Sunday 1 August 2021

Introducing... Queen Philippa!

Every beehive has a single queen bee, and the queen in hive #2 is called Philippa. She is named after Philippa Foot, who was a philosopher and one of the founders of virtue ethics.

Philippa Foot attended Somerville College, Oxford from 1939–1942, where she obtained a first-class degree in philosophy, politics, and economics.  After a five year spell spent as a government economist, she took up the post of lecturer in philosophy at Somerville College in 1947.  Philippa spent the remainder of her career at Somerville, becoming a senior research fellow in 1969 and honorary fellow in 1988.  She also held a number of visiting professorships in the United States.

Philippa is best known for devising, along with Judith Jarvis Thomson, the thought experiment popularly known as the "trolley problem".  This considers the scenario where a runaway trolley is careering down the tracks towards five people.  If it continues on its present course, it will run into them and kill them.  You have control of a set of points; if you pull the lever, the trolley will be diverted onto a side-track.  However, there is one person on the side track who will be killed if the trolley is diverted onto it.  Which is the more moral choice?

Philippa was one of the founders of contemporary virtue ethics, and she spent much of her career considering questions such as "Why be moral?"  She was inspired by, and developed upon the ethics of Aristotle, and critiqued ideas including consequentialism and non-cognitivism.

You can find out more about Philippa Foot here: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philippa_Foot

Here is a photograph of her namesake, queen Philippa: