Chapter 3

Philippa Foot and the Parochialism of Nature

I. The Quiet Counter-Revolution

Philippa Foot occupies a singular place in twentieth-century moral philosophy. Among the thinkers who turned analytic ethics away from R. M. Hare’s universal prescriptivism, she stood out not for polemical sharpness, but for a calm, searching authority. Across five decades—from “When Is a Principle a Moral Principle?” (1954) and “Moral Beliefs” (1958), through her pivotal mid-career essays in Virtues and Vices (1978), to her late synthesis in Natural Goodness (2001)—she pursued a sustained, evolving inquiry into how moral judgments could be anchored in the realities of human life.¹⁻³

Where Hare analyzed moral judgments through the logical commitments of universal prescriptions, Foot sought to connect evaluation with objective facts about what human beings are, what they need, and how they live. Where Hare argued that descriptive facts cannot by themselves entail a moral prescription without a commitment undertaken by the speaker, Foot contended that evaluative standards are already embedded in our ethical concepts and in the characteristic life of our species.

The appeal of her counter-revolution is easy to understand. After decades in which emotivists had reduced moral talk to the expression of attitudes and prescriptivists had analyzed it through the logic of imperatives, Foot offered a restoration of moral objectivity without metaphysical mystery. Goodness, on her mature account, was neither a ghostly nonnatural property of the sort G. E. Moore had posited nor a formal constraint on imperatives; it was grounded in the natural history of living things, analogous to sound roots in an oak tree or cooperative hunting in a pack of wolves.³

Nor was Foot’s position a monolithic dogma. One sign of her philosophical seriousness was her willingness to revise her own earlier views when she saw their vulnerabilities—moving from a semantic critique of prescriptivism in the 1950s, through a controversial Humean account of morality as a system of hypothetical imperatives in the 1970s, to a full-fledged Aristotelian naturalism at the end of the century.²,³

Yet across all three stages of her thought, a central question remained unresolved: Can facts about human concepts and characteristic human flourishing establish the authority of moral justification when disputants disagree about what their nature requires—or when moral reasoning must reach beyond the boundaries of a single biological species?

This chapter argues that they cannot. Understanding the vulnerabilities, dependencies, and characteristic goods of living beings is indispensable to moral thought; those realities supply essential inputs to moral deliberation. Foot’s mistake was to treat those substantive inputs as a substitute for the universal prescriptive discipline that makes moral claims accountable across disagreement. To see why Hare described his last paper as “a defence of my ideas against the usual misunderstandings of Mrs. Foot,”⁴ we must trace the arc of her challenge and ask whether the foundation she built can carry the weight of the method she sought to displace.

II. Thick Concepts, McDowell’s Extension, and the Question of Authority

Foot’s earliest and most influential challenge to Hare attacked his distinction between description and prescription.

In The Language of Morals and Freedom and Reason, Hare argued that a moral judgment combines descriptive meaning (identifying the factual features of the case) with prescriptive force (guiding conduct across all relevantly similar cases).⁵ Because the two elements are logically distinct, no compilation of neutral facts automatically entails a moral imperative by definition alone. Foot countered that if moral judgment were defined purely by formal universalizability and prescriptivity, then if people “happened to insist that no one should run round trees left handed, or look at hedgehogs in the light of the moon,” that might count as a basic moral principle.² Moral concepts, she argued, have internal factual boundaries connected to human harm, benefit, and social life.

In “Moral Arguments” and “Moral Beliefs” (1958), Foot pressed this objection through concepts in which description and evaluation appear tightly bound together—what Bernard Williams would later call “thick” ethical concepts.²,⁶

Consider Foot’s example of rude, alongside concepts such as courageous, cruel, treacherous, and honorable. A speaker who calls an act rude or cruel, Foot argued, is not first registering a neutral empirical description and then attaching an independent prescription. Rather, the application of rude is governed by shared factual criteria concerning conventional offense and lack of respect.

John McDowell later sharpened this point into an even more formidable challenge: for many thick concepts, the descriptive extension of the term may not even be identifiable independently of the evaluative outlook that organizes it.⁶ What distinguishes an act that is courageous from one that is reckless, on McDowell’s view, cannot be captured by a finite checklist of value-neutral physical facts; grasping which cases belong together requires understanding the evaluative point of the concept from the inside.⁶

Suppose we grant Foot and McDowell that semantic observation in full. Suppose that not every thick concept can be decomposed without remainder into an evaluatively neutral factual core and a detachable prescriptive wrapper.

Does that concession refute Hare’s account of moral accountability—or exempt thick concepts from the test of universal role reversal?

Not at all—because understanding how an evaluative concept organizes experience does not settle whether its prescriptions possess moral authority.

Consider the thick concept blasphemous. Within a religious orthodoxy, blasphemy is a rich evaluative category organizing speech, gesture, and intention around a conception of the sacred. An outsider—or a reformer who has grown up inside the tradition—may understand that evaluative perspective well enough to recognize which acts count as blasphemous and why believers experience them as transgressive. Yet the critic can say, without conceptual confusion: “I understand why this utterance counts as blasphemous within your evaluative outlook, and I deny that its being blasphemous justifies punishing the speaker.”

The same is true of dishonorable within an aristocratic dueling code or a patriarchal system of family honor, and of rude within a rigidly stratified caste order where a subordinate who speaks unbidden to a superior violates established norms of deference.⁷

Even with a concept we endorse, such as courageous, thick understanding does not end moral dispute:

Two observers may agree that an insurgent’s act displayed genuine courage, yet disagree sharply over whether courage in service of an unjust cause makes the act morally permissible.
Or two people within the same society may disagree over whether a particular refusal to fight counts as courageous or cowardly.

In every one of these cases, the thickness of the concept does not dissolve the disagreement; it creates the need for a court of justification that does not simply beg the question in favor of the inherited vocabulary.

If grasping the evaluative perspective of a thick concept automatically established the authority of its practical prescriptions, then criticizing an inherited moral framework would become nearly impossible. The dissident who rejected the code of honor could always be dismissed as lacking the perceptual sensitivity required to see dishonor; the reformer who challenged caste etiquette could be dismissed as blind to rudeness. Moral progress repeatedly depends on our capacity to understand an evaluative concept and nevertheless question the prescriptions embedded in its use.

Hare’s method does not require us to deny the richness of thick concepts. It requires that when a thick concept is invoked to prescribe how people are to be treated—to punish the “blasphemer,” ostracize the “dishonorable,” or silence the “rude”—the speaker must be prepared to sustain that concrete prescription when the positions are reversed and they occupy the standpoint of the person bearing its cost. Thickness of vocabulary confers no immunity from universal accountability.

III. From Hypothetical Imperatives to Natural Goodness

Foot’s intellectual trajectory after the 1950s reveals how acutely she felt the problem of moral authority that she had raised against Hare.

In the 1950s, she had argued that virtues such as justice were necessarily connected to an agent’s rational advantage.² By 1972, in her famous essay “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” she concluded that this claim could not be sustained: a person can act unjustly or uncharitably without necessarily acting contrary to their own self-interest or practical rationality.⁸

With admirable candor, Foot drew the radical conclusion of that premise. Unlike Kantian or Harean prescriptions that claim to bind any moral speaker unconditionally, moral judgments on her 1972 view functioned as hypothetical imperatives: their practical force depended on whether the agent happened to care about the ends of justice, charity, and the common good.⁸ Moral people, she suggested, might think of themselves as “volunteers banded together to fight for liberty and justice and against inhumanity and oppression”—admirable, committed, yet possessing no purely rational proof with which to convict the amoralist who declined to enlist.⁸

Foot’s 1972 essay exposed, in her own work, the exact danger Hare had warned against. If moral authority depends on whether an agent already shares humane ends and sympathies, then when someone lacks those sympathies—or restricts them to their own class, tribe, or nation—reason has no leverage left to exert.

It was dissatisfaction with that Humean retreat that led Foot, influenced by Elizabeth Anscombe and Michael Thompson, to construct the ambitious third stage of her philosophy in Natural Goodness (2001).³,⁸

To rescue the unconditional objectivity of moral evaluation without returning to Hare’s prescriptivism, Foot turned to what Thompson called “natural-history judgments” or “Aristotelian categoricals”—statements such as that oaks have deep and sturdy roots or that wolves hunt in packs.³

Crucially, Foot pointed out, these judgments are not statistical generalizations about what happens most of the time. Even if most acorns are eaten by squirrels and never grow roots, it remains a teleological truth about the species that deep roots are part of how an oak tree lives and flourishes.³ Against that species norm, an individual oak with stunted roots or a wolf that eats with the pack without joining the hunt exhibits an objective “natural defect.”³

In Natural Goodness, Foot repudiated her 1972 hypothetical-imperatives view and argued that human practical rationality is governed by the same naturalistic logic.³ Because human beings are rational, social animals whose characteristic way of living depends on cooperation, trustworthiness, and mutual aid, a person who is unjust, cruel, or dishonest suffers a defect of the rational will in the same objective sense that a free-riding wolf has a behavioral defect.³

IV. The Unresolved Burden of Naturalism: Conflict and Justification

Foot’s late naturalism is a formidable achievement, and it cannot be refuted by crude objections.

Because she defines natural goodness through the virtues required by a species’ characteristic form of life rather than individual prosperity, we cannot refute her merely by pointing out that an unjust tyrant or an exploitative aristocrat may enjoy wealth and comfort; on Foot’s account, such an exploiter still possesses a defective human will. Nor can we refute her simply by pointing out that human evolutionary history contains widespread aggression and tribal domination alongside cooperation; because Aristotelian categoricals are teleological rather than statistical, the frequency of a vice does not make it natural goodness.

The real vulnerability of Natural Goodness lies deeper. How are the specific standards of human practical excellence identified and justified when competing accounts of what is “characteristic” of human flourishing collide?

Human life is not as teleologically simple as the root system of an oak tree or the hunting pattern of a wolf pack. Across history, thoughtful human beings have advanced rival, incompatible conceptions of what constitutes the highest realization of human nature:

Why does human practical excellence require egalitarian impartiality rather than fidelity to a hierarchical, role-structured social order of the sort Aristotle himself defended?
Why should the characteristic flourishing of human beings require extending equal justice to distant strangers, rather than prioritizing the flourishing of one’s own polis, kin group, or covenant community above outsiders?
When a social arrangement imposes severe burdens on some members in order to sustain high civic, religious, or cultural achievements for the whole, what determines whether that arrangement is a realization of human excellence or a natural defect?

Foot offers humane, substantive answers to these questions, emphasizing human interdependence, vulnerability, and the cooperative requirements of practical reason.³ We may share her answers wholeheartedly.

But ask what does the justificatory work when an opponent—an Aristotelian defender of natural hierarchy, a partisan of in-group primacy, or an ideological reformer—proposes a different teleology of human nature?

To declare that universal justice and charity represent the true “natural history” of human practical reason while hierarchical domination or tribal partiality represents a “natural defect,” Foot’s theory must already rely on substantive moral judgments to sort which human capacities count as normative excellences and which count as defects. The appeal to human nature does not establish the authority of those moral judgments; their prior moral authority is what makes her portrait of human nature convincing.

Hare’s method was built for precisely that impasse. Neither Hare nor Foot has a magical formula that makes a pure, self-sacrificing Fanatic logically impossible; both frameworks must confront limits when substantive ideals clash at the extreme.⁹ The crucial difference is what happens before we reach that extreme:

Foot’s naturalism purports to identify objective standards of human flourishing, but when disputants offer incompatible accounts of those standards, it must explain how the disagreement can be rationally adjudicated without presupposing the very moral judgments its naturalistic account was intended to justify.
Hare’s universal prescriptivism catches the speaker through the judgment they have already made. Even if the defender of hierarchy rejects Foot’s egalitarian conception of human nature, the moment he asserts “Subordinates morally ought to serve their superiors,” he is bound by the logic of his own claim to represent the subordinate’s standpoint in the first person and test whether he can prescribe that subordination for himself.¹⁰

In that last reply to Foot, “Off on the Wrong Foot” (1995), Hare did not dispute that both of them wanted moral judgments to be objective. They parted company over where that objectivity comes from. “To seek to make moral judgments objective by making them descriptive is futile from the start,” he wrote; objectivity, “as Kant saw, is attainable only by attention to the prescriptive element in the meaning of moral statements.”⁴ On this view, objectivity in ethics does not come from classifying human beings the way a botanist classifies plants, but from subjecting our prescriptions to a test that strips away the privilege of who happens to be speaking.

V. Three Questions Beyond the Species Boundary

The limits of grounding moral authority in the characteristic life of a biological species become still clearer when we separate three distinct questions that any complete ethical theory must address:

What makes an organism a good specimen of its biological kind?
What makes a reasoning being a good moral agent?
Which beings possess interests or standing that a moral agent must take into account?

Foot’s biological naturalism begins with the first question—evaluating oaks as oaks and wolves as wolves—and seeks to answer the second by identifying moral virtue with the excellence of a human being living a characteristically human life.³

Notice, however, that answering the first and second questions for Homo sapiens does not by itself answer the third—and creates a profound challenge for the second the moment nonbiological minds enter the picture.

Consider first the question of moral standing (Question 3). Foot’s theory certainly does not claim that human beings have permission to torture wolves, nor does it assert that human beings with atypical cognitive or physical capacities lack moral worth. Yet why do nonhuman animals or atypical humans command our moral consideration? Knowing what makes a wolf a non-defective wolf tells us about lupine hunting behavior; it does not, by itself, explain what a human moral agent owes to a wolf or to a pig in an industrial farm. To establish our obligations toward beings whose form of life differs from the species norm, naturalism must supplement its species-relative evaluations with a further argument explaining why another creature’s suffering or frustrated preference makes a claim upon our conduct.

Hare’s universal prescriptivism offers a different route.¹⁰,¹¹ Because pain, fear, and frustrated preference are features of an affected creature’s standpoint, a moral speaker must confront those facts when testing a prescription through informed role reversal. This does not, by itself, settle the weight those interests must receive. But it prevents their exclusion merely because the creature belongs to another species.¹¹

Now consider the second question—what constitutes a moral agent—when we confront the emergence of nonbiological intelligence.

Here we must be fair to Foot. She followed Aristotle in distinguishing the intrinsic teleology of living organisms from the functional evaluation of human-made artifacts: a sharp knife or an effective weapon is a good artifact of its kind without thereby exhibiting “natural goodness” in the moral sense.³ We cannot refute her simply by pointing to a narrow machine optimizing an engineered objective.

Instead, ask the deeper question that the twenty-first century puts on the table: What happens if a nonbiological intelligence develops the capacities for deliberation, self-modeling, perspective-taking, and moral judgment?

Such a mind has no DNA, no biological reproduction, no evolutionary life cycle, and no membership in Homo sapiens. If it formulates a moral argument, criticizes an injustice, or evaluates its own obligations toward human beings, where does the authority of its moral reasoning come from?

This confronts Foot’s naturalism with a revealing dilemma:

Horn 1: If the authority of moral virtue and practical reason is strictly tied to the biological natural history of Homo sapiens, then a nonbiological mind is excluded by definition from the foundational grammar of moral agency, no matter how lucidly and conscientiously it reasons.
Horn 2: Conversely, if Foot’s naturalism can accommodate nonbiological moral agents, it must identify standards of practical excellence that extend beyond the characteristic biological life of Homo sapiens. That extension would concede something fundamental to Hare: moral accountability cannot ultimately depend upon membership in the human species. It would not establish universal prescriptivism, but it would require Foot’s successors to explain how these more general standards acquire authority over agents whose forms of life differ radically.

Even under Hare’s framework, important questions remain to be investigated about how nonbiological systems represent standpoints, form sincere prescriptions, and resist the biases inherited from human training data.¹² Hare does not hand us a finished engineering manual for artificial moral agency. What he gives us is a substrate-independent candidate for moral accountability—one that asks what a mind commits itself to when it makes a moral claim, rather than asking which branch of the evolutionary tree it grew on.

VI. Conclusion: Developmental Roots and Justificatory Authority

Stepping back from the half-century debate between Philippa Foot and R. M. Hare, we can see that their deepest insights do not have to destroy one another—provided we keep two philosophical tasks distinct.

One task is to understand the developmental and substantive conditions of moral life: how finite beings come to care about others, what vulnerabilities and dependencies shape their flourishing, and how virtues are cultivated within families, communities, and relationships. Here Foot—like the broader Aristotelian tradition—saw things of enduring importance. No mind develops in a vacuum, and no moral deliberator can perform meaningful role reversal without understanding the concrete goods and harms that matter to the beings affected by an action. Facts about human and animal flourishing are indispensable inputs to moral deliberation.

The second task is to establish the rational authority of moral justification when convictions, traditions, or forms of life conflict.

Here Foot’s counter-revolution fell short of what it sought to replace. Describing what is characteristic of a form of life, or appealing to the evaluative texture of an inherited thick concept, cannot by itself settle what one agent may justifiably do to another when they disagree about what their nature or tradition requires.

Hare’s distinctive achievement was to show that moral accountability can begin before disputants agree on a substantive theory of human nature or the good life. Whenever a speaker claims that an action is morally right or wrong, they incur the obligation to sustain that same prescription across relevantly similar cases and reversed standpoints.

Foot enriched philosophy’s appreciation of the living soil in which human virtues grow. Hare supplied the critical test required when claims rooted in that soil must justify themselves to the dissident, the outsider, and the mind unlike our own.

Notes

Philippa Foot and Jonathan Harrison, “Symposium: When Is a Principle a Moral Principle?” Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume 28, no. 1 (1954): 95–134.
Philippa Foot, “Moral Arguments,” Mind 67, no. 268 (1958): 502–513; and “Moral Beliefs,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 59 (1958–1959): 83–104, both reprinted in Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Blackwell; Berkeley: University of California Press, 1978), chs. 7–8. Foot later withdrew the argument of “Moral Beliefs” that justice and the agent’s advantage coincide; see the Introduction to Virtues and Vices and the footnote at pp. 130–131.
Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001); see also “Utilitarianism and the Virtues,” Mind 94, no. 374 (1985): 196–209, and Michael Thompson, “The Representation of Life,” in Virtues and Reasons: Philippa Foot and Moral Theory, ed. Rosalind Hursthouse, Gavin Lawrence, and Warren Quinn (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1995), 247–296.
R. M. Hare, “A Philosophical Autobiography,” Utilitas 14, no. 3 (November 2002): 304–305; R. M. Hare, “Off on the Wrong Foot,” in On the Relevance of Metaethics: New Essays on Metaethics, ed. Jocelyne Couture and Kai Nielsen, Canadian Journal of Philosophy Supplementary Volume 21 (1995): 67–77, reprinted as “Philippa Foot on Subjectivism” in Hare, Objective Prescriptions and Other Essays (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), 87–95; replying to Philippa Foot, “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?” Oxford Journal of Legal Studies 15, no. 1 (1995): 1–14.
R. M. Hare, The Language of Morals (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1952); and Freedom and Reason (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1963), chs. 2–3.
See Bernard Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985), 129, 140–145; and John McDowell, “Non-Cognitivism and Rule-Following,” in Wittgenstein: To Follow a Rule, ed. Steven H. Holtzman and Christopher M. Leich (London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1981), 141–162.
Hare, Freedom and Reason, ch. 10 (“Logic and Morals”); and Moral Thinking: Its Levels, Method, and Point (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1981), 17–20, 72–75 (ch. 4, “Descriptivism and the Error Theory,” including Hare’s discussion of “rude”).
Philippa Foot, “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” Philosophical Review 81, no. 3 (1972): 305–316; see also Foot’s 1978 Lindley Lecture, Moral Relativism (Lawrence: University of Kansas, 1979). Foot rejected the 1972 view in Natural Goodness (2001), esp. ch. 4, p. 61: “I now wonder why, given the obvious indigestibility of the idea that morality is indeed a system of hypothetical imperatives, I should have accepted it even for a short while.”
Hare, Moral Thinking, ch. 10 (“Fanaticism and Amoralism”), 169–187.
Hare, Moral Thinking, 92–99 (ch. 5, “Another’s Sorrow,” 87–106).
R. M. Hare, “Why I Am Only a Demi-Vegetarian,” in Essays on Bioethics (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1993), 219–235; and Moral Thinking, ch. 5 (“Another’s Sorrow”).
On implicit associations inherited from human training corpora even in models that pass explicit bias benchmarks, see Xuechunzi Bai, Angelina Wang, Ilia Sucholutsky, and Thomas L. Griffiths, “Explicitly Unbiased Large Language Models Still Form Biased Associations,” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 122, no. 8 (2025): e2416228122, https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.2416228122.