Abstract
My goal in this chapter is to provide a sympathetic interpretation of Foot’s grammar of goodness, clarifying and expanding it in a few places, and defending it against some objections. I begin by sketching Foot’s grammar. As I understand it, that grammar includes four main notions: (1) The Good Of, (2) Good As/Good In, (3) Good For, and (4) Goods/Good Things. I then consider the relation between Good For, on the one hand, and The Good Of and Good As, on the other. Is it always Good For a living thing to be Good As the kind of thing it is? Could something be Good For an organism without being part of The Good Of that kind of thing? I argue that Good For, Good As, and The Good Of are inseparable: What is Good For a living thing just is that which furthers or constitutes The Good Of such a creature, and The Good Of any creature is the actualization of those well-formed capacities that make it Good As the kind of creature that it is. In the final part of this chapter, I consider how happiness fits into Foot’s grammar of goodness as applied to human beings, paying special attention to the idea that The Good Of any living thing consists in a certain form of activity.
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Notes
- 1.
Foot takes this sense of “grammar” from Wittgenstein. See NG 91.
- 2.
Of course, Foot also speaks about natural defect, and she argues that moral vice is a form of natural defect in the human will. Judgments of natural goodness and natural defect belong to the same grammar.
- 3.
Cf. Foot’s gloss of “human goods” as “the elements that can make up good human lives” (NG 44). For another passage relevant to this issue, see Foot’s brief remarks on the notion of “good and better states of affairs” (NG 48–51), and also the arguments in her earlier essays “Utilitarianism and the Virtues” and “Morality , Action , and Outcome,” both collected in MD.
- 4.
A recent example of this misinterpretation of Foot is Harcourt (2016): “But although Foot too wants to connect excellence and flourishing in some sense, she is not trying to connect excellence with benefit or well-being or happiness, for she thinks that excellence of one’s kind and benefit need not go together: ‘the swiftest deer falls into the hunter’s trap’ (Foot 2001, 42)” (220).
- 5.
In speaking about vital activities, in the plural, we focus on the various things that an organism does, such as breathing, hunting, reproducing. But since those various activities are teleologically related to one another as aspects of a unified whole, we can also talk of an organism ’s whole way of living as an activity, in the singular.
- 6.
The following points also apply to the unlucky lion who falls into a trap after being healed by St. Jerome, and to the bees whose nest is destroyed by the gardener.
- 7.
Cf. Groll and Lott: “[Z]oos that are better for their animals are ones that allow them to be active to a greater degree – and active precisely in those ways that are most naturally good for them (i.e., re-creating habitat, climate, objects of interest that engage the organism ’s capacities and allow those capacities to develop and be active)” (Groll and Lott, 23).
- 8.
Of course, there are many other examples with the same features as the elk case.
- 9.
For further discussion, Groll and Lott, 20–7.
- 10.
Related to this, we might also consider the sexual cannibalism of some species of arachnids and insects.
- 11.
Thanks to Daniel Groll for helping me to think about the issues in this section.
- 12.
This paragraph contains my reconstructions of arguments that are presented, in a highly compressed form, at NG 82. Foot says that there is a “tangled skein of ideas” in this area, and she aims to unravel them in Chapter 6.
- 13.
“Benefiting someone means doing something that is for his or her good. If I am right, then the concept of benefiting someone reveals a way of thinking about the human good that excludes the pursuit of evil things, as is shown by my observation about prolonging the pleasures of the Wests. But then the concept of happiness that one finds in the expression ‘Happiness is Man’s good’ must also exclude the pursuit of evil. So considering the notion of benefiting someone offers us a glimpse of a way we have of thinking about happiness that involves goodness.” Foot quoted in Voorhoeve, 106–7.
- 14.
For very helpful discussion of these issues, see Russell (2012), especially Chapters 4, 5, and 8.
- 15.
In my view, the best contemporary account of virtuous activity is found in Brewer (2009). Brewer’s notion of “dialectical activities” gives considerable substance to Foot’s grammar as applied to human beings.
For helpful feedback on this chapter, I thank Anne Baril, Daniel Groll, and Richard Kim.
References
Brewer, T. 2009. The Retrieval of Ethics. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foot, P. 2001. Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
———. 2002. Moral Dilemmas. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Groll, D., and M. Lott. 2015. Is There a Role for ‘Human Nature’ in Debates About Human Enhancement? Philosophy 90 (4): 623–651.
Harcourt, E. 2016. ‘Mental Heath’ and Human Excellence. Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 90: 217–234.
Hursthouse, R. 2012. Philippa Foot. Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy XI: 179–196.
Russell, D. 2012. Happiness for Humans. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Thompson, M. 2008. Life and Action: Elementary Structures of Practice and Practical Thought. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
Voorhoeve, A. 2009. Philippa Foot: The Grammar of Goodness. In Conversations on Ethics, 87–110. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
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Lott, M. (2018). Foot’s Grammar of Goodness. In: Hacker-Wright, J. (eds) Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91256-1_8
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