Ever hear of the philosophical puzzle called “the trolley problem”? It’s a famous way to make you realize that your instincts might not match up with your ideas about morality. Namely, most people would elect to throw a trolley switch that would take it off its course if it would kill only one person instead of the otherwise certain deaths of five people. But we wouldn’t, say, harvest the organs of one live person in order to save numerous others who would die without the transplants. It’s a mind-blower when you think about it. And this woman invented it.
Philippa Foot (1920-2010) was a British philosopher educated at Oxford and famed for her vigorous endorsement of objective morality (the idea that ethics exist outside of one’s own mind). Her most famous work was an essay called “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,” where she argued that self-interest is rational – otherwise there would be no reason for it. Morality, however, is not. In fact, she argued, moral explanations only exist when we have desires that we might rationally lack.
Foot didn’t have an exquisite educational background. As she remembered, she “lived in the sort of milieu where there was a lot of hunting, shooting, and fishing, and where girls simply did not go to college.” What got her out of that environment besides her sharp intellect was a correspondence course in Latin and eventually a coach who helped her apply to Oxford. Once there, Philippa fell in with a circle of undergraduate philosophers, many of them women who later made names for themselves. This began her career.
Foot died at age 90 after working at many American universities such as Berkeley and Princeton, eventually settling at UCLA. She was, incidentally, the granddaughter of American president Grover Cleveland.
Source(s): Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Image wikipedia.
