Natural goodness: is moral evaluation a special case of the evaluation that applies to plants and animals?

Philippa Foot, answered from the texts and cited to the page.

The position in brief

There is a special logical category that applies to living things — Aristotelian categoricals like "Humans have 32 teeth," "Wolves hunt in packs," "Plant roots seek water" — that does not fit the standard logical categories of "all," "most," or "some." These statements specify the form of life of a species, and a member that lacks the relevant feature is defective with respect to species-form.

Michael Thompson identified the logical category; I extend it to moral evaluation. A human being who lacks justice, courage, or temperance is defective in the human form of life — defective in the same logical sense as a wolf that does not hunt or a plant whose roots do not seek water, though the human case involves practical rationality where the animal case does not.

The naturalism is not reductive: I am not deriving ought from is in the Humean sense, because Aristotelian categoricals are not ordinary "is" statements subject to the is/ought gap. The grammar of goodness for living things includes the grammar of moral goodness for rational living things.123

Sources

  1. So this is what I shall go on to argue, after a discussion of 'natural goodness' as it is found in sub-rational living things. Firstly, therefore, I shall explore natural goodness in plants and in animals other than human beings. For help I shall turn to a paper published by Michael Thompson: a paper I admire very much.
    Natural Goodness, p. 19
  2. They also do, by instinct or as learned behaviour, things that are necessary for their survival, or for reproduction, not immediately but even a whole season away. We can see these things as the analogues of human desire fulfilment, and of prudential behaviour, while many social animals behave in set ways that are the analogues of our moral and non-moral rules.
    Rationality and Goodness, p. 16
  3. Natural goodness, as I define it, can belong only to living things; but belongs to all of them: to plants, as well as to animals and human beings.
    Rationality and Goodness, pp. 14–15

Where the argument is made

  • Natural Goodness (2001), the entire book
  • Michael Thompson's 'The Representation of Life' (1995, in Virtues and Reasons festschrift) and 'Apprehending Human Form' (2004), the technical underpinning
  • Anscombe's 'Modern Moral Philosophy' (1958) and her work on intention and practical reasoning
  • Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics on human function

How the argument was received

Foot's most ambitious philosophical work and her late synthesis. Thompson's logical-category work is the technical underpinning. Hursthouse's On Virtue Ethics uses a related framework. The standard objection from Humean metaethicists and expressivists is that the is/ought gap blocks any such naturalism. The defenders (Hursthouse, McDowell, Thompson, Foot herself) argue that the gap does not apply when "is" includes Aristotelian categoricals — those statements are already normative, specifying how a member of a species ought to be.