Foot, Philippa (1920-)

English moral philosopher.

In a series of concentrated articles starting in the 1950s' she has attacked emotivism and prescriptivism by arguing that moral considerations are "necessarily related in some way to good and harm", and that there is no separate "evaluation element" in the meaning of moral terms. Like Nietzsche, she sees no logical reason why people ought to care about morality; but she holds that "morality may be stronger than weaker if we look this fact in the face". Her principals are collected in Virtues and Values.