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Articles

Can an ‘Ought’ be Derived from an ‘Is’?

Philippa Foot says it’s super easy, barely an inconvenience.

One thing about running a philosophy magazine, with the resulting creative chaos, is that occasionally when tidying up you stumble across memos from your philosophical heros. At least, that was my experience recently.

One of my greatest philosophical heros was the Oxford philosopher Philippa Foot (1920-2010). One of the world’s best known and most original moral philosophers, she reignited interest in virtue ethics. She also invented the ‘Trolley Problem’– an ethics thought experiment that recently inspired an entire episode of The Good Place! At university my ethics tutor Anthony Price introduced me to another of Foot’s groundbreaking contributions, a 1972 paper called ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’.

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