Natural Goodness

Rating:
Summary: Brilliant, appealing, ultimately unsatisfying
Review: I agree with most everything in this elegant, well-reasoned book. Unfortunately, I think, it will convince no one not already of like mind--and rightly should not.

Foot's thesis is that "good" refers to fulfilling "the life form of the species" to which one belongs. Thus, a tree has good roots if, in the circumstances in which it grows, those roots allow for it to be a good specimen of the sort of tree that it is. Thus "natural good" depends on facts about one's species and the circumstances in which one finds one's self--dissolving the "fact/value distinction." To be a good person, then, is to fulfill the life form of our species under the circumstances in which we find ourselves--allowing that there may be many specific ways of doing this very general thing. As an earlier reviewer noted, Foot maintains that for humans, a certain sort of "practical reason" is characteristic of our species, since certain forms of life define us and reason must serve those defining characteristics; not to reason thusly is to be defective, in a way analogous to a shallow, poorly dispersed root system in a tall, heavy tree growing in sandy soil.

There are many problems with this.

(1) Contra to the earlier reviewer, I believe Foot has sleights of hand of her own:

(a) Traditionally, the dilemma of practical reasoning is, "And what about circumstances in which practical rationality demands that one act against virtue?" E.g., a CEO must maximize profits, despite what that does to the lives of employees and the businesses of competitors. Foot simply turns it around: She insists that, virtue being normative, to defy virtue is to be irrational. That is, practical reason must fultill the demands of virtue to be rational. That's nice, but no one is likely to believe it unless they are desperate to do so. If the CEO goes to his board to explain why profits are declining with, "To be practically rational requires one to act in accordance with virtue," do we really think anyone on the board will be impressed?

(b) Similarly, her "rescuing" the notion of happiness turns on distinguishing various meanings of the term, some of which apply quite well to "happy Nazis"--or CEO's--and the like, but to insist that there is *another* sense of the term that cannot be fulfiilled in the absence of virtue. Wonderful. And why should wicked people prefer, or be obligated by, this kind of "happiness" rather than the other senses that Foot acknowledges are real and consistent with evil? Because practical reason must conform with virtue? And how many people who are happy--though not in the "right" sense--will find this compelling?

(2) At one point, Foot criticizes Nietzsche for constructing a generalizing theory without bothering to observe facts. Sadly, she does the same, and her argument turns on her so doing.

Several very substantial bodies of research today claim that, in fact, our "vices" are "natural" and have substantial advantages. For instance, in evolutionary psychology, infidelity, deception, vengeance, jealousy, and the like seem to have substantial advantages in maximizing the survival of one's genes. Similarly, in clinical and social psychologies robust bodies of research show that self-deception is characteristic of "healthy" people, while persons prone to, or suffering, depression are more likely to be truth-seeking and to be accurate in their self-appraisals and appraisals of their control over their environments. (E.g., in any group, on any desired atribute, about eighty percent of the people believe themselves to be above average, and over half believe themeslves to be above the ninetieth percentile.) And the basic irrationality of how we "naturally" approach problem-solving is well known, a la Kahneman and Tversky.

If these bodies of research hold up, it will follow that "fulfilling the life form of the species" involves all the vices that ethics is supposed to give us reason to proscribe. "Natural goodness," by Foots criteria, would be very bad indeed.

Doesn't it seem, contra Foot, that (if we retain our current notions of virtue) such research fits the old religious idea that our natures are inclined to evil and must be disciplined toward virtue? Even truth-seeking is not a "natural" attribute of our species, requiring a good, disciplined (philosophical?) education for its instantiation!

(3) It is hard to see, on this analysis, how ethics differs from mental health, and hence why we should not turn ethics over to psychologists--they, after all, are supposed to know the "life form of our species" and to identify and address "defects." Yet surely it is obvious that listening to mental health types has been one of the ethical disasters of our century, is it not?

(4) These days, no one is "defective" for failing to instantiate the "life form of our species," even on the attributes that Foot supposes we can obviously evaluate as better or worse--e.g., sight,hearing, able-bodiedness, and the like. They are, at best "challenged," and allegedly it is only our prejudices that make us think "normal" characteristics are "better." Such views grow out of a body of ethical reasoning that Foot gives no inkling of even knowing--and her blithe assumption that outside of ethics we have "natural goods" defined by the "life form of our species" bespeaks some sort of serious blindness to the conditions under which we live today. Her argument cannot even get off the ground in the face of such views, and people who hold them are neither few in number nor floundering at the margins of power.

There is value in this book, for those of us who think this way, in that it is probably the most logically elegant presntation of this view around, and it presents it in less than a hundred pages, deftly written. But is does nothing to help us see why our thinking this way should carry much weight, or indeed why we should not give up the field to our opponents.

Rating:
Summary: disappointing
Review: The tight, hard reasoning that Foot was once known for
is gone, and its place has been taken by ethical wishful
thinking. There's good work in this tradition -- Michael
Thompson's "Representation of Life," for instance -- and I'd
go there instead.

Rating:
Summary: Virtue, Happiness and the Form of Human Life
Review: This short work is certainly the most beautiful and moving treatise on moral philosophy that has yet been written in the contemporary Anglo-American tradition. Foot's unusually brilliant use of examples, most of them drawn from life and literature, makes Natural Goodness a very pleasant and accessible book to read. But the purpose of these illustrations is to outline a very deep theory of the good life, rational choice and moral reasons. Her main aim is to oppose both the popular neo-Humean and neo-Kantian positions in contemporary moral philosophy and to defend a sort of "neo-Aristotelianism."

Foot begins with the simple point that it is not only part of well-constituted human life to have the capacity to see and hear (as it is of mole or blue-jay life), but also to *reason practically about how to live*. Practical reasoning is not an accidental feature of some human lives, as hat-wearing is. But just as it is part of a soundly constituted human life to discriminate colors and sounds *within certain specific ranges,* so it is part of a soundly constituted human life to *reason practically in certain specific ways*, that is, to operate with certain forms of practical reason. In the first instance, it is an open question what these forms of reasoning are. But whatever they are, things might be quite different with, say Martians: they see only "in black and white", as we say; they have no hearing, let's suppose; and they do not reason about their own future good or in accordance with ideas of justice, at least when they are well functioning. With human beings, Foot argues, prudence and justice are genuine virtues: it belongs to this kind of organism to pursue its own future good, for example, and to take account of other human beings in some way. Of course, a lot of them don't, but a lot of them don't have the right number of teeth either!

To reformulate: just as different things may count as "good sight," "good hearing" and "the right number of teeth" in different species of animal, so different things might count as "good reasoning about how to live" in different forms of "intelligent" life. Or again: the distinction of fundamental "virtues" and "vices" might rightly be drawn differently in radically different forms of intelligent life. But as a matter of fact for *us humans* prudence and justice are genuine virtues and genuine forms of practical rationality. Or rather, this is what we are implicitly claiming in offering people reasons of prudence and justice and in criticizing their actions on these fronts -- and, Foot argues, there is no reason why we should not accept these implicit claims, once they become explicit.

The question much discussed by philosophers -- what gives certain forms of practical reasoning "authority" or "normativity" -- is thus solved by Foot without the slight of hand we find in Kantian writers and without the immoralist conclusions reached by consistent Humeans. This part of the book is difficult but Foot's magnificent style keeps the reader on board.

In the chapter on Happiness these ideas are extended and applied; her discussion of "happy" Nazis and "happy" idiots and "unhappy" imprisoned Resistance leaders is worth the price of the book. She rescues the idea of happiness from the egoistic treatment that is usually presupposed in discussions of it, making an astonishingly strong case that something in the way of justice, for example, is essential to the possibility of a genuinely happy life.

Foot's concludes with a short exposition and critique of the ideas of Nietzsche which helps one grasp the larger picture she has been drawing: she is in many respects close to Nietzsche but believes that most of what we value in morality can be defended against his attack.

This book is certain to become one of the classics of moral philosophy. It is also likely to be an excellent introduction to serious work in the field.