Philippa Foot

1. Philippa Foot 1920 – 2010 By Hannah Kiely

2. Philippa Foot Foot is a contemporary British philosopher who tried to modernise Aristotle. She believed that goodness should be seen as the natural flourishing of humans as living beings. She believed that ethics should not be about dry theorising but about making the world a better place (she was one of the founders of Oxfam). The virtues are beneficial to the individual and the community – they contribute to the good life.

3. Philippa Foot Foot kept the understanding of character and virtue from Aristotle in her ethics and recognised the importance of the person’s own reasoning in the practice of virtue, claiming that virtues benefit the individual as they lead to flourishing. Foot stresses that a virtuous person does far more that conform to the conventions of society. A virtue does not operate as a virtue when turned into a bad end (e.g. when someone needs daring to commit a murder). Virtues are good for us and help us correct the harmful human passions and temptations.

4. Philippa Foot Philippa Foot tried to modernise Aristotle’s way of thinking and showed that it could be adapted into a contemporary world view. She grounded the virtues to what is good for human beings. The virtues are beneficial to their owner or to the community. Rather than being constitutive of the good life, the virtues are valuable because they contribute to it.

5. Philippa Foot “[We] both are and are not inclined to think that the harder a man finds it to act virtuously the more virtue he shows if he does act well. For on the one hand great virtue is needed where it is particularly hard to act virtuously; yet on the other it could be argued that difficulty in acting virtuously shows that the agent is imperfect in virtue.”Philippa Foot, “Virtues and Vices” “The dilemma can be resolved only when we stop talking about difficulties standing in the way of virtuous action as if they were of only one kind.”

6. Foot’s Solution Consider the following… A woman finds a purse on the street with lots of money in it, and is temped to take it because… (a) she is a poor single mother with hungry children at home(b) she is struggling with kleptomania (the desire to steal)

7. Circumstances vs. Character In (a) it is the woman’s circumstances that makes it hard to act rightly. Even further, an important factor contributing to the difficulty is her love and concern for her children, which is a sign of virtue. So, we can imagine that even someone with full virtue would find this situation difficult. In fact we might think less of the woman if she weren’t tempted by the purse. 

8. Circumstances vs. Character In (b) it is the woman’s vicious character that makes it hard to act rightly. Assuming that she did not need the money to feed her children, the prospect of taking the purse should not quite have occurred to her if she were fully virtuous.