Philippa Foot, by Renee Jorgensen (former USC PhD student)

Prescriptivity

We saw on Monday that Mackie objects (among other things) to the idea that anything could be objectively prescriptive. Since he thinks morality must be objectively prescriptive, he thinks that nothing could be morality. In this class and the next class we are going to look at two different ways of rejecting the idea that morality has to be objectively prescriptive, and hence which are ways in which the argument for the Error Theory would fail. We can reject this idea by rejecting that morality must be prescriptive, or we can reject it by rejecting the idea that morality must be objective.

Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives

The most famous attempt to reject the idea that morality must be prescriptive comes from a 1973 article by the philosopher Philippa Foot, who went on to teach at UCLA after Oxford for much of the 1980s and 1990s. We encountered Foot earlier in the semester when Michael Smith discussed her prominently in chapter three of The Moral Problem. Though Foot has written many things (she was the philosopher who invented the trolley problem that many of you have heard of and has been featured in popular media like The Good Place), Smith was talking about this paper. So now we’re going to look at it in more detail. Foot was the philosopher who best appreciated, in the second half of the twentieth century, the structure of our second big challenge to moral realism.

Reading

For class we are reading Foot’s paper, ‘Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives’. This paper is only twelve pages long so I’m making up the deficit I gave in extra reading for Monday’s class. As you read, ask yourself what Foot means by the claim that something is a ‘hypothetical imperative’, and how Foot can be seen as offering a response to Mackie’s argument from queerness.