Iris Murdoch (1919–1999) was a prominent British philosopher ofthe second half of the 20^th century, best known for hermoral philosophy. Unusual for her times, she combined her grounding inWittgensteinian and linguistic/analytic philosophy with a stronginfluence of 19th and 20^th century Continental philosophy,Christian religion and thought, and Hindu and Buddhist philosophy.Though linked with virtue ethics, care ethics, and particularism, shedeveloped a unique form of Platonic moral realism not readilyassimilated or even comparable to any of the dominant approaches toethics in 20^th century Anglo-American philosophy.

• 1. Overview
• 2. Murdoch’s Trajectory and Reception
• 3. Murdoch in Her Times
• 4. Murdoch’s View of the Self Against the Existentialist/Behaviorist Account
• 5. Moral Reality and Moral Realism
  • 5.1 Moral reality as other persons
  • 5.2 Moral reality as Platonic good
  • 5.3 Murdoch, Sidgwick, Plato and the self/other moral framework
  • 5.4 Moral realism, fact and value, practical reason
  • 5.5 Moral reality as metaphysics
  • 5.6 Metaphor
• 6. Moral Agency as Inner Activity
• 7. The Fabric of Moral Being
• 8. Seeing Replaces Doing
• 9. Simone Weil
• 10. Murdoch on Attention
  • 10.1 Care ethics, feminism, and particularity
  • 10.2 Particularity and particularism
  • 10.3 Obstacles to loving attention
• 11. Murdoch’s Focus on the Active Dimension of Moral Formation
• 12. The Absence of Social Sources of Negative Moral Formation in Murdoch’s Philosophy
• 13. Moral Seeing as a Spiritual Achievement vs. the Unreflective Good, Non-Egoistic Person
• 14. Virtue
• 15.Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals
  • 15.1 Duty
  • 15.2 Axioms
• Bibliography
  • A. Primary Literature: Books and Papers by Iris Murdoch
  • B. Secondary literature
• Academic Tools
• Other Internet Resources
• Related Entries

1. Overview

Murdoch’s family was middle class (her father was a civilservant) and Irish Protestant (an identity that remained important toMurdoch throughout her life). They moved to London from Ireland whenMurdoch was very young. Murdoch attended Oxford University,overlapping with three other women—Elizabeth Anscombe, PhilippaFoot, and Mary Midgley—at a time (1938–1942) when manymale students were away at war. Foot, Murdoch, and Midgley all becameprominent and influential moral philosophers, and Anscombe a prominentphilosopher of action and a student, friend, translator andinterpreter of Wittgenstein.

The four (now being referred to as the “Wartime Quartet”[MacCumhaill & Wiseman 2022; Lipscomb 2021]) stayed intouch after the war, and Murdoch did so with each of themindividually. All four pushed back against various aspects of themale-dominated Oxford orthodoxy of linguistic and analytic philosophy(e.g., the fact/value dichotomy, the severing of ethics from anunderstanding of human nature, the neglect of virtue and vice), thoughtheir own philosophies differed significantly from one another.

Over her lifetime Murdoch developed an entirely distinctive positionin moral philosophy, as well as philosophy of art and religion (bothof which she saw as important for morality). She was engaged with theAnglo-American moral philosophy of that period and its historicalantecedents (such as Hobbes and Hume) but was equally engagedthroughout her life with traditional and some then-current“Continental” philosophy—especially Schopenhauer,Hegel, Heidegger (on whom she wrote a book, to be published in thenear future), Sartre, Adorno, Buber, and Derrida; with Christianthinkers St. Paul, St. Augustine, Anselm, Eckhart, Julian of Norwich;and with Hindu and especially Buddhist thought. Her views were alsostrongly influenced by Plato, Kant, Simone Weil, and Wittgenstein, andshe 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 andlecturer), and was highly regarded by colleagues, often appearing incollections and BBC programs with leading British philosophersgenerally though not always in the analytic or linguistic tradition.She was comfortable with the analytic approach, though her thinkingwas clearly headed in different directions, in part because of theinfluence of Simone Weil (Broackes 2012a: 19–20).

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

Murdoch left her position at Oxford in 1963 (though she continued tolive in Oxford for some of each week) and increasingly lost touch withBritish academic philosophy. As of this writing, Murdoch is best knownfor a collection of three essays written in the 1960s, none originallypublished in easily accessible philosophy venues, published in 1970 asThe Sovereignty of Good. This collection is by far the mainsource for professional philosophers writing on Murdoch, and ofMurdoch’s broader impact on moral philosophy, and this entrywill draw largely but not exclusively on that work.

Toward the end of the 1970s and into the 1980s, some Anglo-Americanphilosophers began to make use of Murdoch in criticizing moralphilosophy of the day, or in developing a distinctive position oftheir 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 didnot involve deep scholarly engagement with Murdoch’s own work,but was inspired by it and helped bring Murdoch to the attention ofthe wider professional philosophical world.

A collection of almost all Murdoch’s previous articles(including those inSovereignty) plus a short book on Platowas published in 1997, asExistentialists and Mystics: Writings onPhilosophy and Literature, edited by her friend and biographer,the literary scholar Peter Conradi. That and the first scholarlycollection on her work,Iris Murdoch and the Search for HumanGoodness (Antonaccio & Schweiker 1996), with essays bytheologians and philosophers (including Diamond, Nussbaum, and Taylor)prompted an increase in scholarship directly on Murdoch in the 2000s.Justin Broackes’sIris Murdoch, Philosopher, in 2012,was the first all-philosopher collection on Murdoch. While the recentscholarship sometimes aims at demonstrating Murdoch’s relevanceto current live issues in Anglo-American ethics (Setiya 2013; Hopwood2018), increasingly, scholarship (including the two articles justcited) engages with Murdoch’s own philosophicalpreoccupations on her terms.

In 1992, Murdoch published her sole book working out her ownphilosophical views (Sovereignty being a collection ofseparately published essays),Metaphysics as a Guide toMorals. Murdoch’s views, especially in the latter work,have been difficult for contemporary philosophers to place comfortablywithin the intellectual terrain of moral philosophy as it hasdeveloped in our time, in part because of her unusual range ofintellectual touchstones; in part because, especially inMetaphysics, she seldom writes in a standard“argument/conclusion” format; and in part because of herintellectual distance from contemporary Anglo-American philosophy.There is currently very little secondary literature onMetaphysics, but Dooley and Hämäläinen’s 2019collection,Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide toMorals will hopefully spur further scholarship on that work. ARoutledge Handbook, Hopwood and Panizza’sThe MurdochianMind (forthcoming), will contribute substantially toMurdoch scholarship.

Murdoch is distinctive as a philosopher in another way as well.Beginning in 1954, she became a published novelist, with twenty-sixnovels in her lifetime, several of which won or were short-listed forimportant British literary prizes. Although her philosophy and hernovels can be read entirely separately from one another, they areplausibly regarded as connected and mutually illuminating, although ininterviews Murdoch sometimes denied this. A good deal of scholarlyliterature (mostly from literary scholars [but from the philosophyside, see Nussbaum 1990; Browning 2018b]) is devoted to exploringtheir connection and non-connection. Murdoch is the subject of anaward-winning biography,Iris: The Life of Iris Murdoch, byPeter Conradi (2001), and an award-winning film of that same year,Iris (dir: Richard Eyre), based on a memoir byMurdoch’s husband, John Bayley, which focuses largely on herdecline into Alzheimer’s in her last years (Bayley 1999). TheIris Murdoch Society publishes (since 2008) a twice-yearly journal,theIris Murdoch Review (seeOther InternetResources), that had been almost entirely a venue for scholarshipand commentary on Murdoch’s literary oeuvre, but recently hasstarted to carry much more philosophy.

3. Murdoch in Her Times

As is generally recognized, the English philosophical tradition has astrong empiricist and anti-metaphysical bent. An important exceptionwas the late 19^th and early 20^th centurymovement of a Hegelian-influenced “absolute idealism”,whose most prominent exponent was F.H. Bradley (1846–1924). Thismovement was seen as discredited by two prominent early20^th century British philosophers, G.E. Moore and BertrandRussell. The final blow was dealt by A.J. Ayer “logicalpositivist” work,Language, Truth, and Logic,channeling for an English audience views developed by the ViennaCircle in the 1920s and 30s. Logical positivism essentially declaredthat what made a statement meaningful was the possibility of verifyingit through empirical observation. Science was seen as the paradigm,though not the only, form of meaningful discourse. Metaphysicalstatements typical of British Idealism, such as that “allreality is one” or that “time is unreal”, wereviewed as meaningless because unverifiable. Ethical and evaluativestatements, such as that killing is wrong, were taken to have nocognitive significance. Murdoch thus came of age when the metaphysicaltradition was still within memory (she read Bradley seriously andtaught him), even if regarded as discredited. For her entire career,she retained a strong sense of the value of metaphysics both in itselfand as providing broader visions and structures for moralphilosophical reflection, while also appreciating the force ofespecially a Wittgensteinian critique of traditional metaphysics. Hermain tutor at Oxford, Donald MacKinnon, with whom she remained closethrough much of her younger life, was a philosophical theologian, andhelped influence her in a less positivistic direction, also lessdistant 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 moresophisticated, and (in Oxford) a much more influential view of ethicallanguage was developed by R.M. Hare, in his 1952The Language ofMorals. Hare said that moral statements did not aim to maketruthful 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 aprescription no matter what its content was moral if the subjectprescribed it for all (or everyone relevantly similarly situated), andin that sense universally.

Hare’s account of ethics involved several assumptions, notalways articulated, but widely shared in the practice of moralphilosophy in the 1950s (and many of them beyond). Murdoch’srejection of all of them provides an essential backdrop to herdistinctive approach to ethics.

1. Fact/value dichotomy: A fact can never entail avalue. If a term appears to be simultaneously factual and evaluative(e.g., “rude”, to take an example made famous byMurdoch’s dear friend Philippa Foot), it is really a conjunctionof a descriptive/factual meaning and an evaluation conferred on thefactual referent by the speaker. This view is inherited from theempiricist tradition “created in the scientific image” (SG1970: 28/321^[1]). Murdoch says it is “the most important argument in modern moralphilosophy” (M&E 1957/EM: 64).
2. Moral agents all inhabit the same shared world offacts (M&E 1957/EM: 71).
3. Values are not part of the world, capable of beingdiscovered by individual agents, but are brought to or projected ontothe world by moral agents. Quite often, situations present no moralissues for the agent at all.
4. The fundamental subject matter of ethics is what actspersons should perform, and principles and procedures for determiningthose acts, not what kind of person it is good to be (e.g., what sortof qualities of character, or virtues, it is good to have), or how todescribe the human world, an enterprise Murdoch takes to be inherentlyethical.
5. “The individual’s ‘stream ofconsciousness’ is of comparatively little importance, partlybecause it is often not there at all, and more pertinently because itis and can only be through overt acts that we can characterize anotherperson mentally or morally” (VCM 1956/EM 77). Inner reflectionis of moral interest only as it issues in choice, decision andaction.
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 fromthat of the moralist, who aims to “elaborate a moral code orencourage its observance”, as Ayer says (Warnock 1960: 131). The task of themoral philosopher is to analyze the character of moral statements, alinguistic/analytic rather than moral enterprise. The moralphilosopher qua philosopher should remain neutral on specific moralissues or more generally on questions about how to act and live.

Murdoch’s rejection of all these views in her writings of the1950s and 60s is partly connected with her take on existentialism.Existentialism attracted Murdoch partly because it was a philosophyone could “inhabit” or “live by” [OGG:47/337]. For existentialism it mattered tremendously what one did, inparticular situations as well as with one’s life overall, andhow philosophy was to guide and illuminate that journey. That sense ofurgency is lacking in British philosophical ethics in its turn towardcharacterizing “the language of morals”, partly becausethis enterprise was seen as morally neutral, not having implicationsfor conduct. (Murdoch’s friend Foot, who herself famouslychallenged the idea that the language of morals was morally neutral,poignantly captured Murdoch’s relation to the linguistic turn inethics: “We were interested in moral language, she wasinterested 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 bothHare and (notwithstanding her admiration for it) Sartreanexistentialism as she understood it. (For a critique of her take onexistentialism, see Moran 2012.) Both viewed freedom as fundamental tothe moral enterprise. For Hare the moral agent is free to choose theirmoral values, constrained only by the requirement that the agentprescribe those values universally. Sartre shares the former view buteschews the universalist “logic of morality” constraint.^[2] For Sartre, anguish (Angst) attends our recognition that our choicesare totally up to us; Hare’s view lacks that existentialanguish. But what interests Murdoch is their shared privileging of thechoosing will in the moral enterprise, the central image of the moralagent as responsible and free (and, in Hare’s case, rational),and their rejection of a structure of objective value outside theindividual that gives authoritative direction for deciding andchoosing. Murdoch sees the appeal of this view, in both itsexistentialist and analytic forms, but finds it false to our moralexperience and to the nature of moral agency.

In the 1962 “The Idea of Perfection” (inSovereignty), Murdoch begins to develop a contrasting pictureof the self, moral agency, and moral reality, building on her 1956“Vision and Choice in Morality”. Her stated target is notHare, who is only briefly mentioned, but Stuart Hampshire, whom sheadmired as a subtler and deeper thinker (and to whom she dedicatedSovereignty) and whom she regarded, in his 1959Thoughtand Action, as having articulated and defended much moreexplicitly than Hare the view of human agency and the self underlyingHare’s moral theory (largely but not entirely incorporating theseven 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 ongoingattitudes, perceptions, drives, attachments, beliefs, and modes ofattention. This substantial self is in the process of formation,change, and development all the time; and it provides the context forchoice in determinate situations (againstpoint 4 above). Murdoch notes that sometimes our way of apprehending a particularsituation will seem to make so evident to us what we should do thatprocesses of deliberation standardly underlying choice will not benecessary and we will simply perform the action. We should not, shethinks, value a kind of “freedom” that would exert willcontrary to an accurate perception of moral features of the situationthat bear on conduct.

Murdoch says that philosophy should develop a moral or philosophicalpsychology that provides the terms in which to understand andcharacterize the substantial self to which she gives center stage,displacing the existentialist/analytic (which she sometimes calls“existentialist-behavioristic”) freely choosing will. Thiscall for a new turn in philosophical ethics toward what came to becalled “moral psychology” helped to usher in that subject.It somewhat echoed Murdoch’s friend Elizabeth Anscombe’ssimilar but more radical and striking charge in her 1958 “ModernMoral Philosophy” to put the subject of ethics on hold until aphilosophical psychology that clarified the notions of intention,will, desire, and belief could be developed. But Anscombe thought ofphilosophical psychology as an enterprise independent of and prior todoing ethics (Anscombe 1958 [1997: 38]). By contrast Murdoch did notthink such a philosophical psychology (a term she also sometimes usedbut more frequently used “moral psychology”) could beseparated from ethics (OGG: 46/337; Diamond 2010; Brewer 2009:8–9).

Murdoch takes some steps toward developing such a moral psychology byembracing 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 naturalattachments are sexual, ambiguous, and hard for the subject tounderstand or control. (OGG: 51/341)

This substantial self constrains the will much more extensively thanthe existentialist/analytic picture recognizes. “The area of[the moral agent’s] vaunted freedom of choice is not usuallyvery great” (SGC: 78/364). We cannot easily rid ourselves ofpernicious emotions, attachments and motives that work against moralmotivation and behavior. Murdoch adds,

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

She sees the Freudian view as “a realistic and detailed pictureof the fallen man” (OGG: 51/241), one of many places where herphilosophy is influenced by a Christian worldview, as she fullyrecognizes. This pessimistic view of the human psyche plays a centralrole in Murdoch’s thought for her entire life, bolstered by herencounter with Schopenhauer and her particular take on Kant, both ofwhom articulate a philosophic dualism with a strong egoisticanti-moral force countered by a moral force (differing among thosetwo philosophers) in the psyche.

5. Moral Reality and Moral Realism

Murdoch’s critique of the existentialist/analytic conception ofthe self and the will mirrors her critique of both the Sartrean andHarean rejection of a moral reality outside the individual self. Shebelieves in that reality, that it can be known by human persons, andthat that reality, or the apprehension of it, motivates us to actmorally. She is thus a “moral realist”, “moralobjectivist” and “moral cognitivist” (thus rejectingpoint 3 [values are not part of the world]).

There are three distinct strands within Murdoch’s conception ofmoral reality—“other persons”, “theGood”, and “metaphysics”. Murdoch does not pull thethree 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 isother persons. Murdoch is not thinking of “other persons”as an aggregate, nor primarily as instances of a category. Rather agiven moral agent’s moral reality consists in the individualreality of each other person, one at a time.

In this strand, Murdoch emphasizes the complexity and difficulty ofapprehending the moral reality in question. She says that we are proneto 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 refersto as “unselfing” (a concept she draws from SimoneWeil’s “décreation”)—in order for us tofully grasp reality in this sense.^[3] (“We cease to be in order to attend to the existence ofsomething else”. OGG: 59/349) Murdoch’s novels frequentlyportray characters lost in their own world who see others primarilythrough their own fantasies of them. But Murdoch also emphasizes amore general contingency and idiosyncrasy of persons, resulting in ageneral opaqueness of persons to each other, a point apparentlyindependent of the one about fantasy and egoism, though complementingit.

Murdoch thinks grasping the reality of the other comes in degrees,that extend to a “perfect” understanding of another, astate that can be aimed at but not actually attained. She often speaksof levels of understanding—of persons, concepts, ideas—anidea she increasingly comes to associate with Plato, and that sheconnects with a “perfectionism” that holds out the perfectunderstanding as a (moral) standard (IP: 29/322; OGG: 61/350). Themoral challenge of knowing the other differs for each individual agentbecause each agent encounters different people, but also because thetask and challenge of knowing differs for each agent in relation toeach other person.

Sometimes Murdoch expresses the “other persons” strand inmore 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 individualanimal, but also non-animate and conceptual objects such as a languageor a subject matter, and also situations. She sometimes, andincreasingly so inMetaphysics, sees an appreciation of allof reality in its manifold detail as a crucial form of moralaspiration, and there is evidence in her novels of a specialappreciation of natural objects, not only living beings, and not onlyas beautiful (White 2020). But more frequently Murdoch regards otherpersons specifically as the content of moral reality.

5.2 Moral reality as Platonic good

A second, and increasingly prominent, strand in Murdoch’s viewof moral reality is that it is “The Good”, understood in aPlatonic sense. One element in Murdoch’s Platonism is thatsomething like the form of the Good constitutes what is known when wehave moral knowledge, and is also what is sought and loved. We achievethat understanding through knowing and loving the good in goodparticular things (including persons but also art, nature and ideas),then ascending to an understanding of Good itself. (Murdoch frequentlyemploys Plato’s “ascending” metaphor [e.g., SGC:94/377].) Murdoch also says, attributing it to Plato, that the Good islike a light that enables us to see goodness in particular things(SGC: 93/376).

Murdoch explicitly rejects two philosophically familiar ways tounderstand “good”—a functional use (“goodknife”; SGC: 93/376) and good as “the most generaladjective of commendation” (SGC: 98/381). These do not give us aclue to the concept. “A genuine mysteriousness attaches to theidea 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, tosee” [OGG: 66/354]; “attention to reality inspired by,consisting of, love” [OGG: 67/354]), she does not subscribe tothe aspect of Plato’s view that regards the forms as more realthan individual objects and persons who partake of them in the worldof experience, nor as inhabiting a transcendent world beyond our worldof experience (Hämäläinen 2019: 267). And she rejects this as aproper interpretation of Plato (SGC: 96/378f; Robjant provides adetailed defense of her interpretation of Plato [Robjant 2012].)).

The Good and other persons are distinct strands in Murdoch’sview of moral reality. But they reinforce each other. Hopwoodinterprets Murdoch as saying that “we love particularindividuals in light of the Good, and we love the Good throughparticular individuals” (Hopwood 2018: 486). Murdoch’sview is not analogous to Kant’s idea that respecting the otherperson involves directing that respect to the moral law or rationalwill within them, or to their best self. (Velleman defends a form ofKant’s view as Murdochian, understanding rational will to be thecapacity for valuing [Velleman 1999 (2006: 100)]. Hopwood criticizesthis view [Hopwood 2018: 482].) For Murdoch loving and knowing otherpersons is also not the same as knowing what is distinctly good inthem or about them. Susan Wolf rejects the idea that loving attentionas Murdoch (and she) understand it affirms the moral goodness, oroverall goodness, of its object. One can love, and direct lovingattention to, another whose deficiencies and faults she fullyrecognizes (Wolf 2014). Both Cordner and Wolf emphasize that it is theperson as a whole that is the proper object of loving attention(Cordner 2016; Wolf 2014). Murdoch agrees, in giving a criticism ofKant: “Kant does not tell us to respect whole particulartangled-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 beenproposed. Clarke suggests that the Good is a perfectionist principlein Murdoch, so that seeing other persons in light of the Good is justan expression of her perfectionism, pushing the agent to achieve amore and more just, loving, and complete perception of that person(Clarke 2012). Dorothy Emmet, an older contemporary and friend ofMurdoch presses a similar view, that the Good should be thought of asa “regulative ideal” in the Kantian sense, “anindefinable standard towards which we can turn in appreciationof” what is Good (or Beautiful). But Emmet differs from Clarkein denying that this is a moral principle (Emmet 1994 [this book wasdedicated to Murdoch]: 65–66; see also 1979 for one of the firstscholarly engagements with Murdoch). Emmet likely also influencedMurdoch’s resistance to British philosophy’s jettisoningof metaphysics in its analytic and linguistic modalities in the 1950s,through Emmet’s defense of metaphysics in her 1945TheNature of Metaphysical Thinking; which Murdoch read, and in herand Murdoch’s attempts starting in the 1950s (and in all ofMurdoch’s subsequent writings) to bring religion and philosophycloser together. Murdoch acknowledges that the Christian conception ofGod influences her understanding of the Good. “I shall suggestthat God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representableand necessarily real object of attention” and that we shouldretain a non-theistic concept [i.e., Good] with those characteristics(OGG: 55/344). This semi-religious dimension relates to the ideaMurdoch occasionally expresses, and more so inMetaphysics,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 inMurdoch’s view of moral reality, the “other persons”strand is un-Platonic in two important ways. One is that it involves asharp separation between self and other, and identifies morality withattention to, love of, or concern for the other and not the self.Henry Sidgwick articulated a standard view in Anglo-American moralphilosophy on this matter when he said that the field of ethics madean important step beyond the ancients when it articulatedself-interest as a distinct rational principle of action that isseparate from a principle of the good of others, understoodimpersonally. (He attributed this discovery to Bishop Butler.)(Sidgwick 1874 [1907: 404]; Sidgwick 1886 [1902: 197–8]; Brewer2009: 193). Neither Plato nor Aristotle have this exclusivelyother-focused conception of virtue, common to both Murdoch and thetradition Sidgwick identifies and praises. Murdoch agrees withSidgwick’s self/other distinction as one of great moralsignificance, though she does not regard cognizing or caring for theother in terms either of rationality or principle.

A second difference from Plato (and Aristotle) is Murdoch’srejection of the Greeks’ sense that virtue and virtuous actionare good for their agent as well as for their own sake (but the former“good for” is not understood by Plato or Aristotleprudentially and is not separable from virtue being good for its ownsake [Brewer 2009: 202]). For Murdoch it is indeed good to actvirtuously, and doing so helps to constitute the agent as morallygood. But she does not understand this virtuousness as intrinsicallygood for the agent. Virtue is pointless, as Murdoch oftensays (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 simplyhere” with no larger purpose ortelos (SGC:79/364). But in the face of this purposelessness, being and becoming amorally good person through a suppression or transcendence of self isthe best aspiration we can have.

Despite aligning with Sidgwick regarding the identification ofmorality solely with an appropriate focus on the other and theother’s welfare, not that of the self, Murdoch’s viewdiffers from Sidgwick’s, as well as from much of the Englishempiricist tradition in ethics (Hutcheson, Hume, Mill), in threecrucial respects. First, she pays very little attention toself-interest as an egoistic obstacle to morality through ourunduly privileging our own interests over those of others. For Murdochthe prime self-oriented obstacle to morality is fantasy, which gets inthe way of our seeing the other person as a distinct, separate, otherbeing with their own reality. Sometimes the personal fantasy idea isbound up withself-absorption, which keeps us from being morethan barely aware of others at all. More frequently it is ourinvestment in false ideas of the (particular) other expressed in thefantasy idea. Neither of these, however, is self-interest as anoverall 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, andHutcheson, and the empiricist temper of British philosophy more generally)is Murdoch’s understanding of moral realism. She is viewingmorality not only as calling for a greater focus on the well-being ofothers rather than the self, but saying that doing so involves beingin touch with, being responsive to, reality itself, while egoisminvolves living in falsehood, being out of touch with reality.“The self, the place where we live, is a place ofillusion” (SGC: 93/376). “The authority of morality is theauthority of truth, that is, of reality” (SGC: 90f/374).

Diamond and Brewer both note that Murdoch shares with both Plato andAristotle the view that reality is irreducibly evaluative (Diamond2010, 59f; Brewer 2009: 152). The identification of the Real with theGood is a deep part of Murdoch’s view (Brewer 2009:152). Murdoch recognizes that the view of reality as evaluativelyinert (in addition to human life having notelos) is anhistorical product, tied up with the rise of natural science, withKant playing a particularly important role in solidifying it withinthe Western philosophic tradition (MGM 1992: 40). She views Kant astrying to rescue value and morality in the face of this scientisticview of reality (MGM 1992: 50), but she entirely rejects that(unPlatonic) view of reality. Diamond argues that in doing so she alsorejects the related Kantian distinction between the theoretical domainand the practical domain (Diamond 2010: 73).

A third difference between Murdoch and the British tradition in ethicsis that the latter largely fails to recognize the difficultyand psychic complexity, so central to Murdoch’s view, of knowingthe (individual) other, and thus also often of knowing how to acttoward them so as to bring about their well-being. The notion of“benevolence” as employed in that tradition is taken toimply that being motivated to help others is sufficient to bring aboutwhat is good for the other. Murdoch strongly rejects this view, sincethe benevolent sentiment and motive does not guarantee anunderstanding 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 andinfluential secondary literature that is more engaged than Murdochherself with meta-ethical questions in the Anglo American tradition.Hilary Putnam credits Murdoch with the critique he develops of thefact/value dichotomy, focusing on what Murdoch calls “secondarymoral words” (IP: 22/317) and “normative-descriptivewords” (IP: 31/325; Putnam 2002: 34–35). (Bernard Williamslater influentially referred to these as “thick” moral orevaluative concepts, such as cruel, rude, brave, courageous, generous,elegant [Williams 1985]). These terms possess descriptive content butare also evaluative, and often motivational, contrasting with the moreabstract moral terms “good”, “right”, and“ought” that had dominated British moral philosophythrough the 1950s, and that almost entirely lack the descriptiveelement. For Putnam there are evaluative facts (“Jane’sact was courageous”) that have no less standing as describingreality than a presumptively non-evaluative fact. Nor, he argues, canthe reality reflected in the characterization be factored into twounrelated components joined together—an allegedly “purelydescriptive” component, and an evaluation of the content in thatcomponent (point 1 on the Hare list). The two dimensions are inextricably “entangled”, Putnamargues (2002).

This view thus rejects a common moral non-cognitivist (but shared bysome cognitivists) claim that moral properties always“supervene” on (that is, apply in virtue of)already-existing non-moral properties. Panizza and Setiya defend thisimplication of the existence of secondary moral terms (Panizza 2020;Setiya 2013). Panizza connects the rejection of supervenience withMurdoch’s view that our direct perception of moral properties isbound up with the ways that perception is deeply conceptual (Panizza2020: 284–5; see also Setiya 2013).

Others have focused more distinctly on Murdoch’s view’simplications for practical reason. John McDowell developed aMurdochian-influenced moral realist view, in an influential 1979 paper“Virtue and Reason”, often also regarded as a foundingessay in the contemporary virtue ethics tradition (and indeed McDowellsees his view [developed in other papers as well] as both Aristotelianand Murdochian) (McDowell 1979, 1998). (More on Murdoch and virtuebelow.)

McDowell says that to possess a virtue, such as kindness, is topossess “a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirementwhich situations impose on behavior”. Its

deliverances…are cases of knowledge… [A] kind personknows 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 situationsthat moral perception cognizes cannot be derived from generalprinciples but retain a particularistic dimension, also emphasized byMurdoch. (See “particularity” below.)

Setiya agrees with McDowell that for Murdoch reality as accuratelycognized supplies agents with motivating reasons, including moralreasons, for action; this view thus constitutes a form of “moralinternalism”. “Rationality belongs to full cognition ofthe facts” (Setiya 2013: 13). Setiya responds to the objectionthat a moral agent could apply a moral concept competently to asituation but be unmoved by the moral force of the thus-characterizedsituation. He notes that Murdoch speaks of

two senses of “knowing what a word means”, oneconnected with ordinary language and the other very much less so. (IP:29/322)

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

But Setiya disagrees with McDowell’s view that the moral realitycognized by the moral agent must take the form of moral requirementsand indeed, more broadly, with action-guiding features of situations(Setiya 2013: 11). Mylonaki criticizes McDowell on similar grounds andboth she and Setiya take the “other persons” view of themoral reality Murdoch is concerned with (Mylonaki 2019; Setiya 2013:11a). Mylonaki emphasizes, however, that cognizing that reality cangive rise to reasons for action.

5.5 Moral reality as metaphysics

A final thread in Murdoch’s view of reality is that it is whatmetaphysics describes. She understands metaphysics as anall-encompassing view of a transcendent reality, of the universe, thatthe individual must then attempt to come to understand in order towork out her place in it (M&E 1957/EM: 70). In “Metaphysicsand Ethics” she mentions Thomism, Hegelianism, and Marxism asexamples. These metaphysical systems and pictures are deeply ethicaland evaluative, but, she implies, also provide a broader conception ofreality. In her 1950s essays, she defends metaphysical thinking not somuch as true, as capturing reality, but as a coherent way of thinkingabout the moral endeavor of life that is excluded by the linguisticturn in philosophical ethics, and which thereby refutes (Hare’s)universal prescriptivism’s claim to be the sole moral theoryconsistent with “the language of morals”. She issympathetic to some moral, political, and philosophical/analyticcriticisms of metaphysical systems (especially that they can lose asense of the value of the individual [M&E 1957/EM: 70; Antonaccio1996: 115f], and an acknowledgment of ultimate contingency [MGM 1992:490]). Nevertheless, her evolving moral views always leave room forsome kind of transcendent structure beyond the individual that retainsethical authority over the moral agent. The title of her finalsummative work,Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, expressesthis continuing role for metaphysics in her thinking about moralityand reality. As Diamond argues, she is not thinking of“metaphysics” as a non-morally-informed enterprise, as itis sometimes understood. In that form, Diamond says, Murdoch would notthink it positioned to dictate what possibilities are open to moralphilosophy (Diamond 2010). A metaphysics of actual reality cannotavoid being morally informed.

The Platonic strand of moral reality can of course be seen asexemplifying the metaphysics strand, but the latter remains a moregeneral idea within Murdoch’s complex overall view of moral reality. The“other persons” strand seems less metaphysical and thuscontrary to the final strand. But Murdoch often speaks of the realityof other people in “transcendental”terms—transcending the individual ego—and this framingthereby retains an element important to her complex and shiftingunderstanding of metaphysics. All three strands play a role inMurdoch’s thinking about (moral) reality, but the other personsand the Good are distinctly more prominent.

5.6 Metaphor

In addition to but interwoven with the differences mentioned, otherpersons, the Good, and metaphysics (or a particular metaphysicalsystem or concept) also embody distinct metaphors for understandingmoral reality. Murdoch often emphasizes the importance of metaphor inthinking, especially in philosophy where, in the analytic tradition,there is an often tacit assumption that any metaphorical use oflanguage can be given a purely literal rendering. Murdoch entirelyrejects this way of thinking about language and understanding andoften 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 struggleof each moral agent to grasp the other person(s) in their particularworld as distinct persons, as equally real as themselves. The metaphorof 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 individualagent is placed. The metaphorical dimension (with the differencesamong 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 thefact/value dichotomy; the development of a virtue-ethical form ofmoral realism focused on right-making characteristics prompting actsin the public world; and, more generally, debates about practicalreason and reasons for action. But the significance of Murdoch’sphilosophy, and in particular of her version of moral realism, for anunderstanding of morality significantly transcends thosecontributions. (Setiya recognizes that Murdoch herself is barelyinterested in reason or rationality [Setiya 2013], though she doesvery occasionally talk about reasons. She would not regard “practicalrationality” as a welcome framework for her thought, even if herinsights have bearing on what is currently understood by that notion.She says, in promotion of both her perfectionism and loveas a central ethical concept, “‘Act lovingly’ willtranslate ‘Act perfectly’ whereas ‘Actrationally’ will not” [IP: 102/384].) Bakhurst argues thatMurdoch’s moral realism is a substantive moral view, not ameta-ethical view as McDowell’s is (a rejection ofpoint 7, that philosophers can and should propound morally neutral views ofmorality) (Bakhurst 2020: 218).^[4]

We may focus on two such contributions to moral philosophy connectedto Murdoch’s moral realism: (A) an expanded conception of moralagency; (B) the notion of a “fabric of ethical being”.

On (A), Murdoch delineates a broader notion of moral agency than thatinvolved in reasons internalism and the perception of or sensitivityto action-guiding reasons within situations. She seeks to demonstratea form of moral agency that takes place solely in the mind of theagent with no expression in her behavior in the public world. She doesso through an extended example in IP, which serves other purposes aswell (especially the importance of the inner life for morality,againstpoint 5 [the inner life is not very important for morality]), and isextensively cited in the secondary literature. The example is ofM, the mother-in-law ofD. ThroughoutD’smarriage toM’s son,M has viewedD as“pert and familiar, insufficiently ceremonious, brusque,sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely juvenile”. Shefeels her son has “married beneath him” (IP: 17/312).M behaves towardD without revealing her real opinionsand feelings. Murdoch highlights this feature by imagining thatD moves away or dies, and thatM therefore comes to haveno opportunity to engage in behavior directed at D.

M settles into her fixed picture ofD. But somethingprompts her to reflect on her view, recognizing both her jealousy ofD and her own snobbishness. She tries to look at theDshe knew in a new way, and over time, as the result of her attempts toseeD anew, her view ofD changes.

D is discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, notundignified but spontaneous…not tiresomely juvenile butdelightfully youthful. (IP: 17–18/313)

Murdoch imagines thatM’s new view ofD isaccurate and truthful, recognizing that it need not be. Murdoch seesM’s attempts to seeD as exemplifying activity onM’s part, though issuing in no outward behavior, activitythat is moral in character. Murdoch concludes that our moral agency isnot exhausted by our outward behavior, nor by outward behavior plusmental acts conceptually tied to outward behavior, like deciding,choosing, and deliberating. And the moral philosophy of her time didnot leave any clear place for this purely inner moral activity ofattention.

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 discussingM she says thather inner mental acts of attention contribute to “a continuousfabric 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, whatthey think attractive or praiseworthy, what they think funny. (VCM1956/EM: 80f)

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

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

This metaphor of the fabric of being connects with Murdoch’ssaying that morality is

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

a key criticism ofpoint 4 (morality consists fundamentally in choice-making in specifiablesituations). We are in a constant state of moral formation,and we bring our fabric of being to (what we experience as) choicesituations. Actions and other responses flow from the backgroundfabric of being that has been constructed by this moral formation.This metaphor also connects with Murdoch’s defense of the moralimportance 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 ofWittgenstein’s emphasis on public criteria for the meaning ofconcepts (IP 1970, e.g., 15/311; Wiseman 2020).

8. Seeing Replaces Doing

Nevertheless, it is not entirely clear how Murdoch is envisioning themoral formation that constructs the fabric of moral being. Thisunclarity emerges in Murdoch’s substitutingseeing fordoing as the core metaphor for human life’s mostfundamental moral task. Her influential essay “The Idea ofPerfection” is framed as a critique of Stuart Hampshire on thispoint. She sees Hampshire as articulating the most powerful case forplacing action-in-the-world at the core of the moral enterprise. Shesuggests an alternative conception that uses a range of visualmetaphors such as see, attention, perception, looking, and vision toexpress the fundamental task of morality. Her visual metaphors aredefinitely 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 therebyexpress the limitations of the practical reasoning approach tounderstanding Murdoch’s moral philosophy.

In particular, Murdoch employs “attention” (not entirelyconsistently) to mark the process by which this successfulapprehension of reality—seeing—is brought about.

I have used the word “attention” which I borrow fromSimone Weil, to express the idea of a just and loving gaze directedupon an individual reality.I believe this to be thecharacteristic and proper mark of the moral agent. (IP: 34/327;emphasis added)

9. Simone Weil

Before discussing Murdoch’s notion of attention, some remarksabout Weil are in order, because of her profound impact on Murdoch,not only in relation to attention. Simone Weil (1909–1943) was aFrench philosopher (though never a university professor), politicalactivist, and, in her later (short) life a kind of Christian mystic.Murdoch encountered Weil’s writings in the early 1950s, andreviewed herNotebooks in 1956 (“Knowing theVoid”). Murdoch mentions her only briefly in her earlierwritings; Weil, unlike Sartre, was not a figure at all familiar toBritish philosophy of those years, and indeed she is still littleknown to Anglo-American philosophers (see the Stanford Encyclopedia entry onSimone Weil). But as in the quote above, Murdoch always makes her debt to Weilevident. Weil influenced Murdoch’s turn to Platonism, and herparticular interpretation of Plato. She certainly bolstered thecontinuing Christian elements in Murdoch’s thought, as well asMurdoch’s increasing invoking of mysticism as related tomorality, especially inMetaphysics. She probably influencedMurdoch’s view of psychic energy (understood on a Freudianmodel) as “mechanical”, something to which we aresubjected. And Murdoch made use of Weil’s notion of“void” as part her moral outlook inMetaphysics.

Weil also developed a quite original critique of Marxism that involveda strong emphasis on the dignity of manual work, an emphasis ofMurdoch’s also, in her important political essay, “Houseof Theory”, from 1958. Murdoch refers to Weil frequently inMetaphysics, though only once in any sustained way. In 1976she cited Weil’sAttente de Dieu (Waiting forGod) as one of only three philosophical works that deeplyinfluenced her. (The others are Plato’sSymposium andKierkegaard’sFear and Trembling [Broackes 2012a: 17,note 42].)

But Weil’s strongest influence on Murdoch was in the idea ofattention (Weil 1942 [1977]; 1973b). Weil’s view of attentionhad a strong religious dimension. The proper, ultimate object ofattention is God, though persons and subject matters are also objectsof attention. Weil’s notion of attention also involves a kind ofpassive waiting in readiness for a truth to be revealed, an emptyingof oneself in preparation for receiving the object. Murdoch abandonedthe religious aspect of Weil’s view of attention, as she alsoabandoned for herself the distinctly theistic aspects of Weil’sChristianity, and also adopted a more active conception of attentionthan Weil. (Forsberg argues that Murdoch’s view was closer toWeil’s regarding passivity/activity [Forsberg 2017]. See alsoCordner 2016.) But their notions were otherwise similar.^[5]

10. Murdoch on Attention

For Murdoch, attention involves activity on our part (more so than inWeil), directing the “just and loving gaze upon an individualreality”, asM’s attempt to seeD is meantto illustrate. Sometimes Murdoch suggests that seeing someone justlyand lovingly is precisely what is involved in seeing them as theyreally are [IP: 28/321; OGG: 67/354].

But Murdoch does not regard mere accuracy as constituting this justand loving gaze (IP: 23/317). Learning more details about someone(that they like chocolate or are afraid of snakes) is not whatattention as loving and just provides (Cordner 2016). Moreover, asillustrated by the character of Julius King in her novelFairlyHonorable Defeat, someone can be very perceptive, very tuned intoaspects of other people’s reality, such as their vanity, and canuse this knowledge to manipulate and harm those persons. Julius indeedis incapable of loving others at all, and his perceptiveness mightinvolve accurate, but not just or loving, attention (FHD 1970).

As mentioned earlier, Murdoch thinks that fully recognizing andacknowledging that a given other person is as real as oneself does notcome naturally to us. Our fantasies and self-absorption get in theway; getting past these obstacles is difficult and uncertain andconstitutes a genuine moral achievement. Attention is the process bywhich we are potentially enabled to do so.

The “as real as oneself” formulation may be meant tocapture two somewhat distinct strands in Murdoch’s view. One isthe recognition of the other in her distinct otherness and differencefrom oneself, rather than in light of one’s projections onto theother that assimilate her to oneself. The second is that the other isseen as like oneself, for example as a human being, a person, apossessor of dignity. (Murdoch implies but does not articulate this secondstrand.) Murdoch wants both these strands in what constitutes a moraltake on the other, and “just and loving attention”, evenif it does not seem equivalent to “appreciating that others areas real as oneself”, should probably be understood asencompassing both. (Chappell adds a third strand, what it is like tobe that other person [Chappell 2018: 103].)

Attention is thus a process by which human persons are enabled toaccess moral reality. The process is both cognitive and perceptual(Murdoch does not attempt to work out their relationship to oneanother) but for Murdoch those capacities are also moral in character.Our moral capacities arepart of our cognitive capacities,enabling, and required for us to see, the moral and evaluative aspectsof 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 ofcare ethics, especially in its early (and continuing) form as a typeof feminist ethical outlook (Gilligan 1982; Noddings 1984; Grimshaw1986; Ruddick 1989; Walker 1989; Bowden 1997). Care ethics emphasizesattentiveness and concern for the other person in her particularity,informed by knowledge of the specific needs, desires, and situation ofthat other person, in contrast to emphasizing a universal categorysuch as “person” or “human being” as theappropriate target of attention and care. Murdoch’s emphasis onthe reality of the particular other as the target of loving attentionwas drawn on to develop this form of ethical theory.

In addition both care ethics and Murdoch tend to see personalrelationships as the primary domain of morality. Murdoch’s focuson personal fantasy as a prime obstacle to grasping the other’sreality suggests that she is envisioning persons with whom we have apersonal relationship. But her language sometimes suggests a broaderscope, perhaps to persons known to oneself but with whom one does nothave a personal relationship, or even the broader category of personsone encounters in a fleeting way (e.g., fellow riders on the subway).She seldom suggests that it means needy or suffering persons distantfrom oneself, or members of a general category (e.g., victims ofCovid). Something like that idea surfaces only inMetaphysics, where Murdoch associates it withutilitarianism.

Varieties of care ethics arose to encompass less personal forms ofrelationship, and some also expanded this focus to take account ofinstitutions and structures in which care relationships do, or should,take place (Tronto 1993; Bowden 1997; Norlock 2019). Murdoch never goes in thisinstitutional direction. At the same time, the centrality of thevisual metaphor in Murdoch—attention, seeing, looking,vision—does not sit comfortably with the emphasis in much careethics, especially in its feminist form, on the sustaining of ongoingpersonal relationships involving mutuality and reciprocity, and moregenerally on the fundamentally relational character of the self. Theattentive self is not portrayed by Murdoch as actively engaging withthe attended-to other in a reciprocal relationship. InMetaphysics, she actively defends the standing-apart of themoral subject against the engaged relationality present in the Jewishtheologian Martin Buber’s views (MGM 1992, ch 15: 361–380.See Cordner 2019 discussion). (Murdoch’s overall relationship tofeminism 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 outsidethe care ethics context is particularity—an emphasis on thelimits of universal principle and impersonality to capture thesubstance of appropriate moral response. This particularity takes twoforms, or at least two emphases, one on the particularity ofsituations—the (alleged) impossibility of coming up with a setof general moral principles or a moral code that will always prescribethe right action (McDowell’s emphasis, and the focus of what iscalled “particularism” [Hooker & Little 2000]). Theother is on the particularity of persons as objects of moral attentionand concern. (There are other typologies of particularism. See Driver2012.) Both dimensions are present in Murdoch’s thought and incare ethics, and the person-focus is more central to both Murdoch andcare ethics. Millgram finds a resource for particularism inMurdoch’s emphasis on finding the best description of asituation (Millgram 2002), but situation-particularity remains withinthe “action/reasons for action” framework that Murdochdefinitively transcends, and person-particularity is crucial for herdoing so.

10.3 Obstacles to loving attention

For Murdoch, just and loving attention, seeing the other as equallyreal as oneself is a difficult and infrequent moral achievement. Shedelineates three different stages involving attention, each yieldingobstacles to its realization. First, an agent may fail to notice thatan effort of attention is called for. As Murdoch says, “I canonly choose within the world I can see” (IP: 37/329). What wenotice, what registers with us, is an integral part of our fabric ofmoral being. If an agent fails to see a morally relevant feature of aperson nearby (e.g., their distress), this feature will not becomepart of her subjectively perceived world and she will not even attemptto focus on this other person as part of an attempt at proffering justand loving attention.

But even if she does notice the morally relevant feature of the otherand decides to make that attempt, as for exampleM does withrespect toD, she may not be able to do so. Because offantasies and resentments toward the other, or just self-absorption,the moral agent may simply not be capable of focusing on the otherperson beyond a very superficial level. She may genuinely try, but endup with the wrong target occupying her mind.

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

Notice that “attention” is used in two different ways inthis account. The first is focusing on another as part of anattempt to proffer just and loving attention. (Call this“attempt attention”, attention in its mode as an attemptat just and loving attention). The second issuccessfullyproffering such just and loving attention. (Call this “successattention”, attention in its mode as a successful attempt.)

Only if the three hurdles are cleared has the agent achieved thesuccess attention that Murdoch thinks morality demands. Variousaspects of the agent’s fabric of ethical being can prevent thatmoral achievement.

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

We must therefore look more closely into how Murdoch understands moralformation, the creation of agents’ fabric of ethical being. Shesays that over time our attendings (another term for attemptattention) build up the (subjective) structures of value that largelyconstitute our fabric of being.

[I]f we consider what the work of attention is like, how continuouslyit goes on, and how imperceptibly it builds up the structures of valueround about us…; (IP: 37/329)

[O]ur ability to act well “when the time comes” dependspartly, perhaps largely, upon the quality of our habitual objects ofattention. (OGG: 56/345; see also 67/354, 69/356, 91f/375)^[7]

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

But the idea that our fabric of being and subjective structures ofvalue are built up almost solely or even primarily through acts ofattempt attention seems at odds with Murdoch’sFreudian/Kantian/Schopenhauerian moral psychology, which implies thatthe main forces creating our fabric of being are fantasies, otherdistortions, and egoistic desires infrequently aligned with moral waysof being. These do indeed build up structures of value and ways ofperceiving reality. They are not merely forces operating in amechanical way on the agent’s will, pulling her away from moralaction and perception, although this dualistic image is one Murdochoften employs for the human psyche. But the values and ways ofperceiving built up by these forces are usually morally bad or atleast unworthy. An example from Murdoch’s novels is Julius King,the character referred to earlier, who sees many other persons in aparticular way, contemptuously—Murdoch somewhat implies that heis morally damaged from being a concentration camp survivor—andoften treats his acquaintances and even friends in a malicious andcontemptuous way, arising from the valuational framework (part of hisfabric of ethical being) within which he views them (FHD 1970).Although Murdoch’s predominant view of the psyche implies thategoistic forces do much to create our fabric of being, within whichour capability for success attention comprises but a weak reed, shedoes not actually adopt this view. Rather she takes the view that ouractive, deliberate attendings (attempt attention) are the prime sourceof our subjective structures of value and fabric of moral being.

Thus Murdoch’s stated view privileges what can be seen as theactive dimension of value or moral formation, while her theory of thepsyche should have pointed her (also) toward the passive aspectsthereof. Cora Diamond suggests that the “fabric of being”metaphor mixes active and passive (Diamond 2010: 72). And in a 1966essay, “The Darkness of Practical Reason”, Murdochcriticizes Hampshire for an overly sharp distinction between passiveaspects of mental life (represented by desires and fears that are notthought-dependent) and the active choosing will, aided byreason’s surveying the facts of the agent’s situationenabled by an active stepping back from that situation, that decidesand takes action (DPR 1966/EM: 201). She sees (attempt)attention, and also imagination, as falling into neither of thesecategories. 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 limitedcontrol of their attendings. In this sense, attempt attention doesfall into the “active” category, thus contrasting with theaction-centric view of agency and freedom she criticizes in existentialist and analytic moral philosophies andpsychologies. This attempt attention contrasts with the Freudianintrapsychic forces that contribute to our moral formation withoutengaging our agency in that way. And at least in one place sherecognizes a form of passivity that is connected with a person’sfabric of being, in contrast with aspects of our mental or psychicuniverse that are not. In discussing Hampshire, she attributes to himrecognition that a Freudian explanation or understanding of, say, afear

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

This contrasts with a fear that besieges us but whose character werepudiate, or at least do not accept. Thus Murdoch’s view thatour attendings shape our moral formation and world of perceived valuesdraws on a view of activity reduced in scope from the Hampshireanconcept, yet still distinguishable from a form of passivity that sherecognizes (at least here) as part of our moral being. It is in thissense of “active” that she privileges the active (attemptattendings) over the passive in her explicit account of the formationof our fabric of moral being, resulting in the passive dimension notreceiving 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 formationis also expressed in a striking absence of attention to the distinctlysocial sources of negative moral formation. An important partof how moral formation is, as she says, going on all the time, how our fabric ofbeing is always being constructed, arises from social rather thanintrapsychic factors, for example, representations of categories ofpersons that block or hinder agents’ abilities to see thereality of persons in those groups. As a member of a given society, orparticular subcultures within that society, we are subjected tostereotypes and other misleading representations of different groupsof people, with whom we do or do not come in contact. The stereotypesare attached to race, gender, class, religion, national origin, sexualorientation, age, gender expression, professions and occupations,residence in certain neighborhoods or regions, and other socialgroups. These “figurations”, as Diana Meyers usefullycalls them, are almost always evaluative in character (Meyers 1994).Thus they contribute to social agents’ evaluative take on theworld and to the formation of their moral being. They affect whetherwe do, or try to, have loving attention, respect, compassion, and evenmere acknowledgment toward individual members of those groups. In thisrespect figurations are comparable to the fantasies and other forms ofegoism that Murdoch points to that block loving attention—exceptthat they affect our responses to people unknown to us much more thanthese Freudian intrapsychic forces do. Social stereotypes are not theonly form of socially-produced barrier to loving attention, but theyare important and can represent the larger category for our purposes.^[8]

We are largely passive with respect to the impact of these figurationson our moral being, often not even recognizing their existence, asrecent work on “implicit bias”—unconscious ways wesee 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 groupsin question, nor are they generally (though perhaps they can sometimesbe) generated through (attempt) attention towards groups orindividuals. If we notice them at all, we often just find ourselvespossessing them (Blum 2012).

Social figurations may not clear the bar for contributions to ourmoral formation that Murdoch sets up in the quote above from DPR. Theymay seem more like a fear that we do not endorse. Indeed figurationscan be a source of such fears, such as a stereotype of black males asthreatening, and can function even if the agent has not embraced theircognitive content. Murdoch’s notion of “fabric ofbeing” is never sufficiently defined so as to make entirelyclear whether any item in our mental universe is actually excludedfrom it. But we can rely on an intuitive sense that if a stereotypesubstantially affects how the agent perceives and experiences personsof groupX, and the agent has not attempted to rid herself ofthe stereotype or neutralize its effect on her, then the stereotypecontributes to or is part of her moral being (as a passivefactor).

These social forces, explored by the more recent development of“social epistemology”, complement the intrapsychic ones aspassive contributors to moral formation. The “going on all thetime” that constitutes our moral formation and being is acomplex combination of passive and active elements and processes. Inseveral essays in the late 1950s Murdoch mentions the idea of“convention”, and sometimes sees conventions orconventional thinking as a barrier to adequate perception (Holland2012). But convention does not capture the idea of distinctfigurations of particular groups of persons that are powerful forcesin the culture and society harming social beings’ ability to seethe reality of members of those specific groups. These obstacles havean entirely different source than the intrapsychic forces with whichMurdoch is concerned (Clarke 2012: 244f; Blum 2012). The two cancomplement and interact, asM’s class-based snobberymakes common cause with her jealousy ofD to cast the latter inthe negative light that Murdoch describes. There is strong support inMurdoch’s writing for Nussbaum’s claim that

Murdoch seems almost entirely to lack interest in the political andsocial determinants of a moral vision and in the larger socialcritique that ought…to be a major element in the struggleagainst one’s own defective tendencies. (Nussbaum 2001: 32)

This is not, however, to deny Clarke’s point thatMurdoch’s view of attention and moral perception leave room forself-reflective criticism within which such a social critique could belodged (Clarke 2012). But the point is not only that Murdoch neglectssocial and political factors in moral formation but that herprivileging of the active and neglecting the passive is a theoreticalunderpinning of this neglect.

Murdoch’s stated view that our attempt attention is thevirtually sole source of our fabric of being suggests an ambiguity inwhat she means when she says that morality or moral life is“something that goes on continually” (IP: 37/329), notonly in moments of actional choice. She definitely means thatmoral activity is going on all the time, a view connectedwith her expanding the domain of “activity” beyond itsconventional understanding as the public world of action, to includethe inner life. She wants to say that in between public act-and-choicesituations we are continually active mentally in our attempt attentionand our imagination.

But she also wants to say that themoral formation thatproduces our fabric of being is going on all the time. This opens upthe larger issue of the range of factors that contribute to moralformation, beyond attempt attention. Murdoch may partly be blinded tothe passive forces in this category by a failure to keep clearlydistinct the claims that moral activity goes on continually and thatmoral formation goes on continually. But her vital moral insight ofthe “fabric of being” metaphor requires taking account ofthe 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 andlengthy mental, emotional, and spiritual achievement, never able to befully accomplished. The defeat or transcendence of the ego issomething the agent must continually work at. This idea of a spiritualjourney toward moral seeing looms even larger inMetaphysics.However, Murdoch also wants to leave room for rare persons for whomappreciating the Good and the reality of other people is not achievedprimarily through struggle and challenge. As she says in a oft-quotedpassage, “[I]t must be possible to do justice to both Socratesand the virtuous peasant” (IP: 2/300). (The latter is not anauspicious formulation, as “peasants”, even if uneducated,can still be reflective and intentional in seeking the Good.) Murdochfollows Schopenhauer, an important historical figure for her, inmarveling at meeting that rare someone in whom “the anxiousavaricious tentacles of the self”, so ubiquitous in human nature,are absent [SGC: 103/385]. Of course, this is not to deny that anyvirtuous person must sometimes have to suppress anti-moral desire, orto struggle to see other persons in their full reality. Even if thedifference is one of degree, the “constant struggle” imageis quite different from the virtuous peasant, and Murdoch wants toleave room for both.

14. Virtue

Murdoch speaks often of virtue, and she has been treated as an earlyvirtue theorist. HerSovereignty essays were given exposureby inclusion in some early and canonical virtue ethics collections(MacIntyre & Hauerwas 1983; Crisp & Slote 1997). While she maywell have helped spur interest in virtue within moral philosophy, sheis not a virtue theorist. She is not putting forward a view thatvirtue is a more fundamental moral concept than other concepts, nor isshe claiming that approaching right action through the lens of virtueis superior to doing so through a Kantian/deontological or utilitarianapproach. She does not offer an “ethical theory” in eitherof these senses. Her invocation of virtue reflects an unsystematizedrecognition that virtue is part of the toolbox we use to understandthe moral domain of life, as are attention, perception, love,unselfishness, and (inMetaphysics) duty. She joined withvirtue theory in helping to expand the scope of ethics beyondprocedures and principles of right action to include how it is good tolive and to be (againstpoint 5).

15.Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals

15.1 Duty

It is not possible to provide a full discussion ofMetaphysics asa Guide to Morals in this entry, nor of Murdoch’s evolvingviews on art and literature, religion, politics, concepts, and thenature of philosophy, all of which bear on her view of morality. WhenMetaphysics treats issues of morality, most of what it saysis in the spirit of her earlier moral writings, or extends it, thoughsometimes quite significantly. There is a great deal more emphasis inMetaphysics on purification of the individualconsciousness—purifying it of its egoism—and the Platonic“ascent” to that purification, as a core moral task; butthat idea is present inSovereignty also. She also much morefrequently connects morality with mysticism, spirituality, andreligion. She also retains the idea that we construct our moral worldthrough mental activity, but inMetaphysics she sometimesshifts that activity from attention to Eros, or energy (“[W]eare always deploying anddirecting our energy, refining orblunting it, purifying or corrupting it”. [MGM 1992: 495;emphasis in original]), and sometimes to imagination (MGM 1992:322).

However, inMetaphysics Murdoch amends her moral philosophyin one quite substantial way. She now thinks the moral life cannot dowithout duty, and that duty is not simply an expression of moralvision or attention. She says that there are several different“modes of ethical being” besides moralvision/attention/Eros/purification, that co-exist with it in a larger“field of force”, involving tension between the differentmodes (MGM 1992: 492). Duty is the most important of these. Herconception of duty is like Kant’s in certain respects andcontrary to it in others.

Duties, as Kant said, present absolute moral requirements. They areavailable as a bridle on contrary inclination without being routedthrough the individual’s moral sensibility. They can thereby“introduce order and calmness” (MGM 1992: 494). They donot leave room for flexibility of interpretation by the agent’smoral character (Hopwood 2019: 250).

But, contra Kant, duties are unsystematic, not necessarily connectedwith one another. The reason for not lying is different from that fornot stealing. They are not all expressions of a more general principleor procedure, like the categorical imperative. Murdoch recognizes butrejects Schopenhauer’s and Wittgenstein’s view that“duty”, especially when viewed (as Murdoch does), as anunconnected “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 aclearer commandthan ‘be truthful’” (MGM 1992: 302). However,although the latter does not have the clarity of direction of theformer, both possess an immediate availability to the agent.

Murdoch also rejects Kant’s view that duty is the whole ofmorality, as she rejects Schopenhauer’s view that morality canrest 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 toolittle”, following a rule without imagining that more isrequired (MGM 1992: 494), more that must arise from another mode ofethical being.

Murdoch recognizes something like dutiful action inSovereignty, when she speaks of everyday acts that we performsimply 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 asexpressions of moral perception. InSovereignty she lacks theidea that “the concept of duty remains with us as a steady moralforce” (MGM 1992: 494).

15.2 Axioms

The notion of duty is connected with a third “mode of moralbeing”, part of the field of force constituted by all thesemodes, that she calls “axioms”. Axioms are roughly thepolitical counterpart of duties, the latter understood as operating inthe terrain of personal behavior (Antonaccio 2000: 159). Axioms are(relatively) fixed and unavoidable constraints and requirementsgoverning behavior in the political domain. Like duties, they do notform a system, but are distinct in their individual character, asillustrated by Murdoch’s most frequent example of an axiom-type,that of rights. She mentions, for example, the right to happiness, theright to vote, rights animals have (presumably not to be made tosuffer), and the rights of women. Even if all are rights, they havedifferent valuational characters. Axioms operate by being regarded asreadily understood unconditional and inviolable standards, and so canbe invoked and expect to be honored (Browning 2019: 185).

In contrast to (though not strictly incompatible with) what she saysabout duties, axioms are historical products, and this is connectedwith their being unsystematic and piecemeal. Women’s coming tobe seen as having equal rights with men might not have happened, butit did, and now (Murdoch thinks) equal rights for women has the statusof an axiom. Axioms are products of genuine, if historicallycontingent, moral insight.

InMGM, Murdoch sees the individual-moral and the politicaldomains as governed by very different norms and principles, eachneeding to be protected from too much influence from the other.

Liberal political thought posits a certain fundamental distinctionbetween the person as citizen and the person as moral-spiritualindividual. (MGM 1992: 357)

She sees the individual-moral domain (notably excluding duty) asgoverned by a ‘perfectionism’ that is continuous fromSovereignty toMetaphysics. The aspiration to thehighest moral goodness is the proper aim of the human person. Bycontrast, the polity cannot be ‘perfected’; its proper aimis to be ‘decent’ (MGM 1992: 356), to try to limit theevil contained therein (MGM 1992: 368, from Simone Weil). This view isa radical departure from Murdoch’s political thinking in herfascinating 1958 essay, “A House of Theory”, her onlypre-Metaphysics political philosophy writing. There, and inoccasional remarks inSovereignty, Murdoch sees moral ideasand ideals as the appropriate normative source for sociopoliticalarrangements—for example, as in “House”, the ideasof dignity in work, and the communal bonds of work. InMetaphysics this view is largely (not entirely) rejected(Blum forthcoming).

Though, in contrast to duties and moral vision, axioms concern thepolitical rather than the individual-moral realm, Murdoch conceives ofthem as part of the fabric of moral being. They bear on individualconduct through the individual’s status as a citizen, wherein werecognize, support, and honor human rights, though it is the state thatadopts policies that officially recognize rights (and other axioms). Civicmorality is part of the individual’s moral being. The inclusionof the political as a distinct aspect of moral thinking and being doesnot take Murdoch in the direction of envisioning the human person asdeeply embedded in a rich web of social/institutional relationshipsthat shape her moral being and her moral requirements—forexample, in social role relationships, as explored in her friendDorothy Emmet’s 1966Rules, Roles, and Relations (Emmet1996). Alasdair MacIntyre (Emmet’s student and collaborator)makes this point in a review ofMetaphysics:

[W]hat is absent is any conception of the achievement of the Good as atask for human beings in community, so that the transformation of theself has to be a transformation of social relationships. (MacIntyre1993: 2)

The pluralistic conception of morality in the field of force idea goesbeyond the rejection of a single principle governing conduct, such asutilitarianism, Kantianism, or certain versions of virtue theory.These monistic views concern only conduct, and their rejection(discussed earlier in relation to McDowell’s MurdochianAristotelianism) leaves in place, inSovereignty, a unityinvolved in the idea of moral vision/purification of consciousness.The pluralism inMetaphysics’s modes of ethical beingidea rejects a unity of that sort as well, seeing the purification ofconsciousness as only one, though the most significant, aspect ofmorality in the overall “field of force” of our ethicalbeing (Hopwood 2019).

Bibliography

A. Primary Literature: Books and Papers by Iris Murdoch

A.1 Books

Only one of her 26 novels is listed:A Fairly HonorableDefeat.

• 1953 [1987],Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, New Haven, CT:Yale University Press. Reprinted with a new, substantial, introductionby Murdoch, New York: Penguin Books, 1987.
• [FHD] 1970,A Fairly Honorable Defeat, New York: Penguin,1970.
• [SG] 1970,The Sovereignty of Good, New York: Routledge,1970.
• 1977,The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished theArtists, Oxford: Clarendon Press; reprinted in [EM], pp.386–463.
• [MGM] 1992,Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, New York:Penguin.
• [EM] 1997,Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophyand Literature, Peter Conradi (ed.), New York: PenguinBooks.

A.2 Articles

• [KV] 1956, “‘Knowing the Void’: Review of SimoneWeil’sNotebooks”,The Spectator,November 1956: 613–614; reprinted in [EM], pp. 157–160.
• [VCM] 1956, “Vision and Choice in Morality”,Aristotelian Society Supplementary Volume: Dreams andSelf-Knowledge, 30: 32–58; reprinted in [EM],pp. 76–98.
• [M&E] 1957, “Metaphysics and Ethics”, in D. F.Pears (ed.),The Nature of Metaphysics, London: Macmillan,1957: 99–123; reprinted in [EM], pp. 59–75.
• [HT] 1958, “A House of Theory”, in N. Mckenzie (ed.),Conviction, London: MacGibbon and Kee, 1958: 218–33;reprinted in [EM], pp. 171–186.
• [SBL] 1959, “The Sublime and the Good”, inChicagoReview, 1959: 42–55; reprinted in [EM], pp. 205–220.
• [IP] 1964 [1970/1997], “The Idea of Perfection”, 1962Ballard Matthews Lecture in the University College of North Wales,first published 1964,The Yale Review, 53(3): 342–380.Collected in [SG], pp. 1–45; reprinted in[EM], pp. 299–336.
• [DPR] 1966, “The Darkness of Practical Reason: Review ofStuart Hampshire’sFreedom of the Individual”,Encounter, July 1966: 46–50; reprinted in [EM],pp. 193–202.
• [SGC] 1967 [1970/1997], “The Sovereignty of Good Over OtherConcepts”, Leslie Stephen Lecture, 14 November 1967, firstpublished as a pamphlet by Cambridge University Press, 1967. Collectedin [SG], pp. 77–104; reprinted in [EM], 363–385.
• [OGG] 1969 [1970/1997], “On ‘God’ and‘Good”, first published in 1969,The Anatomy ofKnowledge; Papers Presented to the Study Group on Foundations ofCultural Unity, Bowdoin College, 1965 and 1966, Marjorie Grene(ed.), Amherst, MA: University of Massachusetts Press. Collected in[SG], pp. 46–76; reprinted in [EM], pp. 337–362.

A.3 Interviews

• 1977, “Literature and Philosophy: A Conversation with BryanMagee”, in Bryan Magee,Men of Ideas, London: BBCBooks; reprinted in [EM], pp. 3–30.
• 2003,From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction:Conversations with Iris Murdoch, Gillian Dooley (ed.), Columbia,SC: University of South Carolina Press. A collection of 23 interviewsby many people over the course of Murdoch’s life.

B. Secondary literature

B.1 Cited Works

• Anscombe, G.E.M., 1958 [1997], “Modern MoralPhilosophy”,Philosophy, 33(124): 1–19; reprintedin Crisp and Slote 1997: 26–44.doi:10.1017/S0031819100037943
• Antonaccio, Maria, 1996, “Form and Contingency in IrisMurdoch’s Ethics”, in Antonaccio and Schweiker 1996:110–137.
• –––, 2000,Picturing the Human: The MoralThought of Iris Murdoch, New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2012, “The Virtues of Metaphysics: AReview of Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings”, in Broackes2012b: 155–180.
• Antonaccio, Maria and William Schweiker (eds.), 1996,IrisMurdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, Chicago: University ofChicago Press.
• Bakhurst, David, 2020, “Analysis and Transcendence in TheSovereignty of Good”,European Journal of Philosophy,28(1): 214–223. doi:10.1111/ejop.12539
• Bayley, John, 1999,Elegy for Iris, New York:Picador.
• Blum, Lawrence, 2012, “Visual Metaphors inMurdoch’s Moral Philosophy”, in Broackes 2012b:307–324.
• –––, forthcoming, “Murdoch andPolitics”, in Hopwood and Panizza forthcoming.
• Bolton, Lucy, forthcoming, “Murdoch and Feminism”, inHopwood and Panizza forthcoming.
• Bowden, Peta, 1997,Caring: Gender-Sensitive Ethics, NewYork: Routledge.
• –––, 1998, “Ethical Attention:Accumulating Understandings”,European Journal ofPhilosophy, 6(1): 59–77. doi:10.1111/1468-0378.00050
• Brewer, Talbot, 2009,The Retrieval of Ethics, New York:Oxford University Press.
• Broackes, Justin, 2012a, “Introduction”, in Broackes2012b: 1–92.
• ––– (ed.), 2012b,Iris Murdoch, Philosopher:A Collection of Essays, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Browning, Gary (ed.), 2018a,Murdoch on Truth and Love,Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave MacMillan.
• –––, 2018b,Why Iris Murdoch Matters,London: Bloomsbury Academic.
• –––, 2019, The Metaphysics of Morals andPolitics (MGM ch 12), in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019:179–194.
• Chappell, Sophie-Grace, 2018, “Love and Knowledge inMurdoch”, in Browning 2018a: 89–108.
• Clarke, Bridget, 2012, “Iris Murdoch and the Prospects forCritical Moral Perception”, in Broackes 2012b: 227–253.
• Conradi, Peter J., 1986 [2001],Iris Murdoch: The Saint andthe Artist, Basingstoke: Macmillan; third edition printed asThe Saint and the Artist: A Study of the Fiction of IrisMurdoch, London: HarperCollins, 2001.
• –––, 2001,Iris: The Life of IrisMurdoch, London: HarperCollins.
• Cordner, Christopher, 2009, “Waiting, Patience andLove”, in Ghassan Hage (ed.),Waiting, Melbourne:Melbourne University Press, 169–183.
• –––, 2016, “Lessons of MurdochianAttention”,Sophia, 55(2): 197–213.doi:10.1007/s11841-016-0540-2
• –––, 2019, “Vision and Encounter in MoralThinking”, in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019:209–226.
• Diamond, Cora, 1996, “We Are Perpetually Moralists: IrisMurdoch, Fact, and Value”, in Antonaccio and Schweiker1996.
• –––, 2010, “Murdoch the Explorer”,Philosophical Topics, 38(1): 51–85.
• Crary, Alice, 2007,Beyond Moral Judgment, Cambridge, MA:Harvard University Press.
• Crisp, Roger and Michael Slote (eds.), 1997,VirtueEthics, London: Oxford University Press.
• Dooley, Gillian and Nora Hämäläinen (eds.), 2019,Reading Iris Murdoch’s Metaphysics as a Guide toMorals, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan.
• Driver, Julia, 2012, “’For every Foot its ownshoe’: Method and Moral Theory in the Philosophy of IrisMurdoch”, in Broackes 2012b: 293–306.
• Emmet, Dorothy, 1966,Rules, Roles, and Relations, NewYork: St. Martin’s Press.
• –––, 1979,The Moral Prism, London:MacMillan.
• –––, 1994,The Role of the Unrealisable: AStudy in Regulative Ideals, New York: St. Martin’sPress.
• –––, 1996,Philosophers and Friends:Reminiscences of Seventy Years in Philosophy, London:Macmillan.
• Flynn, Thomas, 2004 [2013], “Jean-Paul Sartre”,The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Fall 2013 edition),Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/fall2013/entries/sartre/>
• Forsberg, Niklas, 2017, “M and D and Me: Iris Murdochand Stanley Cavell on Perfectionism and Self-Transformation”,Iride: Journal of Philosophy and Public Debate, 2017(2):361–372.
• Grimshaw, Jean, 1986,Philosophy and Feminist Thinking.Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Hämäläinen, Nora, 2019, “Which Void? (MGM chapter18)”, in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019: 261–275.
• Hampshire, Stuart, 1959 [1982],Thought and Action,London: Chatto and Windus; new edition, Notre Dame, IN: University ofNotre Dame Press, 1982.
• –––, 1965,Freedom of the Individual,New York: Harper and Row.
• Hare, R.M., 1952,The Language of Morals, Oxford:Clarendon Press.
• Holland, Margaret G., 1998, “Touching the Weights: MoralPerception and Attention”,International PhilosophicalQuarterly, 38(3): 299–312. doi:10.5840/ipq199838324
• –––, 2012, “Social Convention and Neurosisas Obstacles to Moral Freedom”, in Broackes 2012b:255–274.
• Hooker, Brad and Margaret Little (eds.), 2000,MoralParticularism, New York: Oxford University Press.
• Hopwood, Mark, 2018, “‘The Extremely DifficultRealization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: IrisMurdoch on Love and Moral Agency: Iris Murdoch on Love and MoralAgency”,European Journal of Philosophy, 26(1):477–501. doi:10.1111/ejop.12260
• –––, 2019, “Fields of Force: Murdoch onAxioms, Duties, and Eros (MGM chapter 17)”, in Dooley andHämäläinen 2019: 243-260.
• Hopwood, Mark and Silvia Panizza (eds.), forthcoming,TheMurdochian Mind, New York: Routledge.
• Lipscomb, Benjamin J.B., 2021,The Women Are Up to Something:How Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley, and Iris MurdochRevolutionized Ethics, New York: Oxford University Press.doi:10.1093/oso/9780197541074.001.0001
• Lovibond, Sabina, 2011,Iris Murdoch, Gender, andPhilosophy, New York: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203830017
• –––, 2020, “The Elusiveness of theEthical: From Murdoch to Diamond”,Royal Institute ofPhilosophy Supplement, 87: 181–200.doi:10.1017/S1358246119000195
• MacCumhaill, Clare and Rachael Wiseman, 2022,Metaphysical Animals: How Four Women Brought Philosophy Back toLife, London: Chatto and Windus, and New York: Doubleday.
• MacIntyre, Alasdair, 1993, “Which World Do You See?”,New York Times (Book Section), 03 January 1993; [MacIntyre 1993 available online].
• MacIntyre, Alasdair and Stanley Hauerwas (eds.), 1983,Revisions: Changing Perspectives in Moral Philosophy, NotreDame, IN: University of Notre Dame Press.
• MacKinnon, Donald M., 1957 [1962],A Study in EthicalTheory, London: A. & C. Black; reprinted, New York: CollierBooks, 1962.
• McDowell, John, 1979 [1997], “Virtue and Reason”,Monist, 62(3): 331–350; reprinted in Crisp and Slote1997: 141–162. doi:10.5840/monist197962319
• –––, 1998,Mind, Value, and Reality,Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Meyers, Diana T., 1994,Subjection and Subjectivity:Psychoanalytic Feminism and Moral Philosophy, New York:Routledge.
• Millgram, Elijah, 2002 [2005], “Murdoch, PracticalReasoning, and Particularism”,Notizie di Politeia,18(66): 64–87; reprinted in hisEthics Done Right: PracticalReasoning as a Foundation for Moral Theory, New York: CambridgeUniversity Press, 2005, 168–197.
• Moran, Richard, 2012, “Iris Murdoch andExistentialism”, in Broackes 2012b: 181–196.
• Mylonaki, Evgenia, 2019, “The Individual in Pursuit ofthe Individual; A Murdochian Account of Moral Perception”,The Journal of Value Inquiry, 53(4): 579–603.doi:10.1007/s10790-018-9675-4
• Norlock, Kathryn, 2019, “Feminist Ethics”,TheStanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (Summer 2019 Edition), EdwardN. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/sum2019/entries/feminist-ethics/>.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 1990,Love’s Knowledge: Essays onPhilosophy and Literature, New York: Oxford UniversityPress.
• –––, 2001, “When She was Good/IrisMurdoch: Novelist and Philosopher”The New Republic, 31December 2001 and 7 January 2002. [Nussbaum 2001 available online].
• Panizza, Silvia, 2020, “Moral Perception BeyondSupervenience: Iris Murdoch’s Radical Perspective”,The Journal of Value Inquiry, 54(2): 273–288.doi:10.1007/s10790-019-09695-4
• Putnam, Hilary, 2002, “The Collapse of the Fact/ValueDichotomy” inThe Collapse of the Fact/Value Dichotomy andOther Essays, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Robjant, David, 2012, “The Earthy Realism of Plato’sMetaphysics, or: What Shall We Do with IrisMurdoch?,Philosophical Investigations, 35(1):43–67. doi:10.1111/j.1467-9205.2011.01455.x
• Rose, W.K., 1968 [2003], “Iris Murdoch, Informally”,interview,London Magazine, 8(3): 59–73;reprinted in Murdoch,From a Tiny Corner in the House of Fiction:Conversations with Iris Murdoch, G. Dooley (ed.), Columbia, SC:University of South Carolina Press, 2003: 16–29.
• Rozelle-Stone, A. Rebecca and Benjamin P. Davis, 2021,“Simone Weil”,The Stanford Encyclopedia ofPhilosophy (Winter 2021 Edition), Edward N. Zalta (ed.), URL = <https://plato.stanford.edu/archives/win2021/entries/simone-weil/>.
• Ruddick, Sara, 1989,Maternal Thinking: Toward a Politics ofPeace, Boston, MA: Beacon Press.
• Sartre, Jean-Paul, 1945,L’existentialisme est unHumanisme, Les Edition Nagel, Methuen and Co.; Englishtranslation,Existentialism is a Humanism, New Haven, CT:Yale University Press, 2007.
• Saul, Jennifer and Ronald Brownstein (eds.), 2016,ImplicitBias and Philosophy, vols. 1 and 2, New York: Oxford UniversityPress.
• Sandel, Michael, 2020,The Tyranny of Merit: What’sBecome of the Common Good, New York: Farrar, Straus, andGiroux.
• Setiya, Kieran, 2013, “Murdoch on the Sovereignty ofGood”,Philosophers’ Imprint, 13: art. 9 (21pages). [Setiya 2013 available online]
• Sidgwick, Henry, 1874 [1907],The Methods of Ethics,London: Macmillan. Seventh edition, 1907.
• –––, 1886 [1902],Outlines of the History ofEthics for English Readers, London: MacMillan; fifth edition,1902.
• Tronto, Joan, 1993,Moral Boundaries: A Political Argument for an Ethic of Care, New York: Routledge.
• Velleman, J. David, 1999 [2006], “Love as a MoralEmotion”,Ethics, 109(2): 338–374; reprinted in hisSelf to Self: Selected Essays, New York: Cambridge UniversityPress, 2006. doi:10.1086/233898
• Walker, Margaret Urban, 1989, “Moral Understandings:Alternative ‘Epistemology’ for a Feminist Ethics”,Hypatia, 4(2): 15–28.doi:10.1111/j.1527-2001.1989.tb00570.x
• Warnock, Mary, 1960,Ethics Since 1900, London: OxfordUniversity Press.
• Weil, Simone 1942 [1977], “La personne et lesacré”, written in 1942, published inÉcritsde Londres et dernières lettres, Paris: Gallimard, 1957;translated as “Human Personality”, in George A. Panichas(ed.),The Simone Weil Reader, New York: David McKay Company,1977, 313–339.
• –––, 1942 [1973a], “Réflexions sur le bonusage des études scolaires en vue de l’amour de Dieu”(“Reflections on the Right Use of School Studies with a View tothe Love of God”), written 1942, printed in Weil 1950 [1973b:105–116].
• –––, 1950 [1973b],Attente de Dieu,Paris: La Colombe. Translated asWaiting for God, EmmaCraufurd (trans.), New York: Putnam, 1951; reprinted New York: HarperColophon Books, 1973.
• White, Frances, 2020, “Anti-Nausea: Iris Murdoch and theNatural Goodness of the Natural World”,ÉtudesBritanniques Contemporaines, 2020:art. 59. doi:10.4000/ebc.10212
• Williams, Bernard, 1985,Ethics and the Limits ofPhilosophy, Cambridge MA: Harvard University Press.
• Wiseman, Rachael, 2020, “What If the Private Linguist Were aPoet? Iris Murdoch on Privacy and Ethics”,European Journalof Philosophy, 28(1): 224–234. doi:10.1111/ejop.12538
• Wolf, Susan, 2014, “Loving Attention: Lessons in Love FromThe Philadelphia Story”, inUnderstanding Love:Philosophy, Film, and Fiction, Susan Wolf and Christopher Grau(eds.), New York: Oxford University Press, 369–386.doi:10.1093/acprof:oso/9780195384512.003.0017

B.2 Other Secondary Literature

• Altorf, Hannah Marije, 2008,Iris Murdoch and the Art ofImagining, New York: Continuum.
• Antonaccio, Maria, 2012a,A Philosophy to Live By: EngagingIris Murdoch, New York: Oxford University Press.
• –––, 2012b, “The Virtues of Metaphysics: AReview of Murdoch’s Philosophical Writings”, in Broackes2012b: 155–180.
• Bagnoli, Carla, 2012, “The Exploration of Moral Life”,in Broackes 2012b: 197–226.
• Blum, Lawrence A., 1986 [1994], “Iris Murdoch and the Domainof the Moral”,Philosophical Studies, 50(3):343–367; reprinted in Blum 1994:12–29. doi:10.1007/BF00353837
• –––, 1991 [1994], “Moral Perception andParticularity”,Ethics, 101(4): 701–725;reprinted in Blum 1994: 30–61. doi:10.1086/293340
• –––, 1994,Moral Perception andParticularity, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.doi:10.1017/CBO9780511624605
• Bronzwaer, W., 1988, “Images of Plato in ‘The Fire andthe Sun’ and ‘Acastos’”, in R. Todd (ed.),Encounters with Iris Murdoch: Proceedings of an Informal Symposiumon Iris Murdoch’s Work held at the Free University, Amsterdam,on 20 and 21 October 1986, Amsterdam: Free University Press:55–67.
• Foot, Philippa, 1978,Virtues and Vices, Los Angeles, CA:University of California Press.
• Forsberg, Niklas, 2013,Language Lost and Found: On IrisMurdoch and the Limits of Philosophical Discourse, New York:Bloomsbury Academic.
• Emmet, Dorothy, 1945,The Nature of MetaphysicalThinking, London: MacMillan.
• Gaita, Raimond, 2004,Good and Evil: An AbsoluteConception, second edition, New York: Routledge.
• Gilligan, Carol, 1982,In a Different Voice: PsychologicalTheory and Women’s Development, Cambridge, MA: HarvardUniversity Press.
• Gomes, Anil, forthcoming, “Moral Vision”, inHopwood and Panizza forthcoming.
• Hare, R.M., 1963,Freedom and Reason, Oxford: ClarendonPress.
• Jordan, Jessy E. G., 2013, “Thick Ethical Concepts in thePhilosophy and Literature of Iris Murdoch”,The SouthernJournal of Philosophy, 51(3):402–417. doi:10.1111/sjp.12037
• Laverty, Megan, 2007,Iris Murdoch’s Ethics: AConsideration of her Romantic Vision, New York: Continuum.
• –––, 2019, “Iris Murdoch asEducator”, in Dooley and Hämäläinen 2019:125–144.
• Lloyd, Genevieve, 1982, “Iris Murdoch on the EthicalSignificance of Truth”,Philosophy and Literature,6(1–2): 62–75. doi:10.1353/phl.1982.0006
• Lovibond, Sabina, 1983,Realism and Imagination inEthics, Minneapolis, MN: University of Minnesota Press.
• Midgley, Mary, 2005,The Owl of Minerva: A Memoir, NewYork: Routledge. doi:10.4324/9780203027394
• Noddings, 1984 [2013],Caring: A Relational Approach to Ethicsand Moral Education, Berkeley, CA: University of CaliforniaPress.
• Nussbaum, Martha, 2012, “‘Faint With Secret Knowledge’: Love and Vision in Murdoch'sThe Black Prince”, in Broackes 2012b:135–154.
• Rowe, Anne, 2019,Iris Murdoch, Liverpool: LiverpoolUniversity Press.
• Taylor, Charles, 1989,Sources of the Self: The Making of theModern Identity, Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.
• Vice, Samantha, 2007, “Self-Concern in Iris Murdoch’sThe Sovereignty of Good”, in Anne Rowe (ed.),IrisMurdoch: A Re-Assessment, London: Palgrave Macmillan,60–71.
• Weil, Simone, 1952 [1957], “Dieu dans Platon”Intuitions pré-chrétiennes, Paris, La Colombe,Editions du Vieux Colombier, 1951; translated as “God inPlato”, in Elizabeth C. Geissbuhler (ed.)Intimations ofChristianity Among the Ancient Greeks, London: Routledge andKegan Paul, 1957, ch. 7: 74–88.
• White, Frances, 2014,Becoming Iris Murdoch,Kingston-upon-Thames: Kingston University.

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• Iris Murdoch Review.
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• Women In Parenthesis, a study of the collective corpus of Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, Mary Midgley and Iris Murdoch.

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Acknowledgments

I am extremely grateful to Megan Laverty, Vic Seidler, and KieranSetiya for acute and incredibly helpful feedback on a late draft ofthis entry, and equally for their support. I would also like to thankVic and Megan for our “Murdoch study group” over the pastyears, and to the “Murdoch reading group”, organized andguided by Mark Hopwood, during the covid period. Many thanks also toSEP editor Stephen Darwall for excellent suggestions.