Human nature and goodness › What makes an evaluation natural?

Consider a promise to meet a friend who needs help. You made it freely, the friend has arranged the afternoon around it, and keeping it has become inconvenient. Saying that you no longer feel like going leaves something unexplained: why should a change in desire cancel the reason supplied by your commitment? Philippa Foot's Natural Goodness asks how moral reasons can have authority without depending on whichever preferences a person happens to have.

Published in 2001, the book develops an account of moral evaluation through the lives and needs of human beings. Foot calls attention to judgments we already make about living things: whether their characteristics enable them to live well as creatures of their kind. Her proposal is that evaluating a human will belongs within this wider family of judgments. Understanding that proposal requires care. Calling dishonesty a defect of will does not mean that illness is a moral failing, or that whatever occurs in nature deserves approval.

A knife can be good for cutting bread and bad for spreading butter. Such assessments depend on a use someone wants to make of it. In assessing a living thing, we can also ask questions about its own life. A plant's condition need not be judged only by whether it pleases a gardener or produces a profitable crop. We can ask whether it is obtaining what it needs to grow and sustain itself.

This is the distinction behind Foot's natural goodness. The relevant standard belongs to an account of how that living thing lives. It is not supplied entirely by an observer's project. Someone who dislikes a particular plant could still recognize that it is healthy. Someone who loves it could acknowledge that it is failing to obtain the nourishment it needs.

The examples here illustrate the structure of Foot's proposal. They do not identify a universal botanical test. Which conditions help a plant depends on the kind of plant and its circumstances. More of an apparently useful trait is not automatically better. An account of natural goodness needs an account of the role a characteristic plays, rather than an isolated preference for size, strength, or speed.