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Interview

Philippa Foot

Philippa Foot has for decades been one of Oxford’s best-known and most original ethicists. Her groundbreaking papers won her worldwide recognition but at the dawn of the new century she has finally published her first full-length book. Editor Rick Lewis asked her about goodness, vice, plants and Nietzsche.

Your book Natural Goodness has recently been published. I wonder if you could tell us in a few sentences, what is the main idea that you want to get across in the book?

I’m explaining a notion that I have called ‘natural goodness’. An admired colleague of mine, Michael Thompson, has said of my work that I believe that vice is a form of natural defect. That’s exactly what I believe, and I want to say that we describe defects in human beings in the same way as we do defects in plants and animals. I once began a lecture by saying that in moral philosophy it’s very important to begin by talking about plants.

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