Introduction

For fifteen years, from 1948 to 1963, Iris Murdoch was a Tutorial Fellow in Philosophy at St Anne’s College, Oxford.^* She was both brilliant and, I think, immediately recognized as such. By the time her first published novel Under the Net appeared in 1954, she had already produced a small book on Sartre (1953), two substantial papers at the Aristotelian Society, and some reviews for Mind—as well as a couple of radio talks on existentialism and an ambitious piece on existentialist politics for the Socratic Digest. At opposite ends of her work, she was both a thoroughly professional combatant—debating with Ryle whether he had underestimated the notion of ‘private’ experience—and a cultural commentator of wide range and socialist sympathies—enquiring, for example, with Lukács, Oakeshott, and Merleau-Ponty whether Existentialist politics were an adolescent evasion, whereas Marxism and capitalism in their different ways at least had the recommendation of being ‘an incarnation of ideas and values’ (EPM 142). For a good ten years, Murdoch was a philosopher who wrote novels, not a novelist who taught—or had taught—philosophy. And her work in moral philosophy—beginning with two articles in the mid-1950s and culminating in the three papers that were collected together as The Sovereignty of Good (1970)—was important, difficult, and distinctive. It rejected the approach to morality of the two dominant movements of the time—Anglo-American ‘analytical philosophy’, with its emphasis on language and behaviour, and Continental existentialism—and opened up a third path. Murdoch proposed a form of moral realism, allowing the world to contain such things as the courage of an individual person or the meanness of some petty act—something like ‘moral facts’ (VCM 54/95), conceived as what meets the eye of a just and loving moral perceiver. She argued for this with a broadly Wittgensteinian approach, in opposition to a narrower method that (as in R. M. Hare) looked to behaviour and linguistic analysis to delimit the nature of morality. And Murdoch combined with this a moral psychology (what today might be called a theory of motivation and practical reasoning) and a conception of a training in the virtues that went back to Plato. Surprisingly perhaps for a kind of moral realist, she was also a great believer in historical and individual differences in moral perception and conception, and in the difficulty and duty of working for mutual understanding, enlargement of view, and (where a part of our conceptual repertoire itself embodies an injustice) conceptual reform—something more radical than merely changing our minds on the judgements we can already make with our present concepts. Most remarkably, perhaps, Murdoch believed—as Plato and Kant had done, but absolutely in opposition to the mainstream of her time—that moral philosophy should contribute, not just to abstract debates on the nature of morality, but to the practical question, ‘How can we make ourselves morally better?’ (OGG 52/342; cp. SGC 83/368.) But Murdoch’s proposals on that question were deliberately modest: the good is distant and we know it only as seen in reflections, darkly—but we can talk of the main obstacles to perceiving it: social convention, neurosis, fantasy and, above all, the selfish ego, operating obscurely in ways we hardly understand, but which Freud and Plato so richly display for us. In this Introduction I shall say something of Murdoch’s philosophical career and reception; I shall go on to introduce the ideas of her earlier papers from the 1950s and 60s and, especially, The Sovereignty of Good, and then, more briefly, some of her later work; I shall end with some comments to introduce the papers in this collection.