Ante Jerončić: Attending to reality - Biblijski pogledi, 21 (1-2), 101-114 (2013.

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ATTENDING TO REALITY:
IRIS MURDOCH ON THE MORAL GOOD

Ante Jerončić
Andrews University, Michigan, USA

“The good and just life is thus a process of clarification, a

movement towards selfless lucidity, guided by ideas of per-
fection which are objects of love.”– Iris Murdoch1

SUMMARY:

Attending to Reality: Iris Murdoch on the Moral Good

Even a scant acquaintance with current cultural and philosophical trends will readily point
to a widespread predilection for subjectivist forms of moral reasoning. By “subjectivist” I refer
to various non-cognitivist and constructionist paradigms in moral philosophy and popular
parlance that reduce ethical statements to expressions of individual or collective preferences,
feelings, or prejudices stripped of any object-given normativity. The following are but some
of the factors that fuel such perspectives: the proverbial fact/value dichotomy and anti-realist
sentiments pervading large swaths of analytic philosophy; poststructuralist and postcolonial
“genealogies” that tie the language of universal morality to discourses of power, patriarchy, and
totalitarian agency; and the utilization of the language of virtues, values, and “moral clarity” for
a specific set of domestic and foreign policy commitments. Such intellectual positions, accor-

1 Profound thanks go to the friends and colleagues whose feedback made an invaluable contribution to the
thinking in this article: L. Monique Pittman, Karl Bailey, and Vanessa Corredera. I also owe a debt of grati-
tude to my research assistant Mercedes McLean who labored with me in correcting and clarifying the final
draft.
Iris Murdoch, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (New York: Penguin, 1993), 14.

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dingly, result in a double remove of ethics: from the structure of reality on the hand and from
human existence and accounts of human flourishing on the other. In order to interrogate these
issues at a greater length, I will briefly turn to Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy in order to exa-
mine how her specific form of ethical realism addresses such claims about ethics. Despite some
reservations about the cogency of her approach, I will argue that her basic intuition to connect
morality with the wider realm of meaning and accounts of human flourishing is indispensable
for any theological account of the humanization of life.

Key words: Iris Murdoch; metaphysics; ethical realism; the moral good; human flourishing

Thrasymachus’s Burlesque: Whither Morality?

The opening section of Plato’s Republic presents Socrates and a couple of his friends leisurely
spending their time in Polemarchus’s house anticipating the beginning of a night festival. The-
re is a relaxed feel to this scene, one evoking a jovial tête-à-tête between good acquaintances,
when at one point the repartee turns to the meaning of justice. Different definitions are propo-
sed during the ensuing discussion, none of which end up being quite satisfactory to Socrates.
The somewhat hapless dialogue carries along until Thrasymachus steps onto the scene and
stirs up the proverbial pot. His attitude is brazen and cocky—Plato compares him to a wild
animal2—and he flaunts his supposed intellectual prowess in the face of his interlocutors. Like
Callicles in the Gorgias, but with a different twist, he opposes the very attempt to define justice,
to root it in some ultimate reality. Morality is but a façade, exposed for what it truly is by those
that are wise. “Aren’t all moral concepts always put in the service of exploiting the weak and de-
fenseless?” asks Thrasymachus. “And aren’t they that follow them, in turn, like sheep believing
in the goodness of the shepherd, all the way to the slaughterhouse?” In his wording, “justice is
nothing other than the advantage of the stronger” (338c2–3).3 And if Socrates cannot see that,
continues Thrasymachus, then he is dull-witted. “Your justice, Socrates, is but a stalking-horse;
a clever pretext for ulterior motives,” scoffs Thrasymachus snootily.
As one is to expect, the supervening dialectical slugfest with Socrates is quite a read. While
Socrates is initially taken aback by Thrasymachus, he eventually dispenses his opponent by me-
ans of his favored discursive arsenal; one marked by ironic jabs and dogged insistence. By the
time all is said and done, Socrates will have reduced his opponent—how thoroughly wonder-
ful!—to a blush. Over the last century or so different interpretations of Thrasymachus’s positi-
on, including the exact meaning of his blush, have been offered.4 Some see him as an advocate
for natural rights or perhaps a form of legalism, others again present him as an ethical egoist
2 Plato, The Republic of Plato, trans. Allan Bloom, 2nd ed. (New York: Basic, 1991), 336b5–6. Additional
references to the Republic will be given parenthetically in the text.
3 The intertextual link here to Thucydides’s “Melian Dialogue” and its melancholy acquiesce to Realpolitik
will not be lost on perceptive readers: “Right, as the world goes, is only in question between equals in
power, while the strong do what they can and the weak suffer what they must” (Thucydides, History of the
Peloponnesian War, trans. Rex Warner [Baltimore: Penguin, 1954], 5:89).
4 See for example Paul W. Gooch, “Red Faces in Plato,” The Classical Journal 83.2 (1987/1988), 124-127, and
Ivor Ludlam, Plato’s Republic as a Philosophical Drama on Doing Well (Lanham: Lexington, 2014), 102-104.

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according to whom he notion of justice is incompatible with the pursuit of self-interest, while
yet others see him as an ethical nihilist whose project is to show that justice does not exist. On
that count, he fills the role of a proto-postmodernist of sorts.
Unfortunately, a detailed assessment of Thrasymachus is beyond the scope of this article.
My goal here, rather, is to posit this enigmatic figure as an archetype for two distinct yet in-
terrelated claims about the nature of ethics: “Morality is dangerous!” and “Morality is a hu-
man construct!” The first pertains to the function of moral claims, of what they do and how
they are being used, while the second addresses their origin and status. Much of the current
disenchantment with morality, both intellectual and practical, pertains to one or the other of
these two aspects—function and status. In respect to function, we see Thrasymachus standing
as a progenitor for a whole array of thinkers, who like him contend that the categories of right
and wrong, at least frequently so, are not so much rooted in reality as surreptitiously wielded
to achieve assorted power interests. What they propose as a counter-move are various forms
of genealogical and archaeological undertakings, that is, procedures for unmasking by which
the real sources of morality, including such matters as moral obligation and conscience, are
purportedly revealed.
Susan Neiman in her Moral Clarity addresses some of these reservations concerning the
unequivocal beneficence of moral discourse, especially when presented in a universalist or
objectivist form.5 In our contemporary culture, most people harbor, justifiably so, deep sus-
picions about any notion of, well, “moral clarity.” One could point to multiple instances from
both the current and previous US administrations, she notes, in order to illustrate that. How
can one forget the chilling dualism of the “axis of evil” and “us vs. them” rhetoric, or the moral
legitimations of extrajudicial killings, or perhaps the way moral self-righteousness about one’s
place in the world exuded a normalizing and ideological effect concerning the most inhuman
of practices—torture. While these are exhibits from our more immediate past, the problem,
of course, is much broader. Anyone knowing anything about 19th and 20th century history, in
other words, anyone knowing anything about colonialism, fascism, and communism, knows
about the capacity of evil to cloak itself in universalist discourse. It is not surprising then given
such and other specimens that we are apprehensive about anyone claiming to know what mo-
rality is and what moral judgments deserve the level of universal normativity. After all, isn’t the
language of moral clarity quite reminiscent of the sort of doublespeak that populates Orwell’s
1984?
There is also a subtler attack on the function of morality, one that casts it as an impediment
for human self-realization and authenticity. On this count, “fulfillment is not defined in terms
of obedience to social roles, cultural ideals, or the perfection of a certain set of virtues. It is
defined with respect to enhancing the richness and complexity of a person’s life.”6 Accordingly,
any account of ethics that runs against such aspirations becomes highly problematized. Such
misgivings come in different forms, ranging from the virulent anguish of Nietzsche’s Dionysian
piety, to postcolonial and poststructuralist suspicion of essentialist discourse, to James Joyce’s

5 See Susan Neiman, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-up Idealists (Orlando: Harcourt, 2008).
6 William Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1995), 12.

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libidinal celebration of the bodily as found in his poem “The Holy Office.”7 They also inform
current ethical debates in the Adventist faith community, at least occasionally, where anecdotal
narratives, personal experiences, and other forms of affective reasoning are invested with the
weight of a moral arbiter, as if the depth of pathos directly correlates to ethical normativity. The
very idea that empathy might in some instances itself be implicated in structures and acts of
injustice is often lost in the shuffle.
The issue of the function of moral claims, of what they do and what they intend, inevitably
relates to the matter of their origin and status, the second area of concern mentioned above.
For Thrasymachus, we recall, justice is spurious precisely because it is arbitrary and reflective
of subjective interests and preferences. Here too Thrasymachus stands for a venerable stream
of thinking about the nature of moral obligations, one that ties them to constructivist impul-
ses. In view of this, ethical statements are expressions of individual or collective preferences,
feelings, or prejudices stripped of any object-given normativity— “object-given” referring to
the moral realist claim that the good resides outside of us. While there are different varieties of
constructivism, they all have in common the view that “moral reality is constructed from the
states or activities. . . undertaken from a preferred standpoint.”8 You take it away, however that
standpoint might be conceived, and you have taken away morality. Thus a subjectivist, to name
one example of constructivism, will readily claim that individual tastes and opinions are the
things which construct moral reality. In sum, moral constructivism echoes “J. L. Mackie’s con-
tention that ‘values are not objective, are not part of the fabric of the world.’ In other words, we
do not discover moral truths as traditional realism held, by examining human life, the nature
of communities, or reality; we invent them.”9 Instead of being a matter of mimesis, then, ethics
more properly inhabits to the sphere of creative vitality and agon. William Schweiker writes:
The problem we face in ethics is then that the ground of value has shifted from being to
power, or, more precisely put, being itself, the source of value, is conceived in terms of power.
Seeing this shift does not entail jettisoning metaphysical questions from ethics. It is not to
champion will over mind, doing over being. But it is to realize that the metaphysical dimension
of ethics has also shifted. The modern world no longer sees nature as creation or the human
as created in the image of God. We no longer dwell in the classic, mimetic universe wherein
persons and things derived their value from a place in the system of being.10
Christian Smith’s Lost in Transition offers a great study on the preponderance of such su-
bjectivist sentiments in contemporary culture.11 The conclusions of the book are based on a

7 See Martha C. Nussbaum, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (New York: Cambridge Uni-
versity Press, 2001), 683.
8 Russ Shafer-Landau, Moral Realism: A Defence (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 14. He also adds:
“Realists believe that. . . the moral standards that fix the moral facts are not made true by virtue of their
ratification from within any given actual or hypothetical perspective. That a person takes a particular attitude
toward a putative moral standard is not what makes the standard correct” (15).
9 Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics, 107.
10 William Schweiker, “The Sovereignty of God’s Goodness,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human
Goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996),
217-218.
11 Christian Smith et al., Lost in Transition: The Dark Side of Emerging Adulthood (New York: Oxford Univer-

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series of in-depth interviews that Smith and his team of the researchers have conducted with
a cross-section of American youth. In it we repeatedly encounter images of individuals gro-
ping for a coherent language to express their values in the context of today’s society marked
by consumerist capitalism and rampant individualism. One cannot but squirm observing
the inability of most participants to use any sort of coherent moral language. While most of
them agree that sexual violence and capital murder ought to be condemned, they have a hard
time pinning down why exactly cheating, for example, is unethical. Even more troublesome,
in my view, is the tendency to continually fall back on how one feels about things, as if this
sphere of “common sense” or “innate feelings” was a pristine source of normative authority
somehow untouched by power constellations, ideological claims, and other processes of so-
cialization.
What is so eerie about this study is the extent to which it mirrors my experience of teaching
ethics to Adventist college students. I am often surprised to see how otherwise conservative
individuals who believe in the primacy of Scripture channel such subjectivist sentiments about
the status of moral judgments. Their whole moral understanding usually boils down to quoting
the perennial favorite “Do not judge, and you shall not be judged” in order to support their
contention that any apportioning of moral blame is immoral in itself. Even after weeks of dis-
cussion and lecturing most students still have a hard time to distinguish between condemning
and judging (in the sense of moral deliberation), inevitably conflating the two. And even when
faced with stock examples of human rights violations such as female genital mutilation, or the
fact that the very concept of forgiveness does not make sense in the absence of moral judgment,
the subjectivist reflex hardly recedes.
So far, then, I have briefly attended to two main objections leveled against ethics in con-
temporary society. I have noted how misgivings about the function of ethics, i.e. the way we
use claims of moral obligation, correlate to our understanding of its status and origin. As a
result, morality frequently faces a double remove: first, from the structure of reality; and second,
from human existence and accounts of human flourishing. In order to interrogate these issues
at a greater length, I will briefly turn to Iris Murdoch’s ethical realism. Despite reservations
concerning some of her substantial claims, some of which I will address at the end of this ar-
ticle, I find considerable appreciation for key intuitions marking her philosophical approach.
I think “intuitions” is the right word here, as I have in mind certain generalized affinities that
are congenial to my own biblical and theological sensibilities: her articulation and defense of
metaphysical ethics, her realist and cognitivist moral ontology, and her efforts to present a
“philosophy of life” aiming at moral conversion. Part of such overlapping concerns pertains to
the fact that Platonists and Christians “seek a good which transcends the self but which never-
theless accords or resonates with the self.”12 Thus my interest in exploring Iris Murdoch. Again,
not that I need her to legitimize my commitment to the objectivity of moral value—the Bible
with its theistic framework is quite capable of doing that—but in order to express a gesture of
hospitable rapprochement, one that scours for commonalities and resonances for the purpose
of dialogue and fostering of “alliances.”

sity Press, 2011).

12 Schweiker, “The Sovereignty of God’s Goodness,” 219.

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Murdoch’s Metaphysical Ethics

Murdoch begins her delineation of moral ontology by positing the following dilemma: “Is mo-
rality to be seen as essentially and by its nature centered on the individual, or as part of a ge-
neral framework of reality which includes the individual?”13 The first option, the “liberal” view
as she puts it,14 names various voluntarist takes on human identity and ethics that conceive of
the individual “in terms of the simple capacity or freedom to act, thus severing any connection
between freedom and a conception of goodness in the formation of the self.”15 For her, this
encompasses dominant expressions of post-Kantian philosophy, and existentialism most nota-
bly so. On those terms, the moral good is synonymous with the exertion of the will by means
of creative fiat. Murdoch herself favors the “natural law” view where we see the individual “as
moving tentatively vis-à-vis a reality which transcends him. To discover what is morally good
is to discover that reality, and to become good is to integrate” oneself with it.16 Our world is not
morally sterile, a piece of clay receptive to unbridled imprints of arbitrary exertion. Rather, we
need to find ways to attach morality to the “substance of the world,”17 to what reality is indepen-
dent of our personal, communal, and historical coordinates. As Murdoch memorably puts it:
“Love is the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real. Love, and
so art and morals, is the discovery of reality.”18
To further her argument, Murdoch presents us with her version of natural “theology” whe-
re Platonic realism and Romantic intuition merge to account for axiological shocks—those
stabs of C. S. Lewsian Joy or Sehnsucht—tingeing our existence. The breathtaking sublimity
of the Grand Canyon or the embrace of a loved one or a multi-hued sunset over the Adriatic
Sea—all these panoplies of wonder are signs of transcendence and the goodness of being, the
apprehension that “there is more than this.”19 Far from being sporadic incidents of “oceanic fee-
lings” or “thin places,” such experiences, suggests Murdoch, serve as beacons of the “ubiquity”
and “omnipresence” of value.20 Or in the words of Alfred North Whitehead, “our enjoyment
of actuality is a sense of worth, good or bad. . . . Its basic expression is — Have a care, here is
something that matters!”21
13 Iris Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Litera-
ture, ed. Peter J. Conradi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 68.
14 See ibid., 70.
15 Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker, “Introduction,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Good-
ness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), xiii.
16 Murdoch, “Metaphysics and Ethics,” 70.
17 Ibid., 65.
18 Iris Murdoch, “The Sublime and the Good,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and
Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997), 215.
19 Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge, 1970), 71.
20 See for example Murdoch, Metaphysics, 259.
21 Alfred N. Whitehead, Science and that Modern World (New York: Mentor/Macmillan, 1925), 159. For this
reference to Whitehead I am indebted to Franklin I. Gamwell, “On the Loss of Theism,” in Iris Murdoch
and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: The Univer-
sity of Chicago Press, 1996), 173.

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That, in turn, leads to two related assertions. First, Murdoch rejects the proverbial fact/
value distinction according to which statements of value cannot rise to the level of truth cla-
ims. In A. J. Ayer’s famous version of the argument, “the meaning of a statement is determined
by the way in which it can be verified, where it being verified consists in its being tested by
empirical observation. Consequently, statements like those of metaphysics to the truth or fal-
sehood of which no empirical observation could possibly be relevant, are ruled out as factually
meaningless.”22 For Murdoch such a bifurcation of fact and value cannot possibly be correct
as it ignores “the way in which almost all of our concepts and activities involve evaluation.
. . . [In] the majority of cases, a survey of the facts will itself involve moral discrimination.
Innumerable forms of evaluation haunt our simplest decisions.”23 Correlatively, valuing is not
a specialized activity of the will consigned to isolated acts of ethical or aesthetic valuation, but
rather presents the transcendental condition of knowledge. It is not so much that we think
about morality, but thinking itself, to the extent that it is an evaluative activity, is morality. That
is why ethics “is and ought to be connected with the whole of our being.”24
Second, the recognition of the ubiquity of values alerts us to the importance of metaphysics
whose task it is to probe the “unconditional element” (Paul Tillich) in reality as such.25 Akin
to artists who “try to capture fleeting moments in a unified whole, so too the quest for me-
taphysics is a way to do justice to reality, to the intimations of transcendence or the moral Good
in even our most ordinary experiences and endeavors.”26 In that sense, metaphysics “is a deep
emotional motive to philosophy, to art, to thinking itself.”27 Namely, we intuitively respond to
predications of being such as unified, balanced, integrated, dynamic, powerful, vivid, delicate,
moving, graceful, elegant, and so on.28 That is why metaphysics, as I understand Murdoch to be
claiming, is a form of aesthetic cognition par excellence. Like Plato’s concept of synoptikos, de-
noting the ability of a person to see things “in a unified manner,”29 so too Murdoch affirms the

22 A. J. Ayer, “The Vienna Circle,” in The Revolution in Philosophy (London: Macmillan, 1957), 74. For this
reference to Ayer I am indebted to Maria Antonaccio, Picturing the Human: The Moral Thought of Iris Mur-
doch (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2000), 29.
23 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 25-26. For Murdoch’s discussion of the naturalistic fallacy and its component parts
see her “Vision and Choice in Morality,” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Litera-
ture, ed. Peter J. Conradi (London: Chatto & Windus, 1997).
24 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 495.
25 For an excellent overview of the rise and demise of modern metaphysics see A. W. Moore, The Evolution of
Modern Metaphysics: Making Sense of ThingsThe Evolution of Modern Philosophy (Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 2012).
26 Murdoch doesn’t mean to suggest, I think, that every single form of artistic expression concerns such a
search for unity in an intentional way; much of contemporary art, after all, favors the fragmentary and the
nonrepresentational, and with it the brokenness bodies, the “ugly,” the pressing air of dystopian disintegra-
tion.
27 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 1.
28 On this point see Frank Sibley’s seminal essay “Aesthetic Concepts,” in Approach to Aesthetics: Collected Pa-
pers on Philosophical Aesthetics, ed. John Benson, Betty Redfern, and Jeremy Roxbee Cox (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2006).
29 Alister E. McGrath, The Intellectual World of C. S. Lewis (Oxford: Wiley-Blackwell, 2013), 91.

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centrality of integrated “seeing” or theoria as a way of bringing meaning to human existence.30

In that sense, metaphysics and mystical consciousness—the latter naming efforts to intuit and
discern the Whole—inhabit proximate semantic neighborhoods (as Schopenhauer himself in-
triguingly suggests).
Murdoch, I suggest, is aware of the stock objections that invariably follow on the heels of
such claims, including those that deem her position profoundly confused, quaint, falsifying, or
even cowardly. The vociferousness and scope of such objections are so broad that even a mere
cataloging of them would be impossible here. To wit, we not only have individual thinkers but
whole academic disciplines whose principal objective is to debunk and expose such seeming
fatuities for what they really (or supposedly) are: arbitrary, parochial, prejudicial, or solipsistic
extrapolations of personal concerns and interests artificially elevated to a status of universal
normativity. Thus, whether the stress is on the limits of human knowledge, the function of
power-relations, the dynamics of social construction, the opacity of language, or the erasure
of the subaltern, argumentations along Murdochian lines might appear naïvely pre-critical.
In response to such challenges, Murdoch proposes several lines of confutation and cla-
rification. For one, she reminds us that what is really at stake here is the perennial tension
between the universal and the particular. She repeatedly asks: “How do the generalisations of
philosophers connect with what I’m doing in my day-to-day-moment pilgrimage, how can
metaphysics be a guide to morals?”31 In other words, how can metaphysical thinking not only
do justice to the plurality of human experience but also avoid being put to use for nefarious
purposes? Murdoch’s response to this most intractable of conundrums in Western intellectual
history is to argue that “there are times for piecemeal analysis, modesty and commonsense, and
other times for ambitious synthesis and the aspiring and edifying charm of lofty and intricate
structures.”32 In other words, as Antonaccio helpfully summarizes,
a truthful apprehension of individuals requires two kinds of thinking: a unifying kind
of thinking, which renders our fragmentary lives more complete by imposing some
kind of artful shape on it; and a particularizing kind of thinking, which resists the im-
pulse to order or classify and instead individuates phenomena with a kind of laser beam
of attention. This fundamental pattern in Murdoch’s thought is evident in the move-
ment between metaphysics and empiricism which structures Metaphysics as a Guide to
Morals.33
Antonaccio further notes that “Murdoch’s theory of art and her theory of morals are
structured by parallel tensions: the tension between form and contingency, in the novel; and
the tension between metaphysics and empiricism, in moral theory.”34 Such considerations are
indeed at the heart of Murdoch’s project, and she continually affirms the potential danger of
30 One should not infer from this that Murdoch somehow subscribes to a theory of mimetic infallibility or
naïve correspondence theory of truth. As I will note below, she tirelessly points to the human propensity for
self-deception in our descriptions of the reality.
31 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 146.
32 Ibid., 211.
33 Maria Antonaccio, “Form and Contingency in Ethics,” in Form and Contingency, ed. Maria Antonaccio and
William Schweiker (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 112.
34 Ibid., 124.

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metaphysics as much as she argues for its indispensability. The fleeting and kaleidoscopic natu-
re of existence, she argues, cannot be captured in systems that for the sake of unity and compre-
hensiveness purge that which really matters in life—the nuances, the gradations, the subtleties
of difference. “What makes metaphysical (‘totalizing’) coherence theories unacceptable,” writes
Murdoch echoing Kierkegaardian sentiments, “is the way in which they in effect ‘disappear’
what is individual and contingent by equating reality with integration in system, and degrees
of reality with degrees of integration, and by implying that ‘ultimately’ or ‘really’ there is only
one system.”35
However, the real polemical thrust of Murdoch’s defense of metaphysics, I believe, con-
cerns both the nature of the self and the function of language in identity-construction. She ma-
kes that particularly evident in her rigorous defense of “consciousness,” i.e. the actuality of the
self and inner space of freedom vis-à-vis anti-humanist impulses in poststructuralist thought.
In the latter, the self is often perceived as transitive, conflicted, derivative, and illusionary;
“an opaque product of variable roles and performances which have been imposed upon it
by the constraints of society and by its own inner drives or conflicts.”36 In these theoretical
models, the self is decomposed into a totalizing assemblage of disharmonious parts—“an
interplay of different layers of signs and symbols,”37 a semiotic chimera of sorts. What is left
in the wake of such an apokalypsis or “uncovering” is a portrayal of the human self in terms
of a heterogeneous, intermittent cacophony; a cornucopia of différance, a continual sliding
off from one signifier to another.
Murdoch rejects the deterministic cast of these approaches and contends, perhaps unchari-
tably so, that they channel “a deep human wish: to give up, to get rid of freedom, responsibility,
remorse, all sorts of personal individual unease, and surrender to fate and the relief of ‘it could
not be otherwise’.”38 Now, that might or might not be true. What is important to the argument
is her underlying concern that without something like a self, without some notion of agency
that carries the possibility of “distancing,” the very concept of morality becomes problematic if
not unintelligible. Thus even someone like Foucault who does not envision the possibility of a
space unencumbered by relations of power, i.e. a way of conceptualizing the self apart from the
capillary forces of normalization, is at least able to say that something like that comprises our
condition. Foucault, the agent, sees, analyzes, names, and critiques and thus is in the position
to assume a position of otherness from that which he criticizes; he is not just a facsimile of dis-
course. It is such a possibility of critical distance that Murdoch has in mind when she claims,
alongside thinkers such as Charles Taylor and Seyla Benhabib, that human consciousness is not
just a gluey, tempestuous Petri dish concocted by fatalistic forces, be they societal, psychologi-
cal, or linguistic. “The person we wish to defend here, endorsed by common sense,” she writes,
“is not easily magicked away. Our present moment, our experiences, our flow of consciousness,

35 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 196.

36 Anthony C. Thiselton, Interpreting God and the Postmodern Self: On Meaning, Manipulation and Prom-
ise (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 1995), 121.
37 Tyron L. Inbody, “Postmodernism: Intellectual Velcro Dragged Across Culture?” Theology Today 51,
no. 4 (1995): 531.
38 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 190.

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our indelible moral sense, are not all these essentially linked together and do they not imply the
individual?”39 Even Kierkegaard, who is loath to admit any easy correlation between consciou-
sness and certainty, would consent to as much.
While I am aware that such a truncated treatment of Murdoch’s thought falls glaringly
short of doing justice to the subtlety of her approach, it suffices to illustrate how some of
her central commitments such as the omnipresence of value, the function and importance
of metaphysics, and the reality of a self-determining consciousness figure in her account of
moral realism. Before turning to some critical comments about Murdoch’s approach, a few
observations about her conception of the Good in relation the human transformation and
self-realization are in order.

Seeing the Good

We have already noted how for Murdoch the moral good functions both as the ground of our
knowledge— recall Plato’s image of the sun in the Republic as that by which we see everything
else—as well as its measure, its guide. The quest for improvement and fine-tuning, the exigency
for betterment and excellence, the presence of comparative judgment informing our tastes and
decisions—all these aspects of gradation and improvement point to the idea of perfection as
embedded in the very act of cognition. Again Antonaccio:
[Murdoch] argues that although we do not directly experience the good (since it
is the condition and not the object of knowledge), we do experience images and
shadows of perfect truth and goodness. In every sort of cognitive activity (e.g. in-
tellectual studies, work, art, human relations), we intuitively learn to distinguish
gradations of good and bad, better and worse. The whole of our experience thus
furnishes us with evidence of the idea of perfection in the activity of truth-seeking.40
At the same time, the Good is transcendent in that its exact parameters, including material
content, elude our comprehension. It cannot be controlled, grasped, or exhaustively interpre-
ted, nor can it be exactly mediated through any particular good action. We know in which
direction to look at, but we will never arrive at the final destination if by that we mean a perfect
adequatio (Husserl) or epistemological correspondence of perception and object. Borrowing
the language of apophatic theology, Murdoch stresses our limited capacity to offer linguistic
predications of the Good and with it our inability to properly describe what the Good in his
essence is. The Good as “a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real
object of attention” stands outside of us and judges all human constructs.41
But there is another more anthropological reason why the knowledge of the Good eludes
us. In a true post-Freudian fashion, with significant overtones of Plato and St. Paul, Murdoch
continually returns to the way in which different drives and instincts, fallibility and corruption,
blind us to truth and moral goodness.42 We are naturally cave-dwellers—to use Plato’s analogy
39 Ibid., 153.
40 Antonaccio, Picturing the Human, 111.
41 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 54.
42 Murdoch writes: “One may say that what [Freud] presents us with us a realistic and detailed picture of
fallen man” (Iris Murdoch, “On ‘God’ and ‘Good,’” in Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and

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from the Republic—trapped in darkness and illusion about our true condition. Our psyche is
“as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy, largely determined by its own individual
history, whose natural attachments are. . . ambiguous, and hard for the subject to understand or
control . . . . Objectivity and unselfishness are not natural to human beings.”43 Put bluntly, our
“fat relentless ego” is a great enemy of morality.44 Such a thoroughly pessimistic view of human
nature, by Murdoch’s own admission, is at the foundation of all of her writings, including her
novels where the protagonists “always seem to love the wrong person or get caught in nets of
illusion. That they, and we, are so caught reflects our condition, a condition . . . equivalent
to the doctrine of original sin.”45 In fact, “it would be difficult to name a contemporary no-
velist… who takes Freud more seriously in his unyielding portrait of the self-deception of
the ego, especially as the ego searches for the good.”46
It is in this context that we find the dynamic interplay of two key concepts in Murdoch’s
moral vision: attention or vision and detachment. Like the tradition of Russian personalism
that understands ethics as being “about truth and falsehood, . . . about living in recognition of
reality,”47 so too Murdoch sees misperception as the great enemy of morality. On her Platonic
terms, “it is perfectly obvious that goodness is connected with knowledge; . . . with a refined
and honest perception of what is really the case, a patient and just discernment and exploration
of what confronts one, which is the result not simply of opening one’s eyes but of a certainly
perfectly familiar kind of moral discipline.”48 That is, we stand in need of an ocular conversion;
morality is always a struggle to see rightly. Or as she puts it elsewhere: “I can only choose wit-
hin the world I can see, in the moral sense of see which implies that clear vision is a result of
moral imagination and moral effort.”49
The term “moral effort” is a crucial one here in that it connects perception to the idea
of character.50 What we “see” is determined by who we are—a frequent echo in C. S. Lewis’s
Chronicles of Narnia—and who we are cannot be accounted for without some recourse to mo-
Literature, ed. Peter J. Conradi [London: Chatto & Windus], 1997), 341.
43 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 50.
44 Ibid., 51.
45 Stanley Hauerwas, “Murodchian Muddles,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed. Maria
Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996), 198.
46 David Tracy, “The Many Faces of Platonism,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness, ed.
Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1996, 60.
47 Rowan Williams, Prospect Magazine, http://www.prospectmagazine.co.uk/magazine/rowan-williams-dosto-
evsky-russian-literature-personalism-interview/#.Ubsb2-ec824 (last accessed February 20, 2015).
48 Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good, 37.
49 Ibid., 35-36.
50 Murdoch writes: “Truthfulness, the search for truth, for a closer connection between thought and reality,
demands and effects an exercise of virtues and a purification of desires. The ability, for instance, to think
justly about what is evil, or to love another person unselfishly, involves a discipline of intellect and emotion.
Thought, goodness and reality are thus seen to be connected” (Murdoch, Metaphysics, 399). Hauerwas
echoes this perspective when he notes that “Christian ethics is not first of all concerned with ‘Thou shalt’ or
‘Thou shalt not.’ Its first task is to help us rightly envision the world. . . . We can only act within the world
we envision, and we can envision the world rightly only as we are trained to see” (Stanley Hauerwas, The
Peaceable Kingdom: A Primer in Christian Ethics [Notre Dame: University of Notre Dame Press, 1983], 29).

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ral categories such as character and virtue, in other words, the moral good. That is why in order
to properly attend to reality we need to be changed, and we are changed, in turn, buy pursuing,
in the words of Simone Weil, “morally disciplined attention”51—a concerted reflection in the
form of prayer and meditation, of that which is morally good, not unlike the meditation of the
righteous person in Psalm 1.

Assessing Murdoch
Let me briefly retrace the steps of our discussion so far. I began with the observation that con-
temporary ethics faces challenges both in regards to the status and function of moral claims.
As we have noted, such misgivings often take the form of subjectivist proposals that deny the
stance-independent or objectivist status of moral norms as well as their beneficence for human
self-actualization. I then turned to Murdoch’s moral philosophy in order to address such a
double remove of morality in order to argue for a moral realist perspective that situates ethics
as the ground of Dasein or being-in-the-world. The Good, as Murdoch repeatedly stresses,
underwrites our basic acts of cognition and reminds us that the pursuit of truth and virtue are
essential to subjective well-being. On all of these issues I find myself in basic agreement with
Murdoch.
And yet some lingering questions remain. First, since the Murdochian Good is not a Being
or an extrinsic reality outside of me, how can I ever be sure that what I consider as a given
is not simply an expression of my historical consciousness? While I have reservations about
Nietzsche’s genealogical method, for example, not least of which is its continual slide into in-
stances of genetic fallacy, I do wonder how Murdoch’s account could properly defend itself
against the onslaught of such a hermeneutics of suspicion. In order to respond such a challenge
she could argue, in principle, that our innate sense of the Good is epiphenomenal to evoluti-
onary codings, and in so doing provide a naturalistic account of moral intuitionism. But that
line of disputation, as we will see, is closed to her the moment she rejects empirical verifications
of the Good.
Second, I believe that there is a quantum leap from an ontology of cognition that argues for
the transcendentally of value to the idea of moral obligation. That is, one can grant Murdoch
the claim about the ubiquity of value and yet remain unconvinced that gradations of perfection
have any moral claim upon one’s life. And besides, isn’t Murdoch’s argument itself a curious
instance of the “naturalistic fallacy”—that just because I encounter moral and non-moral value
in my daily existence that that in itself obliges my assent? In approaching such a dilemma, I
side with the position that, ontologically speaking, the moral ought can properly function only
within a framework of the divine command theory. Stated plainly, God—understood in the
broadest theistic sense as a divine lawgiver—is the lone basis of moral obligation. Correlatively,
and I am following Stephen C. Evans here, what justification for the law-like character of mo-
dern moral theories can we provide in the absence of a transcendental cause?52 One can read,

51 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 23.

52 C. Stephen Evans, God and Moral Obligation (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2013). Evans terms this co-
nundrum the “Anscombe intuition” in reference to Elizabeth Anscombe’s original statement of the problem.
See G. E. M. Anscombe, “Modern Moral Philosophy,” in Human Life, Action and Ethics: Essays by G. E. M.

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for instance, Derek Parfit’s brilliant discussion about “decisive reasons… to act in some way”
in On What Matters and after plodding through a thousand pages or so still fail to become
convinced as to why exactly such reasons demand one’s submission.53 And so with Murdoch’s
ethics as well. We have already noted how her notion of transcendence is entirely immanentist
in character; there is no supernatural beyond. Simply retaining the formal structure of divine
command theory while getting rid of its substance, i.e. the belief in a God who has the right to
demand our allegiance, might not do the trick in the end. Granted, this is a hypercharged issue
whose complexity I have not even begun to address here, but I do contend that this presents
a lacuna in Murdoch’s thought and that her proposal, consequently, stands in need of a more
cogent phenomenology of moral obligation to account for the ought demanded by the Good.
Third, Murdoch insists that we should not identify the Good “with pleasure, or a will to
live, or what the government says. The possession of a moral sense is uniquely human; morality
is, something unique,. . . sui generis, ‘as if it came to us from elsewhere.’”54 While I understand
Murdoch’s motive in doing so, a refusal to provide an account of natural goodness prevents
her from specifying different forms human goods, such as pre-moral (material well-being), re-
flexive (personal well-being), and social (communal well-being).55 After all, it is quite difficult
to delineate such goods and their normativity function without the ability to give an account
of states and activities that are proper to humans and on which their flourishing depends.56
With that in mind, one wonders whether, in the end, Murdoch’s ethics is more an invitation to
“spiritual” transformation—certainly one essential aspect of human flourishing—rather than a
synthetic vision of how to morally orient human existence in pluralistic societies.
The failure of such a position becomes even more glaring as we consider exponential incre-
ases of power in our world in varied cultural and technological domains—biotechnological de-
velopments, transhumanism, “states of exceptions” (Carl Schmitt), the panopticizing of society,
child labor, exploitation of women, and so on. Such dehumanizations of life call for, I believe,
continued humanist efforts, both religious and nonreligious, to articulate transcultural goods,
norms, and judgments that are, in Hans Jonas’s words, “compatible with the permanence of
genuine human life.”57 I am not sure how Murdoch’s ethics could ever provide such normative
resources given her self-imposed constraints.
Such reservations aside, I am grateful to Murdoch for articulating a broader vision of the
moral landscape, one that moves beyond questions “of what we ought to do” to broader ones
“about what it is good to be or what it is good to love.”58 She prods us to revisit long neglec-
ted paths that strive to connect morality with the wider realm of meaning and reminds us
Anscombe, ed. Mary Geach and Luke Gormally (Exeter: Imprint Academic, 2005).
53 Derek Parfit, On What Matters, vol. 1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), 33.
54 Murdoch, Metaphysics, 26.
55 Schweiker, Responsibility and Christian Ethics, 120-121. For a good discussion of this issue see R. Kendall
Soulen and Linda Woodhead, eds., God and Human Dignity (Grand Rapids: Eerdmans,2006).
56 See for example Philippa Foot, Natural Goodness (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2001).
57 Hans Jonas, The Imperative of Responsibility: In Search of an Ethics for the Technological Age (Chicago: The
University of Chicago Press, 1984), 11.
58 Charles Taylor, “Iris Murdoch and Moral Philosophy,” in Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness,
ed. Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996), 3.

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that ethics is essential to how we envision and protect human flourishing. Like some of her
theological counterparts—Augustine, von Balthasar, and C. S. Lewis come readily to mind
here—Murdoch maintains that experiences of beauty and goodness, fleeting as they might be,
evoke a yearning “for the infinite, a hunger for more than matter can provide.”59 So while I do
not consider myself a Murdochian, that would be quite impossible, really, given my theological
convictions, I do see her as someone who valiantly attempts to clear long neglected paths by
focusing not just on the good life but on the good beyond life.

SAŽETAK:

Promišljanje stvarnosti: Iris Murdoch o moralnom dobru

Čak i nedostatno poznavanje suvremenih kulturnih i filozofskih pravaca odmah će uka-
zati na raširenu sklonost subjektivističkim oblicima moralnog promišljanja. Pod „subje-
kvističkim“ mislim na razne ne-kognitivne i konstruktivističke paradigme u moralnoj
filozofiji i popularnom govoru koji etičke tvrdnje svode na izričaje osobnih i kolektivnih
sklonosti, osjećaja ili predrasuda lišenih bilo kakve objektivne normativnosti. Slijede
samo neki čimbenici koji pothranjuju ovakva gledišta: poslovična dihotomija činjeni-
ca/vrednota i antirealistički nazori koji prožimaju znatna područja analitičke filozofije;
poststrukturialistička i postkolonijalna „rodoslovlja“ koja jezik opće moralnosti vezuje
sa diskursima moći, patrijarhata i totalitarnog djelovanja te uporaba govora o vrlinama,
vrednotama i „moralnoj jasnoći“ za specifičan skup domaćih i inozemnih političkih in-
teresa i opredjeljenja. Shodno tome, ovakva gledišta vode dvostrukom odmaku od etike:
od strukture stvarnosti ali i ljudske egzistencije i ljudskog procvata. Zbog potpunijeg
propitivanja ovih pitanja ukratko ću se osvrnut na moralnu filozofiju Iris Murdoch i
istražiti kako njen specifičan oblik etičkog realizma pristupa ovakvim tvrdnjama o etici.
Usprkos suzdržanosti u vezi s uvjerljivošću njenog pristupa nastojat ću obrazložiti da je
njena temeljna intuicija u povezivanju moralnosti sa širim područjem smisla i prikazima
čovjekovog procvata neophodna za teološki prikaz počovječenja života.

Ključne riječi: Iris Murdoch; metafizika; etički realizam; moralno dobro; ljudski procvat

59 Thomas Dubay, The Evidential Power of Beauty: Science and Theology Meet (San Francisco: Ignatius, 1999),
56.

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