Iris Murdoch on Understanding Goodness

Originally written for PHIL 1110B Plato with Prof. Justin Broackes.

In “The Sovereignty of the Good Over Other Concepts”, Iris Murdoch employs the “extremely rich metaphor” (376)I am using the page numbers in my electronic copy so they should be close to but not exactly the same as the physical numbering of the Good as the Sun from Plato’s Republic. I will here attempt to elucidate some features of this metaphor, and also consider how Murdoch’s resultant conception of the Good holds up to some typical analytic metaethical questions.

The first crucial piece of the metaphor is its hierarchical implications. Looking straight into the Sun is as difficult as knowing the Good fully and directly, but we can indirectly experience the Sun by seeing its light illuminating other things. In this way, things like beauty, nature, and art are subsumed into the Good, because they are “illuminated” by its power. This hierarchy can also be understood via the dialectical ascent/descent metaphor. Because of the nigh impossibility of direct understanding of the Good, because the Sun is so far away and high in the sky, we might come to understand it by ascending through higher and higher sub-concepts that are illuminations of it from closer and closer distance.

What is, then, the illuminating power of the Good? In a critical way it is the power of “unselfing.” Our experiences of the world as limited humans are necessarily limited by a false feeling of the self. It is difficult to resist the feeling that the world revolves around us, and that our own desires and needs are of paramount importance. Thus, “Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness” (377). In the “real world” not only is the self not at the center, but there might not be any self at all. The world, rightly understood, might only contain “myself” because of a perceptual bias created by my brain, and breaking out of this bias consists in realizing the world’s fundamental unity (this might even sound like a BuddhistFor example, the concept of Anattā idea.) Our perceptual bias towards the self is so deep that direct unselfing is nearly impossible, except with the help of the subordinate concepts. It is in this way that art or natural beauty, for example through the form of a kestrel at the window (370), reflects the Good: by presenting us with moments of unselfing. Stepping out of the confines of the self can feel impossible but for brief glimpses into the beautiful depths of other minds, the vast majesty of the galaxies in the universe, or the kestrel unaware of all human concerns.

Here is a good place to attempt to use Murdoch’s account to deal with a classic case study in metaethics: that of the psychopath. Various types of relativism and non-cognitivism struggle to account for a psychopathic person who actively discards all morality and replaces it with pure self-interest. On a conception where Goodness “collapse[s] into the selfish empirical consciousness” to become “a mere value tag of the choosing will” it is hard to say anything about such a person. If morality consists in a choice of value, then it seems that the only deviant thing about a person whose choice is hunger and greed at any cost to others is rarity. Similarly, however, there might be some struggle for an account on which moral motivation is obvious or innate. If we believe that one cannot help but act as morally as possible, then a psychopath who consciously resists that demand seems to be a counterexample. I think Murdoch’s account seems to actually provide insight on the psychopath. What is deficient about the psychopath is exactly that he is completely trapped within himself. His greed and selfishness is a product of a misunderstanding of the world, and it manifests in an inability to understand or enjoy art or beauty in the world. His lack of moral motivation can be traced not directly to a flaw in his motivational structures, but to a bad picture of the world and his dulled higher senses. With Murdoch’s account, we are in a position to criticize the psychopath on moral grounds, but we do not find ourselves forced into saying that the psychopath must simply adopt wholesale a desire to act morally that he did not previously have.

In this way, we can fashion a Murdochian answer to the related question of normative force. What justifies moral “ought” claims? Murdoch doesn’t answer the question directly, but we can glean an answer. An individual rightly understanding the world, upon reflecting on some issue finds that they already are committed to acting in accordance with the Good. That is, when we consider some dilemma like “Should an elderly relation who is a trouble-maker be cared for or asked to go away?” (375) and attempt to focus our attention solely on the right answer to that question, we find that our understanding and approximation of the Good is what guides us. Insofar as we cannot act rightly, it is because of how difficult it is to “keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair.” In other words, then, the normative force of morality stems directly from the normative force of truth and right understanding. The psychopath should be otherwise not because of some completely alien normative moral force, but precisely for the same reason that his conception of the world is deeply flawed and impoverished because of his self-overvaluation.

This might not be wholly satisfying. Murdoch, as a realist, seems to want to take statements like “It is wrong to murder” as literally true (perhaps with the disclaimer that only if we append some description of the relevant circumstances.) However, if we press her account on this point, there might not be an adequate story as to what makes this true. Should we appeal directly to Goodness? What of a situation in which there is disagreement? Murdoch’s view gives an individual moral epistemology, in the sense that it provides a method for a single person to grow morally and hone their moral concepts. Namely, through unselfing and development of attention. However, if this is supposed to be a full account of moral disagreement we might think that it precludes the existence of fundamental moral quandaries that reveal differences in moral structures. Often, this is what appears to be going on when we present some simple case where there seems to be no “right answer” but rather simply different answers for different systems. On its face, there might be disagreement in which, say, a utilitarian and a Kantian fully take themselves to be acting wholly unselfishly, out of purely moral motivation and still disagree because the substance of their disagreement lies just in what morality prescribes. On Murdoch’s view, that appearance must be deceptive.

Let us now turn more closely to Murdoch’s naturalism. There is, I think, some apparent tension between naturalism and Murdoch’s description of Goodness as a “transcendent reality” but the foregoing discussion can help us make sense of it. Our normal, everyday experience of reality is deeply distorted by selfishness (or, so to speak, “selfness”.) Thus, the “transcendence” is the transcendence not of reality, but of our human binds of perception. Goodness, for Murdoch, exists completely in the world but its transcendence stems from its difficulty to perceive or talk about.

This consideration of naturalism leads us to another classic metaethical question: G. E. Moore’s “open question argument.” According to this argument, “Goodness” cannot be a natural property because for any natural property it is an open question as to whether it is identical to Goodness. In other words, we cannot think that “beauty is Goodness” for example, since it is a coherent subject of debate as to whether beauty and Goodness are in fact identical, so they must be distinct as concepts. Murdoch’s view, I think, takes this line of thought seriously, but looks at it from another angle. Since it is an open question as to whether any particular natural property is Goodness, this leads us directly to the thesis that Goodness is indefinable and ultimately complex. Fully knowing the structure of the natural property identical to Goodness would involve in and of itself knowing the right answer to every moral issue, and if there is some unifying big-picture structure to such a property then knowing it would involve a far greater understanding of the “chancy” universe than a human possible could. It is for this reason Murdoch says that “if there were angels they might be able to define good but we would not understand the definition” (382). In other words, the open question argument demonstrates not that Goodness is not a natural property, but that the kind of natural property it is has a structure interminably complex and impossible to fully digest. This leads directly to a sort of particularism. Since it is not possible to understand Goodness directly and wholly by means of conceptual analysis, we must strive for understanding it in bits and pieces by means of incomplete metaphors. We cannot even understand a definition for right action all at once, so we must change our methodology to prize the apprehension of right action in particular circumstances.