PLEASE DO NOT QUOTE OR CIRCULATE

Foot’s Naturalism and Normative Reasons for Action

Colin Patrick

“In thinking of [a term such as] ‘should’…we should think of how it occurs in ordinary language (e.g. as it has just occurred in this sentence) and not just as it occurs in examples of ‘moral discourse’ given by moral philosophers. That athletes should keep in training, pregnant women watch their weight, film stars their publicity…that chairmen in discussions should suppress irrelevances, that someone learning arithmetic should practice a certain neatness…‘should’ is a rather light word with unlimited contexts of application…”

“The terms ‘should’ or ‘ought’ or ‘needs’ relate to good and bad: e.g. machinery needs oil, or should or ought to be oiled, in that running without oil is bad for it, or it runs badly without oil…”

“…if told ‘you have to say pong when I say ping’ there is clearly no answer to ‘Why do I have to?”…But if the procedure [e.g. one entailing as a rule ‘You have to do what you gave your word to do] has the role of an instrument in people’s attainment of so many of the goods of common life, the necessity that people should both actually adopt the procedure, i.e. often [make promises] and also…tend to accept the necessity expressed in [‘You have to…’] and also treat this as a rule – this necessity is a necessity of a quite different sort: it is the necessity [without which some] good cannot be attained. And hence it comes about that by the voluntary giving of a sign I can restrict my possibilities of acting well and hence it can lead to my…deserving, as well as receiving, reproach [when e.g. I fail to keep my word]…this [does not], however, prove the necessity of respecting [such a] rule…For this reason it is intelligible for a man to say he sees no necessity to act well in [such] matter[s], that is, no necessity for himself to take contracts seriously except as it serves his purposes.” (G.E.M. Anscombe, Intention, §35; “Modern Moral Philosophy,” Philosophical Papers III, p. 29; “On Promising and its Justice,” ibid., p. 18-19)

1. Introduction

In her essay “Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives,”[1] Philippa Foot marshaled a criticism of the idea of a universally applicable “ought” enjoining moral actions (and forbidding immoral ones), ascribable to agents independently of any of their contingent aims or features[2] – that is, as a form of judgment that would “in itself [give] us reason to act” by virtue of its “automatic reason-giving force.”[3] Her position was that this idea was “more often repeated than explained” and that no viable account of this “automatic” reason-giving quality that would not also apply to the rules of a club or the standards of etiquette – standards which can be expressed with “oughts,” applicable to agents non-relatively to their aims or desires – had so far been given. We should, she concluded, perhaps learn to live with the idea that reasons to act morally belong to those who have desires and motivational dispositions to match, keeping in mind that “justice, charity and the like have a strange and powerful appeal to the human heart.”[4] Even though moral reasons are based in moral desires, that is, perhaps it is no accident when a human being does have such desires.

More recently, Foot has rejected this view of moral rationality. In her later essays “Rationality and Virtue” and “Does Moral Subjectivism Rest on a Mistake?”, and in her book Natural Goodness, she regards herself as having been too much under the sway of a “Humean” or “subjectivist” picture of practical reasons to be able to conceptualize “the difference, in the matter of practical rationality, between one who follows any old rule and one who follows morality.”[5]

Her more recent view is that in determining the nature of this difference, we should not merely consider what is true of an agent considered as the bearer of this or that desire, aim, preference or “motivational set” (to borrow a phrase from Bernard Williams[6]), but that we should consider an agent as the bearer of a certain life-form, namely the human. Her thesis is that it is fitting for the human being to act on the requirements of (e.g.) justice, prudence and benevolence, and that it is a lucid examination of the conditions and necessities of the well going life of our species that shows this – in formally the same way as an examination of what is needed for well going jaguar-life or dandelion-life show us what it befits the jaguar or dandelion to do or to be like. Foot’s recent approach can thus be called a form of naturalism about ethics.

But Foot’s theory is not meant to simply outline facts about what is good, what a deprivation, and what a necessity in human life. Her analysis connects truths of this latter kind to reasons that human beings thereby have to do certain things. It is as important to her as it is to others writing in this area that such reasons are normative. They are not meant as descriptive of a certain range of human action, nor what members of our species tend to do or care about – rather, they say what human agents ought to do, even where they do not.

In this paper I want to focus on this aspect of Foot’s account of our reasons for action, because as I see it her conception of what we might call practical normativity – that wherein a judgment says what an agent ought to do (and not merely what he ought to think), and where this “ought” is not the “ought” of likelihood (as in “You ought to receive my letter today”) – departs from a widely held contemporary conception of this quality in ways that are rather deep and significant.

It is customarily thought that practical normativity is to be understood primarily in terms of motivational psychology. We can understand various sorts of claims as at least pretending to the title of “normative”: the idea that some action of a given type is required of me by my job or by the state or by the laws of morality or common decency, or that some kind of action is suitable or fitting or good to do, for example. These can be understood, in various ways and to various degrees, as saying that I must or ought to do something. The question is: do they do this justifiably? Do they have this quality of normativity that they appear to have? On the standard conception, as I’m calling it,[7] the answer will be “yes” if and only if they embody a non-defeasible claim to direct my actual practical activity in actual situations – i.e. to direct my deliberation and reasoned action. If they do not, or if there is any serious doubt about things at this level – e.g. if they do not embody claims to direct me towards some practical conclusion on pain of rational error, or a loss of rational identity or agency of some kind – then it seems it will follow that they are only apparently, and not genuinely, normative. This is not, of course, to say that normative reasons are thought to guarantee to move agents; usually the thought is that insofar as agents meet some ideal standard (they are aware of all relevant information, they are not under the force of compulsion, addiction or other psychological disturbance, etc.), then normative reasons must move them in some way – and that this motivational claim, one that may only succeed in moving ideally rational agents, constitutes their normativity.[8]

In other words, the question “Do such reasons have any normative basis?” is more often than not understood as the question “To what degree do they embody a need for me to give them application to my own case?” Thus a special problem arises here in thinking about the possibility that one might ask this question and want to hear an answer that applies to him, and not one that reiterates judgments about what is right or good in more general terms. Thus much of the language of the current debate seems fitted to doing just that: we aren’t simply talking about what is right and good in general terms, nor about how the latter might be conceived as embodying reasons for agents to do things (i.e. without regard to the question of whether they must care about those reasons), but about what this or that agent must be moved by, must count as decisive, what he must be sensitive or responsive to in the right way in deliberation, etc.[9]

With Foot, things are different, or so I will argue here. The normativity of Footian reasons is grounded in two interrelated conceptions: first, the idea of an action, under some description, as necessary to some larger aim or good that itself is a necessary part of a given life-form’s survival and flourishing, and second, the idea of an action as (thus) being suitable or fitting for one of that life-form to do.[10] Neither of these conceptions is best understood in psychological terms.

I will begin in the next section by giving an outline of her theory, focusing on the grounds it provides for normative judgments about what individuals of a certain kind have reason to do. Though it will turn out that Footianism does (in fact necessarily) imply claims about what should go on with us at the level of accepting and applying reasons to deliberative conclusions, I will argue that the normativity of just such claims is nevertheless to be understood in terms not involving these or any other psychological concepts – but rather, as saying what it is fitting for us as human beings to do. Keeping Foot’s conception of normativity distinct from the more standard conception is important not simply because it is easy to blur the two, but it is also important in order to avoid the misunderstanding such a conception can invite of what her theory is trying to do (and thus to avoid misjudging its success in important respects). I will address this point, with help from some examples of the more standard conception of practical normativity, in Section 3.

2. Foot’s Naturalism: “Natural Norms”

In Chapter Two of Natural Goodness, Foot tells us that her theory involves what she calls “species-based criteria of evaluation,”[11] or an evaluation of the actions and characteristics of individuals that looks beyond what is true of this or that individual here and now. It is a form of evaluation, that is, that makes essential reference to the kind to which an individual belongs. In this her work acknowledges a debt to the work of her student Michael Thompson.[12] For Thompson, and Foot following him, the representation of a living thing as so much as living, and so a forteriori as eating, respirating, growing, and defending itself from external threats, involves “an implicit representation of the species or life-form under which the individual organism is thought to fall.”[13] After all, these processes are physically constituted in ways that can vary wildly from one life-form to another – to know that some crooked outgrowth from a torso is an arm instead of a useless or deformed wing or tentacle, for example, we need to have in mind something about the constitution of the life-form to which this individual belongs; to understand it as growing we need to understand it first of all as living (i.e. to distinguish this upward and outward movement from mere expansion), and, so it seems, we must understand it more specifically as tending toward the proper adult size this kind of thing has, and so forth.

Foot’s theory focuses on the kind of judgment that is found in natural histories, of the form “The F has X” or “The F does X,” where “F” is the name of a species and “X” is a trait or a thing that an F characteristically does, and on judgments that illustrate what good X is, what point it has or what end it serves, in the life of the F. Judgments like these, taken together, “articulate the relations of dependence among the various elements and aspects and phases of a given kind of life,” or in Foot’s words, they “relate to the teleology of the species.”[14] They relate to the processes by which a life-form survives, propagates, flourishes, and so forth. (Thus, importantly for Foot, such a judgment describing the “characteristic rustle of the leaves of an Oak” would be out of place in a natural history, while that describing the process by which it develops roots would not.[15])

These judgments together allow us to identify defects in the parts and capacities of individual species members, ones in some way at angles with what the F characteristically does or has: the hawk makes its way by hunting small, scurrying animals on the ground; sharp eyesight is essential to it, as it is not for the snake; thus inability to see clearly past twenty feet or so is a defect in a hawk, while it is not in a snake. It is not merely that most hawks see well past twenty feet; a hawk is supposed to, since this capacity is crucial to how hawks live and flourish; a hawk is supposed to because the hawk does. Thus the fact that a nearsighted hawk is a defective one is to be inferred neither from thoughts about eyesight in general, nor, importantly, from any considerations of what is peculiar to this hawk (what it needs, what is going on in its surroundings, how it is likely to thrive given these things, etc.) – but instead from a consideration of what the hawk is like and what it needs.

Foot is trying to elaborate on a certain nexus of judgments of living things, and its consequences for what we can say, in a normative register, about individuals of a given kind. Consider the following table we might construct with regard to the species white-tailed deer (WTD)[16].

Species-wide good / The WTD… / A WTD/This WTD is supposed to/ought to…

predator-evasion is nimble and quick on its feet be nimble, able to run fast, etc.

eating of legumes, shoots, distinguishes legumes, etc., from be able to distinguish…

leaves, etc. non-nutritive plants

shade-dwelling is found in wooded areas dwell in wooded areas, not

wander above timberline, etc.

congregating/interacting bleats/grunts be able to make and recognize