Philippa Foot 1920 – 2010
Philippa Foot was a British analytic philosopher and one of the principal figures in the twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics. A founder of Oxfam and a longtime fellow of Somerville College, Oxford, she argued in a sequence of influential papers, collected in Virtues and Vices, that moral judgment is rooted in facts about human flourishing rather than in non-cognitive attitudes. Her late book Natural Goodness develops this naturalist conception of ethics, drawing on the work of Anscombe and on classical and Aristotelian sources. The trolley problem in moral philosophy originated in one of her early papers.
Key facts
- Nationality
- British
- Era
- Contemporary
- Movements
- Analytic
Selected quotes
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Attributed to Philippa Foot:
“Goodness is, as it were, built into the very nature of human life.”
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Attributed to Philippa Foot:
“There is in fact a special connection between virtue and human happiness.”
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Attributed to Philippa Foot:
“Virtues are habits of the will.”
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Attributed to Philippa Foot:
“Hypothetical imperatives can be more demanding than categorical ones.”
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Attributed to Philippa Foot:
“The grounding of moral judgement is to be found in facts about what human beings are.”