Do You Have a Reason to Be Good?
The Question That Wouldn’t Leave Her Alone
Philippa Foot (1920–2010) arrived at Oxford University in 1939. She had no formal education as a child. She grew up in a world of hunting, shooting, and fishing in North Yorkshire, taught by governesses who she said did not even teach her whether the Romans came before the Greeks. She got into Oxford through a correspondence course in Latin and a lot of determination.
At Somerville College, she met a group of women who would become some of the most important philosophers of the twentieth century: Elizabeth Anscombe (1919–2001), Mary Midgley (1919–2018), and Iris Murdoch (1919–1999). They argued with each other constantly. And Foot found her life’s question: why should anyone be good?
It sounds like a child’s question. But Foot saw that it was the hardest question in philosophy. If you tell someone “you shouldn’t lie,” and they reply “why not?,” what do you say? Do you point to some rule? What if they don’t care about the rule? For nearly sixty years, Foot wrestled with this — and she changed her mind completely, twice.
Can Being Good Actually Be Good for You?
In the 1950s, when Foot began writing, many philosophers thought that moral statements like “stealing is wrong” were not really true or false the way “the sky is blue” is. Instead, they thought moral statements just expressed feelings — a kind of “boo!” or “hooray!” This view was called noncognitivism. It meant morality was private: your moral “boo!” was as good as anyone else’s.
Foot hated this idea. She argued that moral words like good work more like the word proud. You cannot logically feel proud of just anything. Imagine someone who says they feel proud of moving their hand back and forth three times in an hour. Unless there is some special background — say, they are recovering from a stroke — this claim makes no sense. Pride needs to be about an achievement. Foot argued that calling something “good” also needs to connect to facts about human life. Someone who claims it is a moral duty to clasp their hands three times every hour is not making a genuine moral claim in the absence of some special story about why that matters.
So what facts matter? In her early work, Foot made a bold bet: that the virtues — qualities like courage, justice, and temperance — are always in your self-interest, just like having healthy limbs. You might choose to risk an injury for some greater goal, but no rational person wants an injury for its own sake. Injuries impair how your body works. Similarly, Foot thought, virtues are necessary tools for getting what you want in a social world. Since we all live among other people who can help or block our plans, being just and trustworthy is like having two working legs. Even the unjust person, she argued, would be better off being just.
But she knew the obvious objection. What about the tight corner — the situation where being virtuous seems to cost you everything? Is it really in your interest to be just if it means you lose your life? At this point in her career, she believed she could answer that. Later, she would stop believing it.
What If Morality Is Just Like Fancy Manners?
In 1972, Foot published a paper that shocked many of her readers. She now argued that moral rules do not give everyone a reason to follow them. She compared morality to etiquette.
The German philosopher Immanuel Kant (1724–1804) had argued that morality is a categorical imperative — a command that applies to you no matter what you want. A hypothetical imperative, by contrast, only applies if you have a certain purpose. “You ought to buy a plane ticket” only makes sense if you want to go somewhere. Kant believed morality had to be categorical. If it were hypothetical, you could just opt out.
Foot challenged this. Etiquette tells you “don’t discuss money” with categorical-sounding language. But, she pointed out, you can rationally ignore the rules of etiquette if you do not care about being polite. You might be gauche — rude — but you are not irrational. Foot argued that morality works the same way. Someone who rejects morality entirely can be convicted of villainy, she wrote, but not of inconsistency. The immoral person is wicked, not irrational.
This was Foot’s first big reversal. In her early work, she had argued that everyone has a reason to be moral because morality is in your self-interest. Now she gave that up. Morality only gives you reasons if you already have certain desires — a desire to help others, a desire for truth, a desire that every person be treated with respect. If you lack those desires, morality has no hold on you. You are still bad. But you are not making a rational mistake.
Why did this matter? Because if morality is hypothetical, then the answer to “why should I be good?” is simply: “you should be good if you care about what morality cares about.” That felt, to many, like morality was left alarmingly unsupported.
The Trolley, The Rescue, and The Difficult Line Between Doing and Allowing
Alongside her big question about reasons, Foot was one of the first philosophers to write seriously about practical moral problems like abortion and euthanasia. In doing so, she invented what became the most famous thought experiment in modern ethics: the Trolley Problem.
Imagine a runaway trolley hurtling toward five people who will be killed. You can flip a switch and turn it onto a side track — where it will hit only one person. Should you? Most people say yes. Now imagine a different case: you are driving a jeep on a beach and can save five people from drowning by driving past one person who you would have to run over and kill. Should you? Most people, including Foot, say no.
What is the difference? Foot argued it lies in the distinction between doing harm and allowing harm. In the beach case (which she called Rescue II), you would be initiating a deadly causal sequence. In the trolley case, you are choosing between two paths where someone will die either way — you minimize the harm. Foot called rights against interference negative rights, and she argued they are generally weightier than positive rights to receive help. You normally may not violate someone’s negative rights even to meet the positive rights of five others.
She also defended a version of the doctrine of double effect: it can be permissible to bring about a result you foresee but do not intend, even if you could not permissibly aim at that result directly. Suppose you have a scarce drug. You can give it to cure five people with a mild case of a fatal disease, leaving one seriously ill person to die. That seems permissible — you foresee the death but do not intend it. But you could not let that one person die specifically to harvest his organs to save the five others. There, the death is your means to the end, and that is impermissible.
These principles, Foot thought, capture something deep in our ordinary moral thinking that purely mathematical utilitarianism misses.
What a Cactus Can Teach Us About Being a Good Human
In her final book, Natural Goodness (2001), Foot changed her mind again. She now believed her middle-period view had been a mistake. That view had treated reasons for action as tools for satisfying our desires. But as the philosopher Warren Quinn (1937–1991) had pointed out, this means someone with truly nasty desires — say, a desire to cause suffering — is being perfectly rational when they act on those desires. That seems wrong. Practical rationality is supposed to guide us, not just help us get whatever we happen to want.
Foot proposed a radical new approach. Moral goodness, she argued, is a kind of natural goodness — the same kind of goodness we use when we talk about a good cactus or a good oak tree. To know what makes a good cactus, you need to know what cacti need to flourish: being free of blight, having lush green flesh in the right shape. Those facts are not just your opinion. They come from what a cactus is.
Humans are more complicated. We are rational animals. Unlike a cactus, we choose what to go for based on what we see as good. But Foot argued that what counts as good human reasoning and good human character is still constrained by facts about human life — about what humans need. We need the capacity for language, for understanding stories, for laughing at jokes, for forming friendships. A human who cannot do these things is missing something, just as a blighted cactus is.
On this view, when the Sudetenland farm boy — a real person Foot admired — chose to die rather than serve the Nazis during World War II, his choice was not just morally admirable. It was rational. It was rational because practical rationality is not about maximizing desire-satisfaction. It is about responding well to the kinds of considerations that matter in a distinctively human life. Justice, honesty, loyalty — these are not add-ons. They are part of what a well-functioning human will is responsive to.
This was Foot’s second great reversal. She had come full circle, now arguing on a deeper biological and logical basis that morality really does, after all, give everyone reasons.
Why Her Question Is Still Your Question
Philippa Foot died on her ninetieth birthday in 2010. She never stopped thinking about the question that had seized her in that Somerville common room in 1939.
Her work leaves you with two powerful, competing pictures. One says: morality only binds you if you care about what morality cares about. If someone genuinely does not care about truth, kindness, or fairness, there is no rational lever you can pull to make them care. The other picture says: that cannot be right. A person who does not care about fairness is not just different; they are defective in the way a blighted plant is defective. They are failing to reason well, failing at something that is part of what it means to be a good human.
Her complete answer in Natural Goodness remains a live debate. Philosophers still argue about whether she succeeded. But the fact that this powerful thinker changed her mind, publicly and carefully, is part of what makes her worth knowing. She showed that philosophy is not about defending a position forever. It is about following the argument where it leads.
When you wonder whether you really owe anything to a stranger on the internet, or why you should keep a promise when no one would find out you broke it, you are standing exactly where Foot stood. Her two answers — the devastating one and the hopeful one — are both still on the table.
Think about it
- Can you imagine someone who genuinely does not care at all about being fair or kind? If such a person existed, would you say they are making a mistake, or just different from you?
- Suppose an alien species had desires that were the opposite of ours — they genuinely wanted pain and destruction for themselves and others. Would their actions be rational in the same way ours are, or is something wrong with that picture?
- Think of a time you did the right thing even though it cost you. Did it feel like obeying a rule you could have ignored, or did it feel like something you had to do to still be you?
