Murdoch

Works

Three philosophical books and twenty-six novels she refused to have read as illustrations.

• The Sovereignty of Good (1970) contains the three essays that carry the argument: attention, the critique of the moral agent as a choosing will, and the Good as a non-representable reality.
• Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992) is the long late statement, restating the Platonism at length.
• Sartre: Romantic Rationalist (1953), her first book, is where the critique of the existentialist picture of the will begins.
• The novels stage failures of attention repeatedly, and she resisted having them read as demonstrations of the philosophy.

Central ideas

Four, and the second is the case the whole argument rests on.

• Attention, taken from Weil: a just and loving gaze at an individual reality. Moral improvement is improvement in seeing, and what one can choose is limited by what one has been able to see.
• The mother-in-law case: a woman who finds her son's wife vulgar sets herself to look again, and over time comes to see her as refreshingly simple. No action is taken and nothing observable changes. The example is constructed to show that the moral event can be entirely a change in perception.
• Unselfing: the ego is the main obstacle to seeing anything as it is, and art or the contemplation of something outside oneself can occasion the self-forgetting that lets reality appear.
• The Good as a transcendent, non-representable reality — a Platonism about value maintained without God, and the most metaphysically expensive part of the position.

Distinctive vocabulary

Three terms whose contemporary senses are almost unrelated.

• Attention: a just and loving gaze at a particular reality. Not focus, not concentration, not mindfulness.
• Unselfing: the setting aside of the ego so that something else can appear. Not self-erasure and not humility as a disposition.
• Fantasy: self-serving projection that stands between a person and what is there. Distinguished by her from imagination, which is the disciplined effort to see.

Debates and disagreements

The most consequential question for a work like this one is whether the account can be assessed at all.

• If the moral work is internal and, as her own central case insists, leaves no observable trace, then no third party can evaluate it. That is protective of a person's interior and disabling for any ethics that has to adjudicate a disagreement, and both consequences follow from the same feature.
• Whether Platonism about the Good is defensible without theology, or whether the Good is standing in for something she declined to name.
• Whether unselfing underdescribes the standing of one's own needs and claims, which is the objection pressed hardest from feminist directions.

Intellectual relationships

One source, one target, and a group of contemporaries attacking the same picture.

• Simone Weil supplies attention as a moral category, and the concept arrives with its religious framing largely intact.
• Plato supplies the Good and the movement from appearance to reality, which she keeps as metaphysics rather than as metaphor.
• Sartre is the first target: a will choosing in a value-neutral world is exactly the picture she rejects, and the prescriptivist and emotivist positions in Oxford shared it from the other direction.
• Anscombe, Foot and Midgley were attacking the same moral vocabulary at the same time, and the revival of virtue ethics came out of that convergence.
• Levinas, in this same lens lineage, also makes another person primary and refuses rules — and locates the obligation before any seeing, which she does not.

How it changes this reading

Murdoch is named in the lineage of the Ethical lens.

• She supplies a different location for ethics: not in rules and not in acts, but in the quality of a person's attention, most of which is spent before any choice presents itself.
• The sharpest thing she offers this work is her own central case. A moral change with no observable trace means a record of what someone did is systematically incomplete as moral evidence — and the incompleteness runs both ways. A record cannot convict and it cannot vindicate.
• That is a stronger version of a caution this work makes elsewhere on evidentiary grounds, because here it follows from the ethics rather than from the limits of documentation.
• It is not evidence about anyone's attention, seeing, or moral effort.

Useful comparisons

The Ethical lens names four positions on where morality happens.

• Emmanuel Levinas: an asymmetrical obligation to another that precedes any perception of them.
• Care ethics: responsiveness within concrete relations of dependence.
• Lewis Hyde: circulation that creates a bond between the people it passes through.
• Iris Murdoch: attention, the just and loving gaze, and the unselfing that makes it possible.

Where the ideas meet

None of the four is a theory of applying rules.

• None treats a moral question as a case to be subsumed under a principle.
• All four locate the moral in a relation to a particular other rather than in a general maxim.
• Each treats attention or responsiveness as prior to judgement.

Where they part

Her position differs from each of the others in a way that matters.

• Levinas's obligation precedes seeing and does not depend on getting anyone right; for Murdoch the seeing IS the moral act, and getting someone right is the whole difficulty. Both make the other primary and they disagree about what primacy means.
• Care ethics is practical and relational; her attention is contemplative and can be performed alone, in silence, toward someone absent or dead.
• Hyde's account requires a transfer between people; hers requires none, and its central case involves no interaction at all.
• Her ethics is nearly silent about justice, institutions and power, which the political references elsewhere in this work supply and which she does not.

Limits

What this reference can carry here is narrow, and the limit is unusually clean.

• The moral work she describes is unobservable by construction. Nothing about it can be established from a record in either direction.
• A theory about where morality happens establishes nothing about where it happened for anyone.

Criticisms

The objections are metaphysical, practical and political.

• The Platonism about the Good is expensive and it is not clear it stands without the theology she declined to state.
• An ethics whose central work is unassessable by anyone but the agent cannot adjudicate a dispute, and disputes are much of what ethics is asked for.
• Unselfing underdescribes the standing of one's own needs, which is a real cost rather than a misreading.
• The account has very little to say about justice, structure or power, and reads as a private ethics for someone whose circumstances permit contemplation.
• The relation between her fiction and her philosophy invites the illustrative reading she rejected, and the rejection has not stopped it.

Common misreadings

Five uses this placement does not license.

• Using attention to mean focus, concentration or mindfulness.
• Reading unselfing as self-erasure or as a recommendation to discount one's own claims.
• Inferring anyone's inner moral work from a record, which her central case is specifically built to show is impossible.
• Reading the novels as illustrations of the philosophy.
• Citing the Good as a religious claim, which she deliberately declined to make.

What remains outside this idea

• It cannot establish anything about any person's attention or moral effort.
• It cannot convert an account of where morality happens into evidence that it happened.