Part I: Natural Goodness

I think that Foot's book can be divided into two parts: 1) determining what the good is and 2) determining why it is rational to be good (irrational to be bad). So I have.

Foot's essential claim is that human goodness and badness is to be understood as the relation between a person and the purpose of social living. A person is good insofar as he fulfills this purpose and defective insofar as he fails to do so. Her thought is that human goodness is akin to occular goodness in that one's eyes are good if they allow him to see clearly, etc. Similarly an oak tree has good roots if they are strong and deep and therefore supply the oak tree with the water and nutrients it needs as well as holding it in place.

There is a certain sense in which this is obviously true. To say that a certain X has a particular purpose and then to say that it tends to fulfill that purpose is to say that such an X is good for that purpose. So for the purpose of seeing, it is quite clear that some eyes will be better than others and the same is true with regard to root systems. This sort of thinking is equally valid when it comes to an oak tree or an animal when a purpose is designated. Say, for the purpose of survival, one chipmunk may be better than the next but this does not show that this is the purpose of the chipmunk. I do not believe that it follows from the fact that a particular animal acts in a particular way such that acting in that way fulfills an end that therefore such is the purpose of the animal. Certainly a steer that is very passive and needs little coercision to move is a better steer than an active and aggresive one when it comes to fulfilling the end of cattle herding and slaughtering yet it would seem ridiculous to suppose that this is the purpose of the steer.

I just think that it is a mistake to think that on the basis of a thing's being good or bad at achieving some end that therefore such an end is its purpose. Moreover, of the various ends that animals act so as to achieve (i.e. survival, reproduction, etc.) which should be selected from these as the purpose? Take for example a chipmunk who, though reproductively unsuccessful, is a masterly in the art of evading predators and securing food and dies peacefully in his chipmunk hole at some ripe old age for chipmunks. Now compare this chipmunk to one that lives fast and dies young in the talons of an owl yet has left behind a score or more of baby chipmunks (which is of course an incredible number among chipmunks). Which is the good chipmunk? I have no idea what Foot would say. The natural response is that one is good for survival and the other is good for reproduction, but what this assumes is that the "good" attribution is relative to the "for what end" consideration. The former chipmunk is good qua some considerations and bad qua others and the same is true for the latter chipmunk, but to move from these facts to think that one is good qua nothing just seems to be nonsense. The move does not seem as nonsensical when it is done with regard to people (though I think that it probably is) but in this case it is just ridiculous.

The problem here is, I think, with the notion of purposes that are external to the agent on which the agent can be judged. It would be quite true to say that I am failing miserably at achieving the end or purpose of becoming a doctor and so too could one say that with respect to this end I am defective. But one can not move from this to the claim that I am defective (without adding "in such and such respect"). Similarly one can argue that a person is defective in fulfilling the purpose of social living but from this the move to say that they just are defective does not work. The point of all this is that if Foot is going to claim that something is good, like a system of roots, then I think that she is going to have to answer the question of "good for what?" and if she does not than I just can not see the substance of her claim. But if she does answer that question and gives a "for what" then she can no longer call the roots just plain good and thereby loses what I think she is after i.e. the no holds barred good attribution.

This whole thing reminds me of Ziff's discussion of "good" at the end of his "Semantic Analysis". His conclusion is that "good" just means "answering to certain interests" (where, I am quite sure, "answering" can be understood as fulfilling). If this sort of definition is taken seriously then it would be just plain nonsense to talk about something good without talking about "certain interests" or "for what" considerations. Because Foot does not do this, I think that there view is bound to fail. One just can not talk sensibly about the goodness or badness of something without anchoring his remarks in the considerations that give rise to them. Therefore, I think her account is rife with problems.