The Grammar of Goodness - Harvard Computer Society

1 THE Harvard REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHYXI 2003 INTERVIEWThe Grammar of GoodnessAn Interview with philippa FootPhilippa foot is Griffin Professor, Emerita, at UCLA and an Honorary Fellowof Somerville College at Oxford. foot describes her career as one of slow progressin developing a distinctive line of thought on the nature of moral judgment andthe rationality of acting morally. Asked to characterize herself as a philosopher,she says, I m not clever at all. I m a dreadfully slow thinker, really. But I dohave a good nose for what is important. And though the best philosophers com-bine cleverness and depth, I prefer a good nose over cleverness any day. She isalso known for her writing on medical ethics. Her articles on these topics arecollected in Virtues and Vices and Moral Dilemmas. The recently publishedNatural Goodness is her first book.

2 This interview was conducted at Oxford byAlex Voorhoeve of University College London in September 2002. AlexVoorhoeve s work was supported by the Mind Association Research : AT THE BEGINNING OF NATURALG oodness, you recall an intervention ofWittgenstein s at a seminar at which aspeaker realized that what he was aboutto say was, though seductive, clearlyridiculous. The speaker was trying tohit on something more sensible, andWittgenstein said: No. Say what youwant to say! Be crude, and then we shallget on. Why do you think this is goodadvice for philosophers? foot : I begin Natural Goodness with thisremark, since I have found it excellentadvice. Whenever I find myself temptedto pass over a weird thought, I try to dothe opposite, and give this thought itsday in court. So I advise people to stickwith their seductive but really ridiculousthoughts, because one may well strike gold just : How do you mean strike gold ?

3 foot : I think an analogy may help, though one must always be careful withXI 2003 THE Harvard REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY33 Interviewanalogies. If one is talking with a therapist, and one finds oneself about tosay something disreputable, the last thing one should do is to say somethingrespectable instead. It is the same in a way with our philosophical thinking:the philosophical interest is where the trouble is. And that is why we shouldfocus on the odd or crude thought that we actually had. At the beginning ofNatural Goodness , I give the example of being puzzled by the expression if Iwere you. I remember when I was a child someone saying I d take mymedicine if I were you!, and thinking no you wouldn t, for I m not goingto take it! I later realized that my puzzlement at this expression was due toa philosophical it is because of this peculiar nature of philosophical ques-tions that philosophy is very difficult to explain to non-philosophers.

4 Youknow, Wittgenstein said that one lesson in philosophy is as useful as onelesson in piano playing, and I think that s right!HRP: How did you become interested in philosophy, and how did you cometo study it? foot : I had no formal education as a child. I lived in the sort of milieu wherethere was a lot of hunting, shooting, and fishing, and where the girls simplydid not go to college. But one of my governesses, who herself actually had adegree, said, you could go to university, you know. And so I decided towork for it. I was extremely ignorant, which is not surprising because mostgovernesses weren t themselves highly educated, and they were supposed tobe able to teach you everything! Anyway, I took some correspondence coursesand to my surprise was accepted by Somerville. I had put in for Somervillebecause I had heard that it was a college that was intellectually but not so-cially snobby, and I was working my way out of this socially snobby back-ground.

5 I decided to do the course in Politics, Philosophy, and Economicsbecause I wanted to do something theoretical. I couldn t do mathematics, bylack of education and talent. So I thought economics and philosophy wouldbe the theoretical subjects I could : What brought you to focus on moral philosophy? foot : I was always interested in philosophy. But it was significant that whenI came back to Oxford in 1945, that was the time when the news of the con-centration camps was coming out. This news was shattering in a fashion thatno one now can easily understand. We had thought that something like thiscould not happen. This is what got me interested in moral philosophy inparticular. In a way, I was always more interested in the philosophy of mind,and still am. But in the face of the news of the concentration camps, I thought it just can t be the way Stevenson, Ayer, and Hare say it is, that morality inthe end is just the expression of an attitude, and the subject haunted : What is it in the idea that morality is simply the expression of anattitude that seemed to you so wrong in the face of the Holocaust?

6 THE Harvard REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHYXI 200334 philippa FootFoot: What these theorists tried to do was construe the conditions of use ofsentences like it is morally wrong to kill innocent people in terms of aspeaker s feelings or attitudes, or of his or her commitment to acting in acertain way. And this meant that, according to these theories, there is a gapbetween the facts, or grounds, for a moral judgement and that judgementitself. For whatever reasons might be given for a moral judgement, peoplemight without error refuse to assent to it, not finding the relevant feelings orattitudes in themselves. And this is what I thought was wrong. For, funda-mentally, there is no way, if one takes this line, that one could imagine one-self saying to a Nazi, but we are right, and you are wrong with there beingany substance to the statement.

7 Faced with the Nazis, who felt they had beenjustified in doing what they did, there could simply be a stand-off. And Ithought: Morality just cannot be subjective in the way that different atti-tudes, like some aesthetic ones, or likes and dislikes, are subjective. Theseparation of descriptions from attitudes, or facts from values, that charac-terized the current moral philosophy had to be bad : Before we turn to your response to subjectivism, I d like to dwell abit longer on your early influences in moral philosophy. When one readsyour work, one clearly sees the influence of Anscombe and would you say they have influenced your work? foot : Anscombe, above all, influenced me. My excellent tutor, DonaldMacKinnon, was more of a theologian than a philosopher, really. He taughtme about Hegelian philosophy. And about Kant, which was wonderful.

8 ButMacKinnon didn t really believe in modern, analytic philosophy. So it tookAnscombe to bring me to see the good in that. She herself was a difficultcharacter, not quite the person to be a college tutor and help all the under-graduates through their exams. So she was hard to fit into the Oxford Somerville happily saw her merits. They thought she was marvelous,and found one research fellowship after another for her, not wanting to lether go. This was marvelous for me because it was natural for us to talk to-gether day after day. After lunch in college, we d sit down and talk philoso-phy. She d propound some topic, and, and though she hardly ever agreedwith what I said, she was always willing to consider my objection, and towonder why I had made it. At one crucial moment, I remember saying ofsome sentence that it must have a mix of descriptive and evaluative mean-ing.

9 And she said, Of what? what? And I thought, my God, so one doesn thave to accept that distinction! One can say what?! So you see my position was incredibly privileged because Anscombeis one of the very best philosophers of our time. And moreover, she musthave been putting to me the problems that Wittgenstein had put to her; shemust have had discussions with Wittgenstein on topics like the ones that Iwas discussing with her. She didn t talk about Wittgenstein, but she was teach-ing me something of his way of thinking. I m sure she didn t think of herselfas teaching me, but that was what was going on. She would often come tomy seminars, and I would always attend hers, where I usually opposed nearlyXI 2003 THE Harvard REVIEW OF PHILOSOPHY35 Intervieweverything she said. Naturally, I was regularly defeated. But I would be there,objecting away, the next week.

10 It was like in those old children s comics wherea steamroller runs over a character who becomes flattened an outline onthe ground but is there all right in the next episode. I was like one of went on for about five years, I think. Then Norman Malcolmcame over and gave a talk which got me interested in the Philosophical Inves-tigations. So I started reading it, I mean really reading it, and I said toAnscombe, Why didn t you tell me? And she said, Because it is very im-portant to have one s resistances. She thought that it was very importantnot to accept what Wittgenstein wrote, but rather to try everything againstit. She would not have liked it if I had too easily agreed with anything thatshe said. On a personal level, we were friends of course. She was, as youknow, more rigorously Catholic than the Pope, while I am a card-carryingatheist, so we didn t agree on ideological grounds at all.