Human nature and goodness › Why begin with plants and animals?

The book's second chapter develops natural norms in plants and animals; the third turns to human beings. Beginning outside morality makes it possible to inspect a form of evaluation without immediately taking sides in a dispute about a particular moral rule. We can first ask how a characteristic can be good or defective relative to a life.

This sequence does not make the human conclusion automatic. Even if we accept an account of good roots or effective animal behavior, we still need an account of what is distinctive about human action. A description that leaves out deliberation would miss the feature that makes the evaluation of a will possible.

Foot's later essay "Rationality and Goodness" makes this qualification especially clear. She treats human flourishing as including a person's understanding of life and capacity to act on reasons. She explicitly distinguishes it from a description confined to growth, survival, and reproduction. The essay helps clarify why the move from other living things to human beings is a philosophical argument, rather than a recommendation to copy animal behavior.

The continuity is a continuity in the structure of evaluation. What is evaluated changes. A human agent can understand a consideration, recognize a claim, and still act badly. Explaining such a failure requires attention to intention and judgment, not just to physical performance.