Natural Goodness by Philippa Foot (PDF)

Description

Philippa Foot has for many years been one of the most distinctive and influential thinkers in moral philosophy. Long dissatisfied with the moral theories of her contemporaries, she has gradually evolved a theory of her own that is radically opposed not only to emotivism and prescriptivism but also to the whole subjectivist, anti-naturalist movement deriving from David Hume. Dissatisfied also with both Kantian and utilitarian ethics, she claims to have isolated aspecial form of evaluation that predicates goodness and defect only to living things considered as such: she finds this form of evaluation in moral judgements. Her vivid discussion ranges over topics such as practical rationality, erring conscience, and the relation between virtue and happiness, endingwith a critique of Nietzsche’s immoralism.Natural Goodness is the long-awaited exposition of a highly original approach to moral philosophy, representing a fundamental break away from the assumptions of recent debates. Foot challenges many prominent philosophical arguments and attitudes; hers is not, however, a work of dry theory, but full of life and feeling, written for anyone intrigued by the deepest questions about goodness and human life. This beautifully written book offers a new beginning for moralphilosophy.

User’s Reviews

Reviews from Amazon users which were colected at the time this book was published on the website:

⭐I agree with most everything in this elegant, well-reasoned book. Unfortunately, I think, it will convince no one not already of like mind–and rightly should not.Foot’s thesis is that “good” refers to fulfilling “the life form of the species” to which one belongs. Thus, a tree has good roots if, in the circumstances in which it grows, those roots allow for it to be a good specimen of the sort of tree that it is. Thus “natural good” depends on facts about one’s species and the circumstances in which one finds one’s self–dissolving the “fact/value distinction.” To be a good person, then, is to fulfill the life form of our species under the circumstances in which we find ourselves–allowing that there may be many specific ways of doing this very general thing. As an earlier reviewer noted, Foot maintains that for humans, a certain sort of “practical reason” is characteristic of our species, since certain forms of life define us and reason must serve those defining characteristics; not to reason thusly is to be defective, in a way analogous to a shallow, poorly dispersed root system in a tall, heavy tree growing in sandy soil.There are many problems with this.(1) Contra to the earlier reviewer, I believe Foot has sleights of hand of her own:(a) Traditionally, the dilemma of practical reasoning is, “And what about circumstances in which practical rationality demands that one act against virtue?” E.g., a CEO must maximize profits, despite what that does to the lives of employees and the businesses of competitors. Foot simply turns it around: She insists that, virtue being normative, to defy virtue is to be irrational. That is, practical reason must fultill the demands of virtue to be rational. That’s nice, but no one is likely to believe it unless they are desperate to do so. If the CEO goes to his board to explain why profits are declining with, “To be practically rational requires one to act in accordance with virtue,” do we really think anyone on the board will be impressed?(b) Similarly, her “rescuing” the notion of happiness turns on distinguishing various meanings of the term, some of which apply quite well to “happy Nazis”–or CEO’s–and the like, but to insist that there is *another* sense of the term that cannot be fulfiilled in the absence of virtue. Wonderful. And why should wicked people prefer, or be obligated by, this kind of “happiness” rather than the other senses that Foot acknowledges are real and consistent with evil? Because practical reason must conform with virtue? And how many people who are happy–though not in the “right” sense–will find this compelling?(2) At one point, Foot criticizes Nietzsche for constructing a generalizing theory without bothering to observe facts. Sadly, she does the same, and her argument turns on her so doing.Several very substantial bodies of research today claim that, in fact, our “vices” are “natural” and have substantial advantages. For instance, in evolutionary psychology, infidelity, deception, vengeance, jealousy, and the like seem to have substantial advantages in maximizing the survival of one’s genes. Similarly, in clinical and social psychologies robust bodies of research show that self-deception is characteristic of “healthy” people, while persons prone to, or suffering, depression are more likely to be truth-seeking and to be accurate in their self-appraisals and appraisals of their control over their environments. (E.g., in any group, on any desired atribute, about eighty percent of the people believe themselves to be above average, and over half believe themeslves to be above the ninetieth percentile.) And the basic irrationality of how we “naturally” approach problem-solving is well known, a la Kahneman and Tversky.If these bodies of research hold up, it will follow that “fulfilling the life form of the species” involves all the vices that ethics is supposed to give us reason to proscribe. “Natural goodness,” by Foots criteria, would be very bad indeed.Doesn’t it seem, contra Foot, that (if we retain our current notions of virtue) such research fits the old religious idea that our natures are inclined to evil and must be disciplined toward virtue? Even truth-seeking is not a “natural” attribute of our species, requiring a good, disciplined (philosophical?) education for its instantiation!(3) It is hard to see, on this analysis, how ethics differs from mental health, and hence why we should not turn ethics over to psychologists–they, after all, are supposed to know the “life form of our species” and to identify and address “defects.” Yet surely it is obvious that listening to mental health types has been one of the ethical disasters of our century, is it not?(4) These days, no one is “defective” for failing to instantiate the “life form of our species,” even on the attributes that Foot supposes we can obviously evaluate as better or worse–e.g., sight,hearing, able-bodiedness, and the like. They are, at best “challenged,” and allegedly it is only our prejudices that make us think “normal” characteristics are “better.” Such views grow out of a body of ethical reasoning that Foot gives no inkling of even knowing–and her blithe assumption that outside of ethics we have “natural goods” defined by the “life form of our species” bespeaks some sort of serious blindness to the conditions under which we live today. Her argument cannot even get off the ground in the face of such views, and people who hold them are neither few in number nor floundering at the margins of power.There is value in this book, for those of us who think this way, in that it is probably the most logically elegant presntation of this view around, and it presents it in less than a hundred pages, deftly written. But is does nothing to help us see why our thinking this way should carry much weight, or indeed why we should not give up the field to our opponents.

⭐This is another original and lucid work of moral philosophy by virtual ethics theorist, Philippa Foot. She argues for the similarities of the logical structure of ascribing natural goodness to plants and animals on the one hand, and, humans on the other. In spite of the logical structure similarity in normativity in ascribing ‘natural goodness’ to plants and animals, and, to human, Foot recognises human goodness is sui generis because human uses language to act towards rational ends which she expands with a chapter on practical rationality. Yet, the logical structure of the ‘natural history’ of how humans achieve human goodness and how animals and plants reach theirs are similar. Overall, Foot leads her readers through the structural similarities very well. One thing she could have expanded more on the similarities is the parallel between human social behaviour and animal social behaviour. Though humans use more complicated systems based on laws, rights, and, institutions, animals have similarly their own group behaviour to manage their society, such as wolves hunting in pack and beavers unite to build dams.The chapter on the relationship between goodness and happiness also makes the book worth reading. Foot discusses a concept of deeper happiness beyond superficial contentment that ties in with the concept of goodness.

⭐Stylistically, Foot’s Natural Goodness is eminently readable. It’s tone is so familiar and real it seems almost conversational, and it would serve other academics well to imitate the admirable economy Foot practices with her words. There is little that I can add to the very comprehensive reviews already on this thread. Foot forwards that virtue is a natural constitutive part of being a member of the human species, such as our physical abilities to form word-like sounds and the mental capability to learn language, and that vice (or a lack of virtue, as the case may be) is thence a natural defect. This defect marks an individual as a non-well functioning human, in a manner that structurally is not different from how a physical or mental defect marks a non-well functioning human, or a lame leg marks a non-well functioning deer.One possible oddity of this perspective is how it suggests that moral defects is on par with other natural defects, such as defects physical. In our language and in practice and in appeals to the concept, we seem to give Goodness a higher ground than the merely natural. The most obvious (and possibly flawed) example is how we actively seek to punish individuals with defective virtue, while we do not do so for individuals with physical or mental defects.There are interesting parallels also between the notion that we practice virtue even if it isn’t to our individual benefit because virtue as a general principle may be beneficent to the human species as a whole, and the claims forwarded in Dawkins’ The Selfish Gene. Although, to be fair, in Dawkins’ work terms such as “natural” and “beneficent” (and its synonyms) mean something very different from what they mean in Natural Goodness.

⭐Perfect

⭐Highly recommend to anyone doing metaethics or ethics from a virtue ethics or neo-Aristotelian view. Well-crafted theory of the good based on a neo-Aristotelian theory of categories and a cognitive reading of flourishing.

⭐Short book but interesting. Even for a philosophy book.

⭐It has not yet arrived, but I’m sure I’ll value it. It’s been highly recommended by people I respect and has its place in a philosophical tradition I follow.

⭐boa compraPhilippa Foot is one of the most important thinkers of the 20th century. This book sums up her major views on ethics.

Keywords

Free Download Natural Goodness in PDF format
Natural Goodness PDF Free Download
Download Natural Goodness 2003 PDF Free
Natural Goodness 2003 PDF Free Download
Download Natural Goodness PDF
Free Download Ebook Natural Goodness