## 1. Overview



Murdoch's family was middle class (her father was a civil
servant) and Irish Protestant (an identity that remained important to
Murdoch throughout her life). They moved to London from Ireland when
Murdoch was very young. Murdoch attended Oxford University,
overlapping with three other women--Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa
Foot, and Mary Midgley--at a time (1938-1942) when many
male students were away at war. Foot, Murdoch, and Midgley all became
prominent and influential moral philosophers, and Anscombe a prominent
philosopher of action and a student, friend, translator and
interpreter of Wittgenstein.



The four (now being referred to as the "Wartime Quartet"
[MacCumhaill & Wiseman 2022; Lipscomb 2021]) stayed in
touch after the war, and Murdoch did so with each of them
individually. All four pushed back against various aspects of the
male-dominated Oxford orthodoxy of linguistic and analytic philosophy
(e.g., the fact/value dichotomy, the severing of ethics from an
understanding of human nature, the neglect of virtue and vice), though
their own philosophies differed significantly from one another.



Over her lifetime Murdoch developed an entirely distinctive position
in moral philosophy, as well as philosophy of art and religion (both
of which she saw as important for morality). She was engaged with the
Anglo-American moral philosophy of that period and its historical
antecedents (such as Hobbes and Hume) but was equally engaged
throughout her life with traditional and some then-current
"Continental" philosophy--especially Schopenhauer,
Hegel, Heidegger (on whom she wrote a book, to be published in the
near future), Sartre, Adorno, Buber, and Derrida; with Christian
thinkers St. Paul, St. Augustine, Anselm, Eckhart, Julian of Norwich;
and with Hindu and especially Buddhist thought. Her views were also
strongly influenced by Plato, Kant, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein, and
she declared herself in 1968 to be "a kind of Platonist"
(Rose 1968).


## 2. Murdoch's Trajectory and Reception



Murdoch taught at Oxford from 1948-1963 (as both tutor and
lecturer), and was highly regarded by colleagues, often appearing in
collections and BBC programs with leading British philosophers
generally though not always in the analytic or linguistic tradition.
She was comfortable with the analytic approach, though her thinking
was clearly headed in different directions, in part because of the
influence of Simone Weil (Broackes 2012a: 19-20).



However, unusual for Oxford philosophers of that period, she was also
drawn to Jean-Paul Sartre's existentialism, to which she had
been exposed while working after the war in Belgium (and Austria) for
the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration (UNRRA).
Her first book, in 1953, was *Sartre: Romantic Rationalist*.
She was instrumental in bringing French thinkers of that period,
including also Simone de Beauvoir, the feminist/existentialist, and
Albert Camus, to an English-speaking audience.



Murdoch left her position at Oxford in 1963 (though she continued to
live in Oxford for some of each week) and increasingly lost touch with
British academic philosophy. As of this writing, Murdoch is best known
for a collection of three essays written in the 1960s, none originally
published in easily accessible philosophy venues, published in 1970 as
*The Sovereignty of Good*. This collection is by far the main
source for professional philosophers writing on Murdoch, and of
Murdoch's broader impact on moral philosophy, and this entry
will draw largely but not exclusively on that work.



Toward the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, some Anglo-American
philosophers began to make use of Murdoch in criticizing moral
philosophy of the day, or in developing a distinctive position of
their own. This included Charles Taylor, Hilary Putnam, Cora Diamond,
Genevieve Lloyd, John McDowell, Raimond Gaita, Martha Nussbaum,
Lawrence Blum and Sabina Lovibond. This early secondary literature did
not involve deep scholarly engagement with Murdoch's own work,
but was inspired by it and helped bring Murdoch to the attention of
the wider professional philosophical world.



A collection of almost all Murdoch's previous articles
(including those in *Sovereignty*) plus a short book on Plato
was published in 1997, as *Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on
Philosophy and Literature,* edited by her friend and biographer,
the literary scholar Peter Conradi. That and the first scholarly
collection on her work, *Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human
Goodness* (Antonaccio & Schweiker 1996), with essays by
theologians and philosophers (including Diamond, Nussbaum, and Taylor)
prompted an increase in scholarship directly on Murdoch in the 2000s.
Justin Broackes's *Iris Murdoch, Philosopher*, in 2012,
was the first all-philosopher collection on Murdoch. While the recent
scholarship sometimes aims at demonstrating Murdoch's relevance
to current live issues in Anglo-American ethics (Setiya 2013; Hopwood
2018), increasingly, scholarship (including the two articles just
cited) engages with Murdoch's own philosophical
preoccupations on her terms.



In 1992, Murdoch published her sole book working out her own
philosophical views (*Sovereignty* being a collection of
separately published essays), *Metaphysics as a Guide to
Morals*. Murdoch's views, especially in the latter work,
have been difficult for contemporary philosophers to place comfortably
within the intellectual terrain of moral philosophy as it has
developed in our time, in part because of her unusual range of
intellectual touchstones; in part because, especially in
*Metaphysics*, she seldom writes in a standard
"argument/conclusion" format; and in part because of her
intellectual distance from contemporary Anglo-American philosophy.
There is currently very little secondary literature on
*Metaphysics*, but Dooley and Hamalainen's 2019
collection, *Reading Iris Murdoch's Metaphysics as a Guide to
Morals* will hopefully spur further scholarship on that work. A
Routledge Handbook, Hopwood and Panizza's *The Murdochian
Mind* (forthcoming), will contribute substantially to
Murdoch scholarship.



Murdoch is distinctive as a philosopher in another way as well.
Beginning in 1954, she became a published novelist, with twenty-six
novels in her lifetime, several of which won or were short-listed for
important British literary prizes. Although her philosophy and her
novels can be read entirely separately from one another, they are
plausibly regarded as connected and mutually illuminating, although in
interviews Murdoch sometimes denied this. A good deal of scholarly
literature (mostly from literary scholars [but from the philosophy
side, see Nussbaum 1990; Browning 2018b]) is devoted to exploring
their connection and non-connection. Murdoch is the subject of an
award-winning biography, *Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch*, by
Peter Conradi (2001), and an award-winning film of that same year,
*Iris* (dir: Richard Eyre), based on a memoir by
Murdoch's husband, John Bayley, which focuses largely on her
decline into Alzheimer's in her last years (Bayley 1999). The
Iris Murdoch Society publishes (since 2008) a twice-yearly journal,
the *Iris Murdoch Review* (see Other Internet
Resources), that had been almost entirely a venue for scholarship
and commentary on Murdoch's literary oeuvre, but recently has
started to carry much more philosophy.


## 3. Murdoch in Her Times



As is generally recognized, the English philosophical tradition has a
strong empiricist and anti-metaphysical bent. An important exception
was the late 19th and early 20th century
movement of a Hegelian-influenced "absolute idealism",
whose most prominent exponent was F.H. Bradley (1846-1924). This
movement was seen as discredited by two prominent early
20th century British philosophers, G.E. Moore and Bertrand
Russell. The final blow was dealt by A.J. Ayer "logical
positivist" work, *Language, Truth, and Logic*,
channeling for an English audience views developed by the Vienna
Circle in the 1920s and 30s. Logical positivism essentially declared
that what made a statement meaningful was the possibility of verifying
it through empirical observation. Science was seen as the paradigm,
though not the only, form of meaningful discourse. Metaphysical
statements typical of British Idealism, such as that "all
reality is one" or that "time is unreal", were
viewed as meaningless because unverifiable. Ethical and evaluative
statements, such as that killing is wrong, were taken to have no
cognitive significance. Murdoch thus came of age when the metaphysical
tradition was still within memory (she read Bradley seriously and
taught him), even if regarded as discredited. For her entire career,
she retained a strong sense of the value of metaphysics both in itself
and as providing broader visions and structures for moral
philosophical reflection, while also appreciating the force of
especially a Wittgensteinian critique of traditional metaphysics. Her
main tutor at Oxford, Donald MacKinnon, with whom she remained close
through much of her younger life, was a philosophical theologian, and
helped influence her in a less positivistic direction, also less
distant from and hostile to religion (MacKinnon 1957).



Soon verificationism and its related ethical view,
"emotivism" (ethical statements express emotions,
especially of approval and disapproval) was abandoned and a more
sophisticated, and (in Oxford) a much more influential view of ethical
language was developed by R.M. Hare, in his 1952 *The Language of
Morals*. Hare said that moral statements did not aim to make
truthful assertions, but had a distinct character as prescriptions,
telling their addressees to do what is stated in the prescription.
Hare's view, "universal prescriptivism", said that a
prescription no matter what its content was moral if the subject
prescribed it for all (or everyone relevantly similarly situated), and
in that sense universally.



Hare's account of ethics involved several assumptions, not
always articulated, but widely shared in the practice of moral
philosophy in the 1950s (and many of them beyond). Murdoch's
rejection of all of them provides an essential backdrop to her
distinctive approach to ethics.


1. Fact/value dichotomy: A fact can never entail a
value. If a term appears to be simultaneously factual and evaluative
(e.g., "rude", to take an example made famous by
Murdoch's dear friend Philippa Foot), it is really a conjunction
of a descriptive/factual meaning and an evaluation conferred on the
factual referent by the speaker. This view is inherited from the
empiricist tradition "created in the scientific image" (SG
1970:
 28/321[1]).
 Murdoch says it is "the most important argument in modern moral
philosophy" (M&E 1957/EM: 64).
2. Moral agents all inhabit the same shared world of
facts (M&E 1957/EM: 71).
3. Values are not part of the world, capable of being
discovered by individual agents, but are brought to or projected onto
the world by moral agents. Quite often, situations present no moral
issues for the agent at all.
4. The fundamental subject matter of ethics is what acts
persons should perform, and principles and procedures for determining
those acts, not what kind of person it is good to be (e.g., what sort
of qualities of character, or virtues, it is good to have), or how to
describe the human world, an enterprise Murdoch takes to be inherently
ethical.
5. "The individual's 'stream of
consciousness' is of comparatively little importance, partly
because it is often not there at all, and more pertinently because it
is and can only be through overt acts that we can characterize another
person mentally or morally" (VCM 1956/EM 77). Inner reflection
is of moral interest only as it issues in choice, decision and
action.
6. Metaphysics has no legitimate role to play in ethics,
and is not an intellectually coherent project.
7. The role of the moral philosopher is distinct from
that of the moralist, who aims to "elaborate a moral code or
encourage its observance", as Ayer says (Warnock 1960: 131). The task of the
moral philosopher is to analyze the character of moral statements, a
linguistic/analytic rather than moral enterprise. The moral
philosopher qua philosopher should remain neutral on specific moral
issues or more generally on questions about how to act and live.



Murdoch's rejection of all these views in her writings of the
1950s and 60s is partly connected with her take on existentialism.
Existentialism attracted Murdoch partly because it was a philosophy
one could "inhabit" or "live by" [OGG:
47/337]. For existentialism it mattered tremendously what one did, in
particular situations as well as with one's life overall, and
how philosophy was to guide and illuminate that journey. That sense of
urgency is lacking in British philosophical ethics in its turn toward
characterizing "the language of morals", partly because
this enterprise was seen as morally neutral, not having implications
for conduct. (Murdoch's friend Foot, who herself famously
challenged the idea that the language of morals was morally neutral,
poignantly captured Murdoch's relation to the linguistic turn in
ethics: "We were interested in moral language, she was
interested in the moral life...She left us, in the end"
[Conradi 2001: 302].)


## 4. Murdoch's View of the Self Against the Existentialist/Behaviorist Account



Murdoch developed her own view of morality in reaction against both
Hare and (notwithstanding her admiration for it) Sartrean
existentialism as she understood it. (For a critique of her take on
existentialism, see Moran 2012.) Both viewed freedom as fundamental to
the moral enterprise. For Hare the moral agent is free to choose their
moral values, constrained only by the requirement that the agent
prescribe those values universally. Sartre shares the former view but
eschews the universalist "logic of morality"
 constraint.[2]
 For Sartre, anguish (Angst) attends our recognition that our choices
are totally up to us; Hare's view lacks that existential
anguish. But what interests Murdoch is their shared privileging of the
choosing will in the moral enterprise, the central image of the moral
agent as responsible and free (and, in Hare's case, rational),
and their rejection of a structure of objective value outside the
individual that gives authoritative direction for deciding and
choosing. Murdoch sees the appeal of this view, in both its
existentialist and analytic forms, but finds it false to our moral
experience and to the nature of moral agency.



In the 1962 "The Idea of Perfection" (in
*Sovereignty*), Murdoch begins to develop a contrasting picture
of the self, moral agency, and moral reality, building on her 1956
"Vision and Choice in Morality". Her stated target is not
Hare, who is only briefly mentioned, but Stuart Hampshire, whom she
admired as a subtler and deeper thinker (and to whom she dedicated
*Sovereignty*) and whom she regarded, in his 1959 *Thought
and Action*, as having articulated and defended much more
explicitly than Hare the view of human agency and the self underlying
Hare's moral theory (largely but not entirely incorporating the
seven characteristics of Hare's philosophy mentioned above).
Murdoch says that the will does not engage in choice out of nowhere,
but out of a rich and complex individual psyche formed by ongoing
attitudes, perceptions, drives, attachments, beliefs, and modes of
attention. This substantial self is in the process of formation,
change, and development all the time; and it provides the context for
choice in determinate situations (against
 point 4 above).
 Murdoch notes that sometimes our way of apprehending a particular
situation will seem to make so evident to us what we should do that
processes of deliberation standardly underlying choice will not be
necessary and we will simply perform the action. We should not, she
thinks, value a kind of "freedom" that would exert will
contrary to an accurate perception of moral features of the situation
that bear on conduct.



Murdoch says that philosophy should develop a moral or philosophical
psychology that provides the terms in which to understand and
characterize the substantial self to which she gives center stage,
displacing the existentialist/analytic (which she sometimes calls
"existentialist-behavioristic") freely choosing will. This
call for a new turn in philosophical ethics toward what came to be
called "moral psychology" helped to usher in that subject.
It somewhat echoed Murdoch's friend Elizabeth Anscombe's
similar but more radical and striking charge in her 1958 "Modern
Moral Philosophy" to put the subject of ethics on hold until a
philosophical psychology that clarified the notions of intention,
will, desire, and belief could be developed. But Anscombe thought of
philosophical psychology as an enterprise independent of and prior to
doing ethics (Anscombe 1958 [1997: 38]). By contrast Murdoch did not
think such a philosophical psychology (a term she also sometimes used
but more frequently used "moral psychology") could be
separated from ethics (OGG: 46/337; Diamond 2010; Brewer 2009:
8-9).



Murdoch takes some steps toward developing such a moral psychology by
embracing Freud as the great theorist of the human mind, who 



> 
> 
> sees the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy,
> largely determined by its own individual history, whose natural
> attachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject to
> understand or control. (OGG: 51/341) 
> 
> 
> 



This substantial self constrains the will much more extensively than
the existentialist/analytic picture recognizes. "The area of
[the moral agent's] vaunted freedom of choice is not usually
very great" (SGC: 78/364). We cannot easily rid ourselves of
pernicious emotions, attachments and motives that work against moral
motivation and behavior. Murdoch adds, 



> 
> 
> Introspection reveals only the deep tissue of ambivalent motive, and
> fantasy is a stronger force than reason. Objectivity and unselfishness
> are not natural to human beings. (OGG: 51/241) 
> 
> 
> 



She sees the Freudian view as "a realistic and detailed picture
of the fallen man" (OGG: 51/241), one of many places where her
philosophy is influenced by a Christian worldview, as she fully
recognizes. This pessimistic view of the human psyche plays a central
role in Murdoch's thought for her entire life, bolstered by her
encounter with Schopenhauer and her particular take on Kant, both of
whom articulate a philosophic dualism with a strong egoistic
anti-moral force countered by a moral force (differing among those
two philosophers) in the psyche.


## 5. Moral Reality and Moral Realism



Murdoch's critique of the existentialist/analytic conception of
the self and the will mirrors her critique of both the Sartrean and
Harean rejection of a moral reality outside the individual self. She
believes in that reality, that it can be known by human persons, and
that that reality, or the apprehension of it, motivates us to act
morally. She is thus a "moral realist", "moral
objectivist" and "moral cognitivist" (thus rejecting
 point 3
 [values are not part of the world]).



There are three distinct strands within Murdoch's conception of
moral reality--"other persons", "the
Good", and "metaphysics". Murdoch does not pull the
three together into an overall systematic view of moral reality.


### 5.1 Moral reality as other persons



A central strand in Murdoch's view is that moral reality is
other persons. Murdoch is not thinking of "other persons"
as an aggregate, nor primarily as instances of a category. Rather a
given moral agent's moral reality consists in the individual
reality of each other person, one at a time.



In this strand, Murdoch emphasizes the complexity and difficulty of
apprehending the moral reality in question. She says that we are prone
to fantasy and egoism (the "fat, relentless ego" [OGG:
52/342]) that block us from being able to see other persons clearly;
from appreciating that they are as real as oneself (SBL 1959/EM: 215);
from a lived recognition of their separateness and differentness (OGG:
66/353); and from grasping their true individual character (OGG:
59/348). Our ego must in a way be silenced--a process she refers
to as "unselfing" (a concept she draws from Simone
Weil's "decreation")--in order for us to
fully grasp reality in this
 sense.[3]
 ("We cease to be in order to attend to the existence of
something else". OGG: 59/349) Murdoch's novels frequently
portray characters lost in their own world who see others primarily
through their own fantasies of them. But Murdoch also emphasizes a
more general contingency and idiosyncrasy of persons, resulting in a
general opaqueness of persons to each other, a point apparently
independent of the one about fantasy and egoism, though complementing
it.



Murdoch thinks grasping the reality of the other comes in degrees,
that extend to a "perfect" understanding of another, a
state that can be aimed at but not actually attained. She often speaks
of levels of understanding--of persons, concepts, ideas--an
idea she increasingly comes to associate with Plato, and that she
connects with a "perfectionism" that holds out the perfect
understanding as a (moral) standard (IP: 29/322; OGG: 61/350). The
moral challenge of knowing the other differs for each individual agent
because each agent encounters different people, but also because the
task and challenge of knowing differs for each agent in relation to
each other person.



Sometimes Murdoch expresses the "other persons" strand in
more general terms--not only individual persons but
"individual realities" outside the (agent's) self.
This can include natural objects such as a tree or an individual
animal, but also non-animate and conceptual objects such as a language
or a subject matter, and also situations. She sometimes, and
increasingly so in *Metaphysics*, sees an appreciation of all
of reality in its manifold detail as a crucial form of moral
aspiration, and there is evidence in her novels of a special
appreciation of natural objects, not only living beings, and not only
as beautiful (White 2020). But more frequently Murdoch regards other
persons specifically as the content of moral reality.


### 5.2 Moral reality as Platonic good



A second, and increasingly prominent, strand in Murdoch's view
of moral reality is that it is "The Good", understood in a
Platonic sense. One element in Murdoch's Platonism is that
something like the form of the Good constitutes what is known when we
have moral knowledge, and is also what is sought and loved. We achieve
that understanding through knowing and loving the good in good
particular things (including persons but also art, nature and ideas),
then ascending to an understanding of Good itself. (Murdoch frequently
employs Plato's "ascending" metaphor [e.g., SGC:
94/377].) Murdoch also says, attributing it to Plato, that the Good is
like a light that enables us to see goodness in particular things
(SGC: 93/376).



Murdoch explicitly rejects two philosophically familiar ways to
understand "good"--a functional use ("good
knife"; SGC: 93/376) and good as "the most general
adjective of commendation" (SGC: 98/381). These do not give us a
clue to the concept. "A genuine mysteriousness attaches to the
idea of goodness and the Good" (SGC: 99/381).



While the Good is an object of both knowledge and love for Murdoch
(and she links those two notions ("to love, that is, to
see" [OGG: 66/354]; "attention to reality inspired by,
consisting of, love" [OGG: 67/354]), she does not subscribe to
the aspect of Plato's view that regards the forms as more real
than individual objects and persons who partake of them in the world
of experience, nor as inhabiting a transcendent world beyond our world
of experience (Hamalainen 2019: 267). And she rejects this as a
proper interpretation of Plato (SGC: 96/378f; Robjant provides a
detailed defense of her interpretation of Plato [Robjant 2012].)).


 The Good and other persons are distinct strands in Murdoch's
view of moral reality. But they reinforce each other. Hopwood
interprets Murdoch as saying that "we love particular
individuals in light of the Good, and we love the Good through
particular individuals" (Hopwood 2018: 486). Murdoch's
view is not analogous to Kant's idea that respecting the other
person involves directing that respect to the moral law or rational
will within them, or to their best self. (Velleman defends a form of
Kant's view as Murdochian, understanding rational will to be the
capacity for valuing [Velleman 1999 (2006: 100)]. Hopwood criticizes
this view [Hopwood 2018: 482].) For Murdoch loving and knowing other
persons is also not the same as knowing what is distinctly good in
them or about them. Susan Wolf rejects the idea that loving attention
as Murdoch (and she) understand it affirms the moral goodness, or
overall goodness, of its object. One can love, and direct loving
attention to, another whose deficiencies and faults she fully
recognizes (Wolf 2014). Both Cordner and Wolf emphasize that it is the
person as a whole that is the proper object of loving attention
(Cordner 2016; Wolf 2014). Murdoch agrees, in giving a criticism of
Kant: "Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular
tangled-up historical individuals" (M&E 1957/EM: 215).



Other connections between the Platonic and the other persons strands,
not necessarily incompatible with the ones mentioned, have been
proposed. Clarke suggests that the Good is a perfectionist principle
in Murdoch, so that seeing other persons in light of the Good is just
an expression of her perfectionism, pushing the agent to achieve a
more and more just, loving, and complete perception of that person
(Clarke 2012). Dorothy Emmet, an older contemporary and friend of
Murdoch presses a similar view, that the Good should be thought of as
a "regulative ideal" in the Kantian sense, "an
indefinable standard towards which we can turn in appreciation
of" what is Good (or Beautiful). But Emmet differs from Clarke
in denying that this is a moral principle (Emmet 1994 [this book was
dedicated to Murdoch]: 65-66; see also 1979 for one of the first
scholarly engagements with Murdoch). Emmet likely also influenced
Murdoch's resistance to British philosophy's jettisoning
of metaphysics in its analytic and linguistic modalities in the 1950s,
through Emmet's defense of metaphysics in her 1945 *The
Nature of Metaphysical Thinking*; which Murdoch read, and in her
and Murdoch's attempts starting in the 1950s (and in all of
Murdoch's subsequent writings) to bring religion and philosophy
closer together. Murdoch acknowledges that the Christian conception of
God influences her understanding of the Good. "I shall suggest
that God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable
and necessarily real object of attention" and that we should
retain a non-theistic concept [i.e., Good] with those characteristics
(OGG: 55/344). This semi-religious dimension relates to the idea
Murdoch occasionally expresses, and more so in *Metaphysics*,
that the Good is a source of energy that is not found within our
"natural psychology" (OGG: 71/358).


### 5.3 Murdoch, Sidgwick, Plato and the self/other moral framework


 Though "the Good" is a distinctly Platonic strand in
Murdoch's view of moral reality, the "other persons"
strand is un-Platonic in two important ways. One is that it involves a
sharp separation between self and other, and identifies morality with
attention to, love of, or concern for the other and not the self.
Henry Sidgwick articulated a standard view in Anglo-American moral
philosophy on this matter when he said that the field of ethics made
an important step beyond the ancients when it articulated
self-interest as a distinct rational principle of action that is
separate from a principle of the good of others, understood
impersonally. (He attributed this discovery to Bishop Butler.)
(Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 404]; Sidgwick 1886 [1902: 197-8]; Brewer
2009: 193). Neither Plato nor Aristotle have this exclusively
other-focused conception of virtue, common to both Murdoch and the
tradition Sidgwick identifies and praises. Murdoch agrees with
Sidgwick's self/other distinction as one of great moral
significance, though she does not regard cognizing or caring for the
other in terms either of rationality or principle.



A second difference from Plato (and Aristotle) is Murdoch's
rejection of the Greeks' sense that virtue and virtuous action
are good for their agent as well as for their own sake (but the former
"good for" is not understood by Plato or Aristotle
prudentially and is not separable from virtue being good for its own
sake [Brewer 2009: 202]). For Murdoch it is indeed good to act
virtuously, and doing so helps to constitute the agent as morally
good. But she does not understand this virtuousness as intrinsically
*good for* the agent. Virtue is pointless, as Murdoch often
says (OGG: 71/358; SGC: 78/364), and this is tied up with the view,
which she sees as historically produced from Kant to Existentialism,
that there is no inherent purpose in human life. "We are simply
here" with no larger purpose or *telos* (SGC:
79/364). But in the face of this purposelessness, being and becoming a
morally good person through a suppression or transcendence of self is
the best aspiration we can have.



Despite aligning with Sidgwick regarding the identification of
morality solely with an appropriate focus on the other and the
other's welfare, not that of the self, Murdoch's view
differs from Sidgwick's, as well as from much of the English
empiricist tradition in ethics (Hutcheson, Hume, Mill), in three
crucial respects. First, she pays very little attention to
*self-interest* as an egoistic obstacle to morality through our
unduly privileging our own interests over those of others. For Murdoch
the prime self-oriented obstacle to morality is fantasy, which gets in
the way of our seeing the other person as a distinct, separate, other
being with their own reality. Sometimes the personal fantasy idea is
bound up with *self-absorption*, which keeps us from being more
than barely aware of others at all. More frequently it is our
investment in false ideas of the (particular) other expressed in the
fantasy idea. Neither of these, however, is self-interest as an
overall motive or principle as Sidgwick envisages. All three (fantasy,
self-absorption, self-interest) are egoistic but in distinct ways.



A second difference from Sidgwick (and from Butler, Hume, and
Hutcheson, and the empiricist temper of British philosophy more generally)
is Murdoch's understanding of moral realism. She is viewing
morality not only as calling for a greater focus on the well-being of
others rather than the self, but saying that doing so involves being
in touch with, being responsive to, reality itself, while egoism
involves living in falsehood, being out of touch with reality.
"The self, the place where we live, is a place of
illusion" (SGC: 93/376). "The authority of morality is the
authority of truth, that is, of reality" (SGC: 90f/374).



Diamond and Brewer both note that Murdoch shares with both Plato and
Aristotle the view that reality is irreducibly evaluative (Diamond
2010, 59f; Brewer 2009: 152). The identification of the Real with the
Good is a deep part of Murdoch's view (Brewer 2009:
152). Murdoch recognizes that the view of reality as evaluatively
inert (in addition to human life having no *telos*) is an
historical product, tied up with the rise of natural science, with
Kant playing a particularly important role in solidifying it within
the Western philosophic tradition (MGM 1992: 40). She views Kant as
trying to rescue value and morality in the face of this scientistic
view of reality (MGM 1992: 50), but she entirely rejects that
(unPlatonic) view of reality. Diamond argues that in doing so she also
rejects the related Kantian distinction between the theoretical domain
and the practical domain (Diamond 2010: 73).



A third difference between Murdoch and the British tradition in ethics
is that the latter largely fails to recognize the difficulty
and psychic complexity, so central to Murdoch's view, of knowing
the (individual) other, and thus also often of knowing how to act
toward them so as to bring about their well-being. The notion of
"benevolence" as employed in that tradition is taken to
imply that being motivated to help others is sufficient to bring about
what is good for the other. Murdoch strongly rejects this view, since
the benevolent sentiment and motive does not guarantee an
understanding of the other's reality and well-being.


### 5.4 Moral realism, fact and value, practical reason



Murdoch's form of moral realism has spurred important and
influential secondary literature that is more engaged than Murdoch
herself with meta-ethical questions in the Anglo American tradition.
Hilary Putnam credits Murdoch with the critique he develops of the
fact/value dichotomy, focusing on what Murdoch calls "secondary
moral words" (IP: 22/317) and "normative-descriptive
words" (IP: 31/325; Putnam 2002: 34-35). (Bernard Williams
later influentially referred to these as "thick" moral or
evaluative concepts, such as cruel, rude, brave, courageous, generous,
elegant [Williams 1985]). These terms possess descriptive content but
are also evaluative, and often motivational, contrasting with the more
abstract moral terms "good", "right", and
"ought" that had dominated British moral philosophy
through the 1950s, and that almost entirely lack the descriptive
element. For Putnam there are evaluative facts ("Jane's
act was courageous") that have no less standing as describing
reality than a presumptively non-evaluative fact. Nor, he argues, can
the reality reflected in the characterization be factored into two
unrelated components joined together--an allegedly "purely
descriptive" component, and an evaluation of the content in that
component
 (point 1 on the Hare list).
 The two dimensions are inextricably "entangled", Putnam
argues (2002).



This view thus rejects a common moral non-cognitivist (but shared by
some cognitivists) claim that moral properties always
"supervene" on (that is, apply in virtue of)
already-existing non-moral properties. Panizza and Setiya defend this
implication of the existence of secondary moral terms (Panizza 2020;
Setiya 2013). Panizza connects the rejection of supervenience with
Murdoch's view that our direct perception of moral properties is
bound up with the ways that perception is deeply conceptual (Panizza
2020: 284-5; see also Setiya 2013).



Others have focused more distinctly on Murdoch's view's
implications for practical reason. John McDowell developed a
Murdochian-influenced moral realist view, in an influential 1979 paper
"Virtue and Reason", often also regarded as a founding
essay in the contemporary virtue ethics tradition (and indeed McDowell
sees his view [developed in other papers as well] as both Aristotelian
and Murdochian) (McDowell 1979, 1998). (More on Murdoch and virtue
below.)



McDowell says that to possess a virtue, such as kindness, is to
possess "a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement
which situations impose on behavior". Its 



> 
> 
> deliverances...are cases of knowledge... [A] kind person
> knows what it is like to be confronted with a requirement of kindness.
> The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity.
> (McDowell 1979 [1997: 142]) 
> 
> 
> 



McDowell adds that the reasons for action in particular situations
that moral perception cognizes cannot be derived from general
principles but retain a particularistic dimension, also emphasized by
Murdoch. (See "particularity" below.)



Setiya agrees with McDowell that for Murdoch reality as accurately
cognized supplies agents with motivating reasons, including moral
reasons, for action; this view thus constitutes a form of "moral
internalism". "Rationality belongs to full cognition of
the facts" (Setiya 2013: 13). Setiya responds to the objection
that a moral agent could apply a moral concept competently to a
situation but be unmoved by the moral force of the thus-characterized
situation. He notes that Murdoch speaks of 



> 
>  two senses of "knowing what a word means", one
> connected with ordinary language and the other very much less so. (IP:
> 29/322) 
> 
> 
> 



The second sense is the deeper understanding on which her moral
realism relies. And the deeper understanding can be both of a concept
and of an individual person in the situation to which the concept is
being applied (Setiya 2013: 9). Murdoch connects these points to an
aspect of her perfectionism, implying the ideal of perfect
understanding of both individuals and concepts.



But Setiya disagrees with McDowell's view that the moral reality
cognized by the moral agent must take the form of moral requirements
and indeed, more broadly, with action-guiding features of situations
(Setiya 2013: 11). Mylonaki criticizes McDowell on similar grounds and
both she and Setiya take the "other persons" view of the
moral reality Murdoch is concerned with (Mylonaki 2019; Setiya 2013:
11a). Mylonaki emphasizes, however, that cognizing that reality can
give rise to reasons for action.


### 5.5 Moral reality as metaphysics



A final thread in Murdoch's view of reality is that it is what
metaphysics describes. She understands metaphysics as an
all-encompassing view of a transcendent reality, of the universe, that
the individual must then attempt to come to understand in order to
work out her place in it (M&E 1957/EM: 70). In "Metaphysics
and Ethics" she mentions Thomism, Hegelianism, and Marxism as
examples. These metaphysical systems and pictures are deeply ethical
and evaluative, but, she implies, also provide a broader conception of
reality. In her 1950s essays, she defends metaphysical thinking not so
much as true, as capturing reality, but as a coherent way of thinking
about the moral endeavor of life that is excluded by the linguistic
turn in philosophical ethics, and which thereby refutes (Hare's)
universal prescriptivism's claim to be the sole moral theory
consistent with "the language of morals". She is
sympathetic to some moral, political, and philosophical/analytic
criticisms of metaphysical systems (especially that they can lose a
sense of the value of the individual [M&E 1957/EM: 70; Antonaccio
1996: 115f], and an acknowledgment of ultimate contingency [MGM 1992:
490]). Nevertheless, her evolving moral views always leave room for
some kind of transcendent structure beyond the individual that retains
ethical authority over the moral agent. The title of her final
summative work, *Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,* expresses
this continuing role for metaphysics in her thinking about morality
and reality. As Diamond argues, she is not thinking of
"metaphysics" as a non-morally-informed enterprise, as it
is sometimes understood. In that form, Diamond says, Murdoch would not
think it positioned to dictate what possibilities are open to moral
philosophy (Diamond 2010). A metaphysics of actual reality cannot
avoid being morally informed.



The Platonic strand of moral reality can of course be seen as
exemplifying the metaphysics strand, but the latter remains a more
general idea within Murdoch's complex overall view of moral reality. The
"other persons" strand seems less metaphysical and thus
contrary to the final strand. But Murdoch often speaks of the reality
of other people in "transcendental"
terms--transcending the individual ego--and this framing
thereby retains an element important to her complex and shifting
understanding of metaphysics. All three strands play a role in
Murdoch's thinking about (moral) reality, but the other persons
and the Good are distinctly more prominent.


### 5.6 Metaphor



In addition to but interwoven with the differences mentioned, other
persons, the Good, and metaphysics (or a particular metaphysical
system or concept) also embody distinct metaphors for understanding
moral reality. Murdoch often emphasizes the importance of metaphor in
thinking, especially in philosophy where, in the analytic tradition,
there is an often tacit assumption that any metaphorical use of
language can be given a purely literal rendering. Murdoch entirely
rejects this way of thinking about language and understanding and
often talks of exploring metaphors. 



> 
> 
> Metaphors are not merely peripheral decorations or even useful models,
> they are fundamental forms of our awareness of our condition. (SGC:
> 77/363, and elsewhere 93f/377) 
> 
> 
> 



The "other persons" strand involves an image of a struggle
of each moral agent to grasp the other person(s) in their particular
world as distinct persons, as equally real as themselves. The metaphor
of Good involves a reaching to an abstract and implied-to-be
"higher" entity. The metaphor of "metaphysics"
generally evokes an elaborated system within which the individual
agent is placed. The metaphorical dimension (with the differences
among the three) is integral to our understanding of each strand.


## 6. Moral Agency as Inner Activity



Murdoch's form of moral realism has influenced a critique of the
fact/value dichotomy; the development of a virtue-ethical form of
moral realism focused on right-making characteristics prompting acts
in the public world; and, more generally, debates about practical
reason and reasons for action. But the significance of Murdoch's
philosophy, and in particular of her version of moral realism, for an
understanding of morality significantly transcends those
contributions. (Setiya recognizes that Murdoch herself is barely
interested in reason or rationality [Setiya 2013], though she does
very occasionally talk about reasons. She would not regard "practical
rationality" as a welcome framework for her thought, even if her
insights have bearing on what is currently understood by that notion.
She says, in promotion of both her perfectionism and love
as a central ethical concept, "'Act lovingly' will
translate 'Act perfectly' whereas 'Act
rationally' will not" [IP: 102/384].) Bakhurst argues that
Murdoch's moral realism is a substantive moral view, not a
meta-ethical view as McDowell's is (a rejection of
 point 7,
 that philosophers can and should propound morally neutral views of
morality) (Bakhurst 2020:
 218).[4]



We may focus on two such contributions to moral philosophy connected
to Murdoch's moral realism: (A) an expanded conception of moral
agency; (B) the notion of a "fabric of ethical being".



On (A), Murdoch delineates a broader notion of moral agency than that
involved in reasons internalism and the perception of or sensitivity
to action-guiding reasons within situations. She seeks to demonstrate
a form of moral agency that takes place solely in the mind of the
agent with no expression in her behavior in the public world. She does
so through an extended example in IP, which serves other purposes as
well (especially the importance of the inner life for morality,
against
 point 5
 [the inner life is not very important for morality]), and is
extensively cited in the secondary literature. The example is of
*M*, the mother-in-law of *D*. Throughout *D*'s
marriage to *M*'s son, *M* has viewed *D* as
"pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque,
sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile". She
feels her son has "married beneath him" (IP: 17/312).
*M* behaves toward *D* without revealing her real opinions
and feelings. Murdoch highlights this feature by imagining that
*D* moves away or dies, and that *M* therefore comes to have
no opportunity to engage in behavior directed at D.



*M* settles into her fixed picture of *D*. But something
prompts her to reflect on her view, recognizing both her jealousy of
*D* and her own snobbishness. She tries to look at the *D*
she knew in a new way, and over time, as the result of her attempts to
see *D* anew, her view of *D* changes. 



> 
> 
> *D* is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not
> undignified but spontaneous...not tiresomely juvenile but
> delightfully youthful. (IP: 17-18/313)
> 
> 
> 



Murdoch imagines that *M*'s new view of *D* is
accurate and truthful, recognizing that it need not be. Murdoch sees
*M*'s attempts to see *D* as exemplifying activity on
*M*'s part, though issuing in no outward behavior, activity
that is moral in character. Murdoch concludes that our moral agency is
not exhausted by our outward behavior, nor by outward behavior plus
mental acts conceptually tied to outward behavior, like deciding,
choosing, and deliberating. And the moral philosophy of her time did
not leave any clear place for this purely inner moral activity of
attention.


## 7. The Fabric of Moral Being



(B) Beyond her expansion of moral agency to include inner mental life,
Murdoch proposes the notion of a person's total moral being,
which transcends agency itself. In discussing *M* she says that
her inner mental acts of attention contribute to "a continuous
fabric of being" (IP: 22/316) that she says 



> 
> 
> is shown in their mode of speech or silence, their choice of words,
> their assessment of others, their conception of their own life, what
> they think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny. (VCM
> 1956/EM: 80f) 
> 
> 
> 



In discussing the fabric of being idea, Diamond refers to
"thoughts, jokes, patterns of attention, fantasies, imaginative
explorations, and a thousand other things" (Diamond 2010: 72.
See also Crary 2007: 47). In *Metaphysics* Murdoch says
"Morality is and ought to be connected with the whole of our
being". (MGM 1992: 495).



Murdoch is saying that our thoughts, modes of speech, emotions,
imaginings, contemplatings, and the like, are responses to our
perceived reality, just as the exercise of moral agency is. If we are
amused by someone making fun of a disabled person, that is part of our
moral being; it reflects on us morally. Such responses are part of us,
but are not always *doings,* exercisings of agency.



This metaphor of the fabric of being connects with Murdoch's
saying that morality is 



> 
> 
> something that goes on continually, not something that is switched off
> in between the occurrence of explicit moral choices. (IP: 37/329) 
> 
> 
> 



a key criticism of
 point 4
 (morality consists fundamentally in choice-making in specifiable
situations). We are in a constant state of moral formation,
and we bring our fabric of being to (what we experience as) choice
situations. Actions and other responses flow from the background
fabric of being that has been constructed by this moral formation.
This metaphor also connects with Murdoch's defense of the moral
importance of the inner life, of the individual's consciousness,
that is ignored or demoted in the moral philosophy of her time
 (point 5),
 a development she thinks due partly to a partial misunderstanding of
Wittgenstein's emphasis on public criteria for the meaning of
concepts (IP 1970, e.g., 15/311; Wiseman 2020).


## 8. Seeing Replaces Doing



Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear how Murdoch is envisioning the
moral formation that constructs the fabric of moral being. This
unclarity emerges in Murdoch's substituting *seeing* for
*doing* as the core metaphor for human life's most
fundamental moral task. Her influential essay "The Idea of
Perfection" is framed as a critique of Stuart Hampshire on this
point. She sees Hampshire as articulating the most powerful case for
placing action-in-the-world at the core of the moral enterprise. She
suggests an alternative conception that uses a range of visual
metaphors such as see, attention, perception, looking, and vision to
express the fundamental task of morality. Her visual metaphors are
definitely meant to retain an important place for action in the world,
but to place it in a larger context than does Hampshire's
"doing" metaphor (see Moran 2012: 189). They thereby
express the limitations of the practical reasoning approach to
understanding Murdoch's moral philosophy.



In particular, Murdoch employs "attention" (not entirely
consistently) to mark the process by which this successful
apprehension of reality--seeing--is brought about. 



> 
> 
> I have used the word "attention" which I borrow from
> Simone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed
> upon an individual reality. *I believe this to be the
> characteristic and proper mark of the moral agent*. (IP: 34/327;
> emphasis added)
> 
> 
> 


## 9. Simone Weil



Before discussing Murdoch's notion of attention, some remarks
about Weil are in order, because of her profound impact on Murdoch,
not only in relation to attention. Simone Weil (1909-1943) was a
French philosopher (though never a university professor), political
activist, and, in her later (short) life a kind of Christian mystic.
Murdoch encountered Weil's writings in the early 1950s, and
reviewed her *Notebooks* in 1956 ("Knowing the
Void"). Murdoch mentions her only briefly in her earlier
writings; Weil, unlike Sartre, was not a figure at all familiar to
British philosophy of those years, and indeed she is still little
known to Anglo-American philosophers (see the Stanford Encyclopedia entry on
 Simone Weil).
 But as in the quote above, Murdoch always makes her debt to Weil
evident. Weil influenced Murdoch's turn to Platonism, and her
particular interpretation of Plato. She certainly bolstered the
continuing Christian elements in Murdoch's thought, as well as
Murdoch's increasing invoking of mysticism as related to
morality, especially in *Metaphysics*. She probably influenced
Murdoch's view of psychic energy (understood on a Freudian
model) as "mechanical", something to which we are
subjected. And Murdoch made use of Weil's notion of
"void" as part her moral outlook in
*Metaphysics*.



Weil also developed a quite original critique of Marxism that involved
a strong emphasis on the dignity of manual work, an emphasis of
Murdoch's also, in her important political essay, "House
of Theory", from 1958. Murdoch refers to Weil frequently in
*Metaphysics*, though only once in any sustained way. In 1976
she cited Weil's *Attente de Dieu* (*Waiting for
God*) as one of only three philosophical works that deeply
influenced her. (The others are Plato's *Symposium* and
Kierkegaard's *Fear and Trembling* [Broackes 2012a: 17,
note 42].)



But Weil's strongest influence on Murdoch was in the idea of
attention (Weil 1942 [1977]; 1973b). Weil's view of attention
had a strong religious dimension. The proper, ultimate object of
attention is God, though persons and subject matters are also objects
of attention. Weil's notion of attention also involves a kind of
passive waiting in readiness for a truth to be revealed, an emptying
of oneself in preparation for receiving the object. Murdoch abandoned
the religious aspect of Weil's view of attention, as she also
abandoned for herself the distinctly theistic aspects of Weil's
Christianity, and also adopted a more active conception of attention
than Weil. (Forsberg argues that Murdoch's view was closer to
Weil's regarding passivity/activity [Forsberg 2017]. See also
Cordner 2016.) But their notions were otherwise 
 similar.[5]



## 10. Murdoch on Attention



For Murdoch, attention involves activity on our part (more so than in
Weil), directing the "just and loving gaze upon an individual
reality", as *M*'s attempt to see *D* is meant
to illustrate. Sometimes Murdoch suggests that seeing someone justly
and lovingly is precisely what is involved in seeing them as they
really are [IP: 28/321; OGG: 67/354].



But Murdoch does not regard mere accuracy as constituting this just
and loving gaze (IP: 23/317). Learning more details about someone
(that they like chocolate or are afraid of snakes) is not what
attention as loving and just provides (Cordner 2016). Moreover, as
illustrated by the character of Julius King in her novel *Fairly
Honorable Defeat*, someone can be very perceptive, very tuned into
aspects of other people's reality, such as their vanity, and can
use this knowledge to manipulate and harm those persons. Julius indeed
is incapable of loving others at all, and his perceptiveness might
involve accurate, but not just or loving, attention (FHD 1970).



As mentioned earlier, Murdoch thinks that fully recognizing and
acknowledging that a given other person is as real as oneself does not
come naturally to us. Our fantasies and self-absorption get in the
way; getting past these obstacles is difficult and uncertain and
constitutes a genuine moral achievement. Attention is the process by
which we are potentially enabled to do so.



The "as real as oneself" formulation may be meant to
capture two somewhat distinct strands in Murdoch's view. One is
the recognition of the other in her distinct otherness and difference
from oneself, rather than in light of one's projections onto the
other that assimilate her to oneself. The second is that the other is
seen as like oneself, for example as a human being, a person, a
possessor of dignity. (Murdoch implies but does not articulate this second
strand.) Murdoch wants both these strands in what constitutes a moral
take on the other, and "just and loving attention", even
if it does not seem equivalent to "appreciating that others are
as real as oneself", should probably be understood as
encompassing both. (Chappell adds a third strand, what it is like to
be that other person [Chappell 2018: 103].)



Attention is thus a process by which human persons are enabled to
access moral reality. The process is both cognitive and perceptual
(Murdoch does not attempt to work out their relationship to one
another) but for Murdoch those capacities are also moral in character.
Our moral capacities are *part of* our cognitive capacities,
enabling, and required for us to see, the moral and evaluative aspects
of
 reality.[6]


### 10.1 Care ethics, feminism, and particularity


 Murdoch's (and through her, Weil's) view of (loving)
attention as the core moral capacity influenced the development of
care ethics, especially in its early (and continuing) form as a type
of feminist ethical outlook (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Grimshaw
1986; Ruddick 1989; Walker 1989; Bowden 1997). Care ethics emphasizes
attentiveness and concern for the other person in her particularity,
informed by knowledge of the specific needs, desires, and situation of
that other person, in contrast to emphasizing a universal category
such as "person" or "human being" as the
appropriate target of attention and care. Murdoch's emphasis on
the reality of the particular other as the target of loving attention
was drawn on to develop this form of ethical theory.



In addition both care ethics and Murdoch tend to see personal
relationships as the primary domain of morality. Murdoch's focus
on personal fantasy as a prime obstacle to grasping the other's
reality suggests that she is envisioning persons with whom we have a
personal relationship. But her language sometimes suggests a broader
scope, perhaps to persons known to oneself but with whom one does not
have a personal relationship, or even the broader category of persons
one encounters in a fleeting way (e.g., fellow riders on the subway).
She seldom suggests that it means needy or suffering persons distant
from oneself, or members of a general category (e.g., victims of
Covid). Something like that idea surfaces only in
*Metaphysics*, where Murdoch associates it with
utilitarianism.



Varieties of care ethics arose to encompass less personal forms of
relationship, and some also expanded this focus to take account of
institutions and structures in which care relationships do, or should,
take place (Tronto 1993; Bowden 1997; Norlock 2019). Murdoch never goes in this
institutional direction. At the same time, the centrality of the
visual metaphor in Murdoch--attention, seeing, looking,
vision--does not sit comfortably with the emphasis in much care
ethics, especially in its feminist form, on the sustaining of ongoing
personal relationships involving mutuality and reciprocity, and more
generally on the fundamentally relational character of the self. The
attentive self is not portrayed by Murdoch as actively engaging with
the attended-to other in a reciprocal relationship. In
*Metaphysics*, she actively defends the standing-apart of the
moral subject against the engaged relationality present in the Jewish
theologian Martin Buber's views (MGM 1992, ch 15: 361-380.
See Cordner 2019 discussion). (Murdoch's overall relationship to
feminism is complex. For extended treatments, see Lovibond 2011;
Bolton forthcoming).


### 10.2 Particularity and particularism



One Murdochian strand in care ethics that has been influential outside
the care ethics context is particularity--an emphasis on the
limits of universal principle and impersonality to capture the
substance of appropriate moral response. This particularity takes two
forms, or at least two emphases, one on the particularity of
situations--the (alleged) impossibility of coming up with a set
of general moral principles or a moral code that will always prescribe
the right action (McDowell's emphasis, and the focus of what is
called "particularism" [Hooker & Little 2000]). The
other is on the particularity of persons as objects of moral attention
and concern. (There are other typologies of particularism. See Driver
2012.) Both dimensions are present in Murdoch's thought and in
care ethics, and the person-focus is more central to both Murdoch and
care ethics. Millgram finds a resource for particularism in
Murdoch's emphasis on finding the best description of a
situation (Millgram 2002), but situation-particularity remains within
the "action/reasons for action" framework that Murdoch
definitively transcends, and person-particularity is crucial for her
doing so.


### 10.3 Obstacles to loving attention



For Murdoch, just and loving attention, seeing the other as equally
real as oneself is a difficult and infrequent moral achievement. She
delineates three different stages involving attention, each yielding
obstacles to its realization. First, an agent may fail to notice that
an effort of attention is called for. As Murdoch says, "I can
only choose within the world I can see" (IP: 37/329). What we
notice, what registers with us, is an integral part of our fabric of
moral being. If an agent fails to see a morally relevant feature of a
person nearby (e.g., their distress), this feature will not become
part of her subjectively perceived world and she will not even attempt
to focus on this other person as part of an attempt at proffering just
and loving attention.



But even if she does notice the morally relevant feature of the other
and decides to make that attempt, as for example *M* does with
respect to *D*, she may not be able to do so. Because of
fantasies and resentments toward the other, or just self-absorption,
the moral agent may simply not be capable of focusing on the other
person beyond a very superficial level. She may genuinely try, but end
up with the wrong target occupying her mind.



Third, even if the agent is able to direct her attention to the other
person, she may be unsuccessful in making that attention a just and
loving take on that other person. Try as she might with all sincerity
(which she is unable to muster at the second stage) her fantasies
about that other person, and her fabric of being more generally, may
keep her from seeing the other as she really is.



Notice that "attention" is used in two different ways in
this account. The first is focusing on another as part of an
*attempt* to proffer just and loving attention. (Call this
"attempt attention", attention in its mode as an attempt
at just and loving attention). The second is *successfully*
proffering such just and loving attention. (Call this "success
attention", attention in its mode as a successful attempt.)



Only if the three hurdles are cleared has the agent achieved the
success attention that Murdoch thinks morality demands. Various
aspects of the agent's fabric of ethical being can prevent that
moral achievement.


## 11. Murdoch's Focus on the Active Dimension of Moral Formation



We must therefore look more closely into how Murdoch understands moral
formation, the creation of agents' fabric of ethical being. She
says that over time our attendings (another term for attempt
attention) build up the (subjective) structures of value that largely
constitute our fabric of being. 



> 
> 
> [I]f we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously
> it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up the structures of value
> round about us...; (IP: 37/329) 
> 
> 
> 
> [O]ur ability to act well "when the time comes" depends
> partly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual objects of
> attention. (OGG: 56/345; see also 67/354, 69/356,
>  91f/375)[7]
> 
> 
> 



Murdoch is implying that by our efforts of attending to various
objects (attempt attention), especially other persons, bringing them
into our active mental universe, we build up the evaluative structures
of our subjectively experienced or perceived world, and create our
fabric of ethical being. This sets the stage for attempts at loving
attention and (less frequent) successes in proffering such loving
attention.



But the idea that our fabric of being and subjective structures of
value are built up almost solely or even primarily through acts of
attempt attention seems at odds with Murdoch's
Freudian/Kantian/Schopenhauerian moral psychology, which implies that
the main forces creating our fabric of being are fantasies, other
distortions, and egoistic desires infrequently aligned with moral ways
of being. These do indeed build up structures of value and ways of
perceiving reality. They are not merely forces operating in a
mechanical way on the agent's will, pulling her away from moral
action and perception, although this dualistic image is one Murdoch
often employs for the human psyche. But the values and ways of
perceiving built up by these forces are usually morally bad or at
least unworthy. An example from Murdoch's novels is Julius King,
the character referred to earlier, who sees many other persons in a
particular way, contemptuously--Murdoch somewhat implies that he
is morally damaged from being a concentration camp survivor--and
often treats his acquaintances and even friends in a malicious and
contemptuous way, arising from the valuational framework (part of his
fabric of ethical being) within which he views them (FHD 1970).
Although Murdoch's predominant view of the psyche implies that
egoistic forces do much to create our fabric of being, within which
our capability for success attention comprises but a weak reed, she
does not actually adopt this view. Rather she takes the view that our
active, deliberate attendings (attempt attention) are the prime source
of our subjective structures of value and fabric of moral being.



Thus Murdoch's stated view privileges what can be seen as the
active dimension of value or moral formation, while her theory of the
psyche should have pointed her (also) toward the passive aspects
thereof. Cora Diamond suggests that the "fabric of being"
metaphor mixes active and passive (Diamond 2010: 72). And in a 1966
essay, "The Darkness of Practical Reason", Murdoch
criticizes Hampshire for an overly sharp distinction between passive
aspects of mental life (represented by desires and fears that are not
thought-dependent) and the active choosing will, aided by
reason's surveying the facts of the agent's situation
enabled by an active stepping back from that situation, that decides
and takes action (DPR 1966/EM: 201). She sees (attempt)
attention, and also imagination, as falling into neither of these
categories. So in this particular "active/passive"
framework attempt attention does not fall in the "active"
category.



Nevertheless, Murdoch still sees moral agents as in genuine if limited
control of their attendings. In this sense, attempt attention does
fall into the "active" category, thus contrasting with the
action-centric view of agency and freedom she criticizes in existentialist and analytic moral philosophies and
psychologies. This attempt attention contrasts with the Freudian
intrapsychic forces that contribute to our moral formation without
engaging our agency in that way. And at least in one place she
recognizes a form of passivity that is connected with a person's
fabric of being, in contrast with aspects of our mental or psychic
universe that are not. In discussing Hampshire, she attributes to him
recognition that a Freudian explanation or understanding of, say, a
fear 



> 
> 
> enables us to attach the fear intelligibly to a more clearly seen
> structure of motivation which we may endorse or at any rate accept as
> ours. (DPR 1966/EM: 196) 
> 
> 
> 



This contrasts with a fear that besieges us but whose character we
repudiate, or at least do not accept. Thus Murdoch's view that
our attendings shape our moral formation and world of perceived values
draws on a view of activity reduced in scope from the Hampshirean
concept, yet still distinguishable from a form of passivity that she
recognizes (at least here) as part of our moral being. It is in this
sense of "active" that she privileges the active (attempt
attendings) over the passive in her explicit account of the formation
of our fabric of moral being, resulting in the passive dimension not
receiving adequate attention (Blum 2012).


## 12. The Absence of Social Sources of Negative Moral Formation in Murdoch's Philosophy



Murdoch's failure to theorize passive forces in moral formation
is also expressed in a striking absence of attention to the distinctly
*social* sources of negative moral formation. An important part
of how moral formation is, as she says, going on all the time, how our fabric of
being is always being constructed, arises from social rather than
intrapsychic factors, for example, representations of categories of
persons that block or hinder agents' abilities to see the
reality of persons in those groups. As a member of a given society, or
particular subcultures within that society, we are subjected to
stereotypes and other misleading representations of different groups
of people, with whom we do or do not come in contact. The stereotypes
are attached to race, gender, class, religion, national origin, sexual
orientation, age, gender expression, professions and occupations,
residence in certain neighborhoods or regions, and other social
groups. These "figurations", as Diana Meyers usefully
calls them, are almost always evaluative in character (Meyers 1994).
Thus they contribute to social agents' evaluative take on the
world and to the formation of their moral being. They affect whether
we do, or try to, have loving attention, respect, compassion, and even
mere acknowledgment toward individual members of those groups. In this
respect figurations are comparable to the fantasies and other forms of
egoism that Murdoch points to that block loving attention--except
that they affect our responses to people unknown to us much more than
these Freudian intrapsychic forces do. Social stereotypes are not the
only form of socially-produced barrier to loving attention, but they
are important and can represent the larger category for our
 purposes.[8]



We are largely passive with respect to the impact of these figurations
on our moral being, often not even recognizing their existence, as
recent work on "implicit bias"--unconscious ways we
see members of particular groups in negative or positive lights (Saul
& Brownstein
 2016)--demonstrates.[9]
 We do not generally choose to embrace these figurations of the groups
in question, nor are they generally (though perhaps they can sometimes
be) generated through (attempt) attention towards groups or
individuals. If we notice them at all, we often just find ourselves
possessing them (Blum 2012).



Social figurations may not clear the bar for contributions to our
moral formation that Murdoch sets up in the quote above from DPR. They
may seem more like a fear that we do not endorse. Indeed figurations
can be a source of such fears, such as a stereotype of black males as
threatening, and can function even if the agent has not embraced their
cognitive content. Murdoch's notion of "fabric of
being" is never sufficiently defined so as to make entirely
clear whether any item in our mental universe is actually excluded
from it. But we can rely on an intuitive sense that if a stereotype
substantially affects how the agent perceives and experiences persons
of group *X*, and the agent has not attempted to rid herself of
the stereotype or neutralize its effect on her, then the stereotype
contributes to or is part of her moral being (as a passive
factor).



These social forces, explored by the more recent development of
"social epistemology", complement the intrapsychic ones as
passive contributors to moral formation. The "going on all the
time" that constitutes our moral formation and being is a
complex combination of passive and active elements and processes. In
several essays in the late 1950s Murdoch mentions the idea of
"convention", and sometimes sees conventions or
conventional thinking as a barrier to adequate perception (Holland
2012). But convention does not capture the idea of distinct
figurations of particular groups of persons that are powerful forces
in the culture and society harming social beings' ability to see
the reality of members of those specific groups. These obstacles have
an entirely different source than the intrapsychic forces with which
Murdoch is concerned (Clarke 2012: 244f; Blum 2012). The two can
complement and interact, as *M*'s class-based snobbery
makes common cause with her jealousy of *D* to cast the latter in
the negative light that Murdoch describes. There is strong support in
Murdoch's writing for Nussbaum's claim that 



> 
> 
> Murdoch seems almost entirely to lack interest in the political and
> social determinants of a moral vision and in the larger social
> critique that ought...to be a major element in the struggle
> against one's own defective tendencies. (Nussbaum 2001: 32) 
> 
> 
> 



This is not, however, to deny Clarke's point that
Murdoch's view of attention and moral perception leave room for
self-reflective criticism within which such a social critique could be
lodged (Clarke 2012). But the point is not only that Murdoch neglects
social and political factors in moral formation but that her
privileging of the active and neglecting the passive is a theoretical
underpinning of this neglect.



Murdoch's stated view that our attempt attention is the
virtually sole source of our fabric of being suggests an ambiguity in
what she means when she says that morality or moral life is
"something that goes on continually" (IP: 37/329), not
only in moments of actional choice. She definitely means that
*moral activity* is going on all the time, a view connected
with her expanding the domain of "activity" beyond its
conventional understanding as the public world of action, to include
the inner life. She wants to say that in between public act-and-choice
situations we are continually active mentally in our attempt attention
and our imagination.



But she also wants to say that the *moral formation* that
produces our fabric of being is going on all the time. This opens up
the larger issue of the range of factors that contribute to moral
formation, beyond attempt attention. Murdoch may partly be blinded to
the passive forces in this category by a failure to keep clearly
distinct the claims that moral activity goes on continually and that
moral formation goes on continually. But her vital moral insight of
the "fabric of being" metaphor requires taking account of
the full range of contributions to that fabric of being, passive as well as active.


## 13. Moral Seeing as a Spiritual Achievement vs. the Unreflective Good, Non-Egoistic Person



Murdoch generally presents seeing moral reality as a difficult and
lengthy mental, emotional, and spiritual achievement, never able to be
fully accomplished. The defeat or transcendence of the ego is
something the agent must continually work at. This idea of a spiritual
journey toward moral seeing looms even larger in *Metaphysics*.
However, Murdoch also wants to leave room for rare persons for whom
appreciating the Good and the reality of other people is not achieved
primarily through struggle and challenge. As she says in a oft-quoted
passage, "[I]t must be possible to do justice to both Socrates
and the virtuous peasant" (IP: 2/300). (The latter is not an
auspicious formulation, as "peasants", even if uneducated,
can still be reflective and intentional in seeking the Good.) Murdoch
follows Schopenhauer, an important historical figure for her, in
marveling at meeting that rare someone in whom "the anxious
avaricious tentacles of the self", so ubiquitous in human nature,
are absent [SGC: 103/385]. Of course, this is not to deny that any
virtuous person must sometimes have to suppress anti-moral desire, or
to struggle to see other persons in their full reality. Even if the
difference is one of degree, the "constant struggle" image
is quite different from the virtuous peasant, and Murdoch wants to
leave room for both.


## 14. Virtue



Murdoch speaks often of virtue, and she has been treated as an early
virtue theorist. Her *Sovereignty* essays were given exposure
by inclusion in some early and canonical virtue ethics collections
(MacIntyre & Hauerwas 1983; Crisp & Slote 1997). While she may
well have helped spur interest in virtue within moral philosophy, she
is not a virtue theorist. She is not putting forward a view that
virtue is a more fundamental moral concept than other concepts, nor is
she claiming that approaching right action through the lens of virtue
is superior to doing so through a Kantian/deontological or utilitarian
approach. She does not offer an "ethical theory" in either
of these senses. Her invocation of virtue reflects an unsystematized
recognition that virtue is part of the toolbox we use to understand
the moral domain of life, as are attention, perception, love,
unselfishness, and (in *Metaphysics*) duty. She joined with
virtue theory in helping to expand the scope of ethics beyond
procedures and principles of right action to include how it is good to
live and to be (against
 point 5).


## 15. *Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals*


### 15.1 Duty



It is not possible to provide a full discussion of *Metaphysics as
a Guide to Morals* in this entry, nor of Murdoch's evolving
views on art and literature, religion, politics, concepts, and the
nature of philosophy, all of which bear on her view of morality. When
*Metaphysics* treats issues of morality, most of what it says
is in the spirit of her earlier moral writings, or extends it, though
sometimes quite significantly. There is a great deal more emphasis in
*Metaphysics* on purification of the individual
consciousness--purifying it of its egoism--and the Platonic
"ascent" to that purification, as a core moral task; but
that idea is present in *Sovereignty* also. She also much more
frequently connects morality with mysticism, spirituality, and
religion. She also retains the idea that we construct our moral world
through mental activity, but in *Metaphysics* she sometimes
shifts that activity from attention to Eros, or energy ("[W]e
are always deploying and *directing* our energy, refining or
blunting it, purifying or corrupting it". [MGM 1992: 495;
emphasis in original]), and sometimes to imagination (MGM 1992:
322).



However, in *Metaphysics* Murdoch amends her moral philosophy
in one quite substantial way. She now thinks the moral life cannot do
without duty, and that duty is not simply an expression of moral
vision or attention. She says that there are several different
"modes of ethical being" besides moral
vision/attention/Eros/purification, that co-exist with it in a larger
"field of force", involving tension between the different
modes (MGM 1992: 492). Duty is the most important of these. Her
conception of duty is like Kant's in certain respects and
contrary to it in others.



Duties, as Kant said, present absolute moral requirements. They are
available as a bridle on contrary inclination without being routed
through the individual's moral sensibility. They can thereby
"introduce order and calmness" (MGM 1992: 494). They do
not leave room for flexibility of interpretation by the agent's
moral character (Hopwood 2019: 250).



But, contra Kant, duties are unsystematic, not necessarily connected
with one another. The reason for not lying is different from that for
not stealing. They are not all expressions of a more general principle
or procedure, like the categorical imperative. Murdoch recognizes but
rejects Schopenhauer's and Wittgenstein's view that
"duty", especially when viewed (as Murdoch does), as an
unconnected "list", is a holdover from a theological view
"as arbitrary orders given by God" (MGM 1992: 301f,
303).



Murdoch is aware that this conception of duty applies more fully to
"negative duties" than positive ones.
"'Don't lie' is a *clearer* command
than 'be truthful'" (MGM 1992: 302). However,
although the latter does not have the clarity of direction of the
former, both possess an immediate availability to the agent.



Murdoch also rejects Kant's view that duty is the whole of
morality, as she rejects Schopenhauer's view that morality can
rest solely on compassion and eschew duty (MGM 1992: 292).
Purification of consciousness remains the "fundamental
'arena'" of morality (MGM 1992: 293). The
"dutiful man" may be "content with too
little", following a rule without imagining that more is
required (MGM 1992: 494), more that must arise from another mode of
ethical being.



Murdoch recognizes something like dutiful action in
*Sovereignty*, when she speaks of everyday acts that we perform
simply as any moral agent, and for publicly obvious reasons [IP:
43/334]. But there she does not frame these actions as
"duty" as she develops that notion in MGM, but as
expressions of moral perception. In *Sovereignty* she lacks the
idea that "the concept of duty remains with us as a steady moral
force" (MGM 1992: 494).


### 15.2 Axioms



The notion of duty is connected with a third "mode of moral
being", part of the field of force constituted by all these
modes, that she calls "axioms". Axioms are roughly the
political counterpart of duties, the latter understood as operating in
the terrain of personal behavior (Antonaccio 2000: 159). Axioms are
(relatively) fixed and unavoidable constraints and requirements
governing behavior in the political domain. Like duties, they do not
form a system, but are distinct in their individual character, as
illustrated by Murdoch's most frequent example of an axiom-type,
that of rights. She mentions, for example, the right to happiness, the
right to vote, rights animals have (presumably not to be made to
suffer), and the rights of women. Even if all are rights, they have
different valuational characters. Axioms operate by being regarded as
readily understood unconditional and inviolable standards, and so can
be invoked and expect to be honored (Browning 2019: 185).



In contrast to (though not strictly incompatible with) what she says
about duties, axioms are historical products, and this is connected
with their being unsystematic and piecemeal. Women's coming to
be seen as having equal rights with men might not have happened, but
it did, and now (Murdoch thinks) equal rights for women has the status
of an axiom. Axioms are products of genuine, if historically
contingent, moral insight.



In *MGM*, Murdoch sees the individual-moral and the political
domains as governed by very different norms and principles, each
needing to be protected from too much influence from the other. 



> 
> 
> Liberal political thought posits a certain fundamental distinction
> between the person as citizen and the person as moral-spiritual
> individual. (MGM 1992: 357) 
> 
> 
> 



She sees the individual-moral domain (notably excluding duty) as
governed by a 'perfectionism' that is continuous from
*Sovereignty* to *Metaphysics*. The aspiration to the
highest moral goodness is the proper aim of the human person. By
contrast, the polity cannot be 'perfected'; its proper aim
is to be 'decent' (MGM 1992: 356), to try to limit the
evil contained therein (MGM 1992: 368, from Simone Weil). This view is
a radical departure from Murdoch's political thinking in her
fascinating 1958 essay, "A House of Theory", her only
pre-*Metaphysics* political philosophy writing. There, and in
occasional remarks in *Sovereignty*, Murdoch sees moral ideas
and ideals as the appropriate normative source for sociopolitical
arrangements--for example, as in "House", the ideas
of dignity in work, and the communal bonds of work. In
*Metaphysics* this view is largely (not entirely) rejected
(Blum forthcoming).



Though, in contrast to duties and moral vision, axioms concern the
political rather than the individual-moral realm, Murdoch conceives of
them as part of the fabric of moral being. They bear on individual
conduct through the individual's status as a citizen, wherein we
recognize, support, and honor human rights, though it is the state that
adopts policies that officially recognize rights (and other axioms). Civic
morality is part of the individual's moral being. The inclusion
of the political as a distinct aspect of moral thinking and being does
not take Murdoch in the direction of envisioning the human person as
deeply embedded in a rich web of social/institutional relationships
that shape her moral being and her moral requirements--for
example, in social role relationships, as explored in her friend
Dorothy Emmet's 1966 *Rules, Roles, and Relations* (Emmet
1996). Alasdair MacIntyre (Emmet's student and collaborator)
makes this point in a review of *Metaphysics*: 



> 
> 
> [W]hat is absent is any conception of the achievement of the Good as a
> task for human beings in community, so that the transformation of the
> self has to be a transformation of social relationships. (MacIntyre
> 1993: 2)
> 
> 
> 



The pluralistic conception of morality in the field of force idea goes
beyond the rejection of a single principle governing conduct, such as
utilitarianism, Kantianism, or certain versions of virtue theory.
These monistic views concern only conduct, and their rejection
(discussed earlier in relation to McDowell's Murdochian
Aristotelianism) leaves in place, in *Sovereignty,* a unity
involved in the idea of moral vision/purification of consciousness.
The pluralism in *Metaphysics's* modes of ethical being
idea rejects a unity of that sort as well, seeing the purification of
consciousness as only one, though the most significant, aspect of
morality in the overall "field of force" of our ethical
being (Hopwood 2019).