The Sovereignty of Good

Iris Murdoch collects three essays in this work of moral philosophy, mounting a sustained challenge to the dominant ethical thinking of her era. Her targets are the existentialist and behaviorist currents in Anglo-American analytic philosophy: Existentialism here refers to a will-and-choice-centered moral outlook, while behaviorism ties mind and morality to observable public behavior. Murdoch argues that these traditions distort the picture of the human soul by reducing moral life to isolated acts of will and ignoring the roles of love, attention, and the concept of Good as a transcendent reality.

The first essay, "The Idea of Perfection," opens with the claim that philosophy must continually return to "simple and obvious facts" (1). Murdoch identifies two such facts that contemporary moral philosophy has overlooked: that an unexamined life can be virtuous, and that love is a central concept in morals. She surveys the philosophical landscape, beginning with G. E. Moore, an early-twentieth-century moral philosopher who held that good was a real, indefinable quality apprehended through something like vision. Moore's successors argued that good is indefinable because value judgments depend on individual will and choice. Murdoch sides with Moore on almost every point.

She then sketches the dominant image of the moral agent drawn from the work of Stuart Hampshire, a moral and political philosopher. In Hampshire's picture, nothing counts as an act unless it brings about a publicly recognizable change in the world, and the inner life is treated as parasitic on the outer. The resulting moral agent has a will isolated from belief, reason, and feeling. Murdoch compares this model to shopping: One enters a shop in total freedom, assesses the goods, and chooses. She labels this image as simultaneously behaviorist, existentialist, and utilitarian. She describes it as a marriage of Kantian liberalism with the logic of Ludwig Wittgenstein, the Austrian-British philosopher, solemnized by the psychologist Sigmund Freud. She traces this picture to its philosophical keystone: Wittgenstein's argument that private mental entities cannot form part of a public concept's structure. Murdoch acknowledges this argument's achievements but contends that others drew unwarranted moral conclusions from it, making it seem logically impossible to take a contemplative attitude toward the good.

To challenge this picture, Murdoch introduces a central counter-example. She asks us to imagine a mother, M, who feels hostility toward her daughter-in-law, D, finding D unpolished, juvenile, and beneath her son. M behaves perfectly toward D throughout. The young couple then emigrate, or D dies, ensuring that any subsequent change occurs entirely in M's mind. Over time, M reexamines her view, telling herself she may be prejudiced or snobbish. Gradually her vision shifts: D comes to seem not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully youthful. M's outward behavior does not change. Murdoch insists that something genuinely moral has occurred, something the behaviorist picture cannot accommodate, since M has attended to D justly and lovingly, and this inner work has moral weight in itself.

From this example, Murdoch develops several linked ideas. The natural metaphor for M's situation is vision: M looks at D, attends to D, focuses her attention. This activity is progressive and infinitely perfectible, which introduces the idea of perfection into moral concepts and undermines the genetic analysis of their meaning, that is, the assumption that a concept is fully learned once its public use is acquired. One cannot learn "love" or "courage" at a basic level and stop; there is a deepening process that moves toward an ideal limit. Murdoch borrows the term "attention" from Simone Weil, a French philosopher and mystic, to describe a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality, which she takes to be the proper mark of the active moral agent.

This leads to a reinterpretation of freedom. Rather than a grandiose leap of will, freedom is a small, piecemeal activity that goes on all the time. At crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over, shaped by the prior work of attention. What the existentialists celebrated as the void at the moment of choice, Murdoch reinterprets as the fright of the conscious will discovering the strength of a personality not under its control. She concludes the essay by arguing that art and morality are two aspects of a single struggle, both requiring selfless attention to reality.

The second essay, "On 'God' and 'Good'," asks what can replace the traditional concept of God as a moral anchor. Drawing on Freud, Murdoch argues for a realistic view of human nature: The psyche is an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy in which fantasy is stronger than reason and unselfishness does not come naturally. She declares that in the moral life, "the enemy is the fat relentless ego" (51), and moral philosophy is properly the discussion of techniques for its defeat.

She proposes that moral philosophy should retain a central concept possessing the attributes traditionally assigned to God: an object of attention, unitary, transcendent, perfect, and necessarily real. Focusing attention on something valuable, analogous to being in love, produces genuine moral energy. Reflecting on the virtues reveals their interrelation: The best kind of courage is also steadfast, calm, temperate, intelligent, and loving. Morality is a form of realism, and the chief enemy of excellence is personal fantasy. Art provides Murdoch's primary evidence: Great art achieves a vision of reality by silencing the self, and the appreciation of beauty checks selfishness in the interest of seeing the real. She contends that Good, not will, is transcendent, and she interprets the ancient Greek philosopher Plato's image of the good man looking at the sun: Good is the source of light that reveals all things as they really are. She maintains that the background to morals is properly a kind of non-dogmatic mysticism, an unformulated faith in the reality of the Good.

The third essay, "The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts," states two foundational assumptions: that human beings are naturally selfish, and that human life has no external purpose or telos (a Greek term meaning end-goal). Murdoch traces the philosophical tradition stemming from Immanuel Kant, the Enlightenment-era philosopher whose will-centered ethics made the human being the creator of value. She identifies the central figure of this tradition, the lonely, powerful, rational hero, as Lucifer, noting that this figure received its literary incarnation in the work of the poet John Milton. The romantic movement then transformed Kant's austere image by converting the idea of death into a cult of suffering.

Against this tradition, Murdoch proposes beauty in nature and art as an accessible starting point for moral life. She describes looking out a window in an anxious state and suddenly observing a hovering kestrel: In a moment the brooding self vanishes, and there is nothing but the bird. Good art affords a similar experience of unselfing, the temporary dissolution of selfish self-preoccupation through absorbed attention to something real. She extends the argument to intellectual disciplines, using the example of learning Russian: The student confronts an authoritative structure that commands respect, and the honesty required is the same virtue required of the moral agent.

Murdoch presents her fullest account of Good using Plato's allegory of the cave from the Republic. The prisoners ascend through stages of enlightenment, and she interprets the fire inside the cave as representing the self, warning that self-scrutiny may be mistaken for genuine moral progress. Moral advance carries intuitions of unity: Courage is revealed as a particular operation of wisdom and love, freedom turns out to be the disciplined overcoming of self, and humility is selfless respect for reality. The indefinability of Good is not trivial emptiness but reflects the inexhaustible variety of the world and the immense distance between ordinary consciousness and apprehension of the real.

She concludes by distinguishing Good from Love: Good is the magnetic center toward which love naturally moves, and love is the tension between the imperfect soul and the perfection beyond it. Goodness requires the acceptance of real death, real chance, and real transience. The humble person, because such a person sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are. Murdoch proposes humility as the virtue most closely aligned with goodness and suggests that the humble person is most likely to become good.