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In this page, we offer some notes on Philippa Foot, and her struggling to understand these things, which derive from the discussion of her on BBC Radio4 programme In Our Time, 16 May 2024. We also suggest how she was perhaps reaching for what Dooyeweerd has to offer, and how Dooyeweerd might give grounding to what she brought up.
# Philippa Foot [PF] brought up in luxury 16-room mansion in Yorkshire; got bored with that life; went to Oxford University to study PPE; got in with 3 philosophers, Anscombe, etc. Loved it.
# Whereas Anscombe was Catholic, Foot was 'card carrying atheist'.
[But that maybe made her more determined to understand the laws of reality.]
# AJ Ayer 'Language, Truth and Logic' "a tub-thumping book" re "Facts >> Values" Only facts can be verified and hence true. Ethics, values merely subjective, never objective grounds, because cannot be verified.
# PF against that. She thought that ethics and values DO have some solid foundation, and wanted to work out what.
# Her 3 main books:
# Some things are neither facts nor values.
# PF example is RUDENESS: "He is rude" - both a fact that can be verified and a value.
# Some 'facts' derive from values. e.g. "There is no room on this bus" could be spatial fact, but it could also be a social value, especially early racist America.
# Others similar. e.g. Foucault argued that what we could as facts derive from power.
# Fact and value interact.
[Dooyeweerd: NCTT: theoretical thought is never neutral nor absolute but is based on religious presuppositions and beliefs. In fact, our choices intervene at all stages of coming to know 'facts' and 'theories'. ]
# So there is some 'objective' in moral judgements.
# e.g. CRUELTY.
# [The following might not have been here but later on.] The Trolley Problem (a trolley going down a railway track would crash into and kill 5 people, unless we switch points, but then it kills one person, who is more valuable in society; what do we do?) seems to exercise theoretical philosophers.
# Likewise, I am a surgeon, and have 5 patients dying for need or organs. There is a tramp outside, who has these organs but is "no use to anyone", so do we kidnap him, kill him and take his organs for these 5 people?
# Many philosophers see the two problems as identical at root, but PF held out: there is something fundamentally different about them.
# Eventually, she decided it was that in the latter we alter the stream of 'causaity' while in the former we do not.
# But where do does this objectivity and the root of these differences come from? From social structures and agreements?
# But PF concerned with the person who says "I know it's cruel, but I don't care!"
# Many others would ignore that, but PF listened to her intuition that it is wrong.
# Moral 'ought' is resistant to subjectivity, whether individual or social.
# There is something objective about the badness of cruelty that goes deeper even than social agreement.
[Dooyeweerd: All the aspects and their norms transcend even societal agreement; in fact it is they that make societal agreements possible. ]
# In bk MA PF ended up getting rid of 'OUGHT'. We should see ourselves as like an army of VOLUNTEERS who LOVE morality.
# We are not given any objective reason to be moral, good or even just.
# [But her statement seems to suggest morality is not purely subjective, but has a deeper reason than that of 'ought'. ]
[Dooyeweerd: In this we see the distinction between the juridical aspect, in which OUGHT is meaningful, and the ethical aspect in which VOLUNTEERING and LOVE are meaningful. No aspect is reducible to another in terms of what is makes meaningful, and earlier aspects cannot 'see' or truly understand what other aspects make meaningful. So 'ought' cannot truly understand love. Maybe PF stumbled on, and was reaching for, that?]
# However, later, PF moved away from this position, not being entirely satisfied with is.
[Dooyeweerd: Is that because those two aspects are not the only ones? In particular, there is the pistic aspect in which beliefs are meaningful, that follows both of them and is not reducible to them. What this what PF was reaching for? The title of her next book, Moral Beliefs, might suggest so. ]
# In particular, she emphaised the micro moral judgements found in everyday experience. "Applied ethics".
[ Dooyeweerd: Everyday experience features, and is rich in, all aspects. ]
# PF was introduced to Aristotle and Aquinas, by Anscombe especially, and their idea of VIRTUES.
# Virtues are dispositions of the will. Each virtue has its opposite, which the virtue person tries to avoid. Virtues are corrective [In the programme, it came across as though the virtues are there merely / mainly to protect against the anti-virtues, but I believe virtues are more positive than that!]
# There are reasons why they are virtues. Aquinas shows these reasons. [i.e. these virtues 'work' in practice.]
# Virtue ethics has become a third main strand of ethics alongside Consequentialist and Deontological.
# However, PF claimed that she was not a virtue ethicist, but only a virtue theorist.
# Because she believed that virtues are not enough.
# PF came to believe that we need to revise the very way we think.
# So, the person who says "I know it is cruel but I don't care", what PF called the shameless person, is not just morally defective from other people's stance, but has defective reasoning.
# What is it to be a human being? What morals apply to humans?
# [The discussion mentioned Bernart Williams here, but I did not get the points made.]
# PF had the idea of "species norms".
# What is the difference between an excellent and a defective oak tree? An excellent oak tree has deep, strong roots, for example, while an oak tree without them is defective.
# But a human is excellent or defective if they are just and merciful rather than cruel.
[Dooyeweerd: Each kind of thing has different aspects that qualify it, providing its main norms. The oak tree is biotic. The human is all aspects. It seems to me that, here, PF was reaching for Dooyeweerd's idea of structures of individuality or what Clouser calls Type Laws, which are profiles of aspects that contribute to the being of each kind of thing. ]
# But what about the parasite that is killing another being? The norm for, or good of, one seems counter to those of the other.
# On what grounds do we decide such cases?
# That is a weakness in her Natural Goodness ideas.
# PF or the discussants suggested that the answer is that humans are social [but I did not follow their argument well].
[ Dooyeweerd: In one sense, one could compare the structures of individuality. But I suspect that the real decision should not be theoretical like that, but rather decided in each case, i.e. in everyday life, on what is the actual functioning in each aspect. ]
This page, 'http://www.dooy.info/ext/philippa.foot.html', is part of a collection of pages that links to various thinkers, within The Dooyeweerd Pages, which explain, explore and discuss Dooyeweerd's interesting philosophy. Email questions or comments would be welcome.
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Created: 16 May 2024. Last updated: