Foot basically exemplifies what @Banno was moving towards in the previous thread: a form of moral relativism that is ultimately based on the conventions of a given society. For Foot morality has the same quality as cultural etiquette, and therefore a moral claim will only be compelling to an individual who is situated within the required cultural milieu:
What we actually have are rules of conduct adopted by certain societies, and individuals within these societies; and Kant is saying that these rules are universally valid.
[…]
But someone who thinks that significant concessions have now been made to Kant must answer the following question. Has anything been said about the inescapability of morality which could not also be said about the inescapability of etiquette?
(Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices, 171)
Or:
It is obvious that the normative character of moral judgement does not guarantee its reason‐giving force. Moral judgements are normative, but so are judgements of manners, statements of club rules, and many others. Why should the first provide reasons for acting as the others do not? In every case it is because there is a background of teaching that the non‐hypothetical ‘should’ can be used. The behaviour is required, not simply recommended, but the question remains as to why we should do what we are required to do. It is true that moral rules are often enforced much more strictly than the rules of etiquette, and our reluctance to press the non‐hypothetical ‘should’ of etiquette may be one reason why we think of the rules of etiquette as hypothetical imperatives. But are we then to say that there is nothing behind the idea that moral judgements are categorical imperatives but the relative stringency of our moral teaching? I believe that this may have more to do with the matter than the defenders of the categorical imperative would like to admit. For if we look at the kind of thing that is said in its defence we may find ourselves puzzled about what the words can even mean unless we connect them with the feelings that this stringent teaching implants. People talk, for instance, about the ‘binding force’ of morality, but it is not clear what this means if not that we feel ourselves unable to escape. Indeed the ‘inescapability’ of moral requirements is often cited when they are being contrasted with hypothetical imperatives. No one, it is said, escapes the requirements of ethics by having or not having particular interests or desires. Taken in one way this only reiterates the contrast between the ‘should’ of morality and the hypothetical ‘should’, and once more places morality alongside of etiquette. Both are inescapable in that behaviour does not cease to offend against either morality or etiquette because the agent is indifferent to their purposes and to the disapproval he will incur by outing them.
(Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices, 162)
Or finally:
The conclusion we should draw is that moral judgements have no better claim to be categorical imperatives than do statements about matters of etiquette. People may indeed follow either morality or etiquette without asking why they should do so, but equally well they may not. They may ask for reasons and may reasonably refuse to follow either if reasons are not to be found.
This is not relativism. This is the sort of mischaracterisation to which I have objected repeatedly, Leon. You are mis-presenting both Foot and I. Selective quotations out of context are of little support.
What’s sad is that there is a difference between ethics and etiquette, one that Foot addresses, and which might be of interest. See if you can set it out. How does Foot differentiate etiquette from ethics?
There is a worthwhile objection here. it is not merely an accusation of relativism. Can you find it?
Enough with these silly personal attacks. I am the only one in the thread who has quoted outside sources regarding Foot, including Foot’s penultimate work of moral philosophy. I asked you to provide quotations twice and you ignored those requests. The OP contains a lot of flowery ideas and language, but it provides us with little reason to think that it connects with Foot’s actual thought.
The point i was making is that this seems to stem from the environment. That this is a normative “fact” (i prefer ‘conclusion’, I’ve been thinking lately) is likely to influence all sorts of talk about ethics, these cases and people’s rights and obligations. If the environment were different - perhaps a truly communal one, where to forfeit one’s rights in the saving of others is lauded and encouraged… perhaps we’d have a different normative conclusion. But i agree with what you’ve said.
@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).
Subjectivism holds that moral truth depends on individual or collective attitudes, so what is right is grounded in approval or preference. Foot seems to reject this and instead argues that morality is based on facts about the human life-form, empirical facts about our biological, psychological, and social nature and the conditions under which humans flourish or fail to flourish, rather than what people happen to approve of.
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 seems to avoid the is–ought problem by treating “flourishing” as already evaluative, so saying humans ought to flourish just unpacks what counts as a good human life.
So part of the difficulty here is that Foot substantially altered her views twice, and once towards the end of her life, after she had retired from UCLA. I am familiar with her 20th century work which was part of the philosophical give-and-take of that era of Anglophone moral philosophy. Thus the collection I quoted from was originally published in 1978. Perhaps @Banno is thinking of her late works, such as Natural Goodness (2001). I’m not sure because he hasn’t provided any sources.
She argues against Categorical Imperatives as foundational to moral claims, and specifically addresses the difference between etiquette, and ethics: that ethics is important. It’s deontology that makes ethics into etiquette, not Foot.
If that is the text you have in mind then I maintain that everything I have said holds good. That is the essay I was quoting from in Virtues and Vices (although the first quote comes from a footnote she added in 1977).
But it seems to me that to keep the account coherent she needs to maintain a distinction between is and ought, but say that we recognise the ought in an is. Foot does not want normative claims to collapse into mere descriptions.
That tree’s roots are shallow and diseased. We recognise that the tree is defective. but notice that the defect is not an additional, observable fact alongside the diseased roots; it is recognised in the facts about the roots, given an understanding of what roots are for.
So she is not avoiding the is-ought dichotomy, so much as leaning on the difference.
Importantly, for the purposes of our more long-term discussion, the tree is not defective because it fails to be sufficiently tree-ish, or to match the essence of tree-ness; it just can’t do the things we would consider a good tree capable of doing. it has limited capabilities.
Erm. That’s essentialist/teleological thinking through and through. This is a remarkably apt quote in showing up how madly you misrepresent essentialism and teleology. She may not have understood how deeply Aristotelian her points about the tree were in 1961, but the fact remains.
…So it turns out that late in her life, in Natural Goodness, she explicitly recognizes this fact.
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] And for all the enormous differences between the life of humans and that of plants or animals, we can see that human defects and excellences are similarly related to what human beings are and what they do. We do not need to be able to dive like gannets, nor to see in the dark like owls; but our memory and concentration must be such as to allow us to learn language, and our sight such that we can recognize faces at a glance; while, like lionesses, human parents are defective if they do not teach their young the skills that they need to survive.
She goes on to draw heavily on Michael Thompson’s idea of “Aristotelian categoricals.” In Natural Goodness Foot appeals to primary or secondary sources on Aristotle in seven of her footnotes, and she appeal to Aquinas in four footnotes while drawing on him heavily in parts of her text.
Foot was the only one of the four not to do “Greats” at Oxford; she did Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Somerville. Nevertheless it is risible to suggest she was unaware of her Aristotelian debt.
There’s more than one way to understand Aristotle, Leon. Something that is often missed in these forums. In particular, hereabouts Aristotle is apparently understood only after reading Aquinas. The essentialism she uses is a long way from that of Tim and yourself. Sliding from “sounds like Aristotle” to “therefore commits to Aristotelian essentialism” is… unimaginative.
Oops. You spoke too soon. See my edit. Thankfully Foot is not as devoutly anti-Aristotelian and anti-Thomistic as you are. See also “Thomophobia,” by Mary Harrington (or in video form: “Our Crisis is Metaphysical”).
That Foot is indebted to Aristotle is part of the reason for this thread. It’s something I want to explore in depth, not at the trivial level of competing football teams.
What text were your questions about Foot’s teleological thinking coming from? Or were you reading a source like SEP?
It seems that neither Banno nor I understood how, late in her life, Foot connected the dots and became explicitly indebted to both Aristotle and Aquinas. This is interesting. See, for example:
In spite of this recent work, it is best when considering the virtues and vices to go back to Aristotle and Aquinas. I myself have found Plato less helpful, because the individual virtues and vices are not so clearly or consistently distinguished in his work. It is certain, in any case, that the most systematic account is found in Aristotle, and in the blending of Aristotelian and Christian philosophy found in St. Thomas. By and large Aquinas followed Aristotle—sometimes even heroically—where Aristotle gave an opinion, and where St. Thomas is on his own, as in developing the doctrine of the theological virtues of faith, hope and charity, and in his theocentric doctrine of happiness, he still uses an Aristotelian framework where he can: as for instance in speaking of happiness as man’s last end. However, there are different emphases and new elements in Aquinas’s ethics: often he works things out in far more detail than Aristotle did, and it is possible to learn a great deal from Aquinas that one could not have got from Aristotle. It is my opinion that the Summa Theologica is one of the best sources we have for moral philosophy, and moreover that St. Thomas’s ethical writings are as useful to the atheist as to the Catholic or other Christian believer.
What’s the point of trying to do a bit of thinking out loud when the inevitable result is being shouted over by childish zealots, pulled into point-scoring and exegetical gotcha games.
You think you gave me a voice? How confused you are about the power you have!
Note that you are the one who brought up anti-essentialist and anti-Thomistic points (as you always do!) before I pointed out that Foot’s later work is explicitly indebted to Aristotle and Aquinas. Indeed the reason Foot’s conversion is so interesting is because you are so rabidly anti-Aristotelian and anti-Thomistic. I don’t see how you could maintain that such topics are “childish” if you are always the one inaugurating them.
So it seems we must address Foot’s essentialism. Consider the sick Oak.
On a Thomist reading, there is an essence to “tree” that is metaphysicaly prior and determinate of what it is to be a tree. Being a good or bad tree is accounted against this quiddity. if you have the essence of human nature, you can derive what humans ought to do. The is-ought gap is crossed by appeal to essence.
Foot’s tree does not work in that way. The tree is defective because it cannot perform the functions that constitute the life of a tree. For Thomistic essentialism, a grand metaphysics grounds the ought. For Foot, the form of life gives rise to the need. There is no “what it would be for this tree to fully realise itself” apart from the description of what trees characteristically do and need.
The difference is profound. Where the Thomist works from a grand metaphysics down to the tree, beginning by seeking to understand the essence of “tree”, Foot starts with the tree; begin by looking at the tree to see how it might grow. Foot drawing on Aristotle’s categoricals, that wolves hunt in packs, humans learn language, is not the same as drawing on Aquinas’s essentialist metaphysics.
The categorical sets out how we assess the individual, and does so without appeal to an antecedent essence. They are inherently both descriptive and yet normative. The normative standard is not preordained and subsequently applied to individuals; it emerges from and remains answerable to the pattern of living things of that kind. It serves to set out what counts as a tree, what counts as a wolf.
We are moving too fast now, and need to go back over quite a bit. An artefact of the shit that comes up in a public forum.
By now it should go without saying that you are incapable of accurately representing Aquinas, but the great thing about Foot being indebted to Aquinas is that we can actually use Foot herself to remedy your ignorance:
Earlier in the book, in Chapters 1-3[84], I gave reasons for believing propositions about natural goodness and badness in various plants, animals, and human beings; for instance, for believing that an individual oak tree with superficial, spindly roots was to be evaluated as defective, and, passing to human beings, gave reasons of the same form for the assertion that Maklay would have acted badly had he photographed his sleeping servant.
[84]. I am in general following Aquinas in making these distinctions; but what he says about species and circumstances of an action is complex, and I am not trying exactly to represent his view about this. It is natural to say that circumstances often affect the goodness or badness of an action, as the circumstance that the subject has been convicted of a crime by due process of law changes what is done in depriving him or her of liberty. And an end can also operate in this way as a circumstance, though this is not, of course, to say that even a good end will always do so. See the discussion of ‘absolutism’ on pp. 77–80, 114–115.
(Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, 64)
So here we have Foot herself correcting your misinterpretation. “I am in general following Aquinas in making these distinctions.” Again, it should come as no surprise that your account of Aquinas is a strawman, but we can bypass the exegesis and take Foot at her word that she is following Aquinas.
Note too that Aquinas is famous for following Aristotle carefully. Foot herself notes this:
By and large Aquinas followed Aristotle—sometimes even heroically—where Aristotle gave an opinion…
The idea that Aquinas’ view of essences is significantly different from Aristotle’s is not true at all. You are making up things to try to create an artificial gap.
One of the essays I read on Foot said that she was one of the few philosophers who would continue to change her views (and talk about being mistaken previously), which made attending her lectures a potential source of surprise rather than the usual ex cathedra droning of so many other institutional figures.
I guess critics of Foot probably ponder the merits of that “form of life” foundation. The last paragraph in the SEP article ends with, “but which facts matter and why should they matter to us?” “And why should we care about what is naturally good for humans?”
From the small amount I have gleaned, I can’t see how this is much different from a natural-facts grounding of morality. If human nature contains aggression, tribalism, domination, and cruelty as well as cooperation and compassion, what determines which natural facts become morally authoritative?
And to be honest, the idea of flourishing seems a bit off to me anyway. Obviously, the best way to make it work is to connect flourishing to key indubitable facts about the world. Can this be done?
The difficulty is that flourishing sometimes seems to “smuggle” moral conclusions into the definition of flourishing itself.
What I do get out of these discussions is stronger desire to ignore philosophy completely and just do what I’ve always probably always done. Decide for myself situationally based on how I feel about a given issue.
