Moral Dilemmas

Abstract

Abstract Moral Dilemmas is the second volume of collected essays by the eminent moral philosopher Philippa Foot. It fills the gap between her 1978 collection Virtues and Vices and her acclaimed monograph Natural Goodness, published in 2001. Moral Dilemmas contains the best of Prof. Foot's work from the late 1970s to the 1990s. In these essays, she develops further her influential critique of the ’non‐cognitivist’ approaches that have dominated moral philosophy over the last fifty years. She shows why it is a mistake to think of evaluations in general (or moral judgements in particular) as distinguished from ‘statements of fact’ by a special connection with the feelings, attitudes, or commitments of an individual speaker. Instead, she portrays thoughts about the goodness or badness of human action as like (though also unlike) the evaluation of other operations of human beings, and those of all living things. She also discusses moral relativism, utilitarianism, and moral dilemmas, as well as some subjects of special relevance to medical ethics. This work contains a select bibliography of the publications of Philippa Foot. With Prof. Foot's other two books, these essays present her distinctive and lasting contributions to twentieth‐century moral philosophy.