Natural Goodness, Sex, and the Perverted Faculty Argument

There is a longstanding and widely held view, often associated with Catholicism, that intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts are intrinsically immoral. Some philosophers who hold this view, such as Edward Feser, claim that they can defend the view on purely philosophical grounds by relying on the perverted faculty argument. This paper argues that Feser's defense of the perverted faculty argument does not work because Feser fails to recognize the full implications of the species-dependence of natural goodness. By drawing on the work of Peter Geach and Philippa Foot, this paper presents a view of natural goodness that adequately accounts for the species-dependence of such goodness. Using this adequate account, the paper argues that at least some intrinsically nonprocreative human sex acts contribute to human flourishing.

A New Metaphysics for Virtue Ethics

This chapter proposes a new metaphysics for virtue ethics, hermeneutic ontology, that is opposed to the orthodox ‘natural goodness’ metaphysics of goodness owed to Foot, and developed in a virtue ethical direction by Hursthouse. This ‘new metaphysics’ is initially inspired by McDowell’s view that the stance of science is not the only mode of access to the real and in particular to ethical reality. But the notion of access is ambiguous between an ontological notion and an epistemological notion. The development of the ontological notion is the topic of this chapter and is owed to Heidegger. Central to this development is the idea that intentional access to the being of entities as, for example, ethical is through logos, a network of significance relations. Two key problems—the plurality of the logoi, and critique of the logos—are topics of later sections.

Power-ing up neo-aristotelian natural goodness

Something is good insofar as it achieves its end, so says a neo-Aristotelian view of goodness. Powers/dispositions are paradigm cases of entities that have an end, so say many metaphysicians. A question therefore arises, namely, can one account for neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of an ontology of powers? This is what I shall begin to explore in this paper. I will first provide a brief explication of both neo-Aristotelian goodness and the metaphysics of powers, before turning to investigate whether one can give an account of neo-Aristotelian goodness in terms of powers. I will suggest that the answer to this question is yes.

6. America

What did Montaigne think of the New World? “America” looks at two of his essays, “On Coaches” and “On Cruelty.” Montaigne saw virtue as a sliding scale, seeing natural goodness, including his own, as less evolved, whereas a man overcoming dark urges carried more weight. Montaigne abhorred cruelty, and while he did not see the New World’s inhabitants as innocent, he mourned the lost opportunities for brotherhood in the Old World’s razing of the New for “pearls and pepper” and found in the tribes a useful rhetorical device for contrasting their “savage” behavior, such as cannibalism, with the more calculated cruelties of the Old World.

Depicting Human Form

This paper involves constructive exegesis. I consider the contrast between morality and art as sketched in Philippa Foot's 1972 paper of the same name, ‘Morality and Art’. I then consider how her views might have shifted against the background of the conceptual landscape afforded by Natural Goodness (2001), though the topic of the relation of art and morality is not explicitly explored in that work. The method is to set out some textual fragments from Natural Goodness that can be arranged for a tentative Footian ‘aesthetics’. I bring them into conversation with some ideas from Iris Murdoch to elucidate what I think the import may be, for Foot, of depicting human form.

Virtues as Perfections of Human Powers: On the Metaphysics of Goodness in Aristotelian Naturalism

The central idea of Philippa Foot’s Natural Goodness is that moral judgments belong to the same logical kind of judgments as those that attribute natural goodness and defect to plants and animals. But moral judgments focus on a subset of human powers that play a special role in our lives as rational animals, namely, reason, will, and desire. These powers play a central role in properly human actions: those actions in which we go for something that we see and understand as good. Many readers of Foot resolutely ignore what she says about the human good being sui generis and obstinately continue to read her as advocating a version of naturalism grounded in empirical study of human nature. One might wonder how else it could count as a naturalistic view unless we could square the view with nature as studied by the empirical sciences. In this paper, I propose a metaphysical response to this question: help can come from turning to recent defenses of Aristotelian essentialism. Foot’s naturalism can square with nature as interpreted through the lens of Aristotelian essentialism. On such a view, the virtues are perfections of human powers including reason, will, and desire.