Analytic & pragmatist · 1920–2010
Philippa Foot
Oxford moral philosopher who devised the trolley problem
Moral goodness is a kind of natural goodness: just as a plant or animal can be a good or defective specimen of its kind, human virtues are what human beings need to live well.
Life and thought
Philippa Foot (1920–2010), a granddaughter of US President Grover Cleveland, studied at Somerville College, Oxford, and spent most of her career there; from 1976 to 1991 she also taught at UCLA. With Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley she belonged to a remarkable group of women philosophers at wartime and postwar Oxford, and she was an early member of the charity Oxfam.
Foot attacked the view, common after Hume and Ayer, that moral judgements only express feelings or choices: words like “good” or “rude” cannot be applied to anything at all regardless of facts about human life. In Natural Goodness (2001) she argued that we judge a human will the way we judge a plant’s roots or a wolf’s hunting, by what members of the species need in order to flourish, and human beings need virtues such as justice, courage and honesty. In a 1967 paper on abortion and the doctrine of double effect she imagined the driver of a runaway tram who can steer onto a track where it will kill one person instead of five: the origin of the “trolley problem”.