out our intuitions about right and wrong in some

difficult cases. And the trolley problem in its classic form goes back to a paper by foot called the problem of abortion and the doctrine of double effect, where she's talking about a contrast between two kinds of cases. And one is the case where you have a rescue to organise, and there's a group of people over there whom you can rescue, but if you do that, you won't be rescuing this other person over here. So you're going to allow that one person to die, and you're going to save the other five.

This is, she uses the trolley as a metaphor. This trolley's charging down a tunnel and you can, if it goes straight on, five people are going to be killed. If a button is pressed, it'll switch and only kill one person. That's right. Right. So that's another case that she gives the same form as the rescue case that I've just described. And those kinds of cases are cases where we omit to save someone and we foresee that the person who isn't rescued is going to die as a result. of our failure to rescue them. But Foote's point is that that seems permissible, and the

following does not seem permissible. I could rescue the five by killing the one. One case that's often talked about here is the case of the kidnapped tramp. So I've got five people in my hospital who all need different kinds of life-saving transplant surgery, and here's a tramp who, let's suppose, this is the way philosophers make up their examples, they often get quite blood-curdling, fast. Let's suppose this tramp is, quotes, no earthly use to anyone, unquote. This tramp has a very low standard of life. I can kidnap this tramp, euthanise him quickly, take all his organs and distribute them to my five patients, and that will save the patient's lives and all will be well. Now, that case seems drastically different in moral character, from the case of the rescue or

the case of the trolley. Why does it seem so drastically different in character? Well, some philosophers have said all that matters is the outcomes, all the matters is the results. So actually, our intuitive sense that there's a big difference here, morally speaking, is an illusion, which we should get rid of. Foot herself digs in her heels. Foot herself says, no, there is a huge difference. Our intuition that there's a massive moral difference between letting one die to save five and killing one to save five, our intuition that there's a massive difference there is correct. And she goes on to give an explanation of why. In the case where we intervene to kill the one in order to save the five,

we are initiating a new causal sequence. We're interfering. In the case where we just allow one to die in order to save five, we're not interfering. And that interference, according to Foote, is the vital difference, morally speaking, between the two kinds of cases. Can we switch here, Rachel,

what would she like as a person, Philip, of what she had to use, from a very grand family, a grandfather was president of the United States and so and so forth. What else was different or significant about her? And she had this friendship group, which was alarmingly brilliant. Yeah, I think she was really courageous and gutsy and fun. I sometimes think of her as a bit like Miss Marple. So she had a tremendous desire to not just do what the done thing was. you know, to go after things that were interesting or exciting.

When she was in the 1960s, she just decided to resign her post at Oxford to go and be an itinerant philosopher in America, just to try something different. She was sort of really brave in that kind of a way and tenacious in her philosophy. She went after the things that everybody else agreed on, and she always said that she had a real nose

for a problem. You know, she could spot if somebody was bluffing or was hiding something or was trying to get away with something. And she wouldn't let go of it. She would keep on going. And I think that tenacity is really shown in the shape of her philosophy. You know, the fact that she picks up this question right after the Second World War, what are we going to say to the Nazis? And she never lets it go right until almost her deathbed. Anil, we're getting deeper into Foote's the strongest work now. What does she find in Aristotle and Aquinas which she took on board? So both Aristotle and Aquinas were important to foot because they introduced her to the idea of the virtues. So Aristotle would have been someone she'd have come across as an undergraduate and then teaching in Oxford. Aquinas is actually Elizabeth Anscombe, who puts her onto Aquinas.

Anscombe tells her to go away and read Aquinas. And both Aristotle Aquinas think that the virtues have to be central to our ethical theorising. I mean, in some ways, the study of ethics for Aristotle and Aquinas just is a study of the virtues. What are the nature of the virtues? What kind of role do they play in our ethical lives? Does the religious threat go through Aquinas and go to her? Not to foot. So Anskine was an important part of Anskine that she was a Catholic, whereas foot to her dying day described herself as a card-carrying atheist. She had no interest in that aspect of religion. What she found important about the virtues in Aquinas and Aristotle was, well,

kind of two things. So think of the virtues as character traits, character traits which are manifest in our action, they can be manifest in our emotional reactions to situations, they can be acquired over the course of an ethical upbringing. It relates in two ways to some of the things we've just been talking about. For the virtues, it looks like they don't fit neatly into that distinction between the facts and the values that she was so inclined to get rid off. So to say that somebody is just or courageous or kind, whatever one's favorite virtue is, looks like it's a claim about the world. It's about them. So the virtues don't look like they can be very cleanly separated into the bits which just describe a person and the bits which

evaluate them. The other important things she found in Aquinas, and this links to what Rachel was saying about morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives. What she found was striking about Aquinas was that every time he mentioned a virtue or a vice, he gave you a reason as to why it was a virtue of vice. They didn't just get plucked out of nowhere. So courage is a virtue because we often have to face up to fears in order to gain something which is worthwhile. So there seemed to be reasons as to why one might need the virtues. And this was really striking to foot. It made it seem that not just that virtues could be part of the fact, subjective features of the world, but there might actually be reasons as to why we ought to acquire these dispositions.

So, Grace, what's becoming clearer to Philip Affutt in the late 70s is shown in her essay, virtues and vices. So where does that take you? I think it's a kind of programmatic paper. It's a most programmatic paper, and it builds upon the insights of Aristotle and Aquinas that Anil's been talking about. And she brings out three features of, of a virtue in particular, that they're dispositions of the will. So they're not just ways that we are. Like, I might be good at running, let's say, or I might be good at arithmetic. Those aren't virtues, at least not virtues of character, because they're not dispositions of the will. They don't frame the world for me when I come to make ethical choices in quite the way that the virtues

of character do. So virtues are dispositions of the will. They're good for us, and they're corrective. So every virtue stands at a point where human beings have a weakness. Temperance helps us to keep away from the liars of too much pleasure. Courage keeps us away from the lures of cowardice. And each of the virtues is corrective

and each of the virtues is good for us in some way. It's good for us to have the virtue of justice. And this, of course, is another way of coming back to the question we started with. Why be moral? Why have the virtues? Do you want to go on now? We've now reached the stage where we talk about virtue

ethics as a third kind of theory in moral philosophy. So we have our consequentialist theories which are concerned to maximise the good. We have our canteen or deontological theories which concern the reasons why people act and that we have our virtue ethics, which is a theory which is to do with the virtues. And people often talk about foot and Anscombe as people as really bringing virtue ethics back onto the contemporary philosophical scene. But foot herself was always insistent that she was not a virtue ethicist in that sense. And one way to think about is exactly as Sophie Gray says, she gives us a theory of the virtues. She's a virtue theorist in that sense, but she doesn't think that the virtues exhaust everything one might want to say about morality.

Virtue ethicists want to explain right action and other things, always in terms of the virtues, whereas Foot wants to say the virtues are an important part of our ethical theorising, but they're not the final point. Rachel, do you want to take this up? Well, I mean, what she's working towards is the position that we see coming into her very late work. into the book Natural Goodness. And if I can connect that back to where I left her last time with this question about, you know, what do we say to somebody who says, well, yes, I get that it's unjust,

but I just don't care about that. How do we make room for saying that, in a sense, that person is acting against reason, that we have reasons to cultivate the virtues? So I think we're working towards that and through thinking about exactly the points that Anil and Sophie Graces have raised. So what she comes to realise, I think, in that late work is that we need to revise the way that we think about rationality. And in particular, we need to start to think about what it is to reason well as something which an already, encompasses a certain kind of sensitivity to questions about morality. So she has this thought in the later work that if somebody isn't responsive to questions about justice or charity or, you know,

courage, then there's something wrong with the way that they're reasoning. Their reasoning is defective. So she moves in a later work through reflecting on the importance of virtues for human life to this idea that there's something defective in somebody who doesn't see the reason-giving force of the virtues. And the character that comes into view in her later work is the character of the shameless person, the person who just doesn't give a fig for morality and just thinks, you know, I'm just going to do what serves me. And this idea brings up for her this question of, well, what is it to reason de factoively? How do we understand? the claim or the judgment that somebody's reasoning insofar as it doesn't take account of morality is defective.

And this brings us into this sphere that I think we're now moving, of thinking about what it is to be a human being who, if you like, is doing well or is living the kind of life that is proper to a human. There's so much in play here. And one way of putting it is to put it in the terms that were made famous by one of Foote's interlocking. in Oxford, a younger philosopher than her, Bernard Williams. Bernard Williams talked about internal and external reasons. And external reasons are things like morality in Williams' view, or indeed etiquette in Foote's view, which come from outsiders. When people tell us that we have these reasons, if those external reasons don't match up with what's internal to our subjective motivational set, then we can just say, I don't give a fig for that. That doesn't move me. Now, I think

the problem with Williams' viewpoint here is a bit like the problems that you get with morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives. The problem is that we haven't given, despite Williams quite careful attention to this point, we haven't given a clear sense to what we mean by internal and external. And it's not clear why one shouldn't expand

one's reasons from, starting from a very thin and mean set into a much broader and more inclusive set. And at some point in that expansion outwards from, I mean, I don't think anybody actually does start from a narrow set of wholly self-interested reasons. We're all a mix of all sorts of reasons. But assuming we did start from only self-interested reasons, in the tightest and meanest sense, we quickly get to other kinds of reasons, and we quickly get to the kind of species norms that Fult wants to talk about in natural goodness. So when someone says to me,

look, you're a human being, it's important for you to look after your body, it's important for you to take exercise. And I say, I don't give a fig about the fact that I'm a human being. matter to me in the slightest. I'm in a pretty exposed position if I say that. It's not Foote who's in an exposed position here. It's the person who wants to say a fig for health. My health doesn't matter to me. And Foote is saying that justice is like health in that sense. It's something that anyone with any sense is going to care about. And if people don't care about it, that doesn't show anything about the scope of reasons. It shows that they are somewhat diminished in the way they think about reasons. Can I come back to you, Anil, and of natural

goodness. which is a big part of her work. What did she set out to achieve? What did she achieve there? Natural goodness is this really beautiful slim book, which she was really working to her whole life, answering this question about why should one be moral? So there's a very famous lecture she gives to the American Philosophical Association

in the run-up to Natural Goodness, where she stands up in front of this room packed full of philosophers and says, sometimes in moral philosophy it's important to think about plants, which kind of sounds ridiculous on the face of it. But one way to think about natural goodness is that it says there's a certain way we have of evaluating living things, plants, animals, human beings, which brings with it certain standards of defectiveness and excellence, and moral evaluation should be seen as continuous with the ways in which we evaluate other kinds of living things. So if we think about the plants, think about oak trees, given the kind of life of an oak tree, they need strong, good roots. that gives us a kind of way of assessing whether an oak tree is doing well or not.

So if we're walking around the garden centre and there's an oak tree which has little thin spindly roots, it's a defective example of its kind. Something's gone wrong. And if we see an oak tree which is tall and broad with good strong roots, it's an excellent example of its kind. So by thinking about the form of life of an oak tree, you can think about what counts as excellent for an oak tree and what counts as defective for an oak tree. The same way as you want to say for human beings,

we think about what the form of a life of a human being is, and the virtues of those excellences that we need, their natural excellences, natural goodness, the kind of excellences that humans need in order to live a distinctively human kind of life. And vices are just the opposite. They're the defects in living a human life. Do you want to take that up?

Well, I think that it's at this point when we start talking about the virtues solely in species-specific terms that we begin to, or I at any rate, begin to go back on the other tack and to worry a bit about the kind of zoological naturalism that foots advancing, because take the species good of the alien. The species good of the alien involves laying its eggs inside the chests of human beings, from which they burst out at a later stage in the life cycle.

And we might be very happy to concede that some particular alien is a species of a healthy and flourishing alien, and yet not be inclined at all to think that that's anything that we'd like to see anywhere near us. So we're trying to banish the specter of relativism, or think about Eichnumann wasps to the same effect. Darwin was famously worried about Eichnumann wasps, which, like the alien, are a parasitic species. Some nasty stuff goes on in nature, familiarly enough. And anyone who wants to base ethics upon the species norms relative to the human species, immediately has a problem I think about other species.

And this is something that worries me about the theory that you get in natural goodness. Rachel. Yeah, I see that worry. I suppose I just wanted to bring an extra bit into Anil's story, which was beautiful, about why you might think

that the virtues are things that humans need, whereas obviously wolves and bees and the alien maybe doesn't need the virtues. And it's to do with the kind of life, the kind of animals that humans are. So we're social, for example. We live in very complex social systems. We need friends.

We need people who we can rely on to help us with the raising of our children. We become weak in our old age and we need people to look after us. So once you start to think about humans and human life as essentially collective and social and rich and connected to our vulnerabilities in these kinds of. of a ways, then you can start to see why somebody who isn't moved by keeping promises or doesn't care about being kind to people or is going to find themselves really struggling to live the kind of life that we might think of as happy or valuable in that kind of a context. Do you want to come in, I know? So I think that's exactly right. We're social animals for foot.

So it's not a contingent fact about human beings that we operate. in societies that we are dependent on each other, that we look after each other's children. And that sets various standards of assessment by which we can think about whether human beings are doing well or not. So human beings have the capacity to reason. Part of what it is to reason well is to be responsive to the right kind of reasons to take Sophie Grace's case from earlier if somebody is prioritising a very trivial pleasure, even though it would risk really serious injury to themselves. There's a sense of which they're not reasoning well. But similarly for all the kind of reasons that Rachel has just given, if I don't see the fact that considerations of justice

might be relevant to what I'm doing, I'm also not reasoning well. So unlike Kant, who thought that we could do ethics for all rational beings, anyone who's got reason, the same kind of ethics is going to apply to them. What Foot wants to say is no, we're human rational beings, and the kind of ethics which applies to us is going to turn on the fact that we are humans as well as rational. What do you like to say about her legacy, Rachel? I would like to tell another story, And I think because we've been thinking so much about character and virtue and thinking about the kind of character traits that a philosopher might need. And I think Philippa Foote's bravery combined with a real sense of joy and fun

is something that we all need to kind of keep burning in ourselves as philosophers. And she tells this lovely story of, so when she was at Somerville College with Elizabeth Anscom, the two of them would meet every week and they would talk about philosophy. and they would argue about philosophy. And Philippa Foot was always objecting to Elizabeth Anscom and Elizabeth Anscombe would always win the argument. And Philippa Footh says, I was like one of those cartoon characters

and each week the steamroller would run me over and I'd just be a sort of flat template on the floor. But the next week I'd be back again ready. And she says it was tremendous fun and I loved it. And I think that sense of philosophy is really, really serious but also a kind of great adventure is a really good and important thing for us to remember as philosophers. Well, thanks very much. Thanks to Sophie Grace Chapel, Anil Gomes and Rachel Wiseman,

and to our studio engineer Andrew Garrett. Next week, the concubine who became the most powerful force in Imperial China for almost 50 years, the Empress Dowager Sushi. Thanks for listening. And the In Our Time podcast gets some extra time now with a few minutes of bonus material from Melvin and his guests. And the only question I really ask at this round is what would you like to have said that you didn't get time to say? I think one thing that's very important for some of the problems which are central to Philippa Foote's whole career, in particular, why be moral?

One of the things that's very important there is that there are two concepts in Aristotle that I don't think she always keeps as separate as might be advisable. and one is the concept of flourishing and the other is the concept of I won't even attempt to translate the Greek Eudymonia. Eudymonia means happiness but in a very special sense. It means having the kind of life that you might be congratulated on having

after it's over. The kind of life you might be felicitated on, as we sometimes say. So Eudimonia isn't necessarily the same thing as flourishing. You can have a life where you're flourishing in that you've got lots of friends, you've got got lots of money, you're in good health, etc, etc. You can be flourishing without being happy and you can be happy without being flourishing. And what matters, according to Aristotle and according

to Foote following him, is to be happy in the Eudaimonia sense. And so cases like the letter writers that Foote very movingly discusses in natural goodness. The letter writers are people who write letters from prison in the last days before they're executed by Hitler for being opponents of his regime. And Foot is saying, what good was it to them to be just, courageous, benevolent, and to have the other virtues, because they ended up getting sordidly executed by a horrible regime? And I think if we separate flourishing from eudaimonia, clearly, then the answer to that question is easier to see. They had lives that we would want to congratulate them on having had in a certain sense. We would want to say, that was a wonderful life, well done. Round of applause may be.

in some heavenly court, they get received with a round of applause. But did they flourish in the ends of their lives? No, not at all. Tragically, they had an awful time. So one figure we've not talked about, but I'm really looking to Rachel to say something about it, is Wittgenstein and the importance of Wittgenstein for foot. She talks about having learned Wittgenstein through Anscombe. Anscombe was in effect.

They would sit together in the common room at Somerville every afternoon, and Anskine would be giving her the kind of problems that Wittgenstein had been given to Anscombe. And although she didn't know she was getting this through Wittgenstein, when she went to read the philosophical investigation, she could see that this was really... What sort of problems? Problems about the privacy of sensations.

But in a way, I think for foot, the real thing that Anskam was giving in was a way of doing philosophy, as opposed to any particular content. What she's getting from Anscom is this idea that in order to do philosophy, we have to look very carefully at the way we use our words and bring them back to their ordinary usage, bring them back to the way of life in which we use those words, and that's going to help us make progress on things.

So in some ways, she's always been a Wittgensteinian, I think, in terms of the method of her philosophy as much as its content. Yeah, I think that's right. She talks about a time when Elizabeth Anskine brought Wittgenstein to Oxford, and he gave a talk, well, he responded to a talk by a student. And the student was about to say something. can't remember what it was about, about inner experience or something, and stopped himself and said, oh, I won't say that, you know, it's silly. And Wittgenstein says, no, let's get the thought

out there. Let's have it. And then we can do the philosophy. And Philip of Fitt says that those five minutes, I think she said, had had a more profound effect on my philosophy and then as a result on my life than anything else. And she draws an analogy with, if you're going to see a therapist, and you want some help with your, you know, whatever your problems are. And if you find yourself about to say something disgraceful, the last thing you should do is sort of stop yourself and turn it into something a bit more socially acceptable. Because it's only once it's out that the therapist and you can start to kind of uncover why you said it, why you felt you had to say it. And I think that idea that she gets from Wittgenstein that, you know, you should bring to the service,

all of these philosophical temptations and be completely honest about them, and then we can do the philosophy is another aspect of the kind of Wittgenstein influence, I think. It goes together with her idea that you want a good nose rather than cleverness. Exactly, yeah. I call it the splurge with my PhD students. I said there are two phases in philosophical writing. First splurge, just splurge, just get it down on paper. Don't switch off your critical faculty while you're doing the splurge.

And then once you've got it out, go for a walk, have a night's sleep, come back to it in the morning, and edit. The splurge in the edit are separate phases. One thing we didn't talk about as well was her association with Oxfam, which was really important. So Oxfam, which was the Oxford Committee for Famine Relief, was formed during the Second World War to offer relief for famine victims in occupied Europe. And Philippa Futt joined very early. probably in the 19, well, certainly in the 1940s, and was soon really central to the activities of Oxfam. And she said at the end of her life

that it was one continuous thread of happiness, Oxfam. And I think a lot of what she admired in Oxfam was exactly the kinds of things that we've been talking about today, the kind of courage, the fight for justice, for charity, the pluckiness, the absence of kind of arbitrary social norms. and this feeling that justice calls for certain kinds of actions and let's just get on with it, that kind of practical, earthy sense of, you know, come on then,

let's roll up her sleeves and get on with the job that we've got. She had a tremendous humility which manifested itself in her willingness to change her mind. And morality is a system of high aesthetic comparatives is a paper she completely disowned in her later work. She described it as a very bad mistake. And that humility was wonderful, but it was conjoined with this tenacity. And yes, there was an air of Miss Marple about it. I'll never forget being in a meeting of the Oxford Philosophical Society

when Foote was talking about justice, charity and trolley problems and the like. And she said in her paper, nobody would imagine for a moment that it was morally symmetrical to fail to send aid to people who are starving in Africa and to send poisoned parcels to those same people. and everybody nodded along during the talk. And that, of course, was another instance of her saying there's all the difference between action and omission. And then in discussion, some plucky postdoc from the university

stuck up their hand and said, it wasn't me, by the way, but some plucky postdoc stuck up their hand and said, well, Mr. I can't see the slightest difference with those two things. I think if you fail to send aid to the people in Africa, you're just as bad as the person who sends them poisoned food. and Philip afoot looked this postgrad in the eye, this postdoc in the eye, and replied, do you think that? Do you really? How extraordinary! And that was it. That was the sum of her response to it. Was there any sense in which these poor women mowed their way through Oxford at the time and were significant as a quartet?

Well, I mean, I would think so. I think they're very significant as a quartet. I mean, I think we, Sophie Grace, talked about this at the beginning in their absolute refusal right from the beginning to go along with this idea that morality is a matter of, you know, is something subjective, that it can be sort of extracted from the background context of human life, that there's something deeply wrong with anybody who tries to say that morality isn't absolutely central to the way that we and to what it is to be a human being. They all right from the very beginning just said, absolutely no way.

We're not having that. And I think that unfolds in different ways in their philosophy. But the kind of the courage of that conviction and the ability and intellect to see that through is a real sort of inspiration for me anyway. I think they started off very much as rebels and as the establishment will, the establishment tended to take them to its bosom,

but all of them had a trick of resigning from cushy posts as soon as they felt they were getting too mainstream. And the real signature note, I think for all four of them, was the famous opposition to Harry Truman's honorary degree from Oxford. When Elizabeth Anscombe opposed the conferring of an honorary degree upon President Truman because he had dropped the bomb upon Hiroshima Nagasaki, which Anscombe took the view that that was an act of mass murder and therefore that the Universos had no business awarding him an honorary degree.

And I believe I'm right in saying that there were just two people in convocation when this was discussed who said, known placate, we do not consent to this motion when it came up. And the three people were Anscombe herself, Philippa Foote and Peter Geach, Anskin's husband. I think I'm right in saying there's a very thin roll call, and it certainly included Anscombe in Foote, and I think Geach was the third. Is there anything you can say that Foot has changed by what she's written? Just in terms of the content of what she's written, it's true that things like the fact-value distinction,

the virtues are much more central to philosophical topics nowadays than they would have been before Foote arrived. She was central in putting those, kind of the criticism of the fact-value distinction, attention to the virtues right at the centre are philosophical theorising. But in some ways, one thing which I think foot has changed, which is a little bit less obvious, is something about she's given us a kind of new model for how to do philosophy. I mean, this comes back to some of the things that Rachel was saying before. So we're often inclined to think about the great philosophers as these great system builders.

So when I teach Kant and my undergraduate, I often say, look, what's great about Kant is that you can hold all of these things in his mind at the same time. And it's just incredible to have the great breadth of knowledge and unity of vision. to be able to say things across such a wide range of areas. Foot instead focuses on one problem slowly over the course of a whole career. There's a line in a late interview where she says, I'm a slow thinker, but I've got a good nose, right? So the good nose is more important than cleverness any day. We've talked about her friendship with Iris Murdoch.

There's a lovely line where Iris Murdoch says, if you're not moving at a snail's pace in philosophy, then you're not moving at all. I'm not sure that foot was moving at a snail's pace. pace exactly, but she certainly shows in some ways models for us a way of being a philosopher where you don't try to build this giant system, but maybe Miss Marple-like, you attend to the facts slowly and carefully and seriously trying to get at the truth of the matter. That's a really wonderful thing to model.

John Dissan. One of the most important things that Foote has bequeathed to us is her resolute opposition to consequentialism, which is, and to utilitarianism, which is a very natural and tempting oversimplification of the moral life that we all fall into. And one of my favourite essays by Philip Afoot is utilitarianism and the virtues from Mind in 1985, where she says a thing that I think can't be sustained, but also a thing that I think is absolutely true. The thing that can't be sustained that she says

is that we just have no conception of what it would mean to say that an event was a good event. She thinks that good is too specific in the philosophical work it does to attach to a vague noun-like event. I don't think that's sustainable. I think we do know what a good event is. But the other thing that she says in that essay, which I think is correct and enormously important,

is that our judgment of what counts as a good event is something that depends on the virtue of benevolence or charity in us. So our judgments that things are good events are not just a bare beginning point in the way that consequentialism supposes. They're part of a framework which is already set by one of the virtues, benevolence or charity, and there are other virtues, in particular, justice. And justice may require us to do things which delinit what we would do in pursuit of benevolence. I could steal all Anil's money and give it to the poorest person I can see.

That would be benevolent, though not to anil, but it would be unjust. And that's what's wrong with it. I would be pursuing something which benevolence would not be, would not judge as a good event, precisely because although it's in line with benevolence, except to Anil, it's not in line with justice. So she gives us a framework in which we think about moral problems using different lenses, as it were, using different angles on them at the same time. And benevolence and justice are two different angles on the same set of moral problems, which vitally combine. Is there a final remark from either be, Anil?

I mean, one thing we've not mentioned is she's a wonderful writer as much as anything. So in some ways, people should just go ahead and read her work. She writes with, like Rachel says, seriousness but without po-faced, which is enjoyable. And you get a very light touch introduction to helping you work through issues of central ethical concern. There's a famous exchange between Ted Hondurich and Bernard Williams, which may or may not be apocrycal, where Ted Hondurich said to Bernard Williams, you could be a really smart philosopher if he weren't so determined to be bloody deep. To which Williams replied, you could be a really deep philosopher if you weren't so determined to be bloody smart.

And Philippa Furt is very much, I think, on the deep end of this, perhaps range of temperaments, which we have in philosophy, but she's also pretty bloody smart. She combines the two. And finally, Rachel? Yeah, I think natural goodness and the reminder that we are living creatures, like other kinds of living creatures, we're not this sort of alien thing to the rest of the natural world.

We're part of the natural world. And when we're thinking about what's good and bad for human beings, we need to think about what we need to flourish and what the kinds of animals that we are and the sorts of environment that we need. And that reminder of the importance of habitat and context and environment, I think, is extremely timely for us today. Well, thank you all very much indeed.

Thank you. That was great. Thank you. Does anybody want to your coffee? Do you copy? I like some water. Some water? Yeah. Tea be lovely. Tea would be great.

Three teas and water. Thank you very much. It was really good. In our time with Melvin Bragg is produced by Simon Tillotson and it's a BBC Studios audio production. I found a secret room and it's behind a trap doll. We're looking for someone who controls one of the largest gangs of people smugglers. He calls himself Scorpion.

The top one? Impossible you can't find them. His gang has made millions from people coming to the UK in small. boats. This was so cold. So cold. Finding him won't be easy and it will be dangerous. Oh we need to get out of here. So we're getting the cat. I'm Sue Mitchell and this is intrigue to catch a scorpion from BBC Radio 4. Listen on BBC Sounds.