Philippa Foot

It is on the "why be moral?" question (which for her may be said to divide into the questions "why be just?", "why be temperate?", etc.) that her doctrine underwent a surprising series of reversals. In "Moral Beliefs", she had argued that the received virtues – courage, temperance, justice, and so on – are typically good for their bearer. They make people stronger, so to speak, and condition to happiness. This holds only typically, since the courage of a soldier, for instance, might happen to be precisely his downfall, yet is in some sense essential: possession of sound arms and legs is good as well. However, damaged legs may happen to exclude someone from conscription that assigns contemporaries to their deaths. So people have reason to act in line with the canons of these virtues and avoid cowardly, gluttonous, and unjust action. Parents and guardians who want the best for children will steer them accordingly. The "thick" ethical concepts that she emphasized in her defense of moral judgment's cognitive character were precisely those associated with such "profitable" traits, i. e., virtues; this is how such descriptions differ from randomly chosen descriptions of action. The crucial point was that the difference between "just action" and "action performed on Tuesday" (for example) was not a matter of superadded "emotive" meaning, as in Ayer and Stevenson, nor a latent imperative feature, as in Hare. It is just that justice makes its bearer strong, which gives us a reason to cultivate it in ourselves and our loved ones by keeping to the corresponding actions. So Foot must face a threat posed by Nietzsche and the Platonic immoralists: perhaps the received ostensible virtues in fact warp or damaged the bearer. She suggests that modern and contemporary philosophers (other than Nietzsche) fear to pose this range of questions because they are blinded by an emphasis on a "particular just act" or a particular courageous act, rather than the traits that issue from them. It seems that an agent might come out the loser by such act. The underlying putative virtue is the object to consider.

Fifteen years later, in the essay "Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives", she reversed this when it came to justice and benevolence, that is, the virtues that especially regard other people. Although everyone has reason to cultivate courage, temperance and prudence, whatever the person desires or values, still, the rationality of just and benevolent acts must, she thought, turn on contingent motivations. Although many found the thesis shocking, on her (then) account, it is meant to be, in a certain respect, inspiring: in a famous reinterpretation of a remark of Kant,[9] she says that "we are not conscripts in the army of virtue, but volunteers";[10]^:170 the fact that we have nothing to say in proof of the irrationality of at least some unjust people should not alarm us in our own defense and cultivation of justice and benevolence: "it did not strike the citizens of Leningrad that their devotion to the city and its people during the terrible years of the siege was contingent".

Foot's book Natural Goodness attempts a different line. The question that we have most reason to do ties into the good working of practical reason. This in turn is tied to the idea of the species of an animal providing a measure of good and bad in the operations of its parts and faculties. Just as one has to know what kind of animal is meant, for instance to decide whether its eyesight is good or bad, the question of whether a subject's practical reason is well developed depends on the kind of animal it is. This idea is developed in the light of a concept of animal kinds or species as implicitly containing "evaluative" content, which may be criticized on contemporary biological grounds. However, it is arguable even on that basis that it is deeply entrenched in human cognition. In this case, what makes for a well-constituted practical reason depends on us being human beings marked by certain possibilities of emotion and desire, a certain anatomy, neurological organization, and so forth.

Once this step is taken, it becomes possible to argue in a new way for the rationality of moral considerations. Humans begin with the conviction that justice is a genuine virtue. So a conviction that well-constituted human practical reason operates with considerations of justice means that taking account of other people in that sort of way is "how human beings live together." (The thought that this is how they live must be understood in a sense compatible with the fact that actual individuals often do not – just as dentists understand the thought that "human beings have n teeth" in a way that is compatible with many people having fewer.) There is nothing incoherent in the thought that practical reasoning that takes account of others and their good might characterize some kind of rational and social animal.

Similarly, there is nothing incoherent in the idea of a form of rational life. Such considerations are alien, where they can only be imposed by damaging and disturbing the individual. There is nothing analytical about the rationality of justice and benevolence. Human conviction that justice is a virtue and considerations of justice are genuine reasons for action assume that the kind of rational being we are, namely human beings, is of the first type. There is no reason to think such a rational animality is impossible, and so none to suspect that considerations of justice are frauds.

Of course, it might be suggested that this is precisely not the case, that human beings are of the second kind, thus that the justice and benevolence we esteem are artificial and false. Foot would hold that machismo and ladylikeness considerations are artificial and false; they are matters of "mere convention", which tend to put one off the main things. As far as justice is concerned, that was the position of the "immoralists" Callicles and Thrasymachus in Plato's dialogues, and as far as benevolence is concerned, that was the view of Friedrich Nietzsche.

With Callicles and Nietzsche, this is apparently to be shown by claiming that justice and benevolence respectively can be inculcated only by warping the emotional apparatus of the individual. Foot's book ends by attempting to defuse the evidence Nietzsche brings against what might be called the common-sense position. She proceeds by accepting his basic premise that a way of life inculcated by damaging the individual's passions, filling one with remorse, resentment and so forth, is wrong. She employs exactly the Nietzschean form of argument against some forms of femininity, for example, or exaggerated forms of etiquette acceptance. However, she claims that justice and benevolence "suit" human beings and there is no reason to accept Callicles' or Nietzsche's critiques in this case.