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1Foot, PhilippaIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.Philippa Foot (1920–2010) is widely regarded as one of the foremost Anglo-American moral philosophers of the twentieth century. Her published work, spanning 50 years, consisted entirely of essays until its culmination in her only monograph, Natural Goodness (2001). Although her work forms, by and large, a coherent whole, subsets of the essays relate to different areas of ethics, in each of which she made a substantial contribution. In applied ethics, most of the essays are on abortion (1967, 197…Read more
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13Neo-Aristotelian Ethical NaturalismIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.The proponents of neo-Aristotelian ethical naturalism (henceforth “Aristotelian naturalism” for short) include Foot (2001), Geach (1956, 1977), Hursthouse (1999), McDowell (1995), MacIntyre (1999), Nussbaum (1993, 1995), and Thompson (1995); and also Anscombe because her work has influenced so many others. (Gaut [1997, 2002] should also be known as a significant contributor.) Their views are so unlike those of other proponents of ethical naturalism (see Naturalism, Ethical), and they occupy such…Read more
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5Moral StatusIn Hugh LaFollette (ed.), The International Encyclopedia of Ethics, Blackwell. 2013.The concept of moral status has developed from three initially independent philosophical discussions that became prominent in the 1970s. It figured in the three in rather different ways, which explains why the current concept has some of the vagaries that it has.
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1AristotleRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 20 33. 1986.Aristotle (384–322 BC) was born in Stagira, Macedonia. He went to Athens and entered Plato's Academy when he was eighteen. He remained there until Plato's death in about 347 BC, when he left Athens to spend the next five years at Assos in Asia Minor and at Mytilene on the island of Lesbos, working on philosophy and biology. In 343 he was invited to return to Macedonia to tutor the son of Philip II of Macedonia, the future Alexander the Great. This lasted three or four years. After a further peri…Read more
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253Emotional Reason: Deliberation, Motivation and the Nature of Value (review)Mind 111 (442): 418-422. 2002.This book has an ambitious aim—to make convincing the rejection of the hard and fast cognitive–conative divide currently so prevalent in philosophy of mind and moral psychology. Only such a rejection, Helm believes, can solve—or dissolve—the two major problems of practical reason. The ‘motivational problem’ is ‘a puzzle about the connection between our choosing something as the outcome of deliberation and our being motivated to pursue it’ (p. 1); the ‘deliberative problem’ concerns ‘how delibera…Read more
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256Philippa Ruth Foot (Bosanquet, 1939)Somerville College Report 1011 81-83. 2011.Very soon after Philippa Foot’s death, there was a flood of newspaper obituaries and ‘posts’ on blogs referring to her as one of the greatest moral philosophers of the twentieth century. She was also, though very few of the writers were in a position to say so, a particularly loyal Somervillian. She read PPE at Somerville during the war, started teaching there after war work in London in 1947, became its first Philosophy Tutorial Fellow in 1949, Vice Principal in 1967, and, although she resigned…Read more
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67Foot, Philippa Ruth, 1920-2010Biographical Memoirs of Fellows of the British Academy Xi. 2012.PHILIPPA RUTH FOOT was born on 3 October 1920, the second daughter of William Bosanquet, who had done mathematics at Cambridge and became the manager of a steelworks in Yorkshire, and Esther Cleveland, daughter of President Grover Cleveland. She was educated mainly at home in the country by governesses, and not well. She said, many years later, that, ‘unsurprisingly’, she had been left ‘extremely ignorant’, and when the last one, ‘who actually had a degree’, suggested to her that she should go t…Read more
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5Virtuous ActionIn Timothy O'Connor & Constantine Sandis (eds.), A Companion to the Philosophy of Action, Wiley‐blackwell. 2010.This chapter contains sections titled: References Further reading.
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11Virtue Theory and AbortionIn Daniel Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 227-244. 1997.The sort of ethical theory derived from Aristotle, variously described as virtue ethics, virtue-based ethics, or neo-Aristotelianism, is becoming better known, and is now quite widely recognized as at least a possible rival to deontological and utilitarian theories. With recognition has come criticism, of varying quality. In this article I shall discuss nine separate criticisms that I have frequently encountered, most of which seem to me to betray an inadequate grasp either of the structure of v…Read more
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31Virtue Ethics and the EmotionsIn Daniel Statman (ed.), Virtue Ethics: A Critical Reader, Edinburgh University Press. pp. 99-117. 1997.
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1Environmental Virtue EthicsIn Rebecca L. Walker & Philip J. Ivanhoe (eds.), Working Virtue: Virtue Ethics and Contemporary Moral Problems, Oxford University Press Uk. 2006.
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25The Grammar of Goodness in Foot’s Ethical NaturalismIn Micah Lott (ed.), Philippa Foot on Goodness and Virtue, Palgrave-macmillan. pp. 25-46. 2018.This essay treats the development of Foot’s efforts to produce a naturalistic theory of moral judgement from her early “Moral Beliefs” to her 2001 book Natural Goodness. Although she consistently attempts to isolate and defend a notion of goodness that is grounded in goodness in living things, she is not attempting to get ethics out of biology, especially not evolutionary biology: “species/life-form” in her and Thompson is the everyday concept not the specialised evolutionary theory one. She is …Read more
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222Aristotle, Nicomachean EthicsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 20 35-53. 1986.Our understanding of the moral philosophy of Aristotle is hampered by a number of modern assumptions we make about the subject. For a start, we are accustomed to thinking about ethics or moral philosophy as being concerned with theoretical questions about actions—what makes an action right or wrong? Modern moral philosophy gives two different sorts of answers to this question. One is in terms of a substantial ethical theory—what makes an action right or wrong is whether it promotes the greatest …Read more
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18Virtue Theory and AbortionIn Roger Crisp & Michael Slote (eds.), Virtue Ethics, Oxford University Press. 1997.The sort of ethical theory derived from Aristotle, variously described as virtue ethics, virtue-based ethics, or neo-Aristotelianism, is becoming better known, and is now quite widely recognized as at least a possible rival to deontological and utilitarian theories. With recognition has come criticism, of varying quality. In this article I shall discuss nine separate criticisms that I have frequently encountered, most of which seem to me to betray an inadequate grasp either of the structure of v…Read more
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324Virtue EthicsStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. 2022.Virtue ethics is currently one of three major approaches in normative ethics. It may, initially, be identified as the one that emphasizes the virtues, or moral character, in contrast to the approach that emphasizes duties or rules (deontology) or that emphasizes the consequences of actions (consequentialism). Suppose it is obvious that someone in need should be helped. A utilitarian will point to the fact that the consequences of doing so will maximize well-being, a deontologist to the fact that…Read more
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55On the Grounding of the Virtues in Human NatureIn Matthias Lutz-Bachmann & Jan Szaif (eds.), Was Ist Das Für den Menschen Gute? / What is Good for a Human Being?: Menschliche Natur Und Güterlehre / Human Nature and Values, Walter De Gruyter. 2004.
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42The Logic of Decision and Action (review)Philosophical Books 10 (1): 24-26. 1969.The bulk of this book is made up of four substantial papers, originally presented at a conference in 1966, followed by comments from fellow-symposiasts. Three of the papers are formal and/or technical; the fourth is an excellent piece of analysis by Donald Davidson followed by illuminating remarks from the late E. J. Lemmon.
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190On Virtue EthicsOxford University Press. 1999.Virtue ethics is perhaps the most important development within late twentieth-century moral philosophy. Rosalind Hursthouse, who has made notable contributions to this development, here presents a full exposition and defense of her neo-Aristotelian version of virtue ethics. She shows how virtue ethics can provide guidance for action, illuminate moral dilemmas, and bring out the moral significance of the emotions
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365Human Nature and Aristotelian Virtue EthicsRoyal Institute of Philosophy Supplement 70 169-188. 2012.Given that it relies on claims about human nature, has Aristotelian virtue ethics been undermined by evolutionary biology? There are at least four objections which are offered in support of the claim that this is so, and I argue that they all fail. The first two maintain that contemporary AVE relies on a concept of human nature which evolutionary biology has undercut and I show this is not so. In Part 2, I try to make it clear that Foot's Aristotelian ethical naturalism, often construed as purpo…Read more
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276Virtue Ethics and the Treatment of AnimalsIn Beauchamp Tom & Frey R. G. (eds.), The Oxford Handbook of Animal Ethics,, Oxford University Press. 2011.
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9Neo-AristotelianismIn Nigel Warburton (ed.), Philosophy: The Basic Readings, Routledge. pp. 110-122. 1999.In recent years virtue theory, which is derived from Aristotle’s moral philosophy, has become increasingly popular as an alternative both to deontological theories such as Kant’s and to consequentialism such as Mill’s utilitarianism. Here Rosalind Hursthouse (1943– ) sketches the main features of such virtue theory or neo-Aristotelianism, bringing out its distinctive approach. Neo-Aristotelians are interested not just in particular actions, but in the flourishing of individuals over a lifetime; …Read more
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322Environmental virtue ethicsIn Rebecca L. Walker & Philip J. Ivanhoe (eds.), Environmental Ethics, Oxford University Press. pp. 155--172. 2006.
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48An Interview with Rosalind Hursthouse: Philosophy in the Open UniversityCogito 12 (1): 5-10. 1998.Rosalind Hursthouse took her undergraduate degree in New Zealand and her B. Phil. and D. Phil. at Oxford. She taught in Oxford for six years before joining the Open University in 1975. As part of her work for the O.U. she has published Beginning Lives (Blackwell, 1987) on the morality of abortion; this generated Virtue theory and abortion, Philosophy and Public Affairs, 1991) which has already been reprinted five times. She has published numerous other articles on virtue ethics, the most recent …Read more
Areas of Specialization
Philosophy of Action |
Applied Ethics |
Normative Ethics |
Ancient Greek and Roman Philosophy |
Areas of Interest
Philosophy of Action |
Normative Ethics |