Foot's Natural Goodness and the Good of Nature

Extract

Philippa Foot is a good philosopher. She is a good person too, insofar as her manner of thinking, conversing, and asking questions are evidence of who she is ‘as a human being’. I begin with reference to Foot as good philosopher and human being for a few reasons. For one, I do so in order to introduce particular uses of the word ‘good’. The guiding question in Foot’s recent Natural Goodness (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001) is whether my ‘she is good’ is simply equivalent to T like it’ or ‘it strikes me in a favorable way’. Do I have some objective basis to make my claim, in reference not only to ‘good philosopher’ but also to ‘good human being’ ? Foot argues that I can be objective in both descriptions, that a non-subjective account of ‘good’ is necessary to make sense of how practical reason is both practical and reasonable. By staking out the non-subjective constraints of practical reason, she suggests that the modern ‘turn to the subject’ has come to its dead end. This dead end is a leading concern of my remarks on Foot’s Natural Goodness, and my principal aim is to advance her arguments for a teleological conception of nature, particularly human nature. But first, there is more to say about what is good.