Philippa Ruth Foot

Life and Academic Career

Philippa Ruth Foot (1920–2010) was a British philosopher whose work transformed twentieth-century moral philosophy. Born into an aristocratic family in Lincolnshire, she studied at Somerville College, Oxford, where she read Philosophy, Politics, and Economics. During the Second World War she worked at the British Ministry of Economic Warfare, after which she returned to Oxford and increasingly devoted herself to academic philosophy.

Foot became a fellow and tutor in philosophy at Somerville College, a position she held for many years. In an era when analytic moral philosophy was dominated by noncognitivist and emotivist views, she emerged as a central figure of a new generation questioning this consensus. She later held positions in the United States, including at Cornell University and the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), which strengthened her international influence.

Her major writings were initially published as essays, later collected in volumes such as Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (1978). Her systematic statement of an Aristotelian ethical view appeared late in life in Natural Goodness (2001). Foot remained intellectually active into her nineties and died in Oxford on her ninetieth birthday, 3 October 2010.

Moral Objectivity and Critique of Noncognitivism

Foot’s early work is best understood as a challenge to the then-dominant view that moral judgments lack objective truth. Influenced by J. L. Austin and the Oxford ordinary-language tradition, as well as by G. E. M. Anscombe’s critique of modern moral concepts, Foot argued that the logical and grammatical features of moral language had been widely misdescribed.

Against emotivists and prescriptivists, who claimed that moral judgments are expressions of feeling or prescriptions rather than statements of fact, Foot proposed that:

• Moral judgments can be truth-apt; they are candidates for being correct or mistaken.
• Moral reasons can be rationally compelling, not merely dependent on an agent’s contingent desires or attitudes.
• The patterns of evaluation found in moral discourse closely parallel those found in other areas where objectivity is uncontroversial, such as evaluations of skills or functional artifacts.

In essays such as “Moral Beliefs” and “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives?”, she criticized the idea that moral obligations are merely conditional on an individual’s aims. She maintained that it is a mistake to assimilate moral “oughts” to hypothetical imperatives like “If you want to catch the train, you ought to leave now.” Instead, she suggested that moral requirements may have a deeper, categorical authority grounded in the nature of human life and rational agency.

Foot did not defend a simple return to Kantianism. Rather, she opened conceptual space for thinking of moral judgments as objective evaluations of human action and character, without committing herself to the strong, formal universality claims characteristic of Kant. This line of thought set the stage for her later, explicitly Aristotelian naturalism.

Virtue, Natural Norms, and Human Flourishing

Foot played a crucial role in the revival of virtue ethics within analytic philosophy. Drawing inspiration from Aristotle, she argued that moral philosophy should focus not primarily on rules or consequences but on virtues of character—stable, rational dispositions such as justice, courage, temperance, and benevolence.

Her distinctive contribution was to connect virtue with a naturalistic account of goodness. In Natural Goodness, she claims that evaluations of human character and action can be understood in continuity with evaluations of other living things. Statements like “This plant has good roots” or “This wolf is defective in its hunting behavior” are, she argued, objective judgments about life-functions relative to the species or “life-form” of the organism. Similarly, humans as rational, social animals have characteristic needs, capacities, and forms of flourishing.

On Foot’s view:

• Virtues are excellences that enable human beings to live and reason well as the kind of creatures they are.
• Moral defects (such as cruelty or injustice) can be described as natural defects in rational life, akin to defects in perception or movement.
• Moral reasons arise from what is needed for human flourishing, not merely from subjective preferences or arbitrary social conventions.

This neo-Aristotelian naturalism attempts to reconcile three elements: the objectivity of moral evaluation, the centrality of character and virtue, and a non-supernatural, naturalistic picture of human beings. Supporters see this as a powerful alternative to both utilitarian and deontological theories, integrating fact and value without reducing ethics to mere empirical science. Critics question whether the norms governing rational and moral life can be straightforwardly derived from facts about species-typical functioning, and whether Foot’s analogy between moral and biological evaluations can ultimately be sustained.

The Trolley Problem and Legacy

Foot is widely associated with the trolley problem, a thought experiment introduced in her 1967 article “The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of Double Effect.” She asked readers to consider a runaway trolley headed toward five people tied to a track. A bystander can pull a lever to divert the trolley onto a side track where it will kill one person instead of five. Foot contrasted this case with others, such as killing one person to save five by harvesting their organs, to explore differences in moral permissibility.

Her original aim was to examine the Doctrine of Double Effect—a principle distinguishing intended harms from foreseen but unintended side effects—and to challenge simple act-utilitarian accounts of right action. Later philosophers, most notably Judith Jarvis Thomson, adapted and complicated the trolley scenarios. Nonetheless, Foot’s formulation provided one of the most influential testing grounds for theories of:

• Doing versus allowing harm
• Intention versus foresight
• The moral significance of agency and personal involvement

The trolley problem has since become a canonical tool in moral philosophy, moral psychology, and even applied ethics (e.g., in debates over autonomous vehicles and medical triage). It exemplifies Foot’s style: using carefully crafted thought experiments to reveal subtle features of moral judgment and to pressure abstract theories.

Philippa Foot’s legacy lies in her persistent defense of moral realism, her role in the re-emergence of virtue ethics, and her effort to ground ethical evaluation in a philosophically sophisticated account of human nature and practical reason. Subsequent neo-Aristotelians, including Rosalind Hursthouse and Michael Thompson, have developed and refined themes from her work, while ongoing debates about moral naturalism, virtue, and the basis of normativity continue to engage with her arguments. Foot remains a central figure in the landscape of contemporary moral philosophy.