Put Your Best Foot Forward

Philippa Foot was a member of the “Oxford Quartet” of moral philosophers, along with Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, and Mary Midgley, all of whom we’ve discussed in recent episodes. She was also an important influence on Judith Jarvis Thompson, who picked up one of Foot’s thought experiments and made it famous.

In Foot’s original scenario, you see a runaway tram barrelling down a track, about to kill five people. You realize that you can flip a switch to divert it, but then it will run over a different person on a different track. Flipping the switch certainly seems like a no-brainer: only one person dies instead of five. But Foot says it’s not so simple, since you’d be actively killing one person instead of just letting five die. For Foot, there’s a crucial difference between doing harm to someone and letting something bad happen to them. She says it’s always wrong to do harm, even if it’s sometimes okay to allow harm—especially if that allows you to do more good overall.

Foot used this same principle to shed light on the abortion debate: if giving birth is going to kill you, do you have the right to harm the fetus to save your own life? She also thought it applied to debates over euthanasia. If a doctor “pulls the plug” and withdraws life support from a patient, that might merely seem like letting them die, in which case it’s permissible for Foot; or it might seem like killing them, in which case it’s not. Foot would say that a lot depends on the doctor’s intentions. If the doctor intends for the patient to die, then what she’s doing is killing them, and it’s wrong.  But if she just intends to alleviate the patient’s suffering and the death is just a foreseeable consequence, then it could be morally okay.

So much for how to do the right thing. But why? Why should we be moral in the first place? Socrates might say because it’s good for the soul: who would want to be a cruel, cowardly, or dishonest person? And that may be true when all things are equal, but in some cases the cost of being moral can be pretty steep. In one of her late papers, Foot cites an example of a German farm boy who was put to death for refusing to serve the Nazis. That was arguably an admirable choice, morally speaking, but it’s hard to maintain it was good for him.

Foot’s thinking on this question changed considerably over the course of her career. In one phase she argued that we can’t, in fact, give any reasons for doing good. All morality can tell you is what you should do if you already want to be moral (exercise good social judgment, avoid hurting others, and help out where you can); it can’t tell you why you should be moral, any more than the rules of chess can tell you why you should play chess. 

Later on, however, Foot reached a very different conclusion. Being moral, she said, is part of the built-in purpose of human beings, just as being healthy is part of the built-in purpose of plants, and indeed of organisms in general. 

So being moral may may not be fun, and it may not always get you what you want out of life, but there’s still a sense in which it’s good for you. Even if you’re the farm boy choosing to die rather than serve the Nazis, it’s even worse to survive by becoming a Nazi; it may be an easier option, but it’s a blemish on your life forever. But still… how can something be good for you if it winds up leading to your death? Our guest will shed some light on that tricky question. It’s John Hacker-Wright from the University of Guelph, author of several books on the moral philosophy of Philippa Foot.