HOME PAGE TODAY'S PAPER VIDEO MOST POPULAR TIMES TOPICS Subscribe to The Times Welcome, gerszon1946 Log

o The Times Welcome, gerszon1946 Log Out Help TimesPeople

Search All NYTimes.com

Magazine
WORLD U.S. N.Y. / REGION BUSINESS TECHNOLOGY SCIENCE HEALTH SPORTS OPINION ARTS STYLE TRAVEL JOBS REAL ESTATE

AUTOS

Published: December 21, 2010 TWITTER COMMENTS (53) E-MAIL SHARE

TELLING RIGHT FROM WRONG

Lynn Redgrave
She argued for another way to think about morality.
Richard C. Holbrooke By JAMES RYERSON

Dodge Morgan PHILIPPA

FOOT LUDWIG WITTGENSTEIN once
Mary Daly said that in philosophy, it is hard
B. 1920
Karen Woo to work as slowly as you should.
When the British philosopher
Jimmy Dean
Philippa Foot finally published
George Steinbrenner “Natural Goodness,” her first and
Benoît Mandelbrot only book-length statement of her
Kate McGarrigle
thinking, at age 80 in 2001, an
editor at Oxford University Press
Allan Tibbels
recalled Wittgenstein’s challenge.
Ruth Kligman “Well,” he said, “that is a problem
Donald Lukens that Philippa seems to have
solved.”
Talitha and Emmanuella

Termilus Foot’s philosophical voyage, her

“painfully slow journey,” as she
Steve Pyke/Getty Images.
Lorene Yarnell TRUE VALUE The philosopher in 1990. put it, was long in part because it
Alex Chilton, Bobby Hebb was uphill. Though born into a
C. K. Prahalad family of privilege — her father was a wealthy British industrialist, her mother a
daughter of the U.S. president Grover Cleveland — she was given no formal
Joan Hinton
education (“I was extremely ignorant,” she later said) and, being a woman, was not
Lucille Clifton expected to go to college. Spurred on, however, by a governess who recognized her
Philippa Foot intelligence, Foot educated herself via correspondence courses and eventually
attended Somerville College at Oxford. There, in the clubby, masculine atmosphere
Prescott Sheldon Bush Jr.
of high British learning, she cultivated friendships with a group of young female
Robert Culp
philosophers, among them Elizabeth Anscombe, who would become a prized
David Levine student and editor of Wittgenstein’s, and Iris Murdoch, the future novelist.
The Music They Made
(Philippa would marry one of Murdoch’s former boyfriends, the historian M.R.D.
Foot.)

The chief obstacle in Foot’s life, however, wasn’t educational disadvantage or social
prejudice but academic orthodoxy. Returning to Oxford as a graduate student in
1945, after working in London during the war (and living in an intermittently
bombed-out apartment with Murdoch), Foot became troubled by a central
assumption of 20th-century moral philosophy: that facts and values are logically
independent. According to this view, you can’t derive an “ought” conclusion from a
series of “is” premises. Nature is composed of objective facts that we can verify
through science; values are mere attitudes in our heads that we project onto the
world as we like. When we engage in moral disagreement with, say, an unrepentant
murderer, reasoned argument breaks down. We feel it is wrong to kill innocent
people; he simply does not. There is no accounting for taste.

1 of 2 1/2/11 11:33 PM
 In the wake of the news of the concentration camps, Foot was haunted by the notion
that there was no way to rationally overcome a moral standoff with a Nazi. She
wanted to argue that moral evaluation (“It is wrong to kill innocent people”) is not
fundamentally different from factual evaluation (“It is incorrect that the earth is
flat”). A cynic should no more be able to deny the moral implications of a relevant
body of evidence than a flat-earther can deny the factual implications of
astronomical data. It was Anscombe, a devoted Catholic, who liberated Foot, a
lifelong atheist, to dare to think in this outmoded fashion. Foot had been speaking
of the conventional contrast of “ought” and “is,” and Anscombe feigned confusion.
“She said: ‘Of what? What?’ ” Foot recalled. “And I thought, My God, so one doesn’t
have to accept that distinction! One can say, ‘What?’!”

Incrementally, over many decades, first at Oxford and then at U.C.L.A., Foot shaped
an alternative moral vision. In the late 1950s, she questioned whether you can have
a recognizably moral attitude about just any set of facts. (Can you really believe that
it is immoral to look at hedgehogs in the light of the moon?) By the ’70s, inspired by
Anscombe’s suggestion that she revisit St. Thomas Aquinas’s ethical writings, Foot
was arguing that if you focus on traditional virtues and vices like temperance and
avarice instead of abstract concepts like goodness and duty, you can see the concrete
connections between the conditions of human life and the objective reasons for
acting morally. (Why is cowardliness a vice? Because courage is needed to face the
world’s challenges.) In the ’80s, after considering how we evaluate what is “good”
for plants and animals, she developed the argument, presented in “Natural
Goodness,” that vice is a defect in humans in the same way that poor roots are a
defect in an oak tree or poor vision a defect in an owl: the latter two assessments
have clear normative implications (“oughts”), yet are entirely factual. Even from a
secular scientific vantage point, you could locate good and evil in the fabric of the
world.

In time, many other thinkers, academic philosophers and popular moralists alike,
came to imitate or echo Foot’s efforts to secure moral truth by reflecting on the
classical virtues. Looking back, she seemed to appreciate the connection between
her distinctive talents and the long arc of her career. “I’m a dreadfully slow thinker,
really,” she said. “But I do have a good nose for what is important.”

LUCILLE PRESCOTT
CLIFTON SHELDON BUSH
JR.

Monograms by Mother Design

Send Feedback

Home World U.S. N.Y. / Region Business Technology Science Health Sports Opinion Arts Style Travel Jobs Real Estate Autos Back to Top

Copyright 2010 The New York Times Company Privacy Terms of Service Search Corrections RSS First Look Help Contact Us Work for Us Advertise Site Map

2 of 2 1/2/11 11:33 PM