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Record W2030755280 · doi:10.1017/s0012217300001013

Philippa Foot's Virtue Ethics Has an Achilles' Heel

2006· article· en· W2030755280 on OpenAlexaff
Scott Woodcock

Bibliographic record

VenueDialogue · 2006
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldHealth Professions
TopicEthics in medical practice
Canadian institutionsUniversity of Victoria
Fundersnot available
KeywordsNaturalismVirtueNormativeVirtue ethicsEpistemologyNormative ethicsNatural (archaeology)Foot (prosody)AppealPhilosophyConsequentialismSociologyLawPolitical science

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

ABSTRACT My aim in this article is to argue that Philippa Foot fails to provide a convincing basis for moral evaluation in her bookNatural Goodness.Foot's proposal fails because her conception of natural goodness and defect in human beings either sanctions prescriptive claims that are clearly objectionable or else it inadvertently begs the question of what constitutes a good human life by tacitly appealing to an independent ethical standpoint to sanitize the theory's normative implications. Foot's appeal to natural facts about human goodness is in this way singled out as an Achilles' heel that undermines her attempt to establish an independent framework for virtue ethics. This problem might seem to be one that is uniquely applicable to the bold naturalism of Foot's methodology; however, I claim that the problem is indicative of a more general problem for all contemporary articulations of virtue ethics.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

How this classification was reachedexpand

Full frame machine prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.005
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.014
Version: metacan-v3-hybrid-931329e0061cValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesnone
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Theoretical or conceptual · Consensus signal: Theoretical or conceptual
GenreCandidate signal: Commentary · Consensus signal: Commentary
Teacher disagreement score0.006
Threshold uncertainty score0.027

Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0050.014
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0010.001
Science and technology studies0.0050.026
Scholarly communication0.0060.005
Open science0.0010.004
Research integrity0.0050.006
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0050.001

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.173
GPT teacher head0.477
Teacher spread0.304 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Classification

machine, unvalidated

Machine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.

The models applied no category: nothing in the taxonomy fit this work.
Study designTheoretical or conceptual
Domainnot available
GenreCommentary

How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".

Quick stats

Citations47
Published2006
Admission routes1
Has abstractyes

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