The day Philippa Foot was born and died: 3 October, with Assisi and Morris

The calendar keeps few jokes, but it keeps this one. Philippa Foot was born on 3 October 1920 and died on 3 October 2010, on her ninetieth birthday, so that the most influential thought experiment in modern moral philosophy has its author's whole life stamped between two identical dates. The same square of the year holds two other deaths worth a philosopher's attention: Francis of Assisi in 1226 and William Morris in 1896, men six and a half centuries apart who agreed, against almost everyone around them, that how human beings work and what they own is a question about the good life and not only about economics. Louis Aragon was born in Paris on this day in 1897. And in 1990 the two Germanies became one, under a warning that the crowds were in no mood to hear.

What ties the day together is a single question asked from several directions: what a good human life consists in, and which kind of society makes it possible. Foot thought the answer was a matter of fact about our species. Francis thought it could be had without property. Morris thought it had to contain joy in work. Jürgen Habermas, in the autumn of 1990, thought a nation had to settle what its 'we' rested on before it could honestly claim to have one. Begin with Foot, because the day is first of all hers.

The woman who would not let the camps off#

Philippa Ruth Bosanquet was born at Owston Ferry in Lincolnshire. Her mother, Esther Cleveland, had been born in the White House, a daughter of the American president Grover Cleveland; her father came from Yorkshire steel. She was raised to be a lady and, by her own cheerful account, reached Oxford knowing almost nothing. She read Philosophy, Politics and Economics at Somerville from 1939 and took a graduate degree on Kant in 1942. In 1945 she married the military historian M. R. D. Foot, kept his surname after they divorced in 1960, and so entered the history of the subject under a borrowed name.

Wartime Oxford was a strange laboratory. Most of the men were away. A. J. Ayer's Language, Truth and Logic (1936) had announced that moral statements were not knowledge but the venting of feeling, that 'stealing is wrong' said no more than 'stealing — boo'. Four young women dissented and went on dissenting for the rest of the century: Elizabeth Anscombe, Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley and Foot. The source of Foot's dissent, she said later, was not a theory but a photograph. When the pictures from Bergen-Belsen reached the British papers in 1945, she concluded that any moral philosophy which could not say the camps were wrong had itself gone wrong somewhere. Two recent books, Benjamin Lipscomb's The Women Are Up to Something (2021) and Clare Mac Cumhaill and Rachael Wiseman's Metaphysical Animals (2022), reconstruct how the four of them set out to rebuild ethics with the fact of that evil in front of them.

Her own contribution is three papers and a book. 'Moral Beliefs' (1958) argued that moral concepts are not free-floating attitudes laid over neutral facts: what counts as courage, or as justice, turns on facts about human life, so that fact and value are tangled together inside the concepts themselves. 'The Problem of Abortion and the Doctrine of the Double Effect' (1967) introduced, almost in passing, the case that made her famous. May the driver of a runaway tram steer from a track where five men are working onto one where a single man is working, killing one in place of five? Judith Jarvis Thomson sharpened and renamed the example across the 1970s and 1980s, and the trolley problem became the best-known device in the subject: the stock instrument of experimental philosophy, of Joshua Greene's brain-imaging work on moral judgement, and of every present-day argument about what a self-driving car should be built to hit. Foot was faintly embarrassed by its celebrity. Her interest had never been the puzzle but the thing the puzzle was built to test, whether there is a real moral difference between killing and allowing to die.

'Morality as a System of Hypothetical Imperatives' (1972) was her most provocative piece. Against Kant's categorical imperative, which is meant to bind everyone whatever they happen to want, she argued that moral demands are more like the rules of etiquette, reasons only for those who already care about the ends that morality serves. It was a conclusion she came to dislike, and her last book spent its strength taking it back.

That book, Natural Goodness (2001), was the only monograph she wrote, published at eighty, and it carries the largest idea of her life. Moral goodness, she proposed, has the same logical shape as the 'natural goodness' we attribute when we say that the roots of this oak are defective, or that a wolf which abandons the hunt is a defective wolf. Each living kind has a form of life, and a member of the kind is good insofar as it has what that form of life requires. Because the human form of life involves reason and society, the virtues — justice, courage, temperance, honesty — are the qualities a human being needs in order to live well as the kind of thing it is. 'Why be moral?' is then no odder a question than 'why should a wolf hunt with the pack?'. This Aristotelian naturalism, worked out alongside Rosalind Hursthouse, John McDowell and Michael Thompson, became the main current of the revival of virtue ethics that Alasdair MacIntyre had helped set going. Its critics say post-Darwinian biology lends no support to 'good for the species'; its defenders answer that Foot was describing the grammar of how we speak about living things, and not doing biology at all.

Foot taught at Somerville from the late 1940s, held a chair at UCLA from 1976 to 1991, and gave time to Oxfam in its early years. She died in Oxford on her ninetieth birthday. In 2023 an Oxfordshire blue plaque went up on her house at 15 Walton Street, the same year the scheme honoured Murdoch. No life shows more plainly how women opened a road through twentieth-century analytic philosophy, which makes it the stranger that her books are still read mostly by specialists while the trolley rolls through lecture rooms that have forgotten whose it was.

Francis of Assisi: poverty as an argument#

Francis died on the evening of 3 October 1226 at the Porziuncola, the small chapel below Assisi; the Church keeps his feast the next day, and Franciscans mark the night itself as the transitus, his passage out of life. At the end he asked to be laid naked on the bare ground. A saint earns his place in a philosophy calendar through the order he founded, which became the most inventive school of the thirteenth and fourteenth centuries. Bonaventure, Roger Bacon, Duns Scotus and William of Ockham were all Franciscans. Scotus's haecceitas, the 'thisness' that makes each thing the unrepeatable individual it is, and Ockham's nominalism can read like the technical afterlife of Francis's habit of addressing every creature by its name.

Francis wrote no philosophy. His argument was a manner of living: refuse ownership, call the sun brother and the moon sister, treat the created order as a kinship rather than a store of materials. In 1967 the historian Lynn White, in 'The Historical Roots of Our Ecologic Crisis', singled Francis out as the one figure in the Western Christian tradition who had resisted the licence to dominate nature, and proposed him as a patron saint for ecologists; the Vatican made it official in 1979, and Pope Francis took the title of his 2015 encyclical Laudato si' from the Canticle of the Creatures. The most searching modern reading is Giorgio Agamben's The Highest Poverty (2011), which treats the Franciscan idea of use without ownership as a serious philosophical model, a form of life deliberately pitched outside the reach of property law.

William Morris: art as joy in labour#

William Morris died on 3 October 1896 at Kelmscott House in Hammersmith, aged sixty-two, having been a poet, a designer, a printer, a manufacturer and, for the last dozen years of his life, a revolutionary socialist. One thread ran through all of it: a refusal to prise beauty apart from work. From Ruskin, whose chapter 'The Nature of Gothic' he called one of the very few necessary and inevitable utterances of the century, he took the claim that the beauty of a Gothic cathedral came from the freedom of the craftsmen who built it, and that industrial capitalism, by breaking work into mindless fragments, destroyed the worker and the beauty together. He married this to Marx's account of alienation. Art, he said, is man's expression of his joy in his labour. His utopia News from Nowhere (1890), serialised in the socialist paper Commonweal, and his lectures through the 1880s imagine a society in which the line between useful work and art has been rubbed out.

Morris mattered twice over. His designs carried the Arts and Crafts movement into the Bauhaus and from there into modern design, while his politics ran, by way of E. P. Thompson's biography William Morris: Romantic to Revolutionary (1955), into British Marxism and the green socialism that has lately returned to the question of what work is for. The current philosophy of recognition and labour keeps arriving on ground Morris had walked a generation earlier, with a loom and a printing block in front of him.

1990: what a nation decides it is#

On 3 October 1990 the German Democratic Republic acceded to the Federal Republic and forty years of division ended. For political philosophy the date set a hard question, on what grounds a nation may remake itself, and the man who pressed it most sharply was Jürgen Habermas. Unity, he argued through that year, ought to have been the deliberate act of citizens giving themselves a new constitution by referendum, rather than the swift absorption of the East into Western institutions on the strength of the Deutschmark. His fear was that a unification driven by the currency and by a sense of shared ethnic origin would bind political belonging to prosperity and to blood. His alternative was what he called constitutional patriotism: a people held together not by descent or by money but by loyalty to a set of democratic principles. Thirty-six years on, with the hard right strongest in the eastern Länder, the warning reads less like a philosopher's fastidiousness than a forecast. The federal holiday Germans keep today, the Day of German Unity, is in this calendar the day Habermas's question was put. What is a 'we', and what is it built on?

Also on the day#

Louis Aragon was born in Paris on 3 October 1897, a founder with André Breton of surrealism before he became the most committed, and then the most troubled, poet of the French Communist Party. His Le Paysan de Paris (1926) is the book Walter Benjamin credited with setting his own unfinished Arcades Project in motion: the dreamlife of the modern city taken seriously as material for thought.

Foot would have resisted the neat parallel, since she distrusted systems, including the sort that make five lives on a calendar rhyme. She left the day its hardest sentence all the same. If what is good for a human being is a fact about the kind of creature a human being is, then a moral philosophy that cannot state that fact has not kept its hands clean of Belsen. The most recent entry in this series to reach the archive, on Unamuno, Cervantes and Mises, is here, and the month's gatherings are in the October conference diary.