Episode Details

A runaway train, five workers, one lever: the trolley problem is debated everywhere from internet forums to self-driving car boardrooms. This episode goes beyond the puzzle to the woman who co-created it, Philippa Foot, and argues that she rescued modern morality from being dismissed as meaningless emotion. Born Philippa Bosanquet in 1920 in Lincolnshire, the granddaughter of US President Grover Cleveland, she began studying PPE at Somerville College, Oxford, in 1939 before leaving to serve as a government economist from 1942 to 1947, a wartime experience of rationing and life-or-death trade-offs that shaped her demand for a practical philosophy.

Back at Oxford she shared an apartment with Iris Murdoch and forged a combative intellectual partnership with G.E.M. Anscombe, who connected her to Wittgenstein's focus on how language is actually used. Armed with those tools she attacked the non-cognitivism of A.J. Ayer and C.L. Stevenson, the so-called boo-hurrah theory, by showing that thick concepts like cruelty and justice are inseparable from factual criteria. We follow her evolving answer to why anyone should be good, from her early view of virtues as functionally necessary to her later argument that morality is a system of hypothetical imperatives and that humans are volunteers, not conscripts, in the army of virtue, illustrated by the Siege of Leningrad. We close with her 1967 paper on abortion that introduced the trolley problem to test the doctrine of double effect.

• How five years as a wartime economist made abstract moral theories feel hollow to her
• The counterfeit bill analogy that explains why facts and values cannot be separated
• Why she rejected Kant's categorical imperative in favor of human desire and devotion
• What the doctrine of double effect says about intending harm versus foreseeing it
• Her role in reviving Aristotelian virtue ethics and her professorship at UCLA