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The Somerville Senior Common Room

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb

in The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

This chapter follows the rebellious patrician Philippa Foot, through her years as a tutorial fellow at Somerville, chronicling her philosophical apprenticeship to Anscombe, her work with Oxfam, her ... More

This chapter follows the rebellious patrician Philippa Foot, through her years as a tutorial fellow at Somerville, chronicling her philosophical apprenticeship to Anscombe, her work with Oxfam, her separation from her husband, and her contributions to the task of rethinking mid-century ethics. Foot was a dedicated and overworked teacher; her afternoons spent talking with Anscombe gave her a much needed impetus to develop her own philosophical thoughts. Through Anscombe, Foot became a disciple of both Wittgenstein and Thomas Aquinas. She eventually took up Anscombe’s critique of Hare, in a drastically different style. Foot wrote two influential essays, “Moral Thoughts” and “Moral Beliefs,” arguing against Hare’s moral theory, using examples drawn from Hare’s own territory—linguistic analysis. They were clever, careful, in some ways conventional Oxford moral philosophy, and immediately popular. While Foot would eventually repudiate some of these arguments, her contribution to the retrieval of Aristotelian ethics was decisive.Less

Recent Skepticism about Absolute Goodness

Richard Kraut

in Against Absolute Goodness

This chapter focuses on how others have also arrived at a skeptical conclusion about absolute goodness, although the route by which this book comes to that conclusion is different from those that ... More

This chapter focuses on how others have also arrived at a skeptical conclusion about absolute goodness, although the route by which this book comes to that conclusion is different from those that others have taken. This chapter states that doubts may not have occurred to the author had he not read some other authors. The chapter acknowledges a debt to them and calls attention to the ways in which this book's approach to this subject differs from theirs. These authors include P. T. Geach, Philippa Foot, Judith Jarvis Thomson, and T. M. Scanlon.Less

“Time, Like the Sea . . . ”

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb

in The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

This chapter follows Midgley, Anscombe, Murdoch, and Foot through their later years—after they had shaken contemporary orthodoxy in ethics—and reflects on their contributions. These women’s ideas ... More

This chapter follows Midgley, Anscombe, Murdoch, and Foot through their later years—after they had shaken contemporary orthodoxy in ethics—and reflects on their contributions. These women’s ideas shaped a new generation of philosophers—including many women. Midgley became known not only for her work in ethics, but also as a critic of scientific reductionism. Murdoch devoted herself to her fiction, though also teaching and writing philosophy on the side. She always felt that her work was inadequate. Elizabeth Anscombe remained a strident defender of Catholic teaching, though her work gravitated back to philosophy of mind. Foot, the person who most bound together her friends, was an important mentor to women philosophers, published her one monograph at age 80, and tried to bury the hatchet with Hare. The work of these women set the stage for a new generation of naturalistic ethicists, headed by Rosalind Hursthouse and Alasdair MacIntyre.Less

The Trolley Problem

F. M. Kamm

in Morality, Mortality Volume II: Rights, Duties, and Status

Part I considered how to determine whether there is a moral difference between killing and letting die per se, but in the two chapters of Part II, the consideration is when it is and when it is not ... More

Part I considered how to determine whether there is a moral difference between killing and letting die per se, but in the two chapters of Part II, the consideration is when it is and when it is not permissible to kill some to save others. Ch. 6 first examines in some detail the arguments John Harris has made for a survival lottery (where we may select from among healthy people the one who will die to save another or who will share a fair risk of death with another), and considers a very limited context in which a curtailed survival lottery might be installed. The rest of the chapter is devoted to consideration of the many attempts to solve the problem of why we may not ordinarily kill one to save more (as in the Transplant Case, where a non‐consequentialist would believe that we may not chop up one innocent non‐threatening person, who would not otherwise die, to transplant his organs into a greater number of people in order to save their lives) but may kill via redirection of threats (as in the Trolley Case, where there is a choice between killing one or killing a greater number by turning/redirecting, or failing to turn/redirect, a runaway trolley). These attempts include the views of Philippa Foot, proponents of the Doctrine of Double Effect (e.g. Michael Costa), Warren Quinn, James Montmarquet, Judith Thomson, and Bruce Russell. A detailed examination is also made of whether the notion of ‘being already involved’ is a moral notion or can be given a non‐moral description.Less

Biology and Ethics

Philip Kitcher

David Copp (ed.)

in The Oxford Handbook of Ethical Theory

This chapter outlines three programs that aim to use biological insights in support of philosophical positions in ethics: Aristotelian approaches found, for example, in Thomas Hurka and Philippa ... More

This chapter outlines three programs that aim to use biological insights in support of philosophical positions in ethics: Aristotelian approaches found, for example, in Thomas Hurka and Philippa Foot; Humean approaches found in Simon Blackburn and Allan Gibbard; and biologically grounded approaches found in of Elliott Sober and Brian Skyrms. The first two approaches begin with a philosophical view, and seek support for it in biology. The third approach begins with biology, and uses it to illuminate the status of morality. This chapter pursues a version of the third program. A major accomplishment of evolutionary biology has been the explanation of biological altruism, which opens the door to a similar explanation of psychological altruism, or “fellow-feeling.” The chapter conjectures that humans have evolved a capacity for normative governance by socially shared rules. A process of cultural evolution led to the social rules with which we are familiar. This genealogical story poses a challenge, for the idea of moral truth plays no role in it. The story therefore lends support to non-cognitivism or anti-realist expressivism. The chapter concludes by exploring the implications of the genealogical story for moral knowledge, moral objectivity, and the idea of moral authority.Less

Reason, Authority, and Friendship

John Finnis

in Reason in Action: Collected Essays Volume I

The first section of this chapter engages with Hart and Kelsen on the method of legal theory, in a close dialectic with Aristotle's method in his Politics, especially his identification of central ... More

The first section of this chapter engages with Hart and Kelsen on the method of legal theory, in a close dialectic with Aristotle's method in his Politics, especially his identification of central and secondary cases of social realities, and his grounds for attributing centrality or non-centrality. Exploration of Aristotle's appeal to the standards of the morally sound person leads to the second section, examining the course of 20th-century English moral philosophy through the eyes of Geoffrey Warnock, and with special reference to Philippa Foot (whose comment on the chapter is the subject of a long endnote). Friendship, it is argued, carries us beyond the contrast between egoistic flourishing and justice, though Aristotle's account of friendship has its difficulties, too. Recognition of legal obligation is, centrally, appreciation of one's moral obligation.Less

Daughters of 1919

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb

in The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

This chapter traces not only commonalities in the generational experience of Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Iris Murdoch, but also differences in their educations, upbringings, ... More

This chapter traces not only commonalities in the generational experience of Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, Elizabeth Anscombe, and Iris Murdoch, but also differences in their educations, upbringings, and relationships to organized religion. They were all children of the post-Armistice baby boom, growing up in a world profoundly shaped by the Great War, a “morbid age” preoccupied with worries about the decline and fall of Western civilization. And they all belonged to the first generation to benefit from enhanced professional opportunities and legal protections for women. The chapter recounts, among other stories, Anscombe’s intense, dramatic conversion to Catholicism, which alarmed her parents; Foot’s (Bosanquet’s) rebellion against her patrician upbringing, leading to her decision to attend Oxford; Murdoch’s idyllic childhood and “Spartan” but beloved boarding school; and Midgley’s (Scrutton’s) more relaxed school experience and early fascination with all manner of small, wild creatures.Less

The Virtues Benefit Their Possessor

Rosalind Hursthouse

in On Virtue Ethics

Some familiar objections to the very idea that the virtues benefit their possessor can be quickly cleared away. When we consider the claim in the context of bringing up our own children or reflexion ... More

Some familiar objections to the very idea that the virtues benefit their possessor can be quickly cleared away. When we consider the claim in the context of bringing up our own children or reflexion on our own lives, rather than in the context of trying to convince the wicked or the moral sceptic, we believe it. According to Phillips and McDowell, we believe it in so far as we are virtuous, because we have special conceptions of eudaimonia, benefit, harm, and loss, which guarantees its truth. But we also believe it on the basis of the sort of ethical, but non‐evaluative beliefs about human nature cited by Hare and Foot.Less

The Carus Lectures on the Conception of Value

Paul Grice

in The Conception of Value

This chapter discusses Grice's three Carus lectures on value and objectivity, relative and absolute value, and metaphysics and value. The lecture on value and objectivity investigates the conception ... More

This chapter discusses Grice's three Carus lectures on value and objectivity, relative and absolute value, and metaphysics and value. The lecture on value and objectivity investigates the conception of value by addressing questions about objectivity in this region and the relation of such questions to questions about scepticism. It considers the ideas of two anti-objectivists: J. L. Mackie and Philippa Foot. The lecture on relative and absolute value considers the assertion that Mackie's denial of objective values that is tantamount to a denial that there are any absolutely action-directing values, despite what may be claimed in ordinary moral judgements. The lecture on metaphysics and value explores the possibility of providing some kind of metaphysical account of, and positive backing for, the notion of value.Less

Moral Rationalism

Russ Shafer-Landau

in Moral Realism: A Defence

Defends the idea that moral facts constitute excellent reasons for action, regardless of one's antecedent commitments. Provides some presumptive support for this claim, and then proceeds to criticize ... More

Defends the idea that moral facts constitute excellent reasons for action, regardless of one's antecedent commitments. Provides some presumptive support for this claim, and then proceeds to criticize the best arguments against moral rationalism (the idea that moral duties entail powerful reasons for action), including a prominent argument by Philippa Foot. Ends by arguing that the idea of intrinsic normativity is not as implausible as many have thought.Less

Naturalism

Rosalind Hursthouse

in On Virtue Ethics

Virtues are those character traits that make a human being a good human being— those traits that human beings need to live well as human beings, to live a characteristically human life. Ethical ... More

Virtues are those character traits that make a human being a good human being— those traits that human beings need to live well as human beings, to live a characteristically human life. Ethical evaluations of human beings as good or bad are taken to be analogous to evaluations of other living things as good or bad specimens of their kind, as Foot has argued. This naturalism reveals that several features of ethical evaluation thought to be peculiar to it, and inimical to its objectivity, are present in the quasi‐scientific evaluation, even of plants.Less

Murdoch’s Diagnosis

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb

in The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

This chapter traces Iris Murdoch’s philosophical development and the contributions she made to the school of thought shaped by herself, Anscombe, Midgley, and Foot, before she left academic ... More

This chapter traces Iris Murdoch’s philosophical development and the contributions she made to the school of thought shaped by herself, Anscombe, Midgley, and Foot, before she left academic philosophy for the literary world. Murdoch’s embrace of existentialism was short-lived, but her knowledge of continental philosophy helped her to “diagnose” that French existentialists and British linguistic philosophers shared a faulty world-picture. They saw humanity as alone in a value-free universe, choosing principles and imposing meaning at will. Nonetheless, these thinkers covertly and inconsistently implied that there are superior ways of facing this reality. Murdoch had learned from Wittgenstein that pictures can be limiting; to her, contemporary philosophy appeared enslaved by its world-picture. She had learned—through crises in her personal life, including in her relationships with MacKinnon and Anscombe—to see ethical growth as a matter of building habits, rather than of isolated choices.Less

Moral dilemmas

Allyn Fives

in Evaluating Parental Power: An Exercise in Pluralist Political Theory

The argument of this chapter is that we can be faced with genuine, real moral dilemmas, that is, moral conflicts for which there is no general rule for their resolution and conflicts that leave us ... More

The argument of this chapter is that we can be faced with genuine, real moral dilemmas, that is, moral conflicts for which there is no general rule for their resolution and conflicts that leave us with moral regret at the item not acted upon. For example, there is a moral conflict involved in every act of parental paternalism. When I, as a parent, act paternalistically, in attempting to do what is best for my child I violate a moral rule in regard to my child. In making this argument, I reject Philippa Foot’s counter arguments claiming to show the moral dilemmas are a logical contradiction. If we cannot identify a general rule for their resolution, how can we resolve moral conflicts? In this chapter I try to show that we can do so through practical reasoning and practical judgement. In doing so, I will borrow from John Rawls and his account of reasonableness and Thomas Nagel’s account of public justification in a context of actual disagreement. However, we must be cognisant of a number of possible dangers here. In particular, we must ensure that we do not impose a ‘liberal’ political solution on moral conflicts and in that way ourselves become guilty of the moral simplification we have been critical of in others.Less

Facts and Values

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb

in The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

This chapter introduces the first of the four main subjects of the book, Philippa Foot, as well as sketching the philosophical outlook against which all four would argue in later years. A young Foot, ... More

This chapter introduces the first of the four main subjects of the book, Philippa Foot, as well as sketching the philosophical outlook against which all four would argue in later years. A young Foot, recently returned to Oxford, confronts for the first time the horrors of the Nazi regime, through a newsreel exposing conditions in the concentration camps. For Foot, this moment encapsulated a major failing of philosophical ethics in the mid-twentieth century: its inability to grapple with real evil. The contemporary philosophy against which Foot and her friends would revolt depended on a background picture, the “billiard-ball” picture of the universe as nothing but inert, value-free matter. A fact–value dichotomy was grounded in this picture, positing that no ethical propositions can validly derive from fact statements; these together led to what Lipscomb calls the “Dawkins sublime”—the Romantic view that adults must bravely face this harsh and denuded world.Less

Species Concepts and Natural Goodness

Judith K. Crane and Ronald Sandler

in Carving Nature at Its Joints: Natural Kinds in Metaphysics and Science

This chapter defends a pluralist understanding of species on which a normative species concept is viable and can support natural goodness evaluations. The central question here is thus: Since ... More

This chapter defends a pluralist understanding of species on which a normative species concept is viable and can support natural goodness evaluations. The central question here is thus: Since organisms are to be evaluated as members of their species, how does a proper understanding of species affect the feasibility of natural goodness evaluations? Philippa Foot has argued for a form of natural goodness evaluation in which living things are evaluated by how well fitted they are for flourishing as members of their species, in ways characteristic of their species. She has further argued that assessments of moral goodness in humans are of the same evaluative form. However, natural goodness evaluations and, by extension, the natural goodness approach, do not garner justification in virtue of employing a scientifically privileged conception of species. The natural goodness approach is only justified given particular metaethical and normative commitments that are independent of naturalism, since the approach does not depend upon naturalism alone.Less

The Coming Philosophers

Benjamin J.B. Lipscomb

in The Women Are Up to Something: How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris Murdoch Revolutionized Ethics

This chapter traces the early development of Oxford philosophy—and the book’s four subjects—from the middle of World War II through the late 1940s. During this period, Murdoch, Foot, and Midgley all ... More

This chapter traces the early development of Oxford philosophy—and the book’s four subjects—from the middle of World War II through the late 1940s. During this period, Murdoch, Foot, and Midgley all left Oxford briefly, only to gradually return for ongoing scholarship or to teach; Anscombe never entirely left. Together, the four would begin the conversations that would enable them to break out of the dominant world-picture of their age. Also returning to Oxford was R.M. Hare, whose grueling experiences as a prisoner of war on the Burma-Thailand railroad impacted him deeply. For the women, Hare would become both a colleague and a fierce opponent. At the same time, Oxford was developing a distinctive philosophical culture in which ethics had little place. The emotivism popularized by A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson had undermined the possibility of serious work on ethics in the eyes of Oxford philosophers.Less

The Rights and Wrongs of Abortion

John Finnis

in Human Rights and Common Good: Collected Essays Volume III

This chapter, written in 1973, offers a response to Judith Thomson's famous proto-feminist attempt to vindicate abortion by a thought-experiment which accepts the humanity of the unborn child. It ... More

This chapter, written in 1973, offers a response to Judith Thomson's famous proto-feminist attempt to vindicate abortion by a thought-experiment which accepts the humanity of the unborn child. It begins by showing that casting the issue in terms of rights (to life verses to decide what happens in one's body) obscures the underlying question, which (as she belatedly concedes) is about what is morally required. But abortion, at least in most cases, cannot reasonably be assimilated to the range of Good Samaritan problems. The traditional moral discussion of killing is traced, and the traditional casuistry distinguishing justifiable terminations of pregnancy from ‘direct’ abortions is critically analysed (with a partly defective concept of intention). Arguments of Jonathan Bennett and Philippa Foot are considered along the way, as well as Thomson's incidental comparison of the embryo to an acorn. An endnote points the way to rectifying the account of intention.Less

Who Turned the Trolley?

F. M. Kamm

in The Trolley Problem Mysteries

Lecture I begins with a brief history of changing views on what the Trolley Problem is and attempts to solve it. The lecture then critically examines Judith Thomson’s recent view that a moral ... More

Lecture I begins with a brief history of changing views on what the Trolley Problem is and attempts to solve it. The lecture then critically examines Judith Thomson’s recent view that a moral distinction between killing and letting die, and between what a conductor of the trolley or a mere bystander may do to save people from the trolley, eliminates what she now thinks of as the Trolley Problem. The last part considers a different argument for the conclusion that Thomson now favors, but ultimately attempts to resurrect the Trolley Problem, suggesting that it is not who turns the trolley that makes the turning permissible.Less