Philippa Foot

Ray Briggs
Are you responsible for the unintended consequences of your actions?

Josh Landy
Is there a moral difference between killing someone and letting them die?

Ray Briggs
And what does Philippa foot have to teach us about human goodness?

Josh Landy
Welcome to Philosophy Talk program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
..except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs.

Josh Landy
And I’m Josh Landy. We’re coming to you via the studios of KALW San Francisco Bay Area.

Ray Briggs
Continuing conversations that begin at Philosophers Corner on the Stanford campus, where Josh teaches philosophy.

Josh Landy
And at the University of Chicago, where Ray teaches philosophy.

Ray Briggs
Today, it’s the next episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. We’re exploring the life and thought of Philippa Foot.

Josh Landy
She was a member of the so called Oxford quartet of moral philosophers, along with Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, we have episodes on all four as part of this series. We’ve also done an episode on Judith Jarvis Thompson, who was influenced by Foot.

Josh Landy
Right, Thompson developed a thought experiment that Foot originally came up with. So in Foot’s example, there’s a runaway tram—I loved those trams when I was growing up in Britain)—and Thompson replaced it with a trolley, called it a problem and launched a thousand memes.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s right. So in Foot’s original thought experiment, you see a runaway tram barreling down a track, and it’s about to kill five people, and you realize you can flip a switch to divert it, but then it’s gonna run over a different person on a different track. So do you flip the switch?

Josh Landy
Well, I mean, I’m gonna say, yeah, right, if you flip the switch, only one person dies instead of five, that’s a no brainer.

Ray Briggs
Well, Foot says it’s not so simple. You’d be actively killing that one person instead of just letting the five die.

Josh Landy
I get that, but I mean, dead is dead. Isn’t it better to save as many lives as possible?

Ray Briggs
Well, no, there’s a difference between doing harm to someone versus just letting something bad happen to them. Foot says it’s always wrong to do harm, even if it’s sometimes okay to let the harm happen, especially if letting it happen lets you do more good.

Josh Landy
I mean, that does sound super interesting, but I don’t know. Ray, doesn’t this trolley scenario, this tram scenario, seem a bit unlikely. What does it have to do with real life?

Ray Briggs
Well, Foot herself says it can shed light on the abortion debate. If giving birth is going to kill you, have the right to harm the fetus to save your own life? And she also thought it applied to debates over euthanasia, where people often see a difference between killing someone and just letting them die.

Josh Landy
So which is it? If we pull the plug,iIs that killing someone or or letting them die, if a doctor decides to withdraw life support from a patient?

Ray Briggs
Well Foot would say that a lot depends on the doctor’s intentions. So if the doctor intends for the patient to die, then what she’s doing is killing them, and that’s wrong. But if she just intends to alleviate the patient’s suffering and the death is a foreseeable consequence, then it could be morally

Josh Landy
Okay man, I don’t know. That just makes it sound like it’s almost impossible to do the right thing. Why even bother to try?

Ray Briggs
Well, that was one of Foot’s big questions. Why should we be moral?

Josh Landy
So let’s, let’s think about that. Why should we be moral? Socrates might say the reason we should be moral is it’s good for the soul. I mean, who would want to be a cruel, cowardly or dishonest person?

Ray Briggs
Yeah, that’s probably true, and although the things are equal, but sometimes the cost of morality can be pretty steep. So Foote has this example of a German farm boy who is put to death for refusing to serve the Nazis. That’s clearly the morally right choice, but I wouldn’t exactly say it was good for him.

Josh Landy
So what did she think the reason was for being moral?

Ray Briggs
Well, in some of her writings, she claims that there isn’t one morality can tell you that if you want to be moral, you should just exercise good social judgment and avoid hurting others and help out when you can. But morality can’t tell you why you should be moral any more than the rules of chess can tell you why you should play chess.

Josh Landy
Jeez. That sounds a little underwhelming. I mean. Foot’s going to tell us not to flip switches, not to pull plugs? Doesn’t she need a good reason?

Ray Briggs
Well, she did come up with answers in some of her later work. She argued that being moral is part of the built in purpose of human beings, just like being healthy is part of the built in purpose of organisms in general.

Josh Landy
So I was right: being moral is good for you after all.

Ray Briggs
Well, sort of. I mean, it might not be fun and it might not get you what you want out of life, but there is 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 might be easier, but it’s a blemish on your life forever.

Josh Landy
I’m just not sure how something can be good for you if it winds up leading to your to your death.

Ray Briggs
Well, I bet our guest will be able to shed some light on that tricky question. It’s John Hacker-Wright from the University of Guelph, author of several books on Philippa Foot and her moral philosophy.

Josh Landy
But first, we sent our Roving Philosophical Reporter, Mary-Catherine O’Connor, to learn more about what it was like to be one of the women in the Oxford quartet. She files this report.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
If you grew up in the 80s, you might remember the term latchkey kids. If you had working parents, maybe you were one. Yeah, I was a total latchkey kid. Philippa foot and her sister Marion were like the 1920s version of latchkey kids, except with an aristocratic twist. Benjamin Lipscomb, professor of philosophy at Houghton University, says Foote didn’t see much of her parents.

Benjamin Lipscomb
She was very distant from her parents in the way that somebody would be who had nanny and then had a series of governesses.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
She was born Philippa Bosenquat in 1920 and came from transatlantic privilege. Her father was a rich English nobleman, and her mother was Esther Cleveland, daughter of US President Grover Cleveland. Lipscomb’s book, “The Women Are Up to Something,” chronicles the ways that Foot and three of her contemporaries advance the field of moral philosophy. He says Foot was raised during a time of transition in British society.

Benjamin Lipscomb
This new world where women have the vote, or at least a lot more of them do, and are beginning to be allowed to take degrees at places like Oxford.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
But her family had different expectations for her. She would learn French. Etiquette. Fox hunting. Think Downton Abbey.

Downton Abbey
Lady Mary Crowley, I presume. You presume right!

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Foot had no formal education at all, in fact, but she had a rare governess, who herself was highly educated. She told Foot that she could pursue college for her part. Foot was keen to get away. In a 2003 interview, she told the Harvard Review of Philosophy…

Philippa Foot
I had put in for Somerville because I had heard that it was a college that was intellectually but not socially snobby, and I was working my way out of this socially snobby background.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
But Lesley Brown, an Oxford philosopher who studied underfoot in the 1960s says that while Foot didn’t like her aristocratic upbringing, she couldn’t quite shake it either.

Lesley Brown
She was elegant. She dressed well. She didn’t like it when other people didn’t dress well. She knew about etiquette, but she said, I hate knowing about etiquette, but she did know about it, and it was quite important to her.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
In 1939 Foote began her undergraduate studies at Somerville, one of Oxford’s more than 30 colleges. This was just as Europe was falling into the Second World War, with so many men drafted to fight, the halls of the Oxford University system were suddenly far less crowded. Foote and her three peers, Mary Midgley, Elizabeth Anscombe and Iris Murdoch, have garnered attention in recent years as a quartet of influential moral philosophers. But Brown, who also studied under Anscombe, warns against casting these women as feminist pioneers.

Lesley Brown
I don’t think they thought of themselves as opening doors for women, and I’m not sure that I thought of them that way either. Foot, I know, didn’t like being called a woman philosopher.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
But Brown says Foot was very interested in supporting other women in the field.

Lesley Brown
If anyone had a problem, they would go to Foot with it. So she puts herself out hugely for her students for the college.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Foot had tremendous respect for Anscombe work. When Anscombe teaching position at Somerville was nearly cut, Foot put her own career on the line.

Lesley Brown
Even offering to share the job or resign herself so that Anscombe could stay on.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Foot had a much closer personal relationship with Iris Murdoch. In fact, they had a brief romance. Bbut brown thinks that was much ado about nothing.

Lesley Brown
People seize on it, but I think it was a matter of a week or so.

Mary Catherine O’Connor
Still, it was on brand for Foot, in that it went against her aristocratic upbringing, which she continued to distance herself from her whole life in. Foot died in 2010 on her 90th birthday. For Philosophy Talk. I’m Mary-Catherine O’Connor.

Josh Landy
Thanks so much for that wonderful report, Mary-Catherine. Super interesting history of Foot and the Oxford quartet. I’m Josh Landy. With me is my fellow philosopher, Ray Briggs, and today we’re thinking about the formidable philosophy of Philippa Foot.

Ray Briggs
We’re joined now by John Hacker-Wright. He’s professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph and author of “Philippa Foot’s Moral Thought.” John, welcome to Philosophy Talk.

John Hacker-Wright
Thanks for having me here.

Josh Landy
So John, you’ve written three books about Philippa foot. What first got you interested in her philosophy?

John Hacker-Wright
Well, I came across a claim that she made in a talk. It’s not a published piece, but she said in that talk that we can learn a lot about moral philosophy by starting with plants. And that really intrigued me. I You might imply that I love plants, and I do, but I excel at killing them, unfortunately, so. But that claim led me to her then recently published book natural goodness, and I had to read it several times before I made any headway in understanding it.

Ray Briggs
So I have to ask, what can we learn about moral philosophy from plants? Right?

John Hacker-Wright
So Foote thought that we can learn about the meaning of the word good from starting with plants. So she thought that that, you know, we can look at instances like good roots. What are good roots for a plant? Well, that’s something that’s kind of objective. I might really hate the plant that has the good roots. It might be a noxious weed growing in my garden that I want to uproot, but I can’t deny it has good roots and foot. Thought that we can learn something about what it is to say that a person is good by studying the analogy between good roots and good person.

Ray Briggs
Okay, this is interesting because I would have thought that having good roots might be like having a good heart, not in the sense of a morally good heart, but in the sense of a heart that you know doesn’t skip beats and keeps you athletic, but somebody could be, like, athletic and strong and maybe good at their job and be a morally awful person. Like, isn’t there something different about morality there?

John Hacker-Wright
Definitely so, like, physical integrity is part of goodness of a human being, but only part of it. And so Foote thought that there are other things that go into being a good human being, including responding to reasons well and having proper motives. And that’s part of human goodness as well. So she thought that when we talk about a good person, primarily, what we mean is that they have a good will, and so that that is a moral matter, and we can she thought again, it was an objective matter, just like being having good roots is for a plant.

Josh Landy
That’s so interesting. I mean, there’s a obviously, as you know, a long standing debate among philosophers as to whether you can get an ought from an is, can you look out into the the objective structure in the world and find values there? It sounds like foot is saying, yes, you can. I can look at the world of plots, and then turn my gaze the world of humans, and based on what I can see, that there is, I can get an ought out of that. Is that about, right?

John Hacker-Wright
That’s exactly what she thought. So she is very, very much in the camp called naturalism. She’s she’s saying, Yeah, we there are facts of the matter about what makes a human being good, and so we very much can get odds from from facts.

Ray Briggs
So Foot didn’t start out a naturalist. If I’m right, is that right? Like, where did she start out?

John Hacker-Wright
Well, she was a naturalist, I think, from the very beginning, but of a very different stripe. I think her naturalism became more sophisticated and interesting over her course of her life. So she started out in the late 50s with a paper called moral beliefs that tried to make an argument that we need virtue as a matter of kind of self interest, like it’s going to benefit us individually if we have the virtues. And, you know, I guess that sort of view could be defended. But she she came to kind of lose faith in that answer because of the demands of virtues like justice, like they sometimes require us to do very, very difficult things, maybe even lay down our life for the sake of justice.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about the life and philosophy of Philippa Foot with John hacker Wright from the University of Guelph.

Ray Briggs
Is it ever okay to sacrifice one to save five? Would you flip the switch to redirect the trolley? Do intentions matter more than consequences?

Josh Landy
Trams, trolleys, and moral tribulations—along with your comments and questions, when Philosophy Talk continues.

Men At Work
Be good, Johnny

Josh Landy
It’s all very well telling Johnny to be good. But How easy is that in practice? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk, the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs, and we’re exploring the philosophy of Philippa Foot with John Hacker-Wright from the University of Guelph, author of “Philippa Foot’s Moral Thought.”

Josh Landy
It’s the latest episode in our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by a grant from the National Endowment for the Humanities. You can listen to all the episodes in this series at our website, philosophy talk.org/wisewomen. And while you’re there, you can also become a subscriber and ride the rails through our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
So John, as we’ve been discussing, Foot kind of grappled throughout her life with the question of why exactly we should do the right thing. It seems like doing the right thing might be bad for your health, might be not in your self interest. So what do you think her answer to that puzzle ultimately was?

John Hacker-Wright
Ultimately in the last writings, she made the claim that basically, it’s irrational not to be moral, but not in the sense of sacrificing self interest. It’s irrational in the sense that we’re we’re not responding to the reasons a human being should respond to, basically, so if we don’t act on moral reasons where she thinks we’re defective as a human being, that makes us bad as a human being, that’s that’s her final answer. But she changed her mind a couple of times in her in her career, about that.

Josh Landy
Before we get to those other periods, let’s dig into this final phase view. It’s super interesting. I can understand why she would say that a bad person is bad. If you’re doing immoral things, if you’re harming other people, there’s something wrong with you in a moral sense. But why would she say there’s something wrong with your reasoning? Why would she seem to say, you know, if you’re, if you’re sort of getting it right about the facts, if you’re, if you’re thinking clearly, you will do the right thing. That That seems like a controversial view. How does she defend it? Right?

John Hacker-Wright
So she starts out by saying, Look to reason well, as a human being is to really take into account the full range of reasons that one you know might take into account that includes reasons of of self interest, reasons of desire fulfillment, but also reasons of of morality. So she thinks that being a reasonable human being involves being responsive to all of those categories of reason, and none of them. She thought that they were kind of logically on a par. She said, like, you know, it could be that a reason of desire fulfillment outweighs a moral reason. So she gives the example I might ignore, a kind of unimportant promise in order to see an especially marvelous circus that I really want to go to. So it could be that desire fulfillment Trumps moral reasons.

Josh Landy
So I promised, I promised to stay home and do the dishes Exactly. But, yeah, circus is in town for one night.

John Hacker-Wright
Exactly. That’s that she thinks is is the thing to do. But in many cases, moral reasons are of of overriding importance and and they should trump reasons of desire fulfillment or even self interest, in her view. So she takes this, yeah, it’s a controversial view about rationality, but that that’s the view she takes, right?

Ray Briggs
So one of the controversial things in there is that non moral reasons can ever Trump moral reasons, right? So I think that this, this puts her at odds with a lot of other moral philosophers, who think, no, you should always, always do what’s moral if there’s no conflict.

Josh Landy
No circus for you.

John Hacker-Wright
That would be a shame.

Ray Briggs
What’s the argument that she’s she’s got it right, and moral reasons can be outweighed is that just on the strength of examples?

John Hacker-Wright
I think she does just appeal examples there, and it doesn’t strike me as an unreasonable view. It seems to me like the burden of proof would probably be on someone who says moral reasons are always overriding. She doesn’t deny that they are frequently, maybe most of the time overriding, but it seems like the position that they’re always overriding is maybe a little bit more dogmatic than her view.

Josh Landy
I like this position a lot, and, you know, I’m very cheered by the idea that I still get to go to the circus, or at least in my case, I get to the occasional rock concert. But she did seem at the end of her career to have some pretty stringent demands, morally speaking. And as we were mentioning earlier, she approvingly cited the example of the farm boy who chose to die rather than serve the Nazis. Obviously, that’s a that’s about as big a sacrifice as you could possibly make. As far as I understand, she also called upon people to take responsibility for their beliefs and to take responsibility for their values and their desires, she calls on us to want to do the good which that seems a pretty high bar. So even though I get to go to my rock concerts, I’m a little worried it’s going to be hard for me. Me to change my desire so that I become the kind of person who wants to do the right thing in every circumstance. Is this, you know, is her ultimate position humanly possible? Is it maybe just an aspiration and and she thinks, Well, you know, try to move yourself a little bit in that direction. Where does she end up landing on these things?

John Hacker-Wright
I mean, she does still articulate a fairly demanding view. And I think being moral is sometimes really, really demanding. I mean, the case of the farm boy cited at the at the outset, what she wants to say about that is that this, these farm boys were, you know, really acting rationally in a certain sense, by sacrificing their lives, that they had good reason to do so, to do what they did, that it was not an irrational move. And I think on a lot of views of rationality, it would seem irrational to sacrifice one’s life. So that was the kind of thing that she was trying to accommodate in her view of rationality.

Ray Briggs
So the idea that required to be moral so as not to be rationally broken. That was the view that she had at the end of her career, right? But she had other views during her career. Could you? Could you tell us maybe about one of her earlier views?

John Hacker-Wright
Sure, yeah. I think perhaps the her most one of her most notorious papers, at least in philosophy, is her 1972 paper, morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives and so, and this is a very famous paper in which she argued that really, you don’t have reason to be moral unless you want to so that’s a hypothetical imperative. Because you want the end, you take the means. So if you want to be moral, then you have reason to act on moral reasons. So she drew an analogy there with etiquette, like etiquette seems to give us categorical imperatives. Always do this, always I don’t. I’m not very well mannered. So I don’t know good examples.

Ray Briggs
Always write a thank you note, even if you don’t feel like it.

John Hacker-Wright
Exactly, exactly.

Josh Landy
Elbows off the table—I have trouble with that.

John Hacker-Wright
There you go. There you go. So it seems like a categorical imperative, but it’s actually foot says hypothetical. If you want to be well mannered, if you want to then, then do this. And she argued that at that period that morality was was similar.

Ray Briggs
So how do I tell the difference between like, what are some categorical imperatives according to foot that I have to do no matter what I want?

John Hacker-Wright
Well, so it depends on what period of foot we’re talking about. But like, for that, that middle period is sometimes called night, that around that, that paper, morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives, she really thought the only thing that was categorically imperative was to take into account your self interest. Everything else is dependent on having further desires. And then toward the end of her career, she changed her view and said, Look, you know, there are categorical imperatives. Imperatives of justice would be categorical imperatives on that later view.

Ray Briggs
So one thing that I’ve always thought of as really plausibly a categorical imperative is is sort of believing what you have evidence for. Like, if you say I don’t, I don’t care what’s true or what I have evidence for, I’m just gonna believe whatever I feel like I think I can I can say, no, no, you’ve made a mistake. Is that a good example?

John Hacker-Wright
It’s not an example that we find in Foote. But I’d like to think she’d be sympathetic with that. That sounds pretty plausible to me.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk today. We’re thinking about the 20th century English philosopher Philippa Foot with John Hacker-Wright from the University of Guelph. So John, you’ve talked about a famous paper by Philippa foot. Another famous paper is the one that launched 1000 memes, the one that originated the trolley problem. She’s famous for that thought experiment and for thought experiments generally. How would you describe the role of those thought experiments in foot’s moral thinking?

John Hacker-Wright
So I think Foot wanted to take seriously our sort of common everyday sense of morality, and we have a lot of intuitions about right and wrong, but maybe most people don’t really think systematically about how they all fit together. So starting from those intuitions, I think Foote wanted to use thought experiments to help us sort out potential conflicts between different intuitions that we have and define principles for common morality. That’s maybe so she I think, at the end of the day, arrives at a kind of non consequentialist ethics, where we have certain duties that are not grounded in outcomes.

Josh Landy
So consequentialism is the position that we should decide what to do based on what the consequences that’s from our principles might be. That’s right, and she’s saying that’s not the right way to go about it. Instead, decide on a set of principles, try to get those principles right, and then act on the basis of those. That’s right, that’s right, yes. What about the virtues? So people often align Philippa foot with something that ended up being called virtue ethics, a focus on developing traits of character, developing a certain sort of tendency in ourself to do a do the right thing under any circumstances. How committed is Foote to that way of thinking about morality?

John Hacker-Wright
She actually explicitly denies that she’s a virtue ethicist in one of her final papers and from 2004 but the virtues were obviously very, very important to her. And I think it’s not wrong to associate Foote with virtue ethics. She definitely influenced a lot of people like Rosalind Hurst House, who go on to develop virtue ethics. And for Foote, two particular virtues are really, really important, and she really those being justice and charity. And she really like an inner treatment of applied issues. She’s almost always making reference to those two virtues.

Ray Briggs
Why doesn’t she consider herself a virtue ethicist? Given her emphasis on justice and charity?

John Hacker-Wright
Yeah, so she doesn’t really explain her view. It occurs in a footnote in a paper, but it sounded like she kind of misunderstood what the virtue ethicists were doing like so it’s not that the rightness or wrongness of my action is determined by my actual motive. Seems like she thought that’s what virtue ethicists were saying. So she was concerned that that really rightness or wrongness is determined by how I act and not not my motives.

Josh Landy
So okay, so, so we have a picture here where, if we put it all together, being good is, is good for us as part of what it is for human being to flourish Well, rather than wilting, to use her metaphor of plants, right? A human being that’s growing well, rather than wilting in the pot, is someone who has good principles and also has developed these virtues, these capacities to behave justly and courageously and loyally and so on. How do we get there? How do we become the kind of human being that has good principles and also has these traits of character?

John Hacker-Wright
Well, I have to say, Foote didn’t really have a whole lot to say on that account, I think she might have thought, well, that’s a matter for maybe psychologists to work out. So she, I think, takes her role as a moral philosophy, but rather austere, one of saying, here’s the hair, are the ideals, here’s what we should be aiming for, and left how to get there, to others to work out.

Ray Briggs
John, I want to ask a little bit more about charity, because I think we’ve been using some justice focused examples. And charity has always seemed like a tricky one to me, because it’s kind of infinitely demanding. Potentially, there are always people in need. Did Foote think I could be charitable the way that morality needs me to be? And why?

John Hacker-Wright
Yeah, well, I think she thought we were doing a rather poor job of being charitable. She herself was very involved with with Oxfam. And when I think about what she did in her life, I think, well, I’m maybe a little shabby, like, like she said, I’m not doing as much to help others out as I perhaps should be. It is a demanding ideal. It’s a virtue that she she holds out as this is what attaches us to the good of others. But she did point out that we have independent reasons to favor the near and dear. So the reasons of partiality, in her view of of reasons. So, unlike utilitarians, she does think that that there are reasons like, I can help a friend out just because they’re a friend over maybe maybe even more dire need somewhere around the world.

Josh Landy
So again, a somewhat flexible view, a nuanced view, where I get to go to the circus, and I occasionally get to choose my partner, my children, my parents, over someone else in a similar situation, that’s correct, who I don’t know, but at the same time, sometimes demanding, right? And along with those demands, that interesting, Socratic, I guess, thought that at the end of the day, making these sacrifices for goodness is somehow good for me. Can you say a bit more about why it’s good for me, why it’s good for for an individual to be good, not just morally right, not just demanded of us, but somehow, ultimately, in my own interest. Of course, she changes her mind a little bit then in different phases of her career, but there are times when she seems to be adopt. This position that it’s not just good, it’s good for me, right? Why is that?

John Hacker-Wright
Well, I’m not sure. At the end of the day, she does quite say that. So in natural goodness, one of the most difficult chapters and interesting chapters is a chapter on happiness. So it’s not quite clear that all of us are situated such that it ends up being good for me to be moral, but it could be the case that really, there’s no path open to me that leads to really flourishing. So if you think of the farm boy, the sudentonline farm boy she talks about, it’s not clear that there’s any there’s any path that that leads them to flourish, right? I mean, if they did accept being pressed into service of the of the Nazis, their life would be marred by injustice. So it’s a bit of a tragic situation that they face, and she wants to say, but they made the rational choice. It’s just that the rational choice did not leave any path open for them to flourish. But still, she did think that that moral individuals maybe had open to them under good circumstances, a path to a kind of deeper happiness than was available to is available to someone who is kind of shabby and egoistic.

Ray Briggs
So a distinction that kind of post dates foot is between charity and mutual aid. And I kind of wonder whether what like, what she would have thought of it. So charity is as I come down from on high, and I help you because you’re in need, and mutual aid is sort of our welfare is all kind of bound up in each other, and I help you because we’re part of the same larger thing. And I wonder, like, would would foot have supported like mutual aid only? Would she have said, it doesn’t really matter how you’re motivated as long as you help people like, what? What do you think her view would have been?

John Hacker-Wright
A couple of ideas that come to mind in response to that question. One is that she gave a paper in the lecture series, the Gilbert Murray lectures to Oxfam, to an audience at Oxfam, she gave a talk called justice and charity, in which she argued that maybe we should see our duties to people living in impoverished nations more as a matter of justice, less as a matter of charity. So she seemed to thought, think that we really ought to look at at our obligations to people in impoverished nations more as a matter of justice. So I’m not sure if that quite addresses the issue of mutual aid, but it does suggest that maybe some of our demands for serving others is are more stringent than we might think, not just a matter of charity from on high.

Josh Landy
You’re listening to Philosophy Talk. Today we’re exploring the life and thought of Philippa Foot with John-Hacker Wright, author of several books on Foot’s moral philosophy.

Ray Briggs
What’s the moral difference between killing and letting die when is assisted suicide morally acceptable? Who’s responsible when a self driving car runs someone over,

Josh Landy
Putting your best “foot” forward, plus commentary from Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher—when Philosophy Talk continues.

Rage Against the Machine
And now you do what they told you

Josh Landy
Isn’t doing the right thing more than just doing what they told you? I’m Josh Landy, and this is Philosophy Talk the program that questions everything…

Ray Briggs
…except your intelligence. I’m Ray Briggs. Our guest is John Hacker-Wright from the University of Guelph, and we’re exploring the life and thought of Philippa Foot. It’s part of our “Wise Women” series, generously supported by the National Endowment for the Humanities.

Josh Landy
So John, Foot was writing about abortion and euthanasia in the 1960s and 70s. How do you think her arguments hold up in today’s political climate?

John Hacker-Wright
Well, probably a lot of it depends on your own views, but I think she does have something still to contribute. So on her view, these are matters of justice and charity. As I mentioned earlier, she does think that there is room for permissible forms of euthanasia, usually a passive and voluntary form of euthanasia. That’s what. That’s where she would most be confident saying this is permissible in the case of abortion. She has rather more conservative views. Perhaps she does think it’s a matter of whether the fetus is going to be included in the moral community. As she puts it, she doesn’t think, unlike someone like Judith Jarvis Thompson, that there are instances of permissible abortions that we can delineate, even if the fetus is a person. So she really thinks a lot. Turns on whether the fetus counts as a person.

Ray Briggs
John, I’m interested in the thing that you said at the end of last segment about sort of aid being partly a matter of justice rather than charity, which strikes me as like really true insofar as like, our countries are responsible for harming a lot of the countries that now need our aid. And I kind of wonder if that lens would be useful for both the abortion and the euthanasia debates, although I don’t think that that’s really a connection that foot has made. So like in the case of abortion, there’s this kind of widespread reproductive injustice that makes so many abortions necessary in the first place? And in the case of euthanasia, I think, like, Canada’s been having these debates about medical assistance in dying, where there’s just this backdrop of injustice against disabled people that lets this whole thing take place.

John Hacker-Wright
Yeah, I can speak to that a little bit. I mean, I mean, I think in the case of euthanasia, she was very concerned about active euthanasia being abused, and that’s something that is really highlighted in in her paper. She does not want to see instances of killings that are, you know, fueled by people feeling like a burden, or by by people being viewed as discardable. So she’s, she’s, she thinks there, there is a good reason to really frown upon or forbid active euthanasia, given the potential for abuse. She thinks there’s good reason to protect a red line there.

Josh Landy
So that’s one set of worries about the euthanasia that she had, that it might get abused by, you know, but by some kind of system that doesn’t ultimately have the best interest of the patient at heart. Do I understand correctly that she also had another worry having to do with how good even the person themself might be at assessing the quality of their their own life. So even, even if the system were perfect and and everyone were completely just there might be an additional worry that somebody might get it wrong about their situation. Do I have that right?

John Hacker-Wright
It shows up a little bit in the in the There’s a very famous euthanasia paper. This was one of her richest discussions of any applied issue. It’s a wonderful paper. She does recognize that people sometimes mistake the value of their own lives. They they they look at their life and it looks bleak. Someone suffering from depression, say, might think that there’s no hope in their life, but they could be definitely, could be wrong about that, and she acknowledges that for sure.

Ray Briggs
Yeah, so both of these concerns, the like injustice toward people who are deemed not to have value and people misassessing their own lives. These make sense to me, but I don’t quite see how they line up with the active versus passive euthanasia distinction. So active euthanasia is killing somebody, passive euthanasia is letting somebody die. But couldn’t you just negligently let people die because you thought they were valueless, or let yourself die because you thought your own life was valueless? Like, why do these things match?

John Hacker-Wright
Okay? So, yeah, I mean, that’s definitely possible. I mean, it’s not the case that she wants to say that all cases of letting die are okay or permissible for sure, like we do have duties towards others, particularly our own children, or, you know, people in our community to keep them alive if They’re lacking the resources to do so. So, yeah, I guess the question is whether there’s a, still an important distinction between active and passive. Yes, euthanasia, yeah. I mean, one might say, you you can act badly in both, in both, but intuitively, like, you know, we might say sending poisoned blankets to someone who’s in need is worse than not sending anything at all. So there’s like, that’s just an example from from one of one of her papers.

Josh Landy
Actually, they’re very lively examples, very lively thought experiments. And of course, that gets us back to the to the trolley example, and of course, the famous thought experiment of, you know, murdering one patient in order to harvest organs to to keep five people alive, that seems clearly wrong. Whereas you know, if you’re if your medication is rationed, it might be necessary to use medication to save five people while tragically letting one person die. And she thinks that that situation where you’re letting somebody die is less bad. Obviously, that’s right, somebody that’s right. Now, Judith Jarvis Thompson didn’t love this way of thinking about things. So why did Philippa foot think that’s really the right way of thinking about these kind of situations? The right way of thinking about them is make a distinction between killing and letting die. Killing is always worse than letting die.

John Hacker-Wright
Well, she doesn’t quite avow that killing is always worse than letting die, but it does track a distinction that she did find important, between sort of justice and charity, really. So justice requires us to not interfere with people. So by killing them being one instance of interference, and then we have other cases of charity, aid versus aid. So here’s another example that she gives. There’s an incoming tide, and we can save a group of five people, or we can save a group someone else, one person who’s out on its own. So it’s five or save five or save one. This is a case of aid versus aid. Okay? Now change the situation. In order to get to the five, we have to run over one person, killing him in order to get to the five. In that case, we may not kill the one to save five. In the in the first case, we can save the five. That’s a different case. So the difference is that we must commit an injustice to that one person in order to save the five, and that’s not permissible, in her view, but it is permissible to come to the aid of a greater number rather than a lesser number.

Ray Briggs
So I think I might have it in a little bit for the doing allowing distinction. It looks very neat in this aid versus aid case, but in the case of, say, killing versus letting die, where the person is like in dire straits because they’re in a unfortunate social position. What if I’ve benefited from an economic system that has put them in that bad social position? Does that mean that I have harmed them, and now, if I don’t pay for their medication, I’m killing them rather than letting them die? And how do I tell, like, how do I tell whether somebody’s dire circumstances are the result of my previous actions or collective actions that I’ve contributed to?

John Hacker-Wright
That’s a really interesting question. And not one I think. I mean maybe the paper I referenced earlier, justice and charity kind of addresses some of these issues. She also talks about a case where we might arrange to set up respirators for people who are who need them, such that they have to be turned on every morning and then let ourselves off the hook morally by just not turning them on and claim, oh, we’ve just let them die. So she is on to some ways in which we can kind of let ourselves off the hook for things that are really, genuinely duties. And like, the kinds of issues that you’re talking about, seem to maybe fall into that camp. Like, if my actions have have put someone in a position where they’re on the brink of death, that seems to me to create a positive obligation of justice to help them out. So I think it’s consistent with Foote’s overarching framework to say that, even if she didn’t quite explicitly address that.

Ray Briggs
What does she say about the respirators?

John Hacker-Wright
Oh, she says in that case, it doesn’t we cannot say that. Well, we just let them die, and we can’t let ourselves off the hook morally that we’ve we’ve created a situation where we have to turn them on. So we have a we have a positive duty to keep them on.

Josh Landy
It’s clearly an extremely sophisticated, nuanced, complex thinker. Interestingly, Thompson, Chavez, Thompson says she could go even further in that direction. I’d like to hear more details about these thought expressions, which I kind of love. So you know this, this example you mentioned a moment ago, of the you know, having to run over somebody to get to say five. Thompson might say, Okay, tell me more about that person. Like, what if? What if that person was the person responsible for getting those five into their predicament. What if they are barring the way? What if they’re aiming a missile at you? Are there any circumstances under which Foote might consider that it is permissible to take a life, even though, obviously, in almost every situation it’s not.

John Hacker-Wright
I mean, so take a life like a positive killing. I mean, so she does talk about, you know, she does invoke the doctrine of double effect, on which, you know, on some views, she doesn’t really get into the ethics of warfare very much, but on some applications of the doctrine of double effect, it’s permissible to knowingly cause the death of some civilians, if it is for the sake of a military target.

Josh Landy
Double-effect being you have an intended effect and a merely foreseen effect. Correct? Sometimes okay to do things you know will have unintended consequences but predictable consequences. Right?

John Hacker-Wright
Right, right. So I think she may be willing to go along with with that. Again, she doesn’t really drill down on the the ethics of warfare, which is a common application of the doctrine double effect. But So assuming that she is on board with that, then there would be permissible killings.

Ray Briggs
So John, unfortunately, we’re almost out of time. If you could leave our listeners with one piece of moral advice from foot, what would you tell them?

John Hacker-Wright
Well, as mentioned earlier, justice and charity were two really important virtues for her, and I think probably a lot of us are lacking in charity. So there’s a good of the attachment to there’s a virtue of the attachment to the good of others that Foote advocates and that it makes for a richer, happier life, I think. So we could probably all stand to be more charitable.

Josh Landy
John, thank you for charitably spending your morning with us. It’s been an absolutely inspiring conversation.

John Hacker-Wright
It’s been my pleasure.

Josh Landy
Our guest has been John hacker Wright, professor of philosophy at the University of Guelph, and author of “Philippa Foot’s Moral Thought.” So Ray, what are you thinking now?

Ray Briggs
Well, I’m thinking that doing the right thing sounds really hard, and I’ve probably got some reason to do it, and I’ll just kind of go back to reading Foote until I figure out what it is.

Josh Landy
Yeah, I mean, I agree with you, although I have to say, hearing from John today makes me at least want to do a bit better. Whether I can or not is a different question, but I feel like trying, so that I feel like that’s a good result. We’re going to put links to everything we’ve mentioned today on our website, philosophy talk.org, where you can also become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes.

Ray Briggs
And don’t forget, you can listen to all the episodes in our “Wise Women” series at philosophy talk.org/wisewomen.

Josh Landy
Now… not even a wayward tram can slow this man down—it’s Ian Shoales the Sixty-Second Philosopher.

Ian Shoales
Ian Shoale…s The philosopher Philippa Foot was born in 1920 in North Lincolnshire England, the daughter of a captain in the Coldstream Guards and the granddaughter of the American President Grover Cleveland. Her dad also ran the steel works in Yorkshire, and the family was quite well off in an upper class milieu of hunting, shooting and fishing. She was put in the care of Governor, says who didn’t really know much. Apparently, Ms foot claims she never even learned which came first Romans or Greeks. Somehow, though, she decided she wanted an education, she took the equivalent of a college prep mail order course, and found herself miracle of miracles at Oxford, Somerville college with an eccentric male tutor and three other young ladies, Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch, with whom she had an affair. All the while bombs were dropping. This would be a pretty small movie, wouldn’t it, as she told The Guardian in 2013 quote in these wartime classes, which were small men, conscientious objectors, etc, were present, but they weren’t keen on arguing. It was clear that we were all more interested in understanding the deeply pleasing world than putting each other down. Could someone looking at photographs of the death camps continue to maintain that ethical judgments were ultimately not the sort of thing to be true or false? Unquote moral philosophy became her specialty, and her conclusions were that virtue and vice coexist in our nature, so to speak, with vice is a defect. Virtue is a muscle that is in our own self interest to exercise and use. It’s all part of our human nature, like having hair and hot blood. Her lifelong thoughts around all this included her giving the world the trolley problem, variants of which still swarm around us today, and her seminal version, you’re driving a train, not a trolley yet, about to run over five people working on the track ahead, but you can switch to another track where there’s only one person working should you Well, Miss Foote originally intend this is a way to think about abortion, which she was largely against, certainly pro or con, a pregnant woman who doesn’t want to be is between a rock and a hard place. But how does the trolley problem help if you’re not pregnant? It’s just one more endless discussion really, like about the existence of God or whether whales can talk. Is having the baby running over the five, having the abortion running over the one. At any rate, we still have abortion in various locations. And of course, childbirth lumbers on, even though birth rates are dropping in Japan, Korea and here in the United States, we know that abortion and its enemies have led to all kinds of real life train wrecks, you might say, clinic bombings, abortion doctor murders. And now that’s illegal again, forbidding it to rape victims, including underage girls, sending lawyers around to make sure that it’s an allowed miscarriage and not a forbidden abortion. You abortion, taking aim at contraception, because that also leads to babies not being born. It’s a veritable cornucopia of actions that suspect did not originate in philosophy, 101, classroom discussions of the trolley problem. If I was driving that train, I’d make it a coin flip, you know, absolve yourself of all responsibility in this totally imaginary situation. I mean, you don’t even have to stay on the damn train, jump off, leave it to fate. The point is, though somebody has to die, otherwise, there’s no problem. This goes to show, even with trolley problems, do we even have trolleys anymore? Trains have a way of running away with you, or from you or over you. Nothing to me is certainly not my moral decision to make. It’s your train, pregnant lady, not my red wagon. You feel me. Bring the babies into the world. I say give yourself a maga metal for parenthood and then ship them to El Salvador to take the place of babies you took from deported immigrants after they’re weaned, snatch them back to be adopted by Texas legislators with a low sperm count, family values. Win, you know, win. I gotta go.

Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
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Ray Briggs
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Josh Landy
Not even when they’re true and reasonable. The conversation continues on our website, philosophytalk.org, where you can become a subscriber and question everything in our library of more than 600 episodes. I’m Josh Landy.

Ray Briggs
And I’m Ray Briggs. Thank you for listening.

Josh Landy
And thank you for thinking.