Philippa Foot

Philippa Ruth Foot (* nee Bosanquet, October 3rd, 1920 in Owston Ferry, Lincolnshire; † 3 October 2010) was a British philosopher, and was one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics. The first set of her showed trolley problem is one of the ethical dilemmas vielrezipierten debates.

Life and work

Philippa Foot was born in 1920 in England. From 1939 she studied at Somerville College, Oxford, philosophy, politics and economics. From 1942 to 1945 she worked in the field of economics as a Research Assistant at Nuffield College and the Royal Institute of International Affairs operates. From 1947 to 1969 she taught philosophy at Somerville College, from 1949 as a Fellow and Lecturer in Philosophy. Between 1960 and 1976 she perceived in the U.S. as visiting professor at the Universities of Cornell, MIT, Berkeley and Princeton. From 1976 until her retirement in 1991, she was Professor of Philosophy at the University of California at Los Angeles. She lived and worked most recently in Oxford.

Foot was a granddaughter of former U.S. President Grover Cleveland.

Philippa Foot was known primarily for her work in the field of ethics. She was one next to Alasdair MacIntyre and Elizabeth Anscombe to the founders of modern virtue ethics. In her work she drew mainly on the work of Aristotle.

Recently, Foot had come out especially with her ​​monograph The nature of good (Natural Goodness ), where she developed a comprehensive theory of the concept of good. Also was the question raised by her "trolley problem," an ethical dilemma known.

She was temporarily married to the historian Michael Foot.

Ethics

Foot dealt in their writings with issues of moral philosophy, in particular the meta-ethics, virtue ethics, applied ethics and the relationship between rationality and morality.

She turned in the field of meta-ethics against emotivism and prescriptivism and represented a naturalistic position. Foot rejected the associated back- prescriptivism assumption of a dichotomy between facts and values ​​. It is not left to their view of our subjective decision as to what counts as a reason for a moral judgment. End value and moral judgments are logically linked to statements of fact. The facts provide objective reasons for the value judgment dar.

A central role in Foots take an ethics virtues. Besides the traditional cardinal virtues of courage, temperance, wisdom and justice, they had the virtue of charity or charity to a high value. Virtues are usually beneficial for people who own them. They protect us from morally reprehensible behaviors and motivate us in situations where we are guilty of a particular action easily. They allow us to consider the consequences of our actions.

Foot took the view that moral judgments have a hypothetical character. Their binding force depends on the fact that the actors have the appropriate interests and desires. So you attacked the idea of deontological ethics that moral reasons in themselves constitute sufficient grounds for action.

Works (selection)

Michael Reuter: Bibliography of Works by Philippa Foot, in: Thomas Hoffmann, Michael Reuter ( ed.): Naturally good. Essays on Philosophy by Philippa Foot. Ontos -Verlag, Heusenstamm near Frankfurt am Main 2010, 323-332.

  • Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, Berkeley: University of California Press; Oxford: Blackwell, 1978
  • Natural Goodness. Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001 - German translation. Nature of the good, Suhrkamp, ​​Frankfurt am Main 2004, ISBN 3-518-58396-4; Table of Contents; Review (PDF file, 80 kB)
  • Moral dilemmas. And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2002, ISBN 0 - 19-925284 -X
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