# Furthering Philippa Foot **URL:** \ **Category:** Ethics\ **Created:** [June 15, 2026, 10:56pm UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/furthering-philippa-foot/1367 "2026-06-15T22:56:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 1\ **Showing post:** 101
**Author:** ![Leontiskos](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex007/user_avatar/www.thephilosophyforum.com/leontiskos/32/712_2.png) [@Leontiskos](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/u/Leontiskos)\ **Post date:** [June 17, 2026, 2:57am UTC](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/furthering-philippa-foot/1367/101 "2026-06-17T02:57:59Z")
> [@Tom\_Storm](#): > > @Leontiskos @Banno I don’t claim to understand Foot fully, but there does seem to be an idea presented that **what humans are** can ground what we ought to be. The difficulty I see is that human nature contains cruelty, bigotry, marginalisation, conflict, war, and barbarism possibly just as much as it contains other traits. So who gets to decide which parts of “human nature” count as normatively significant? Why is “flourishing” privileged as the standard rather than, say, “power”? > > Am I wrong to think this looks underdetermined? Any selection of what is “natural” already seems to smuggle in an evaluative judgment rather than simply report a fact (more of this later). Foot’s revised view of 2001 looks to be very standard Aristotelianism, explicitly following in the footsteps of Aristotle and Aquinas. A basic argument she makes is that it seems that we are able to do this with animals. From my post above: > [@Leontiskos](#): > > > Anscombe writes, ‘[G]etting one another to do things without the application of physical force is a necessity for human life, and that far beyond what could be secured by . . . other means.’[18] Anscombe is pointing here to what she has elsewhere called an ‘Aristotelian necessity’: that which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it.[19] We invoke the same idea when we say that it is necessary for plants to have water, for birds to build nests, for wolves to hunt in packs, and for lionesses to teach their cubs to kill. These ‘Aristotelian necessities’ depend on what the particular species of plants and animals need, on their natural habitat, and the ways of making out that are in their repertoire. These things together determine what it is for members of a particular species to be as they should be, and to do that which they should do.[20] > > > > (Philippa Foot, [Natural Goodness](https://archive.org/details/naturalgoodness0000foot/page/n7/mode/2up), 15) So then I suppose we should begin by asking this: Do you think your objection applies to animals, too? Can we say what is good for an animal? Or are all such claims about what is good for an animal merely subjective and untrustworthy? > [@Tom\_Storm](#): > > The other concern some might have here is that the step from describing how humans flourish to saying we _ought_ to care about that already seems to smuggle in an evaluative step. Foot actually gives special attention to this area, given her belief that Michael Thompson “has not said enough to isolate the kind of proposition that will yield evaluations of individual organ­isms” (30). But it’s worth pointing out here—and this is something Foot understood—that if you define a description or a fact as, in part, “That from which no evaluation can rationally follow,” (or vice-versa, by focusing on values instead of facts) then you have guaranteed the fact/value gulf. Indeed, you have tautologically begged the question such that, “No evaluation follows from a fact,” means little more than, “No evaluation follows from that from which no evaluation can follow.” This is @Banno’s error which I pointed out to you [here](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/i-am-a-moral-nihilist/1218/472). If we want to take any of this seriously we can’t sloppily import our desired conclusion into our definitions and pretend that we have made some kind of point. --- _[View the full topic](https://www.thephilosophyforum.com/t/furthering-philippa-foot/1367)._