Philippa Foot

Philippa Foot was one of the founders of the revival of virtue ethics in analytic philosophy and the originator of the trolley problem, the most discussed thought experiment in twentieth-century ethics. Working in Oxford from the 1950s, she argued that moral judgements are not mere expressions of attitude but claims constrained by facts about human nature and what it is for a human being to flourish.

Her major work Natural Goodness offered a neo-Aristotelian account grounding morality in the biological notion of natural goodness—what it is for a living thing of its kind to live well. Foot insisted that virtues are genuine goods and that a human life lacking them is defective in the same way a plant lacking roots is defective. Her quiet, patient style of argument made her one of the most admired philosophers of the Oxford tradition.