Natural Goodness
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Book Review Natural Goodness Philippa Foot Clarendon Press: Oxford, 2001, 125 pp. ISBN: 0 19 823508 9. Acta Politica (2005) 40, 138–141. doi:10.1057/palgrave.ap.5500074
Promises should be kept unless there is overwhelming reason not to do so. Most of us will take this for a fact. Moral philosophers ask in what sense this fact — if it is, in fact, a fact — obtains. In her book Natural Goodness Philippa Foot presents an answer to this question. Her answer is one along the lines of virtue ethics as originated and developed by Elizabeth Anscombe, Bernard Williams, David Wiggins, and Foot herself. The book presently under discussion may be viewed as a brief statement of a lifetime of developing insights in philosophy. Promises should be kept, Foot argues, because the good life for man turns on keeping promises. Keeping a promise is an Aristotelian necessity, the sort of thing that needs to be done to maintain the life we lead. This is a proposition, purporting to tell us what a moral judgement says. Foot’s argument in Natural Goodness aims to establish that moral judgements belong to a category of evaluation that logically belongs with evaluation of natural goodness and defect. Natural Goodness starts with a set of arguments meant to stake the claim that the view of the practice of value that has dominated Anglophone moral philosophy in the 20th century rests on a mistake. The mistake is ‘so construing what is special about moral judgement that the grounds of a moral judgement do no reach all the way to it’ (p. 8). The majority of philosophers over the past century endorsed Hume’s view, mistakenly according to Foot, that the fact that there is a reason for acting does not mean that I have a reason to act. According to Foot this must be a mistake, since, pace Hume, if I see a reason for acting, for example when I see a child near drowning I see a reason for rescuing it, I must have a reason to act and I do not need to have a desire to move me. The reason for acting, that is, is itself the reason to act. It is itself the spring that puts me into action. The point of Hume’s view, as Foot reminds us, is that morality is practical. A reason to act thus-and-so is a reason for me only if I value acting thus-andso. Foot thinks Hume’s Practicality Requirement, as she calls it, is legitimate. A moral theory worth its salt ought to provide an account of the practicality of morals. Foot’s own answer to Hume’s Practicality Requirement, then, is to
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view morality as a part of practical rationality. This is a bold and original move, and one that ought to be of great interest to political theorists. The conception of practical rationality that has governed moral and political philosophy is based on the idea that to be rational is to act self-interestedly. Alternatively, rationality is viewed in the light of desire fulfilment theories. These hold that to act rationally is to act in the way that best fulfils your desires. According to Foot, neither the self-interest theory of rationality nor its alternative is able to a
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