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https://fr.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippa_Foot
https://books.google.fr/books?id=E4GFUsscp5EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Philippa+Foot&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=l0ywVOPnKIyX7QaNjIGIBQ&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Philippa%20Foot&f=false
"For many years the subject of the virtues and vices was strangely neglected by moralists working within the school of analytic philosophy. The tacitly accepted opinion was that a study of the topic would form no part of the fundamental work of ethics ; and since this opinion was apparently shared by philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Mill, G. E. Moore, W. D. Ross, and H. A. Prichard, from whom contemporary moral philosophy has mostly been derived, perhaps the neglect was not so surprising after all." (p.1)
-Philippa Foot, "Virtues and vices", in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, University of California Press, 1978, 207 pages.
https://whythis.s3.amazonaws.com/media/reading/Philippa_Foot-Natural_Goodness-Oxford_University_Press_2001.pdf
"It will be obvious that I owe most to the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, and to early discussions with her." (p.
"For better or worse—and many will say worse—I have in this book the overt aim of setting out a view of moral judgement very different from that of most moral philosophers writing today. For I believe that evaluations of human will and action share a conceptual structure with evaluations of characteristics and operations of other living things, and can only be understood in these terms. I want to show moral evil as ‘a kind of natural defect’. Life will be at the centre of my discussion, and the fact that a human action or disposition is good of its kind will be taken to be simply a fact about a given feature of a certain kind of living thing.
To make such a suggestion, as I interpret it, is to contemplate a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of Moore's original thought. To get so much as a hearing for such a position, I must first describe, and give reasons for rejecting, the subjectivism that for the past sixty years or so has dominated moral philosophy in Britain, America, and other countries in which analytic philosophy is taught. This is the subjectivism—often called ‘non-cognitivism’—that came to the fore with A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Richard Hare, informed the work of John Mackie and many others, and has lately appeared, refreshed, in Allan Gibbard's ‘expressivist’ account of normative language." (p.6)
"To identify the common characteristic of the apparently somewhat diverse moral philosophies that I have just grouped together, and also to do justice to them, it will be good to start by asking how the whole non-cognitivist business began. One finds its deepest roots in David Hume. But more immediately, Ayer and Stevenson's emotivism, like Hare's prescriptivism, came into being as a result of the ‘linguistic turn’, popularized by logical positivism but developing far beyond it. For with ‘linguistic philosophy’ came the idea of explaining the singularity of moral judgement in terms of a special use of language, called ‘evaluation’ but more akin to exclamation and command than to anything one would normally mean by that term. With this idea it seemed possible, at last, to say clearly what G. E. Moore had meant, or should have meant, when he insisted that goodness was a special kind of ‘non-natural’ property. In the development of emotivism and prescriptivism the idea of a special (‘non-natural’) property was replaced by that of a special and essentially practical use of language. And this, it seemed, was a great discovery. The language of evaluation was ‘emotive’. It expressed a speaker's feelings and attitudes, as well as inducing similar feelings and attitudes in others. Those who had these ‘attitudes’ ‘favoured’ the things they called ‘good’: the idea of an attitude being linked to a tendency to act. Such also was Ayer's doctrine; and a little later Hare tied ‘evaluation’ even more closely to individual action, in his theory of universalized imperatives by which a speaker exhorted others and, in the acceptance of a first-person imperative, committed himself to choose what he called ‘good’." (p.6)
"Elizabeth Anscombe brings out this dependence of morality on the life of our species in a passage in her article ‘On Promising and its Justice’. There she points out facts about human life that make it necessary for human beings to be able to bind each other to action through institutions like promising, such as that there are so few other ways in which one person can reliably get another to do what he wants. And what hangs on this may, we might add, be something very important, such as that one's children should be cared for after one's death. I shall consider Anscombe's discussion of promising at more length in Chapter.
Anscombe writes, ‘[G]etting one another to do things without the application of physical force is a necessity for human life, and that far beyond what could be secured by . . . other means.’ Anscombe is pointing here to what she has elsewhere called an ‘Aristotelian necessity’: that which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it. We invoke the same idea when we say that it is necessary for plants to have water, for birds to build nests, for wolves to hunt in packs, and for lionesses to teach their cubs to kill. These ‘Aristotelian necessities’ depend on what the particular species of plants and animals need, on their natural habitat, and the ways of making out that are in their repertoire. These things together determine what it is for members of a particular species to be as they should be, and to do that which they should do. And for all the enormous differences between the life of humans and that of plants or animals, we can see that human defects and excellences are similarly related to what human beings are and what they do." (p.15)
"There is no good case for assessing the goodness of human action by reference only to good that each person brings to himself. Is it, one wonders, some lingering shadow of the thoroughly discredited doctrine of psychological egoism—of the belief that all human action is directed to the good of the agent himself— that inclines us to an egoistic concept of practical rationality ? I do not know what else should make us think that the evaluation of reason-following behaviour must be altogether different in its conceptual structure from the evaluation of the behaviour of an animal. And it will surely not be denied that there is something wrong with a free-riding wolf that feeds but does not take part in the hunt, as with a member of the species of dancing bees who finds a source of nectar but whose behaviour does not let other bees know of its location. These free-riding individuals of a species whose members work together are just as defective as those who have defective hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion.
I am therefore, quite seriously, likening the basis of moral evaluation to that of the evaluation of behaviour in animals. I should stress, however, that it is important not to underestimate the degree to which human communication and reasoning change the scene. The goods that hang on human cooperation, and hang too on such things as respect for truth, art, and scholarship, are much more diverse and much harder to delineate than are animal goods. Animals are different also from us in that to do what they should do—what is needed and is within their capacity—they do not have to understand what is going on; whereas a human being can and should understand that, and why, there is reason for, say, keeping a promise or behaving fairly." (p.16)
"If the virtues nowadays thought of especially worthy to be called moral virtues, and often contrasted with prudence, are ‘Aristotelian necessities’ for human beings, so too is a reasonable modicum of self-interest, if only because, once grown, we can look out for ourselves much better than anyone else can do it for us. Good hangs, too, on the careful and cognizant pursuit of many more particular ends, and in general in satisfying appetites and following desires.
It is time now for me to return to the main line of my argument against non-cognitivism. It is because I see practical rationality as determined in this way that I claim to be able to interpret the ‘action-guidingness’ of moral judgement in terms of the practical rationality of moral action. And please notice that I have not reintroduced, via the concept of practical rationality itself, a subjective (agent-centred) condition on moral judgement. For I have not subscribed to a desire-based, Humean, theory of practical rationality: nor have I any reason to go along with Gibbard's ‘expressivist’ account of what it is we are doing when we say that a certain action is rational." (p.17)
"From the line of argument of this chapter that Hare, who said that moral language was ‘prescriptive’—and who so defined the prescriptive use of language that anyone who assents to a prescriptive proposition that in circumstances C an action A is morally wrong, but nevertheless does A in C, is as a matter of logic insincere—said something that is not true.23 Moral judgements, while we may want to call them ‘prescriptive’ for some other reason, are not ‘prescriptive’ in this sense. So no good reason has so far been given for thinking that there is any kind of ‘logical gap’ between a moral judgement and its grounds." (p.20)
-Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001,
https://books.google.fr/books?id=E4GFUsscp5EC&printsec=frontcover&dq=Philippa+Foot&hl=fr&sa=X&ei=l0ywVOPnKIyX7QaNjIGIBQ&ved=0CCMQ6AEwAA#v=onepage&q=Philippa%20Foot&f=false
"For many years the subject of the virtues and vices was strangely neglected by moralists working within the school of analytic philosophy. The tacitly accepted opinion was that a study of the topic would form no part of the fundamental work of ethics ; and since this opinion was apparently shared by philosophers such as Hume, Kant, Mill, G. E. Moore, W. D. Ross, and H. A. Prichard, from whom contemporary moral philosophy has mostly been derived, perhaps the neglect was not so surprising after all." (p.1)
-Philippa Foot, "Virtues and vices", in Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy, University of California Press, 1978, 207 pages.
https://whythis.s3.amazonaws.com/media/reading/Philippa_Foot-Natural_Goodness-Oxford_University_Press_2001.pdf
"It will be obvious that I owe most to the work of Elizabeth Anscombe, and to early discussions with her." (p.
"For better or worse—and many will say worse—I have in this book the overt aim of setting out a view of moral judgement very different from that of most moral philosophers writing today. For I believe that evaluations of human will and action share a conceptual structure with evaluations of characteristics and operations of other living things, and can only be understood in these terms. I want to show moral evil as ‘a kind of natural defect’. Life will be at the centre of my discussion, and the fact that a human action or disposition is good of its kind will be taken to be simply a fact about a given feature of a certain kind of living thing.
To make such a suggestion, as I interpret it, is to contemplate a naturalistic theory of ethics: to break really radically both with G. E. Moore's anti naturalism and with the subjectivist theories such as emotivism and prescriptivism that have been seen as clarifications and developments of Moore's original thought. To get so much as a hearing for such a position, I must first describe, and give reasons for rejecting, the subjectivism that for the past sixty years or so has dominated moral philosophy in Britain, America, and other countries in which analytic philosophy is taught. This is the subjectivism—often called ‘non-cognitivism’—that came to the fore with A. J. Ayer, C. L. Stevenson, and Richard Hare, informed the work of John Mackie and many others, and has lately appeared, refreshed, in Allan Gibbard's ‘expressivist’ account of normative language." (p.6)
"To identify the common characteristic of the apparently somewhat diverse moral philosophies that I have just grouped together, and also to do justice to them, it will be good to start by asking how the whole non-cognitivist business began. One finds its deepest roots in David Hume. But more immediately, Ayer and Stevenson's emotivism, like Hare's prescriptivism, came into being as a result of the ‘linguistic turn’, popularized by logical positivism but developing far beyond it. For with ‘linguistic philosophy’ came the idea of explaining the singularity of moral judgement in terms of a special use of language, called ‘evaluation’ but more akin to exclamation and command than to anything one would normally mean by that term. With this idea it seemed possible, at last, to say clearly what G. E. Moore had meant, or should have meant, when he insisted that goodness was a special kind of ‘non-natural’ property. In the development of emotivism and prescriptivism the idea of a special (‘non-natural’) property was replaced by that of a special and essentially practical use of language. And this, it seemed, was a great discovery. The language of evaluation was ‘emotive’. It expressed a speaker's feelings and attitudes, as well as inducing similar feelings and attitudes in others. Those who had these ‘attitudes’ ‘favoured’ the things they called ‘good’: the idea of an attitude being linked to a tendency to act. Such also was Ayer's doctrine; and a little later Hare tied ‘evaluation’ even more closely to individual action, in his theory of universalized imperatives by which a speaker exhorted others and, in the acceptance of a first-person imperative, committed himself to choose what he called ‘good’." (p.6)
"Elizabeth Anscombe brings out this dependence of morality on the life of our species in a passage in her article ‘On Promising and its Justice’. There she points out facts about human life that make it necessary for human beings to be able to bind each other to action through institutions like promising, such as that there are so few other ways in which one person can reliably get another to do what he wants. And what hangs on this may, we might add, be something very important, such as that one's children should be cared for after one's death. I shall consider Anscombe's discussion of promising at more length in Chapter.
Anscombe writes, ‘[G]etting one another to do things without the application of physical force is a necessity for human life, and that far beyond what could be secured by . . . other means.’ Anscombe is pointing here to what she has elsewhere called an ‘Aristotelian necessity’: that which is necessary because and in so far as good hangs on it. We invoke the same idea when we say that it is necessary for plants to have water, for birds to build nests, for wolves to hunt in packs, and for lionesses to teach their cubs to kill. These ‘Aristotelian necessities’ depend on what the particular species of plants and animals need, on their natural habitat, and the ways of making out that are in their repertoire. These things together determine what it is for members of a particular species to be as they should be, and to do that which they should do. And for all the enormous differences between the life of humans and that of plants or animals, we can see that human defects and excellences are similarly related to what human beings are and what they do." (p.15)
"There is no good case for assessing the goodness of human action by reference only to good that each person brings to himself. Is it, one wonders, some lingering shadow of the thoroughly discredited doctrine of psychological egoism—of the belief that all human action is directed to the good of the agent himself— that inclines us to an egoistic concept of practical rationality ? I do not know what else should make us think that the evaluation of reason-following behaviour must be altogether different in its conceptual structure from the evaluation of the behaviour of an animal. And it will surely not be denied that there is something wrong with a free-riding wolf that feeds but does not take part in the hunt, as with a member of the species of dancing bees who finds a source of nectar but whose behaviour does not let other bees know of its location. These free-riding individuals of a species whose members work together are just as defective as those who have defective hearing, sight, or powers of locomotion.
I am therefore, quite seriously, likening the basis of moral evaluation to that of the evaluation of behaviour in animals. I should stress, however, that it is important not to underestimate the degree to which human communication and reasoning change the scene. The goods that hang on human cooperation, and hang too on such things as respect for truth, art, and scholarship, are much more diverse and much harder to delineate than are animal goods. Animals are different also from us in that to do what they should do—what is needed and is within their capacity—they do not have to understand what is going on; whereas a human being can and should understand that, and why, there is reason for, say, keeping a promise or behaving fairly." (p.16)
"If the virtues nowadays thought of especially worthy to be called moral virtues, and often contrasted with prudence, are ‘Aristotelian necessities’ for human beings, so too is a reasonable modicum of self-interest, if only because, once grown, we can look out for ourselves much better than anyone else can do it for us. Good hangs, too, on the careful and cognizant pursuit of many more particular ends, and in general in satisfying appetites and following desires.
It is time now for me to return to the main line of my argument against non-cognitivism. It is because I see practical rationality as determined in this way that I claim to be able to interpret the ‘action-guidingness’ of moral judgement in terms of the practical rationality of moral action. And please notice that I have not reintroduced, via the concept of practical rationality itself, a subjective (agent-centred) condition on moral judgement. For I have not subscribed to a desire-based, Humean, theory of practical rationality: nor have I any reason to go along with Gibbard's ‘expressivist’ account of what it is we are doing when we say that a certain action is rational." (p.17)
"From the line of argument of this chapter that Hare, who said that moral language was ‘prescriptive’—and who so defined the prescriptive use of language that anyone who assents to a prescriptive proposition that in circumstances C an action A is morally wrong, but nevertheless does A in C, is as a matter of logic insincere—said something that is not true.23 Moral judgements, while we may want to call them ‘prescriptive’ for some other reason, are not ‘prescriptive’ in this sense. So no good reason has so far been given for thinking that there is any kind of ‘logical gap’ between a moral judgement and its grounds." (p.20)
-Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness, Oxford, Clarendon Press, 2001,
Dernière édition par Johnathan R. Razorback le Lun 23 Aoû - 11:00, édité 2 fois
