Philippa Foot Quotes
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. The quotes below are attributed to Philippa Foot, organized by topic.
Philippa Foot on Virtue
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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.”