Natural Goodness

by Philippa Foot

Philippa Foot has for many years been one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy. Long dissatisfied with the moral theories of her contemporaries, she has gradually evolved a theory of her own that is radically opposed not only to emotivism and prescriptivism but
also to the whole subjectivist, anti-naturalist movement deriving from David Hume. Dissatisfied with both Kantian and utilitarian ethics, she claims to have isolated a special form of evaluation that predicates goodness and defect only to living things considered as such; she finds this form of
evaluation in moral judgements. Her vivid discussion covers topics such as practical rationality, erring conscience, and the relation between virtue and happiness, ending with a critique of Nietzsche's immoralism. This long-awaited book exposes a highly original approach to moral philosophy and
represents a fundamental break from the assumptions of recent debates. Foot challenges many prominent philosophical arguments and attitudes; but hers is a work full of life and feeling, written for anyone intrigued by the deepest questions about goodness and human.

Genres: Philosophy, Nonfiction, History, Psychology, School

136 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 2001

About the author

Philippa Ruth Foot
Obituary

Reviews

[Matt · Rating 5 out of 5]

Anyone who wants to talk about grounding ethics in the natural world really needs to read and digest this book. It is short, but the density of ideas is ridiculous.

[Setareh Ezzatabadi · Rating 4 out of 5]

خوبی طبیعی، کتاب اصلی پایان نامه ام بود و به احتمال قریب به یقین اگر مجبور به خواندنش نبودم، نمی خواندمش. البته این به معنای آن نیست که این کتاب خواندنی نبود یا برای من جذابیت نداشت؛ بلکه بیشتر از تنبلی من حکایت می کند!
موضوع مورد بررسی کتاب موضوع بسیار مهمی است: خوبی چیست؟ و چرا باید خوب بود؟ اگر از دشواری های فلسفی بسیاری که قرن هاست فیلسوفان را برای پاسخ دادن به این سوال ابتدایی اما بسیار حیاتی سرگردان کرده است آگاه باشید، می توانید بفهمید که فوت می خواهد با چه حریف قدری کشتی بگیرد. حتما این حرف معروف را شنیده اید که از قول ایوان در رمان «برادران کارامازوف» می گویند: «اگر خدا نباشد همه چیز مجاز است». فوت سعی می کند در این کتاب به نحوی فلسفی بگوید که خیر! چنین نیست که اگر خدا نباشد همه چیز مجاز است. خوبی امری معطوف به خداوند یا احساسات و تمایلات ما نیست و ما برای خوب بودن، به فرض وجود خدا و پیشنهاد اغواکننده ی بهشت او نیازی نداریم. ما در همین زمین و فارغ از آسمان، همچنان دلایل عقلانی ای داریم که خوب باشیم.
فکر می کنم بیراه نیست اگر بگویم که چیزی که فوت از آن دفاع می کند، درواقع همان آرزوی همیشگی فیلسوفان است. فوت برای دفاع از تز خود، مسیری را پی می گیرد که قطعا بصیرت های فراوانی دارد. اما دریغ که عشق آسان نمود اول، ولی افتاد مشکل ها! برای آگاهی از بصیرت ها و مشکل ها، شما را ارجاع می دهم به پایان نامه ی خودم که تا 8 ماه آینده نوشته خواهد شد!

[Piotr Korzynski]

A short, lucid, and well-written philosophical ride towards understanding ethical behavior as "natural" for humankind. That is, this tiny treatise gives footing to the idea that to behave unjustly towards another person is to behave defectively or unnaturally for a human being.

The course of the argument runs into trouble when confronted with accusations of conservativism (i.e., who is to deem what behavior counts as natural? indeed, the very choice of the word "natural" can seem a bit unsettling) and when confronted with specific human behavior (i.e., how do we account for cultural variation among "natural" expressions of justice?).

Further still, there is the issue of what notion of species is at play and where the evolution or history of that species fits in expressing any of a species' natural characteristics.

Foot also gives us a patient, clear, and interesting reading of Nietzsche on the notion of voluntary action.

All in all, an interesting read, if not all together convincing in its ultimate aim.

[Tim Vos · Rating 4 out of 5]

If nothing else, perhaps one of the more original views on modern moral philosophy in general and virtue ethics in particular. Widening the scope of the moral, of morality as such, to living things like animals and plants provides a a new way to reach a form of, more or less, provable objective morality. That which is moral is that which follows the goodness of the species of living being as is. A dog is a good dog if it acts and shows those characteristics common to dogs. A three-legged blind dog unable to hunt shows defects and such is an example of a defect dog. Through a series of clear arguments, both found in secondary literature and formed by Foot herself, and possible counter-arguments Foot attempts and mostly succeeds in showing how the goodness of irrational living things like plants or animals is applicable to the rational humans. Recommended for everyone interested in the question of morality and ethics and perhaps philosophy as such.

[Joseph Yue · Rating 4 out of 5]

The inventor of the (in)famous trolley problem, after a long and productive career, has finally realised what has always been hidden in plain sight: most thought experiments don't work, because they never happen. Foot has repented from her earlier sins of moral rationalism, and presumably Natural Goodness was written for atonement. The very possibility of moral reasoning is grounded in human nature as such, and human beings are as much animals as we are rational. This is why moral goodness does not hinge on abstract moral laws floating around in a Kantian abstract space; no, something is called good, because it is good for us. St. Thomas even goes so far as to say that 'God is not offended by us except when we do something contrary to our own good' (Summa Contra Gentiles, Book III, chapter 122). When this point has become clear, the errors of Mill, of Russell, of so many other 20th century meta-ethicists seem, albeit pernicious, simply childish. In comparison, even Nietzsche in his complete madness still makes more sense than the idea that morality is somehow a kind of command, without having a particular telos as its aim.

[Ana Sofia · Rating 4 out of 5]

Madres su capitulo siete de Nietzsche HUEVOS. Si no les interesa el tema de naturalist morality no lo lean. BUT if you want to dabble in some Ethics philosophy se los recomiendo MUCHO. Esta pretty short y no igual de content dense como los pasados, si lo leen porfavor contactenme, saludos fans que tengan una buena semana ✨🥰

[david]

como dijo Lucy del eliminativismo, "very interesting! wrong, but interestingly wrong!"

[Daniel Hageman · Rating 3 out of 5]

This new rating better reflects the balance of what I think of Foot's content along with the originality she brings to the table when thinking about moral objectivism.

Foot's overall angle of discussion surrounding our understanding the way 'good' and 'bad' are used as adjectives, specifically 'attributive' vs 'predicative', is immensely helpful. She also does a fantastic job rebutting Hume's 'practicality requirement' which seems to be at the heart of so many difficulties in moral philosophy. Further, her opening chapter vitiating moral subjectivism was a joy to read, and can serve as a quick, short reference for anyone looking to such a self-defeating philosophy defeat itself in real time.

While I applaud Foot's overall stance as a moral objectivist, it seems difficult not to find fault in her baseline that she explains via her concept of 'natural goodness'. While she explicitly claims not to be making a naturalistic fallacy in developing her framework, it's difficult not to see much of it as exactly that. The most charitable interpretation that seem to be possible is that her normative outlines for humans seems a bit arbitrary as a reference point for moral action and agency.

The text certainly could use some intermingling of ideas sprouting from the philosophy of mind arena, if not only to ground morality itself in what seems obviously to only plausible area of relevance: conscious experience. Granted, Foot's seemingly feeble attempts to rebuke utilitarianism and pleasure as desirable in itself, seem to render her consideration of conscious experience as the sole baseline for a moral realm to be unlikely. Given her thesis of 'goodness' based on normative standards across a species, or in the human case, 'goodness of will', her outline for practical rationality is left wanting. Granted, her discussion of happiness, and what she saw as problems in its treatment as an inherent good, certainly do provide great starting points for utilitarians to consider, and perhaps sharpen their sub-taxonomies a bit more when considering the more practical side of ethics.

I also thought Foot's jump from non-human animals to humans was a bite too big for her to chew..felt a little reminiscent to someone justifying poor treatment of animals because of our capacity for moral agency. There's just too much research that shows that any of the lines one can draw, outside the binary presence of consciousness, is too arbitrary to make such claims. Also, the idea of comparing to the 'natural' aka normative nature of the species over a given time period seems to fall short in countering the many thought experiments that come to mind about hypothetical species (past, present, or future), where it seems that such a standard is almost certainly not sufficient.

Definitely worth the read for anyone looking for cases of moral objectivism outside the classics, if not in the least because it provides great references to related articles, papers, and a few other full literary works.

Finally, a final note I decided was worth coming back to add in. I found it fantastically refreshing how frequently Foot was relentlessly critical to her own previously published work. This is a feat all too rare in philosophy as far as I can see, and it can be painful to watch intellectuals cave to their sunk cost fallacies for the sake of wanting to look consistent over the years, even when faced with fatal logical arguments to the contrary. This sort of intellectual honesty is something that the field and the world in general could use a lot more of, and I can't help but applaud Foot for doing as such on multiple occasions in this book.

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A recent defense of ethical naturalism that brings a breath of fresh air to the non-cognitivist atmosphere in moral philosophy. If you have read Aristotle and Aquinas, then nothing will be that ground breaking. Nonetheless, a very good (and important) book.

[laura]

for a seminar with gavin lawrence on the deep and the shallow in (moral) life.

[axegrinder · Rating 5 out of 5]

A very good brief for either Virtue ethics or generally speaking, naturalistic ethics. Well done, Aristotle! I have always been a fan of this approach.

[Zachary · Rating 3 out of 5]

In Natural Goodness, Philippa Foot, one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, seeks to describe a kind of evaluation rooted in what she calls “natural normativity” and to show that moral evaluation of human action is a species of this broader type. More specifically, Foot strives to show how natural normativity constrains both practical rationality and morality, in that an action or disposition to act can be neither rational nor moral if it is “defective” by the standard of natural normativity. As Mark C. Murphy observes, this more modest task differs from Foot’s more ambitious thesis that practical rationality and morality are not just conditioned by natural normativity, but determined entirely by it. On this latter claim, the naturally normative supplies the content of practical rationality and morality, such that there can be no reason to act that does not come from natural normativity. As Foot states this thesis, “I want to say, baldly, that there is no criterion for practical rationality that is not derived from that of goodness of the will,” where goodness is determined by the naturally normative (11). It is important to keep these two tasks distinct, since this distinction informs how and on what terms to evaluate Natural Goodness.

To demonstrate that natural normativity constrains practical rationality and morality, Foot first identifies a kind of moral proposition in which goodness is attributable to life-forms and their parts, characteristics, and operations, the truth of which in no way implicates the speaker’s aims, interests, desires, or choices. That is, the goodness predicated in these moral assessments is natural—it “is intrinsic or ‘autonomous’ goodness in that it depends directly on the relation of an individual to the ‘life form’ of its species” (27). Goodness understood in relation to the naturally normative contrasts radically with expressivist theories of goodness influenced by G. E. Moore’s non-naturalism; it would be absurd to think that in my assessment that the oak tree has good roots, the word “good” expresses my “pro-attitude” toward the roots, as the expressivists would have it (26). To make sense of propositions that reflect the naturally normative, Foot, influenced by Michael Thompson, identifies a special type of proposition of the form “S’s are F” or “the S is F” (for example, “deer are swift runners,” or “the deer is a swift runner”), where S denotes the name of a species or life-form and F is some aspect or activity characteristic to that species or life-form, which is not reducible to a claim about what is universally or statistically typically true of individual S’s (i.e. “deer are swift runners” is not equivalent to “all deer are swift” or “most deer are swift”). These kinds of propositions, which Foot and Thompson call “natural-history sentences” because their truth is a truth about a species at a particular historical time which presupposes the relative stability of the most typical features exhibited by that species, “tell how a kind of plant or animal . . . develops, sustains itself, defends itself, and reproduces” (29). Put differently, natural-history sentences describe what is good for a species at a particular time and in its natural habitat to have and to do, such that these sentences, which Thompson also calls “Aristotelian categoricals,” can serve as major premises in deductions of assessments of natural normativity: if the S is F (“deer are swift runners”), and this S is not F (“this deer is not swift”), then this S is defective (“this deer is defective, because it should be swift”).

Now, Foot thinks that moral defect (i.e. vice) in humans is a form of natural defect that is not so different from natural defect in sub-rational life-forms. Put more forcefully, Foot states that “there is no change in the meaning of ‘good’ between the word as it appears in ‘good roots’ and as it appears in ‘good dispositions of the human will’” (39, Foot’s emphasis). This means that humans have their own natural-history sentences in relation to which we can evaluate the goodness of humans. Admittedly, what is good for humans to have and do is vastly more complex than for plants and animals; beyond this, there is so much diversity in human individuals and cultures that the idea of natural normativity applicable to humans may seem doomed (both morally and conceptually) from the start. Nevertheless, Foot thinks that we can articulate what is typically needed for the human good, and not just at the level of self-maintenance and reproduction. While humans need to be able to house, clothe, and feed themselves, for example, they also need to pursue love and friendship, such that “humans form intimate friendships” is one natural-history sentence applicable to the species. And if humans form friendships, then they need virtues like loyalty, fairness, and kindness, such that “humans are fair” is another applicable natural-history sentence (44-5). Heavily influenced by Anscombe, Foot spends considerable time on the human need to make promises, which is rooted in a profound way in what humans can and cannot do (for instance, because I cannot make you care for my children after my death, I need you to promise that you will). “Humans make and keep promises,” then, seems like a viable natural-history sentence for the human species; countless human goods depend on this characteristic human activity and the trustworthy disposition it presupposes. In view of these Aristotelian categoricals, a human life bereft of friendship, or the dispositions to be fair and trustworthy, is defective, and hence the virtues on Foot’s account are those dispositions necessary in human life for the attainment of goods characteristic to the human species. Put differently, a good human has these virtues and acts in accordance with them whereas a bad human does not.

At this point in Natural Goodness, Foot strives to make a connection between natural normativity in humans and the normativity of practical rationality. In other words, does natural normativity as an objective theory of morality offer us reasons to act? Foot answers this question in the affirmative with help from Warren Quinn, who criticizes a “neo-Humean” account of practical rationality that makes the maximal satisfaction of an individual's desires the ultimate aim of practical rationality. Yet if practical reason is only concerned with the relation of means and ends in this way, Quinn observes, then it cannot evaluate the propriety of an individual’s desires: sadist desires would be on the same level as altruistic ones, with no ability to differentiate them normatively. What, Quinn then asks, would be so important about practical rationality? In other words, both Quinn and Foot believe that any adequate account of practical rationality must explain the sense in which it is “a kind of master virtue” capable of normative assessment, and Foot’s notion of natural normativity satisfies this desideratum (62). That is, Foot has already shown that certain human acts and dispositions are by their very nature defective because they are acts that a good human would not perform, or else dispositions that a good human would not have. Consequently, we cannot have practical reasons to perform actions that are defective by the standard of natural normativity. Goodness, then, is a necessary condition of practical rationality and, Foot states here, at least partially constitutive of it (63). Put differently, natural normativity constrains practical rationality, but this does not mean that we cannot have reasons other than the naturally normative to perform certain actions. This claim is the first part of Foot’s more modest thesis in Natural Goodness.

The second part comes from Foot’s effort to show that the aforementioned constraint on practical rationality by natural normativity is also a constraint on morality, by virtue of the fact that reasons of practical rationality and reasons of morality are not all that different. Foot understands “morality” here in the sense that, for example, Mill uses it to denote normative standards for conduct toward others. Foot’s point is not that morality is properly understood in this way, but that this is how morality is often understood, both in everyday life and moral philosophy. To blur the distinction between the moral and practically rational domains, Foot first demonstrates that moral evaluations in Mill’s sense and evaluations of practical rationality both presuppose voluntariness as a condition for praise or blame, so morality’s restriction to the voluntary does not separate them (72). Similarly, both moral evaluations and evaluations of practical rationality presuppose that the goodness or badness of an action depends on the nature of the action itself, the end for which the action is done, and whether one acts in accordance with one’s conscience; none of these features, then, can differentiate the two types of assessment (72-4). Finally, one may think that moral reasons to act should always trump non-moral reasons of practical rationality, and that this marks an important difference between the two domains. Yet Foot denies this claim as well, in part because, just as there are some moral terms (like “unjust” and “cruel”) which are “conceptually verdictive” in the sense that there can be no reason to act unjustly or cruelly, there are several non-moral terms (such as “foolish” and “imprudent”) that are likewise conceptually verdictive (78). In short, rather than sharply differentiate moral and non-moral reasons or evaluations, Foot contends that we should speak simply of “the rational human will,” whose reasons and evaluations derive from natural normativity, which limits the demands of the moral (understood in Mill’s strict sense) just as it constrains the scope of the practically rational (69).

Foot’s more ambitious thesis—that practical rationality and morality (now seen to overlap considerably) are determined entirely by the naturally normative—is most clearly set forth in the book’s introduction and first chapter. That Foot offers her more radical constructive view in these sections is somewhat ironic, since their express function is to clear the philosophical field of prejudicial support for the neo-Moorian and expressivist moral theories so popular in the twentieth century in order to make room for her account of natural normativity. First, Foot makes the helpful observation that expressivist, desire-based accounts of morality can be traced back to Hume’s so-called “practicality requirement,” i.e. the idea that morality is necessarily practical, intended to produce or prevent action (9). On the expressivist view, if morality must be practical, but the only reasons to act come from our desires or interests, then morality must be simply an expression of our desires or interests. While Foot, of course, concurs with Hume that morality must be practical, she denies, as we saw earlier, the expressivist premise that our desires or interests offer the only possible reasons to act: specific natural facts—namely, those facts expressed in natural-history sentences about the human species—also provide reasons to act. On Foot’s view, then, the fact-value distinction collapses and the impermeable wall erected by the expressivists between descriptive and evaluative propositions breaks down; Moore’s naturalistic fallacy, it turns out, is not a fallacy at all (or at least not a certain version of it). The trouble comes when Foot insists not only that facts about what is good for humans to have and do provide reasons for action, but also that moral reasons can only be reasons of this sort—i.e. that the content of morality is supplied exclusively by the naturally normative. If the basis for morality is natural normativity, and there is no substantive difference between the domains of morality and practical rationality (as Foot maintains later in the book), then the ultimate basis for practical rationality must be natural normativity, and practical reasons are necessarily derived from the naturally normative. This would explain Foot’s claims that “there is no criterion for practical rationality that is not derived from that of goodness of the will,” and that “in my account of the relation between goodness of choice and practical rationality it is the former that is primary” (11).

There is only “trouble” here in that this more ambitious thesis is not adequately defended, which may be due to the fact that it is not always clear whether Foot even thinks that she has made such a claim. That she has made such a claim in the introduction and first chapter of Natural Goodness is, perhaps, only salient in view of the fifth chapter on “Human Goodness,” where the distinction between moral evaluations and evaluations of practical rationality is blurred, as each type is rooted in natural normativity. In any case, Foot must say more about whether reasons of natural normativity provide the only reasons to act, morally or otherwise, or whether there are other reasons to act that are not derived from the naturally normative, over which, perhaps, reasons of natural normativity have some kind of authority.

The last two chapters of Natural Goodness are less central to the twin theses described above and explore two traditional problems in moral philosophy in view of natural normativity: happiness and moral skepticism or immoralism. In the chapter on happiness, Foot makes two central claims: the first is that we should not conceptualize happiness as a state of mind separate from its objects. To whatever extent humans across time and space share certain ideas about what constitutes happiness, this commonality derives from shared reactions toward specific goods central to human life—like, for example, human life itself, home, family, work, and friendship (88). Happiness may be an indeterminate concept, but that indeterminacy stems from the variety of goods that make up a happy life. Foot’s second main claim is to defend a necessary conceptual connection between happiness and virtue—that is, to deny that the wicked can be truly happy. Foot offers several examples to help tease out this conceptual connection; the idea is to show that happiness isolated from virtue is not, at least, the only way we typically understand the concept. Her conclusion here is tentative, but she ultimately affirms the Aristotelian notion that happiness is activity in accordance with virtue, even if she does not, with McDowell, completely identify happiness with a life of virtue, since happiness may not be an option for virtuous people in especially difficult circumstances (97).

In the last chapter, Foot’s main foil is Nietzsche, whom she claims analytic moral philosophers have been loath to confront directly. What is most notable about this chapter is that Foot’s account of natural normativity allows her to contest Nietzsche’s core theses about morality on his own terms; after all, Nietzsche insists that traditional morality is bad for us, in that it makes us wretched, fearful, and resentful, and perverts the will to life. Armed with her Aristotelian categoricals, Foot contends that Nietzsche’s revaluation of morality is unpersuasive because, most basically, he has his facts about human life mistaken. For example, the pity (or more aptly, compassion) he derides in Christian morality is necessary to human life, and hence constitutive of the human good. As Foot puts this point, “[Nietzsche] asked whether pity was good for the one pitying or the one pitied, and this was the right question to ask. . . . I have suggested that he got his facts wrong; but if his facts had been right, his revaluation of pity would have been right as well” (109-10). Foot observes that Nietzsche also errs when he claims that the goodness of an action has to do entirely with whether that action suits the individual’s own good, which is true on Foot’s theory of natural normativity, but that an individual has to determine her good for herself, since we are each radically different human individuals. On this latter point, Nietzsche once more has his facts mixed up, since, Foot maintains, we can truly speak of universal human goods, and hence each individual need not (and should not) create her own values in total isolation. In sum, Foot concludes that “it is only for a different species that Nietzsche’s most radical revaluation of values could be valid. It is not valid for us as we are, or are ever likely to be” (115).

[Lauren Larkin · Rating 3 out of 5]

I'm not sure what to say. I believe there to be profound ways Foot is contending with the concept of Goodness. I think that the way she reverses the approach, rejecting a top down and preferring a bottom up, is a necessary alteration in how we consider what is good and what isn't. I think that she is able to include the very real notion that what is good, what is good for a human being, and what is good for me as a human being are all essential questions, neither one essentially eclipsing the other. Ultimately, the focus of the book seems to be the unstated goal of what it means to be human and good, which does not render my previous statement null and void. Rather, the focus of the book is the umbrella under which the previous three questions live. With that said, the text is hard to read. It took me about 2/3 the way through to figure out what the goal was and to pick up on the argumentation style of the author. It felt way more complicated than it needed to be--I do confess that I'm not a trained scholar in this genre and admit that this may be a "Me" problem ("Hi, it's me I'm the problem, it's me," to quote Taylor Swift). I do think that any novice entering into this text might do well to read the last chapter first or the whole entire book from end to beginning rather than the way it's set up. Her discussion on and engagement with Nietzsche is just sharp and invigorating and completely relevant for today; start there and then read the rest.

[Adaelle · Rating 5 out of 5]

I thoroughly enjoyed this modern Aristotelian account of how we answer the normative question. Foot was witty, clear, and a pleasure to read, and I greatly appreciated her thoughtful arguments and critiques.

[Lukas op de Beke · Rating 4 out of 5]

“[I]t is obvious that there are objective, factual evaluations of such things as human sight,
hearing, memory, and concentration, based on the life form of our own species. Why, then,
does it seem so monstrous a suggestion that the evaluation of the human will should be
determined by facts about the nature of human beings and the life of our own species?”


This book contains a refreshing new perspective, commonly called "naturalism", on meta-ethics. It is a form of realism and draws heavily on Aristotelian teleology in nature or "natural normativity". In the beginning, Foot lashes out against noncognitivism, arguing that it is not our emotions that underly moral judgments, but reasons for action. Foot's idea is that what we call moral and immoral is that which benefits ourselves or another person as a member of our species. In other words, moral judgments are true because they are grounded in natural facts. Interestingly, by making this connection with what one might call the proper functioning of a member of a certain species, the rigid and, I agree with Foot, somewhat artificial distinction between prudence or self-regarding virtues (temperance, wisdom etc.) and other-regarding virtues and acts disappears. In both cases, what is good is simply that which is beneficial to a typical member of the species.

So the time-old question "why be moral?" can be answered rather straightforwardly: "because that is what human beings naturally do". And person that is wholly evil or immoral ought to be seen as a defective member of its species, much like in the netflix series Westworld some of the bots show defective behavior. In like manner, a polar bear whose fur is not white enough to blend in with its surroundings is defective in that respect, and surely, there are myriad other possible examples of an individual being defective. Note here that also in animals an individual can be defective in a wholly other-regarding respect. A lioness that fails to coordinate with its fellow lionesses in a hunt is defective and in this respect she is "bad" lioness, or at least behaving "wrongly" or "not how she ought to behave". Between this and a human being stealing from another without good reason, there is only a small gap and it is clear why it is wrong: "people don't normally steal from each other".

The final chapter deals with Nietzche's radical critique of Christian slave- or herd-morality and in my view Foot does wonderfully well at really taking this critique seriously. She argues that Nietzsche's critique can perhaps be put in her naturalistic mold and understood as the suggestion that certain behaviors such as an exaggerated pity for the weak and poor are potentially detrimental to the species at large. But even if this may contain an inkling of truth, on the whole Nietzsche's alternative value system is a sham. I agree with Foot here, as it is probably that herd instinct of ours and hyper-sociability that has propelled Homo Sapiens into the position of evolutionary success which it currently is in.

[Tom Pepper · Rating 2 out of 5]

Foot’s project is an attempt to define virtue in such a way that “the meaning of the words ‘good’ and ‘bad’ is not different when used of features of plants on the one hand and humans on the other, but is rather the same as applied, in judgements of natural goodness and defect, in the case of all living things.” She tells us it is essential to her project that she not “smuggle in” any subjective human notions of what is good, any “moral” values. Unfortunately, she does this throughout. Ultimately, what she does is make an attempt to argue that conventional post-Christian middle-class bourgeois values are in fact natural to the human species. So, happiness, we are told, depends less on facing great challenges in life than on “family, home, and work”; the ultimate “nature” of humans is to be compassionate, generous, loving, kind, etc. Anyone who fails to instantiate these values must not be truly happy. Her major arguments for this depend far to heavily on Nazis. Surely, she says, none of us would say we could be happy being a Nazi if it meant we had a nice home, family, etc. So, therefore, “wickedness” simply violates our “natural goodness.” She fails to see the extent to which she has smuggled in her cultural assumptions, assuming them to be the universal virtues we all want to embody.

To many of her arguments rely on false analogies. For instance, she cannot make the case for justice (as she admits), so makes the argument for friendship as a natural good, then asserts that since justice and friendship are both virtue the argument applies to virtue as well. It doesn’t. She also cannot grasp the banality of true evil today. She resorts to Nazis or communists over and over as examples of the obviously evil (once or twice to drug-dealing gangsters), but cannot even conceive that the evil in the world is done by all of us as we participate in capitalism—that evil is, today, banal, and so it is perfectly conceivable to go on being evil and still be quite happy (witness Elon Musk). If she used Musk instead of Hitler as her example, her argument wouldn’t be so easy to make.

Overall, I think that all attempts to “recover” virtue ethics follow this model: failing to grasp the meaning of arete for the ancient thinkers, and simply assuming that what they must have meant by it is our own list of praiseworthy character traits. This is unfortunate, because I think that properly understood virtue ethics could help us escape the use of moral philosophy as nothing more than capitalist ideology at the level of theory.

[Raymond Lam · Rating 4 out of 5]

This is another original and lucid work of moral philosophy by virtual ethics theorist, Philippa Foot. She argues for the similarities of the logical structure of ascribing natural goodness to plants and animals on the one hand, and, humans on the other. In spite of the logical structure similarity in normativity in ascribing 'natural goodness' to plants and animals, and, to human, Foot recognises human goodness is sui generis because human uses language to act towards rational ends which she expands with a chapter on practical rationality. Yet, the logical structure of the 'natural history' of how humans achieve human goodness and how animals and plants reach theirs are similar. Overall, Foot leads her readers through the structural similarities very well. One thing she could have expanded more on the similarities is the parallel between human social behaviour and animal social behaviour. Though humans use more complicated systems based on laws, rights, and, institutions, animals have similarly their own group behaviour to manage their society, such as wolves hunting in pack and beavers unite to build dams.


The chapter on the relationship between goodness and happiness also makes the book worth reading. Foot discusses a concept of deeper happiness beyond superficial contentment that ties in with the concept of goodness.

[William Rumball · Rating 5 out of 5]

Foot's Natural Goodness has reinvigorated the Aristotelian-Thomistic moral tradition, even if Foot herself was a lifelong agnostic, differing with Catholicism on many crucial moral topics. Nevertheless, Natural Goodness focuses on metaethics, not ethics, and explains the capacity for evaluation by appeal to natural facts brilliantly. Additionally, Foot succeeds in demonstrating the connection between moral action and practical rationality, such that one could justify acting morally as the correct course to take. It would be rated higher if not for two critiques. First, nothing Foot says is really revolutionary, only to those who have been deprived a comprehensive philosophical education (which it seems many contemporaries have), nevertheless Foot does succeed in presenting old ideas to a new audience. The main problem is that by being relatively short, Foot brushes over the essentialism and teleologism that underpins 'natural goodness', which makes the book inadequate on its own to fully sell the Aristotelian ethical system. Nevertheless, probably the best major contemporary exposition of correct moral philosophy.

[Sam · Rating 4 out of 5]

Foot strives to revive Aristotelian ethics within an evolutionary framework. She argues, in short, that certain behaviors count as deficient just so far as they interfere with human flourishing. I think it's a fascinating argument on her part--although not being an Aristotelian, I ultimately differ. However, anyone looking for a short book that demonstrates just what modern analytical philosophy looks like, or someone who's interested in practical reason generally, would not go wrong with this book.

[Micah Newman · Rating 3 out of 5]

Philippa Foot spent decades exploring the philosophy of ethics and its foundations. This book may be thought of as a career capstone of sorts, expositing the author’s settled views on many metaethical and normative questions. But as a comprehensive theory of ethical goodness (which is what it purports to be), it falls well short of expectations.

The starting point is an attack on non-cognitivism, of such as Hume, Hare, and, more contemporaneously, Gibbard. Having canvassed the shortcomings thereof, Foot wants to start over with a conception of “natural goodness” and see whether one can view human beings in light of goodness for an organism qua “form of life” and get something like ethical goodness in a way parallel to that by which one can identify deep roots and sharp teeth as “good for” trees and tigers respectively.

Here's where it all gets hand-wavy, because Foot is nowhere clear about what exactly she means by the notion of “goodness” she means to treat as theoretically load-bearing. Since the aim is to explain what morality is in terms of something else, it’s clear enough that it’s meant to not rely on some pretheoretic idea of goodness that is to be explained in the first place that might be illicitly smuggled in through the back door. But then just what is this notion of “natural goodness” that’s meant to noncircularly ground moral goodness? It clearly involves natural things being judged as good, but it’s hard to distinguish such judgments here as any different from judgments of things as good in Moore’s “non-natural” sense.

I perceive this dilemma: if the account of moral goodness is to be rooted in something that is (1) biological (and thus objective) and (2) completely value-free (and thus non-circular), then that something is going to bottom out in natural selection. And, although this is not widely recognized, natural selection is quite indifferent to what might be “good for” any given individual per se. If organisms lead short, nasty, brutish lives, and that turns out to be an effective and reliable way for genes to be copied, then that’s what will propagate forward indefinitely. On the other hand, it’s hard to see how any attempt to specify what seems to be good for individuals per se (and not merely what’s naturally selected) will avoid judging in terms of what already seems good to us non-cognitively.

Foot adverts to what she perceives as natural teleology to do this, but although it can certainly seem like teleology is inherent in nature, in fact it isn’t: it ultimately comes down to the result of natural selection’s clumsy sufficient but unnecessary conditions of whatever “works.” Foot says “It is easy to confuse these technical uses of words such as ‘function’ and ‘good’ with their everyday uses, but their meanings are distinct. To say that some feature of a living thing is an adaptation is to place it in the history of the species. To say that it has a function is to say that it has a certain place in the life of the individuals that belong to that species at a certain time.” (p. 32, n. 10) But in fact this distinction is spurious, as every function is an adaptation. Natural selection accounts for BOTH the things we like to see, such as a mother’s care of her young, AND the nasty things we also see in nature, such as the tendency of the males of some species to rape as an effective means of reproduction (for some animals, like ducks, this is in fact the usual mode of copulation). I don’t see how distinguishing between the two can be done without invoking our pretheoretic sense of good and thus terminating the inquiry in circularity.

Elsewhere, Foot refers to natural goods that are part of a species’ “natural-history story,” in some sense other than that of the process of natural selection. For humans, this means the development of conventions such as “establish[ing] rules of conduct and recogniz[ing] rights.” (p. 51) But it’s hard to see how such must fall under the heading of “natural history”—and even if it does, the above-mentioned dilemma looms. In any case, as contingent and accidental as “natural history” is normally understood to be, this does not seem a promising path to the sort of moral objectivity/realism Foot is gunning for.

One might think that Foot would pin down this crucial notion of natural goodness more clearly in application, but in the later chapters of the book (ch. 4 onward), where one might expect this to happen, whatever concept of natural goodness Foot has in mind hardly comes up. It seems to me that if one skipped chapters 2 and 3, one would get a wide schematic overview of Foot’s mature views on non-cognitivism, practical rationality (that it must be considered as inherently aiming at the good rather than merely whatever one’s desires happen to be), virtues as conducive to human goods, eudemonic human happiness, and the harm of immorality, and not have left out any essential underpinnings. (All of these chapters may well have begun as stand-alone papers, come to think of it.) This is all not without value, as there are many important insights found therein; it’s just that one is left with the overall impression of some generic version of ethical objectivism having been defended rather than a full-blown theory.

[Ft. Sheridan · Rating 4 out of 5]

p.79 fn.24: "A graduate student once said that my lectures had first made him see 'that to be anti-sex could be immoral'. I liked that."

[Andrew Flynn · Rating 5 out of 5]

THE TRUTH

[Edmund · Rating 4 out of 5]

Doesn't feel logically complete but does raise some issues for utilitarian accounts of ethics.

[Frederico · Rating 4 out of 5]

Narrowing down (and at the same time, amplifying) morality to what it is really about: our condition as living beings.

[Lucas · Rating 4 out of 5]

Read first five chapters; the best writer of the neo-Aristotelians. But, not Kantian (Hegelian) enough.

[Joseph · Rating 4 out of 5]

Her magnum opus. I enjoyed reading it, though it felt a little repetitive. Fortunately it's short. I'm all Aristotled out.

[John · Rating 5 out of 5]

By far the best treatment of virtue ethics I’ve seen.

[Malcolm Morano · Rating 3 out of 5]

It has its merits, but I’d forgotten how frustratingly vague many of the arguments are… and I worry that the view does, in fact, have terrible first-order implications.

[Luke Fox · Rating 4 out of 5]

The book presents Foot’s mature case for naturalism in ethics, grounded largely in an Aristotelian view of human nature, virtue, and eudaimonia, and drawing on a range of interests from her philosophical career, including the reason-giving motivations for action (contra Hume’s Law), the challenges of linking happiness to virtue, and the objections of Nietzschean immoralism.

Foot aims to provide a moral theory that will do two things (p.53)
1. Show that there is a difference between being a good human being and being a ‘gangster’ (a bad or defective human). This difference is based on natural normativity linked to the human species, analogous (though distinct from) how we can describe plants or animals as good or bad based on their characteristics as facilitating flourishing or being defects.
2. Show that this human ‘natural normativity’ is connected to what we as individuals ought to do. In this regard she argues for a special link between virtue and a type of happiness or eudaimonia and also responds to the Niezschean immoralist challenge that there is nothing that is good or bad.

Foot offers sometimes compelling arguments against anti-realism in ethics, particularly those founded on ‘neo-Humean’ is-ought or fact/value distinctions, where she seeks to demonstrate that knowing facts can be reason-giving and provide all the motive required. She also seeks to locate human good alongside (though not equivalent to) the good of plants and animals, helping her to demonstrate that evaluative language (like good and bad) can be grounded in natural properties of species.

Some of her arguments were not persuasive for me. Leaving aside her naturalism, a key argument that virtue is in some sense linked to a special category of happiness not available to bad people (her examples are the Wests and Nazis) seems to me to be particularly flawed and she is forced to appeal to what she takes would be a general consensus that the Wests, despite the satisfaction they gained from their crimes, would not have been able to experience this. This seems to me to be a rather naive or optimistic view of the human situation and of the satisfaction derived from goodness. Goodness looks much more like costly behaviour to me!

I’ve had the audacity to awarded this important work from the renowned philosopher 4 stars because the book is at times dense and may have benefited from clearer signposting as to why specific stages of the argument involved certain discussions. Admittedly, I’m not an ethics specialist, so maybe it would be obvious to someone more versed in the literature. Failure to do this allows her to elide animal or plant characteristics and human virtues where this is (as she sometimes admits) problematic. This may have made her overall argument stronger and more coherent - or perhaps exposed its weaknesses if one thinks she’s trying to inveigle moral properties into nature.

[Jerry Chen · Rating 4 out of 5]

Overall a short but sweet read with an interesting perspective on virtue ethics, and moral concepts in general.

This book spends a good chunk of time refuting other views like non cognitivists, utilitarians, and immoralists. There's some great commentary on topics like happiness, righteousness, practical rationality, and the nature of goodness.

My main issue would probably be that she seems to focus more on tearing other theories down instead of building hers up. I really wish there was more of a taste of the consequences and ideas derived from the ethical naturalism that the author proposes. I had questions going into this book that I didn't really find a satisfying answer to. For example:

(1) What is the proper way to identify virtues in this interpretation of ethical naturalism?
(2) How do we balance between the different virtues or resolve conflicts between them? In part 4 she talks about how under practical reason we consider different "should"s before choosing an action (i.e. all-things-considered or a.t.c.). But how!! In what way does your moral system help us consider and choose between these reasons? Don't you think that's a rather important thing to explain when describing your morality? Why doesn't she tell us??

I also came out with even more questions after reading. What components of our species is this naturalism based on? Biology? How does it factor in evolution, culture, or technological changes that have become essential parts of human life?

It's possible I just had the wrong expectations, I dunno. Maybe I just have to keep reading the literature and I'll eventually find the right info.

But besides those complaints, the last couple of pages where she argues against Nietzsche blew me away. She gives plenty of compelling points on the drawbacks and consequences of his immoralism, and it was more than just a direct disagreement too. In my opinion, she was able to also effectively salvage the good parts of his ideas by recontextualizing them under her own system. Out of all the arguments in the book, I found it the best demonstration of the strength of her moral framework. I would probably recommend this book to others for just that part alone.