Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue

John Hacker-Wright, John Hacker-Wright, John Hacker-Wright

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2018
• ISBN:
  9783319912561
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

This volume focuses on controversial issues that stem from Philippa Foot's later writings on natural goodness which are at the center of contemporary discussions of virtue ethics. The chapters address questions about how Foot relates judgments of moral goodness to human nature, how Foot understands happiness, and addresses objections to her framework from the perspective of empirical biology. The volume will be of value to any student or scholar with an interest in virtue ethics and analytic moral philosophy.

© The Author(s) 2018

John Hacker-Wright (ed.)Philippa Foot on Goodness and VirtuePhilosophers in Depthhttps://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91256-1_7

Begin Abstract

The Deep and the Shallow

Gavin Lawrence¹

(1)

University of California, Los Angeles, CA, USA

Gavin Lawrence

What I am looking for is not happiness. I work solely because it is impossible for me to do anything else

Alberto Giacometti

End Abstract

1 Background Elements

In a footnote in Natural Goodness (2001), Foot writes:

I once discussed the difficult concept of depth in life and literature with Isaiah Berlin. Years later I asked him whether the problem still worried him, to which he replied… ‘I think about it all the time, all the time.’ (87f.6)

Years earlier, writing of wisdom in the title essay to Virtues and Vices (1978a), Foot claimed wisdom has two parts. The one, relatively easy to understand, is a matter of knowing “the means to certain good ends,” where these ends are ends of human life in general, as against the delimited ones of the various arts (technai).¹ The other concerns these ends, and is a matter of knowing “how much particular ends are worth” (VV 1978b, 5)—and this part

… which has to do with values, is much harder to describe, because here we meet ideas which are curiously elusive, such as the thought that some pursuits are trivial and some important in human life . Since it makes good sense to say that most men waste a lot of their lives in ardent pursuit of what is trivial and unimportant it is not possible to explain the important and the trivial in terms of the amount of attention given to different subjects by the average man.² But I have never seen, or been able to think out, a true account of this matter , and I believe that a complete account of wisdom , and of certain other virtues and vices must wait until this gap can be filled. What we can see is that one of the things that a wise man knows and a foolish one does not is that such things as social position, and wealth, and the good opinion of the world, are too dearly bought at the cost of health or friendship or family ties. So we may say that a man who lacks wisdom has ‘false values’, and that vices such as vanity and worldliness and avarice are contrary to wisdom in a special way. There is always an element of false judgment about these vices… (VV 1978b, 6–7)

Foot touched on this topic again in “Rationality and Virtue” (2002b)

A special problem of precedence also arises from the distinction of greater and lesser human goods. Some things are important in human life , while others are less important or trivial; and wisdom, as part of practical rationality, must take account of this in governing our aims. I cannot even begin to deal with this topic here, except to notice a conceptual connexion with the concept of deprivation (as opposed to hardship). It is a reasonable assumption, however, that the idea of importance must depend on facts about the things that run deep in human life , however exactly that is to be understood. (MD 173)

For Aristotle , wisdom is to have correct views of the goods and bads of human life , and of their relative worth and standing, both in general and in the particular situation, whether in the agent’s individual, domestic, or political, capacity. It is to understand how to navigate one’s way through these, in the situations in which one finds oneself, so as to end in successful living ( euzoia ), where this is a matter successful action ( eupraxia )—of fully rational action , Praxis . This is action that expresses the agent’s judgment—their specification—of how best or wisely to act and to live in the light of their values, their view of human goods and bads; wisdom is matter of getting this right, of succeeding at Praxis (or being understandably mistaken). Importantly, wisdom is not only (a) something that both valorizes and integrates those goods enshrined in the different dimensions of the various virtues of character—transforming them from natural dispositions to fully rationally sensitive virtues, each openly and imaginatively sensitive to the demands of the others, in a fully integrated mature human ; but also (b) it has within its purview the entire range of human goods and bads in all their aspects.³ And (c) wisdom , in what Aristotle calls its “architectonic” as against merely “experiential” form, accounts for the value of these goods and bads, the “why” of their goodness and badness, the proper appreciation of the correctness of one’s action —which appreciation is itself a constitutive part of its being fully successful. Lacking wisdom , one is perforce living a life in some way bad or defective.⁴ It may be a really corrupt, wicked, life . Or it may be simply a wasted one, where the agent squanders talents and time, without doing anything so terribly bad, hurting themselves more than others. They were light-minded and frivolous in their ends or in their priorities; or else, while those were correct, the light-mindedness appeared in the means they thought reasonable to take, but which were slapdash, insensitive, profligate, overly optimistic, and ineffective.⁵ Admittedly, we can speak of the wicked as in a certain way shallow, although that needs elaboration (our immediate reaction to extreme cruelty not being to cry “shallow, shallow!”); less contentiously, we can speak of the unjust life of an unjust person as one wasted (although that too is not the first thing we are likely to say, our initial focus being rather on victim than perpetrator). Our talk of waste, however, typically points to a more specific range of defects and misjudgments of worth, where the issues are rather with silliness, idleness, triviality, superficiality, and missed opportunity; with deprivation of things of real human worth, or with failures to appreciate, pursue, or be moved by, them. Much ethical philosophy is preoccupied with good versus wicked, while comparatively neglectful of questions of the deep and the serious, and the danger of wasting one’s life in trivialities. (Not wholly: the third part of Rawls’ Theory of Justice , comes to mind, as does literature on the meaning of life , David Wiggins , and Richard Taylor , or meaningfulness in it, for example, Harry Frankfurt and Susan Wolf .)⁶

Foot appreciates that wisdom covers such issues, and in the last passage adds two remarks on the grammar of “importance.” (1) The first, a conceptual connection with deprivation, reminds us, I think, that our topic also concerns impoverishment—not only wasting one’s life but equally having it wasted. It could be wasted as in “those that die like cattle” (Owen, “Anthem to Doomed Youth”). That aside, parents and society can fail adequately to prepare and educate the upcoming generation, to provide, in George Eliot ’s releasing phrase, “a social medium,” in which the individual has the opportunities, and encouragement, to attain and realize a life truly rich and fulfilling, a life of some consequence.⁷ To see to it that, for instance, work isn’t Taylorized, frittered into a series of simple operations, meaningless to its operators, or repeated into idiocy⁸:

…entering a spinning mill at the age of five, or some other factory, and from then on sitting there every day first 10, then 12, finally 14 hours and engaging in the same mechanical labor means paying dearly for the pleasure of drawing breath. This, however, is the destiny of millions, and many other millions have an analogous one. (Schopenhauer , Chapter 46, 643 (2007/1818))

To see to it that our capacity for wisdom—for the appreciation, prioritization, navigation, and specification of values—is not impeded in its development nor deformed. (2) The other conceptual connection, with what runs deep in human life , brings us to the core question of what matters in human life ; of why we find it intelligible that someone be deeply saddened by an inability to have children, or at their untimely death; of why someone might give up much in their own life to care for others; of why, while we allow that reading mystery novels, window shopping, et al., may make properly innocent contributions to a life well lived, we would be puzzled were they put at the center of life and, absent some special story, see in that an error of judgment, of passion misplaced, lacking, or avoided—and sense a life lacking focus, or having the wrong focus. Yet great caution is needed, lest we find ourselves ineptly supposing that the life of, say, a golf correspondent is a wasted one. Above, all, we need a fuller description of lives, of the wider settings in which work-activities take place, their personal and social resonance, their historical valence, their richness or lack of it: in short, an understanding of the conte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Front Matter
• Introduction: From Natural Goodness to Morality
• The Grammar of Goodness in Foot’s Ethical Naturalism
• How to Be an Ethical Naturalist
• Practically Self-Conscious Life
• Traditional Naturalism
• “Why Should I?” Can Foot Convince the Sceptic?
• The Deep and the Shallow
• Foot’s Grammar of Goodness
• Neo-Aristotelian Naturalism and the Evolutionary Objection: Rethinking the Relevance of Empirical Science
• Back Matter