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Title: Moral Dilemmas: And Other Topics in Moral Philosophy by Philippa Foot ISBN: 0-19-925284-X Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: February, 2003 Format: Paperback Volumes: 1 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
Average Customer Rating: 5 (1 review)
Rating: 5
Summary: More Great Papers from Foot
Comment: Moral Dilemmas is another wonderful collection of papers from Foot. This book covers her work from the 70s to the 90s (and her book Natural Goodness). Along with the earlier collection Virtues and Vices, this provides us with a picture of a career of penetrating thought about the central issues of meta-ethics and normative ethics.
Several areas of Foot's research are represented here. First up are her historical interests. These are the same interests that showed up in the papers in Virtues and Vices: Nietzsche's immoralism and the foundations of contemporary noncognitivism and moral subjectivism in the classical empiricists and their theories of mind. Next up are her interests in normative ethics. The primary aspect of her research in normative ethics that is covered in this collection is Foot's anti-consequentialism. According to consequentialists, maximizing goodness is fundamental point of moral action. Foot's argument against consequentialism is that we can't make sense of this non-moral notion of goodness. In particular, she claims that we possess no notion of a good state of affairs that isn't defined through its relation to certain moral virtues. Consequently, there is no way to coherently formulate the main consequentialist idea--the idea that we ought morally to always maximize the good.
Now for Foot's meta-ethical papers. Included here are two essays about moral dilemmas and appeals to them as arguments against cognitivism. There is a moral dilemma, in the relevant sense, whenever it is the case that agents have conflicting moral obligations, when they are under multiple moral demands but cannot fulfill them all. In cases of moral dilemmas it appears that there is something to be said for the both the judgment that the person acts rightly and the judgment that the person acts wrongly. Why is this supposed to be a problem for cognitivism? Because cognitivists claim that moral judgments express beliefs, and it doesn't seem that we treat conflicting beliefs in this way. When two beliefs conflict, we think that one of them must ultimately be rejected. We do, however, think that there can be conflicts between desires that seem similar to what we have in the case of a moral dilemma: when we have conflicting desires, we can continue to desire both things even though we recognize that these desires cannot both be satisfied. Moral judgments, then, look moral like desires than beliefs, and this suggests a sort of noncognitivism. In both papers Foot argues that this isn't correct, and that moral dilemmas provide no evidence against cognitivism.
As interesting as the material mentioned above is, I think the best papers in this collection are those concerned with the objectivity of morality. Foot's views about the objectivity of morality have changed considerably over time, and this collection provides evidence of those changes. The collection opens with a pair of papers in which Foot is at her most skeptical about the objectivity of morality, and it shows her gradual move towards a neo-Aristotelian position on which morality is robustly objective.
The collection opens with "Morality and Art." She never abandons a form of cognitivism in this paper (or any other in the collection), nor does she reject her contention some moral claims may be strictly provable. Nevertheless, Foot tentatively considers the possibility that there are significant elements of fiction in our ordinary conception of morality. The first element of fiction is that morality is thoroughly objective. While some moral claims are strictly provable and some evidence must be considered by all moralists, there may be a significant amount of 'play' in the system. The second element of fiction is that moral obligations provide people with categorical reasons for action: that is, with reasons for action that are independent of their particular interests or desires. Foot thinks that it is possible that for someone to be under a moral obligation and yet have no reason to act morally. For a person's moral reasons depend on that person's interests and desires, and those interests and desires may make moral action irrational for her.
The third area of fiction is one that Foot develops in her paper "Moral Relativism." According to Foot, there is an area for choice with respect to some of our moral standards. Some moral claims are objective and non-relative, and yet some may be relative. It is unclear that Foot ever comes out and endorses a form of moral relativism, but she is clearly interested in formulating a defensible version of relativism and suggesting why someone might consider it a tenable position about some moral judgments. Hers is a limited sort of appraiser relativism: it claims that certain moral claims may admit of truth and falsity only relative to the standards accepted in the group of the person making the moral judgment.
However, in the later papers "Rationality and Virtue" and "Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?", Foot abandons most of the positions discussed above. In these papers she argues that she had formerly failed to understand the connection between morality and reasons for actions because she held a false view about the nature of practical rationality. There is, she claims, no need to fit morality into a general non-moral conception of practical rationality, of what agents have reasons to do. Instead, she thinks appreciating moral reasons is best understood as part of practical rationality. To ignore moral reasons is to be irrational, as being sensitive to moral reasons for one's actions is part of what it is to be practically rational. But why think there is such a connection between reasons for action and morality? The central idea is to focus on moral virtues and the ways in which they are beneficial to human beings who possess them. We begin by looking at human nature and the qualities of members of the human species, and we see that certain things are naturally good for human beings when we understand them as social organisms. Possessing the moral virtues, Foot argues, is best understood as a good of this sort. Given the needs of beings like us, possessing the virtues is a requirement for flourishing, for leading a good life. Hence being virtuous is naturally good for human beings. Hence human beings have good reason to act virtuously.
I recommend this book to anyone interested in meta-ethics.
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Title: Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy by Philippa Foot ISBN: 0199252866 Publisher: Oxford Press Pub. Date: January, 2003 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: The Reasons of Love by Harry G. Frankfurt ISBN: 0691091641 Publisher: Princeton Univ Pr Pub. Date: 05 January, 2004 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Ethics, Religion and Politics: The Collected Philosophical Paper by G. E. M. Anscombe ISBN: 0631133089 Publisher: Blackwell Publishers Pub. Date: March, 2002 List Price(USD): $19.95 |
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Title: Natural Goodness by Philippa Foot ISBN: 0198235089 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: June, 2001 List Price(USD): $24.00 |
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Title: From Morality to Virtue by Michael Slote ISBN: 0195093925 Publisher: Oxford University Press Pub. Date: May, 1995 List Price(USD): $25.00 |
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