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.
Browse Philippa Foot by topic
Philippa Foot on Justice
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“We will be asked how, on our theory, justice can be a virtue and injustice a vice, since it will surely be difficult to show that any man whatsoever must need to be just as he needs the use of his hands and eyes, or needs prudence, courage and temperance? Before answering this question I shall argue that if it cannot be answered then justice can no longer be recommended as a virtue.”
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Philippa Foot on Knowledge
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“There are here two assumptions about 'evaluations ', which I will call assumption (1) and assumption (2). Assumption (1) is that some individual may, without logical error, base his beliefs about matters of value entirely on premises which no one else would recognise as giving any evidence at all. Assumption (2) is that, given the kind of statement which other people regard as evidence for an evaluative conclusion, he may refuse to draw the conclusion because this does not count as evidence for him.”
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“It may seem that the only way to make a necessary connexion between 'injury' and the things that are to be avoided, is to say that it is only used in an 'action-guiding sense' when applied to something the speaker intends to avoid. But we should look carefully at the crucial move in that argument, and query the suggestion that someone might happen not to want anything for which he would need the use of hands or eyes. Hands and eyes, like ears and legs, play a part in so many operations that a man could only be said not to need them if he had no wants at all.”
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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.”
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“The whole of moral philosophy, as it is now widely taught, rests on a contrast between statements of fact and evaluations. … If a man is given good evidence for a factual conclusion he cannot just refuse to accept the conclusion on the ground that in his scheme of things this evidence is not evidence at all. With evaluations, however, it is different. An evaluation is not connected logically with the factual statements on which it is based.”
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