Philippa Ruth Foot
1920-2010 · Analytic Ethics · Renowned
Philippa Foot was a British philosopher who led the return to Aristotle and Aquinas in modern ethics. She read good and bad in a person the way you read them in an oak or a wolf, from what the creature needs to thrive, which puts moral judgment on facts about human flourishing. The runaway trolley is hers too, built for a paper on abortion: a tram with no brakes, five men on the track ahead, one man on the spur.
Signature
The position Foot is most identified with in the Profiler:
- Ethics
- leans Means
- Ethics Basis
- Virtue
Positions on the 9 axes the sources answer
- Natural Processes
- mildly leans Purposeful (69 on a 0–100 scale from Mechanistic to Purposeful)
- Society
- mildly leans Collectivism (36 on a 0–100 scale from Collectivism to Individualism)
- Ground of Being
- leans Immanence (25 on a 0–100 scale from Immanence to Transcendence)
- Truth
- leans Objective (84 on a 0–100 scale from Subjective to Objective)
- Nature
- leans Harmony (71 on a 0–100 scale from Mastery to Harmony)
- Polity
- mildly between Illiberalism and Liberalism (46 on a 0–100 scale from Illiberalism to Liberalism)
- Ethics
- leans Means (75 on a 0–100 scale from Ends to Means)
- Ignorance
- leans Bondage (25 on a 0–100 scale from Bondage to Bliss)
- Conviction
- leans Uncertain (28 on a 0–100 scale from Uncertain to Certain)
11 of 20 axes are left blank: the sources do not answer them, or Foot refused the framing. Nothing is imputed; a blank is not a middling score.
Foundational questions
- Theology
- Atheism
What is your position on the existence and nature of God or gods? - Highest Good
- Virtue
What is the highest good? - Good and Evil
- Moral Realism
What is the fundamental nature of good and evil? - Knowledge
- Phronesis
What is the ultimate foundation of knowledge? - Ethics Basis
- Virtue
What is the ultimate basis of ethics? - Death
- Annihilation
What happens at death? - Role of Emotion
- Virtue to Cultivate
What is the proper role of emotion? - Human Nature
- Evolved Animal
What is human nature?