Natural Goodness

"Philippa Foot was someone I came to quite late. She wrote very little over her career. There are two or three volumes of papers, one might even have gone out of print. She wrote one monograph, which is this book, Natural Goodness . It’s a short book, not much more than 100 pages. The reason I wanted to highlight her as an example of a good thinker is that she’s not in a hurry to come up with her theories and her conclusions. She’s taking as much time as it takes. Again, I was lucky enough to interview her and Foot said something along the lines that she often does have a very good nose, but she can’t then necessarily pin down exactly what it is she has sniffed out quickly. It takes her time to really work out what’s wrong or right about it. I think that’s true. With Philippa Foot, you’ve got someone who had a real sense of what is important, and what matters and was patient in trying to work it out. She wasn’t in a hurry to present her grand thesis to the world. When things were ready, she would offer them out and that was that. It’s a nice contrast to the idea that philosophy is about ostentatious cleverness and the ability to be very quick and think on your feet. Philosophical education in the UK, historically, at least, has been almost like performance. People give their paper and then other people in the seminar are trying to show how clever they are by trying to shoot it down. The speaker has to show how bright they are by batting away criticisms. It’s like a gladiatorial combat, really. It’s all about that cleverness, smartness, fastness. Philippa Foot wasn’t like that at all, and I think it’s really important. There are people like Philippa Foot: more careful, slow, considered thinkers. She’s a very clear writer, but it’s a subtle book. It’s short, but you should read it slowly and carefully. But yes, it is something I’d recommend to a general reader. All of these books I’ve chosen are ones I think a general reader could read. I haven’t picked anything which is too academic or dry. It’s about this idea, which is often attributed to David Hume, that there is an is/ought gap or fact/value distinction. In its strong form, this says that you can’t derive any conclusions about the way things ought to be by merely observing how they are. A statement of the fact that x is the case or something is the case, doesn’t ever generate the idea that something ought to be the case. But often we assume there’s a very strong and obvious link. For example, if you were to say to a child, ‘Don’t do that to the dog’ and they ask why not, you might say, ‘The dog doesn’t like it, it hurts.’ Now, we assume that means that therefore you ought not to do it. But there’s a logical gap. If the child then says, ‘Okay, it hurts the dog, so why shouldn’t I do it?’, you say ‘because you shouldn’t hurt the dog.’ But now you’re bringing in a moral judgment, which is not a fact. This is a big, big issue in philosophy. If you can’t derive all statements from facts, what’s the basis of morality, if you don’t have it coming from God, or whatever it might be? What Philippa Foot is doing in this book is she’s trying to bridge that gap, to show how an understanding of the way things are and what is good for their flourishing, from a purely natural perspective, does give you that kind of route to a moral statement. But she’s trying to make that bridge without committing that fallacy of simply jumping from an is to an ought. This is why it’s quite subtle, really. You have to accept the fact that there may well be a logical gap at some level between an is statement and an ought statement. But nonetheless, you can do a lot of work on the factual side of things, so much work that the point at which you have to make the transition to a moral statement is small enough that the only person who wouldn’t make it would be a sociopath or psychopath. There is still a logical gap to be bridged but there comes a point where, if you understand the way things are enough, then you shouldn’t really need any extra persuading that it’s good or bad to do certain things."

"Philippa Foot is also an Aristotelian, but of a rather different kind. MacIntyre thinks that the notion of virtue has to be detached from Aristotle’s original ‘metaphysical biology’ as he calls it, whereas Philippa Foot thinks that maybe it doesn’t. In Natural Goodness – which is beautifully written, by the way, and one of my favourite works of moral philosophy – she has this interesting discussion of the sentence “human beings have 32 teeth”. This is a perfectly ordinary sentence in English; readily intelligible, the kind we use all the time. But when you think about it, what does it actually mean? Clearly it doesn’t mean, “all humans have 32 teeth”. That would be false. It doesn’t mean, “the average human has 32 teeth”: that would also be false. What it seems to mean is something like: “human beings are meant to have 32 teeth”, or, “if everything goes well for them they should have 32 teeth”. In other words, it is a normative statement, as well as being an ordinary descriptive statement about the species homo sapiens. Foot says that many of the statements we make about species have this odd feature of being both normative and descriptive. She’s attacking the dominant tendency in modern ethics to think of moral values as attitudes on our part, or stances. She says no, they’re facts about our species that we can discover. As to how they’re spelled out in detail – there’s a huge amount of flexibility there. It’s not as if all human beings have to conform to some template. That’s where we differ from other animals. All lions, for example, lead pretty much the same kind of lives. Humans don’t. So clearly a lot depends on choice and culture. But some things are perversions by any standard. Take the Roman habit of leaning over and vomiting on the floor after a meal so that they could carry on eating. I would say that this was a perversion. You’re perverting the natural function of eating, which is to nourish yourself. Well, yes, I have become interested in the notion of perversion recently."