Perhaps Humans Aren’t ‘Naturally Good’ At All

To Philippa Foot, one of the marvelous generation of British philosophers that also included Iris Murdoch, that seemed almost clear after WWII. “What would a moral philosophy look like if it started from a darker picture of human beings as not, basically, ‘decent chaps’? Part of what animated Foot and her allies was a conviction that the answer to such a question would not be easy or self-contained, would not be the sort of logical proof one could polish off in a few weeks.”