Blogging from Oxford, Part One:

Blogging from Oxford, Part One: Foot on Morality and Goodness

Introduction As I was beginning to compose this post, it was 4:30 p.m. GMT on Monday. I was sitting in the fourth row of Examination Room 6 at the University of Oxford. Reverting to the present tense (in which I originally composed), the speaker is Philippa Foot and her topic is "Goodness and Happiness." Foot is at the front of the room, and she looks very well indeed. The most noticeable difference from the image I remember from 20 years ago is a walking stick. The room is full and buzzing with serious talk (and some not so serious talk as well).
I've been walking all day, and I only got an hour or two of sleep on the red eye from Los Angeles, but I find that I am not the least bit tired. Foot was my teacher twenty some odd years ago, and she is one of my intellectual heroes. So, I am looking forward to this with great anticipation and much fondness.
Robert M. Adams has just come into the room, another former teacher of mine from UCLA, and a long-time colleague of Foot's. We both remark how glad we are to have made this event.
Foot Begins After a short introduction, Foot says she doesn't know where to begin. She says she will say a little about where she is coming from. There has been a notorious battle, with R.M. Hare about the boo-hooray theory, which has received a brilliant restatement by Gibbard. Foot rejected the move to the sharp distinction between descriptive and evaluative propositions. She remembers when she rejected Hare's view. It was in a conversation with Elizabeth Anscombe in which she replied to an example that it was a mixture of description and evaluation. "What?," said Anscombe. That was the beginning of Foot's project. It is entirely wrong to contrast fact and value. In Natural Goodness, she tried to give an account of evaluation as a special kind of fact. She was helped in this by an article by Michael Thompson. It is a view that connects good with life in such a way that if there had been nothing alive, good would have had no application. Foot thinks that although good can be used in so many different ways--good roots of tries, good actions, good weather, and so forth--there would be no good without life. In a lifeless universe, there would be no good or bad of any kind.
That's where I'm coming from, says Foot. Foot parenthetically notes that she is known for changing her views, but that she doesn't think the lecture she gives today involve any changes.
The Paper So now, Foot begins her actual paper. Today's problem is the problem of the letter writer (introduced momentarily) who is in a tight corner. This problem comes from a marvelous book called "Dying We Live." It is a book of letters written home by anti-Nazis who were condemned to death. They were allowed to write letters home. They are very touching, some long, some short. She quotes a letter from a farm boy from the Sudetenland. He wrote, "Dear Parents, I must give you bad news. I am condemned to death. We would not sign up for the SS. Both of us would rather die than become a member of the SS. I know what they do." This letter writer is in a tight corner.
Was this a rational choice? On what theory of practical rationality can the rationality of this choice be made out? How can it be rational to do what is totally inimical to one's own good? (Of course, it might not be a tight corner, because the remorse might be so bad that it would be worse to go on living. But one can get rid of this argument, by imagining an amnesia drug. Amnesia, says Foot, is a real phenomenon. There is no amnesia drug now, but I infer that the point of Foot saying that amnesia is a real phemenon is to insist on the legitimacy of her amnesia-drug countermove to the remorse argument.).
So we have now returned to the main question. Foot now asks whether virtue ethics could help with the problem of the tight corner. Foot notes that she herself is not a virtue ethicist, unlike Rosalind Hursthouse, Michael Slote, and Christine Swanton. She is opposed to virtue ethics, which is now all the rage in moral philosophy. Why?
Foot's Rejection of Virtue Ethics The idea of virtue ethics seems to be that the primary moral judgments are inner states and actions derive their moral status from these. Of course, when an action is judged morally, intentions must be judged. Foot gives the example of a medal for courage given to a Scotsman who fell off a pier while drunk and as a result saved a drowning man. This medal was wrongly given, she observes. But virtue ethics goes much further than this, as when Christine Swanton says that moral goodness is a matter of fine moral states. Foot briefly argues that this view problematic, noting that when Swanton tries to specify the innter state for justice, Swanton specifies the inner state as "sensitivity to the genuine demands of justice." (My paraphrase of Foot's paraphrase--not a quote from Swanton.) Foot left it there, but I assume she thought the audience would conclude that Swanton's specification of the inner state was circular. Foot then notes that justice is the difficult virtue for virtue ethics to handle. And surely Foot is right about that!
Inner states (or what the agent feels), says Foot, are often irrelevant. For example, schadenfreude (joy at others pain) is not always entirely bad. Rather than inner states, Foot claims, it generally is the nature of actions that determine what should and should not be done. So, when Anscombe talked about the morality of promises, she didn't talk about inner states but rather discussed the importance of one person binding herself to another. Another example is theft: the wrongfulness of theft is about depriving others of what they need and not about an inner state.
One reason why Foot says she dislikes virtue ethics is that it seems to forget how much we rely on law, order, and decent behavior. This is one way in which virtue ethics skews our thought. The danger of taking virtues as primary is that it suggests a (false) solution to the problem of the tight corner. It is tempting to think that virtues, being dispositions, manifest one's values and hence can explain why one acts contrary to self interest. It is tempting to suppose that the reference to values solves the problem of acting virtuously in the tight corner.
Is the point of a virtue that the disposition to act well is something that is present, even in the tight corner? The point being that this would explain why one could act rationally by acting on the basis for the reason provided by the virtue. Foot then asks a question, which undermines this account of the virtue-ethical solution to the tight corner. Her question is: "Wouldn't it be rational to at least try to act contrary to the virtue?" Virtue ethics doesn't have a real solution to the problem of the tight corner. Foot was moving rather quickly here, and I may have missed an element of her argument.
Are we in trouble? Once again, Foot moves back to the main question. Are we in trouble? That is, do tight corner cases pose a difficulty for our understanding of the relationship between rationality and morality. Foot says that her present thought is that we aren’t in trouble. That is, Foot is claiming that there is no problem to be solved. As Foot puts it, she now thinks that it is not right to think that there is a problem about goodness and happiness. So today's paper, Foot says, is about why we aren't in trouble. The tight corner, where happiness and morality seem to conflict is not truly a problem.
Warren Quinn and the Priority of Morality and Rationality How did Foot arrive at her new position on this issue? Foot says that her thinking was helped by the work of Warren Quinn. Although I never had a course from Quinn, I spent a good deal of time in his office and I was a witness to his brilliant participation in one of Foot's graduate seminars. Coincidentally, the seminar (held about 15 years ago as I recall was also on the problem of rationality and morality.
Rationality and Morality Now, Foot summarizes an argument of Quinn's (from Rationality and the Human Good and Putting Rationality in its Place. The structure of Quinn's argument is idiosyncratic. Most philosophers start with a theory of rationality and then move to morality--the idea is that morality must answer to rationality. As I understand Foot, she is making a point about the relative priority of rationality and morality. But Quinn suggests that we should count a theory of rationality as deficient if it would endorse a shameful action. In other words, Quinn is arguing that rationality must answer to morality. That is, Quinn claimed that morality has priority over rationality. Foot notes that Quinn's argument was directed at neo-Humean theories, such as (1) the theory that rationality aims at maximizing desire satisfaction and (2) the theory that rationality aims at the agent's well-being. On either theory, it would be possible for morally disgraceful actions to be recommended as rational. Foot paraphrasing Quinn then asks, “Why, if this were true, would we think rationality is so important?” Or as I might put it a bit differently, “How could rationality have priority if it could lead to the recommendations of disgraceful action?” That is, Foot says, the command does not go from rationality to morality; it goes the other way, from morality to rationality.
Natural Goodness Foot then moves on to a new stage in her argument. She makes a point about method. Some might suggest that we could start with indubitable facts about actions that are good or bad. That is, our initial premise could be that we know that such and such is wrong. To this proposed way of proceeding, Foot says “No.” We do not need to begin with what I might call bare intuitions about what is good and bad. Why not? Foot explains that in her recent book Natural Goodness, she argued for criteria for goodness and badness. Foot starts with facts about human life, and proceeds to derive the criteria from these facts. As I interpret her, Foot is claiming that her account of natural goodness does not rest, at bottom, on our bare intuitions about clear cases of good and bad.
If this is roughly right, Foot then asks, “How do things stand between happiness and goodness”? A person's goodness and their good can come apart (as in the tight corner cases). Earlier in her career, Foot tried to give a special conception of happiness to handle this problem, but she abandoned this solution.
In this paper, Foot is offering an alternative account of the relationship of good and goodness. To illustrate her approach, she suggests that we think about plants and animals. In animals, good and goodness are not closely connected. The good animal (e.g. healthy and strong animal) can act in ways that are not for its own good. Healthy bees sting and die young. Acting the way a bee should act can be bad for the individual bee. Birds that defend their nest sometimes decoy a predator from the nest and are killed. Is it the same with human beings? Foot says, she thinks that it is.
Happiness as One Virtue Among Many It may seem shocking that the good human would be harmed because of her goodness. But, says Foot, this is not a true problem. Human beings are like those bees. Being a good human does not guarantee that one acts for one's own good. Why then did Foot see the tight corner as a problem? Foot mistakenly believed that one's own good was part of the structure of rationality’as part of the foundation. But now, Foot says, we should look for one's good in the building. One's good is the aim of one of many virtues. Foot now introduces a bit of terminology. "V sub h" is the virtue of one's own happiness. "V sub o" is the virtue of other's happiness.
Foot then elaborates a bit on “V sub o.” Consider the case where we wish for our children's good. What does this mean? Foot gives the example of a contest with prizes. You will wish your children should earn the prize--there is nothing wrong with having this hope. But one would not wish for one's children to experience the joys of torturing others. Nor would one wish that one's children would experience the pleasures of a perpetual childhood. Insofar as happiness is identified with human good, the idea of it cannot be derived in any simple way from the idea of pleasures.
A Virtue Directed at Happiness Foot now returns to the idea of “V sub h,” comparing it to other virtues, as in “V sub c” = charity and “V sub j” = justice. Someone who has “V sub h” acts for his own happiness. Foot says this virtue has no name. Elaborating a bit more, she says that “V sub h” is a virtue placed among other virtues. Each virtue's content is defined in part by its relationship to the other virtues. That is, the scope of one virtue determines the scope of the others. One cannot do charity by giving away the money one owes to another. An act of V sub h cannot be an unjust act, because the scope of V sub h is determined in part by justice.
And on that point, Foot ends her paper, followed by sustained applause.
A Query About V sub h Foot is extraordinarily careful, so it is always wise to take some time to digest her ideas. I did have a thought or two about what I take to be the new and important idea in the pape “V sub h,” the virtue that is directed at happiness. Initially, I think it is quite interesting to suppose that there is a virtue concept that would seem to play a quite central role in human life, for which there is no name. Our language is rich with vice and virtue words, and it seems rather odd that a central virtue would be missing from our vocabulary.
This initial thought lead to another. Foot's picture is that V sub h is one virtue among many. That it is one room in the house--to use Foot's metaphor. This picture of the relationship between virtue and happiness is quite different from Aristotle's picture--at least as I understand Aristotle’s view. The Aristotelian picture is that happiness is constituted by a life of faring well and doing well, which means a life lived in reasonably favorable circumstance in which one engages in action that is in accord with the virtues. To return to the metaphor of the house, a happy life would be a life lived in a house with rooms for all the virtues (courage, justice, benevolence, temperance, practical wisdom, and the rest). Happiness, for Aristotle, was not just one room in the house.
I asked Foot a question designed to get at the difference between her picture and Aristotle’s. “If one had all the other virtues (courage, justice, benevolence, temperance, practical wisdom, and the rest) but lacked V sub h, what would be missing?”
Foot’s answer began with her astonishment at the question: ?I?m surprised you asked that,? she said with the emphasis on that. At this point, I reverted to my undergraduate self, and thought for a moment, “Why did you ask that question, Solum?” Foot then noted that without happiness, a life would be empty. Consider, for example, a life lived in pursuit of celebrity, Foot suggested. This would be a dreadful life.
I am sure that I am missing something important, because Foot’s answer did not seem fully responsive to my question. Someone who pursues celebrity, who puts external recognition far too high in the hierarchy of values would not, I think, be a person who does possess the full complement of the virtues. Caring too much for recognition by others is a vice that is distinct from not caring about one’s own happiness. Moreover, a person of practical wisdom would recognize that celebrity would be unsatifying as an end for one’s action--that it would not be a fruitful goal to pursue. Indeed, happiness can be thwarted by any of the particular vices, intemperance, bad temper, cowardice, and the rest.
What my question was designed to elicit was some account of V sub h, that is, some account of what is distinctive about this virtue. I was trying to get Foot to say more about the content of “V sub h”. Foot did address this concern, by referring to the concept of “deep happiness.” Foot did not elaborate on what “deep happiness” is, but given what she did say, it would seem that deep happiness is related to the pursuit of projects that are truly worthwhile or significant. And of course, deep happiness does seem to require that one have a meaningful life plan that involves significant and worthwhile goals.
There were many good questions, including one from Robert Adams. Finally, the time was up and the session ended. I was very happy to have had the opportunity to hear Foot once again! Philippa Foot remains a marvel to behold and I count myself as lucky to have learned so much from her.