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Notes
Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 41.
See John McDowell, “Values and Secondary Qualities,” in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); John McDowell, “Some Issues in Aristotle’s Moral Psychology,” in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); John McDowell, J. “Projection and Truth in Ethics,” in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998); John McDowell, J. (1979), “Virtue and reason,” in John McDowell, Mind, Value, and Reality (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1998).
See David Wiggins, “Deliberation and Practical Reason,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society 76 (1975–1976): 29–51.
See J. C. Wright, “The Role of Moral Perception in Mature Moral Agency” in J. J. Wisnewski (ed.) Moral Perception (Newcastle: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2007), 1–24; J. J. Winewski, “The Case for Moral Perception,” Phenomenology and the Cognitive Sciences, 14 (1) (2015): 129–148; R. Cowan, “Perceptual Intuitionism,” Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 90 (2015), 164–193; A. Cullison, “Moral Perception,” European Journal of Philosophy, 18 (2) (2009): 159–175; R. Audi, “Moral Perception and Moral Knowledge,” Proceedings of the Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume, 84 (2010): 79–97; J. P. McBrayer, “A Limited Defense of Moral Perception,” Philosophical Studies, Vol. 149, No 3(2010): 305–320.
The discussion on this in epistemology is notorious but this is not the place to argue for this assumption.
McDowell, op. cit..
Ibid., p. 138.
Ibid.
Ibid.
Murdoch, op. cit.
Wright op. cit.
Gilbert, Harman, The Nature of Morality (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1997), p. 4.
Wright, op. cit., p. 8.
Murdoch, op. cit., p. 17.
Murdoch, Ibid.
Murdoch, op. cit. McDowell takes Murdoch to be an ally. (McDowell, op. cit., p. 72). Other interpreters also assume that Murdoch espouses a reasons-view of moral perception. See B. Clarke, “Iris Murdoch and the Prospects for Critical Moral Perception,” in J. Broakes, (ed.) Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 323; E. Millgram, “Murdoch, Practical Reasoning, and Particularism,” Notizie di Politeia (2002): 64–87; R. Moran, “Iris Murdoch and Existentialism,” in j. Broakes, (ed.) Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012): pp. 181–197; K. Setiya, “Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good,” Philosopher’s Imprint 13 (2013): 1–21. In many ways Murdoch is indeed an ally. But there is a deep difference between the two accounts. For an alternative take on the matter see R. Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” in M. Antonaccio, and W. Schweiker, (ed.) Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996): pp. 3–29. My interpretation of Murdoch’s concept of attention owes a great debt to Taylor.
“I would not be understood, either, as suggesting that insight or pureness of heart are more important than action: the thing which philosophers feared Moore for implying. Overt actions are perfectly obviously important in themselves, and important too because they are the indispensable pivot and spur of the inner sense.” (Murdoch op. cit., p. 42).
Ibid., p. 16.
Ibid., p. 17.
Ibid., p. 62.
See C. Diamond “The Difficulty of Reality and the Difficulty of Philosophy,” Partial Answers 1:2 (2003): 1–26.
Murdoch, op. cit., p. 62.
Murdoch, op. cit., p. 53.
“The area of morals, and ergo of moral philosophy, can now be seen, not as a hole-and-corner matter of debts and promises, but as covering the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world.” (Murdoch op. cit., p. 95).
“I want there to be a discussable problem of consciousness because I want to talk about consciousness or self-being as the fundamental mode or form of moral being.” (Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992), p. 171.)
Ibid., p. 238.
Murdoch, 1970, p. 64.
Clarke, op. cit., p. 239–240; Bagnoli Bagnoli, C. (2012), “The Exploration of Moral Life”, in J. Broakes, (ed.) Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 218; L. A. Blum, “Iris Murdoch and the Domain of the Moral,” Philosophical Studies: An International Journal for Philosophy in the Analytic Tradition, Vol. 50, No. 3 (1986): 343–367, p. 362; E. Millgram “Kantian crystallization,” Ethics, 114 (2004): 511–513, p. 78; etc. For an exception see Moran, op. cit., p. 194.
See C. Diamond, “We Are Perpetually Moralists: Iris Murdoch, Fact, and Value,” in M. Antonaccio and W. Schweiker (eds.) Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), pp. 79–110.
Murdoch talks of “the fat relentless ego” (Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), p. 51), of “personal fantasy: the tissue of self-aggrandising and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one” (Ibid., p. 57). Elsewhere she talks of “fantasy, the proliferation of sliding self-centered aims and images, is itself a powerful system of energy…” (Ibid., p. 65), and finally: “The same virtues, in the send the same virtue (love), are required throughout, and fantasy (self) can prevent us from seeing a blade of grass just as it can prevent us from seeing another person” (Ibid., p. 68). For an illuminating, albeit partial account of this fantasy, see Moran, op. cit., p. 194.
Moran, op. cit. and C. Mole, “Attention, Self and the Sovereignty of the Good” in Anne Rowe (ed.), Iris Murdoch: A reassessment, (Palgrave Macmillan, 2007).
Murdoch, 1970, p. 17.
“…the continuous detailed conceptual pictorial activity whereby (for better or worse) we make and remake the ‘word’ within which our desires and reflections move, and out of which our actions arise.” (Murdoch, 1992, p. 325).
Iris Murdoch, Existentialists and Mystics, Writings on Philosophy and Literature (Chatto and Windus: London, 1997), p. 215.
See Taylor, op. cit. for this metaphor.
Murdoch, 1970, p. 25.
Ibid., p. 21.
Murdoch, 1992, p. 329.
Ibid., p. 337.
“There is a continuous breeding of imagery in the consciousness which is, for better or worse, a function of moral change.” Ibid., p. 329.
Ibid., P. 330.
“…once the historical individual is ‘let in’ a number of things have to be said with a difference. The idea of ‘objective’ reality, for instance, undergoes important modifications when it is to be understood, not in relation to ‘the world described by science’, but in relation to the progressing life of a person.” (Murdoch 1970, p. 25)
Murdoch, 1970, p. 25.
Ibid., p. 27.
Ibid., p. 28.
For a helpful explication of this issue see Bagnoli, op. cit.
J. D. Velleman, “Love as a Moral Emotion,” Ethics, Vol. 109, No. 2 (1999): 338–374, p. 342.
As Millgram points out (Millgram, 2004) Murdoch has forestalled such interpretations in other writings. For instance, she says of Kant: “He attempts to make of the act of moral judgment an instantiating of a timeless form of rational activity; and it is this, this empty demand for a total order, which we are required to respect in each other. Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular tangled up historical individuals, but to respect the universal reason in their breasts” (Murdoch, 1997, p. 215).
“A painter might say, ‘You don’t know what ‘red’ means’” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 29).
C. Diamond, “Murdoch the Explorer,” Philosophical Topics, 38 (1) (2010): pp. 51–85, p. 61.
It is often thought that it is the use of metaphors that occasions all these diverse readings of her work. Thus, there are readings that are particularist (Blum, op. cit., Millgram, op. cit.); Aristotelian (McDowell op. cit., Clarke op. cit.); Platonist (M. Nussbaum, “Faint with Secret Knowledge’: Love and Vision in Murdoch’s The Black Prince,” in J. Broakes, (ed.) Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012); Kantian (Velleman, op. cit.; M. Merritt, “Love, Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics,” European Journal of Philosophy, 25 (4) (2017): 1844–1863.);constructivist quasi-Hegelian (Bagnoli, op. cit.); Existentialist (Moran, op. cit.); Cavellian (C. Cordner, “Lessons of Murdochian Attention”, Sophia, Volume 55, Issue 2(2016): 197–213); and Nietzshean (P. Katsafanas, “Nietzsche and Murdoch on the Moral Significance of Perceptual Experience,” European Journal of Philosophy 26 (1) (2018): 525–545). The aim of this paper is not to take sides in this interpretative debate, but to offer a reading of Murdoch’s thought which provides an alternative answer to the question of moral perception. This answer is distinctive and so places Murdoch along the side of and not under the wings of Aristotle’s, Kant’s, Plato’s, Hegel’s, Sartre’s, Nietzsche’s and Cavell’s great works on moral thought.
L. Blum, “Visual Metaphors in Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy,” in J. Broakes, (ed.) Iris Murdoch, Philosopher: A Collection of Essays (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2012), p. 307.
Murdoch, 1970, p. 75.
Murdoch, 1992, p. 325.
Murdoch, 1992, p. 322.
Murdoch, 1970: 36.
“Knowledge cannot be something immediate, the possession of solitary individual perceptions or thought-data. Knowledge implies ideas, concepts, linguistic networks, connections.” Ibid.: 175. And elsewhere: “Nothing momentary can be an item of knowledge, we must look elsewhere for the structures of veridical awareness.” Ibid., p. 221.
“…if we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuously it goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up structures of value round about us, we shall not be surprised that at crucial moments of choice most of the business of choosing is already over.” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 36.)
Ibid., p. 36.
Ibid., p. 42.
On the connection between good and God see Murdoch, 1970.
See also D. Robjant, “The Earthy Realism of Plato’s Metaphysics, or: What Shall We Do with Iris Murdoch?”, Philosophical Investigations 35:1 (2012): 43–67.
When describing M's activity in the example Murdoch says: “M’s activity is essentially something progressive, something infinitely perfectible. So far from claiming or it a sort of infallibility, this new picture has built in the notion of necessary fallibility. M is engaged in an endless task. As soon as we begin to use words such as ‘love’ and ‘justice’ in characterising M, we introduce into our whole conceptual picture of her situation the idea of progress, that is the idea of perfection: and it is just the presence of this idea which demands an analysis of mental concepts which is different from the genetic one.” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 23)
"One might start from the assertion that morality, goodness, is a form of realism. The idea of a really good man living in a private dream world seems unacceptable. Of course a good man may be infinitely eccentric, but he must know certain things about his surroundings, most obviously the existence of other people and their claims.” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 57) For a focused discussion of this see Murdoch 1970, p. 45–75. Murdoch’s notion of the good is a very rich concept, a careful explication of which lies well past the limited ambition of this paper.
Murdoch, 1970, p. 59.
Ibid., p. 70-72.
“I have used the word ‘attention’, which I borrow from Simon Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 33).
Murdoch, 1997: 216.
Murdoch, 1992, p. 322.
Ibid., p. 323.
“Moral tasks are characteristically endless not only because ‘within’, as it were, a given concept our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move and as we look our concepts themselves are changing.” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 27).
“Often, for instance, when we pay our bills or perform other small everyday acts, we are just ‘nobody’ doing what is proper or making simple choices for ordinary public reasons; and this is the situation which some philosophers have chosen exclusively to analyse.” (Murdoch, 1970, p. 41)
Murdoch, 1992, p. 347.
W. Wilson, Seeing Fictions in Film: The Epistemology of Movies (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011).
R. B. Pippin, Fatalism in American Film Noir: Some Cinematic Philosophy, (University of Virginia Press, 2012).
See T. Nagel, “What is it like to be a bat?” Philosophical Review, 83 (1974): 435–456. For a forceful and imaginative deconstruction of this entire discussion see J. Coetzee, The Lives of Animals (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016).
Murdoch, 1992, p. 339.
Coetzee, op. cit.
Diamond, op. cit. p. 61.
Murdoch, 1992, p. 330.
Murdoch, 1970, p. 100.
Acknowledgements
I would like to thank Robert Pippin for invaluable help with an earlier draft of this paper and for opening my eyes to the difficulties of self- and other-knowledge. For an ongoing series of inspiring discussions on almost all the issues treated in this paper I want to thank John McDowell, Kieran Setiya and Matt Boyle. For generous comments on an earlier draft of this paper I want to thank the audience at the 4th Foundations of Normativity Conference at the University of Edinburgh and in particular Geoff Sayre-McCord and James Brown for his interesting and difficult objections. I would also like to thank the audience at the International Conference on Moral Epistemology at the American Catholic University in Melbourne, Australia and in particular Wojciech Kaftanski and Tristram Oliver-Skuse. Finally, I want to express my deep gratitude for the penetrating and thoughtful comments and suggestions of the anonymous reviewer for the Journal of Value Inquiry.
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This research is implemented through IKY scholarships program and co-financed by the European Union (European Social Fund - ESF) and Greek national funds through the action entitled ”Reinforcement of Postdoctoral Researchers”, in the framework of the Operational Program ”Human Resources Development Program, Education and Lifelong Learning” of the National Strategic Reference Framework (NSRF) 2014 – 2020.
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Mylonaki, E. The Individual in Pursuit of the Individual; A Murdochian Account of Moral Perception. J Value Inquiry 53, 579–603 (2019). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9675-4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10790-018-9675-4