Ep. 369: Philippa Foot's Naturalistic Ethics (Part Two)

Picture this. You're on a date, and then bad breath happens. Confidence gone. Here's the truth. Most gums and mints are just bad breath band aids, but not Zelleman's minty mouth. The functional breath freshener you swallow, tiny dual action capsules with mint on the outside, parsley seed oil inside, clinically tested to fight the toughest offenders, even garlic and onions. It's only available online. Go to zellman's.com, zelmins, zellman's.com, code fresh for 15% off. Okay. Only 10 more presents to wrap. You're almost at the finish line. But first there. The last one. Enjoy a Coca Cola for a pause that refreshes. Today's episode is brought to you by IDOU. For a limited time, IDOU is offering our listeners 15% off-site wide. Go to idou.com/pel. You're listening to the Partially Examined Life episode 369, part two. We've been discussing a Phillip Foote's book, Natural Goodness, and we've given a lot of overview. I think we wanna dive more and more into the actual text and giving quotes and things and not just taking our word for the fact that some of this is confusing. So I think we're still in chapter one here, just about 11 pages in. So I think the next, she's gonna say that, you know, as we've said, goodness has to be built into practical rationality from the ground up. And she'll make the claim on pages 14 to 15 that no one can act with full practical rationality in pursuit of a bad end even if they do it really well. Right? Even if it's done, quote, unquote, rationally, like I said, with the knife being good at robbing someone, for instance, and pulling all that off perfectly. So morality and this is where she says she agrees with Kant. Morality is concerned specifically with goodness of the will, but she wants to ground that in essential features of a specifically human life. And that's what's gonna lead us to this analogy with plants and animals where we can talk about rationality or the will as a a characteristic of human beings that we can treat on analogy to, say, roots in a plant, and we can say whether it's functioning properly or not on that analogy. Right. So even though Kant takes his his first step, that only morality all always has to come from a goodwill. The the goodwill is the defining character. I think we should take goodwill here in more of an Aristotelian sense, a well functioning will. What does that mean for a human being? And she does eventually get in chapter five and further, you know, into bringing forward the kind of arguments that we should be all for getting into more of the meat of doing moral theorizing as opposed to metaethics, which I think is what our focus is here. That if you are able to resist temptation, if you're focused according to right? She asked these questions like, what would for Aristotle, a good will …