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Thinkers

Philippa Foot

Analytic · Europe · 1920 to 2010

British philosopher who argued that moral goodness is a kind of natural goodness for human beings, like health in a living thing.

What it is

Philippa Foot (1920 to 2010) was a British moral philosopher who wrote on the foundations of ethics, moral psychology and applied ethics. She spent much of her career at Oxford, and was one of a small group of women philosophers there that included Elizabeth Anscombe, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch.

She defended the objectivity of morality against views that treat moral judgments as mere expressions of feeling or choice, and she developed a form of ethical naturalism in her book Natural Goodness. She is also widely known for introducing the trolley problem, a case used to test our intuitions about harm.

The main ideas

  • Morality is objective. She argued against noncognitivist and subjectivist views, holding that moral claims can be true or false and are not just expressions of attitude.
  • Natural goodness. In Natural Goodness she held that goodness in a human being is like goodness in other living things: it is a matter of how well one fits the way of life of one's kind.
  • The trolley problem. A case in which one can redirect a threat from five people to one, set against a case in which one deliberately harms one person to save five, to probe why the two seem morally different.
  • Moral reasons. She revised her view on whether moral judgments necessarily give a person a reason to act, a question about the link between morality and motivation.

What it looks like in practice

Picture someone asked to explain why it seems worse to push a stranger off a bridge to stop a runaway trolley than to turn a switch that sends the trolley down another track. Foot introduced the contrast to show that the numbers alone do not settle the matter, and that doing harm and allowing harm may differ. This is an illustration of the idea, not a quotation.

Books and moments

  • Natural Goodness is her monograph setting out her ethical naturalism.
  • Virtues and Vices is a collection of her essays on moral philosophy.
  • The trolley problem first appeared in one of her essays on abortion and the doctrine of double effect.

Questions and criticism

  • Is goodness natural? Her idea that human goodness is measured against the life of our kind has been praised and challenged as a way of getting values from facts.
  • Does the trolley case track a real difference? The distinction between doing and allowing harm is still discussed.
  • Do moral claims always give reasons? Her own change of mind shows how hard it is to answer, and the question remains open.

Close neighbours

She worked with Anscombe, and her work belongs to the revival of Aristotle-style ethics. The pages on Anscombe, Aristotle and MacIntyre show the tradition she helped revive.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 9 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Philosophies they belong to or are close to

Who they connect to

Influenced

Influenced by

  • Aristotle · Foot's natural goodness account is based on an Aristotelian view of living things.
  • Elizabeth Anscombe · Anscombe and Foot were friends and colleagues whose views on moral language developed together.
  • Thomas Aquinas · Foot's Natural Goodness draws on Aquinas' account of natural ends.

Other Analytic thinkers

Sources we used

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