Philippa Foot | English philosopher, 90

Philippa Foot, a philosopher who argued that moral judgments have a rational basis and who introduced the renowned ethical thought experiment known as the Trolley Problem, died at her home in Oxford, England, on Oct. 3, her 90th birthday.

Her death was announced on the website of Somerville College, Oxford, where she earned her academic degrees and taught for many years.

In her early work, notably in the essays "Moral Beliefs" and "Moral Arguments," published in the late 1950s, Ms. Foot took issue with philosophers such as R.M. Hare and Charles L. Stevenson, who maintained that moral statements were ultimately expressions of attitude or emotion, because they could not be judged true or false in the same way factual statements could be.

Ms. Foot countered this "private-enterprise theory," as she called it, by arguing for the interconnectedness of facts and moral interpretations. Her writing on the subject helped establish virtue ethics as a leading approach to the study of moral problems.

It was the Trolley Problem, presented in a 1967 essay, that captured the imagination of scholars outside her discipline.

It offered the ethical dilemma faced by the driver of a runaway trolley hurtling toward five track workers. By diverting the trolley to a spur where just one worker is on the track, the driver can save five lives. Clearly, the driver should divert the trolley and kill one worker rather than five.

But what about a surgeon who could also save five lives - by killing a patient and distributing the patient's organs to five other patients who would otherwise die?

By means of such problems, Ms. Foot hoped to clarify thinking about the moral issues surrounding abortion in particular, but she applied a similar approach to matters such as euthanasia.

Philippa Judith Bosanquet was born in 1920 in Owston Ferry, Lincolnshire. Her mother, Edith, was a daughter of President Grover Cleveland.

- N.Y. Times News Service