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Melvyn Bragg and guests discuss one of the most significant philosophers of the twentieth century, Philippa Foot (1920 - 2010). Her central question was, \u201cWhy be moral?\u201d Drawing on Aristotle and Aquinas, Foot spent her life working through her instinct that there was something lacking in the prevailing philosophy of the 1950s and 1960s which held that values could only be subjective. Could there really be no objective response to the horrors of the concentration camps that she had seen on newsreels, no way of saying that such acts were morally wrong? Foot developed an ethics based on virtues, in which humans needed virtues to flourish as surely as plants needed light and water. While working through her ideas she explored applied ethics and the difference between doing something and letting it happen, an idea she illustrated with what became The Trolley Problem.

With

Anil Gomes\nFellow and Tutor in Philosophy at Trinity College, University of Oxford

Sophie Grace Chappell\nProfessor of Philosophy at the Open University

And

Rachael Wiseman\nReader in Philosophy at the University of Liverpool

Producer: Simon Tillotson\nIn Our Time is a BBC Studios Audio Production

Reading list:

Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices (Oxford University Press, 1978)

Philippa Foot, Moral Dilemmas (Oxford University Press, 2002)

Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford University Press, 2001)

John Hacker-Wright, Philippa Foot's Moral Thought (Bloomsbury, 2013)

Benjamin Lipscomb, The Women Are Up To Something (Oxford University Press, 2021)

Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman, Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back to Life (Chatto, 2022)

Dan Russell (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to Virtue Ethics (Cambridge University Press), especially \u2018Virtue Ethics in the Twentieth Century\u2019 by Timothy (now Sophie Grace) Chappell