No CrossRef data available.
Article contents
The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2020
Abstract
Cora Diamond is a powerful witness to the originality of Iris Murdoch's writings on ethics, showing how Murdoch is at variance with contemporary orthodoxy not just in respect of particular doctrines (no ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, etc.), but in her questioning of mainstream assumptions as to what constitutes the subject-matter of moral philosophy. Diamond celebrates Murdoch as an ally in her campaign against the ‘departmental’ conception of morality – the idea that moral thought is just one branch of thought among others – and highlights Murdoch's enduring belief in the ‘ubiquity of the moral quality inherent in consciousness’. In keeping with this belief, both philosophers affirm the value of general humanistic reflection on experience, an enterprise in which traditions of imaginative literature as well as of self-conscious theory can invite us to participate. While welcoming this vindication of the claims of ordinary (existentially embedded) moral intelligence, I will explore some difficulties flowing from the associated idea that ‘morality’ (in the guise of value-saturated human consciousness) is all-pervasive, and from the ‘perpetually-moralist’ account of our incentive to engage with fictional worlds.
- Type
- Papers
- Information
- Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 87: A Centenary Celebration: Anscombe, Foot, Midgley, Murdoch , July 2020 , pp. 181 - 200
- Copyright
- Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2020
References
1 The Sovereignty of Good (London: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1970; hereafter ‘SG’)Google Scholar: all quotations in this paragraph are from 37 (emphasis added on ‘continually’).
2 Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1993; hereafter ‘MGM’), 259.
3 Op. cit. note 2, 265.
4 Op. cit. note 2, 293.
5 Op. cit. note 2, 169.
6 Op. cit. note 2.
7 Op. cit. note 2, 171.
8 ‘“We Are Perpetually Moralists”: Iris Murdoch, Fact and Value’, in Maria Antonaccio and William Schweiker (eds.), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (1996; hereafter ‘WPM’), 79–109, at 95.
9 ‘Murdoch the Explorer’, in Philosophical Topics 38 (2010) 51–85CrossRefGoogle Scholar (hereafter ‘MTE’), at 54.
10 Op. cit. note 9, 59. Compare also 53, where ‘field of study’ (borrowed from Murdoch) is mentioned as another term belonging to the objectionable idiom.
11 Op. cit. note 8, WPM 106 (emphasis added).
12 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 495.
13 ‘Reaffirming’, since she has previously argued in SG op. cit. note 1, 84 that ‘Our states of consciousness differ in quality, our fantasies and reveries are not trivial and unimportant, they are profoundly connected with our energies and our ability to choose and act’.
14 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 238.
15 Op. cit. note 2,. 218.
16 Op. cit. note 2,. 219.
17 Jeremy Corbyn on Boris Johnson's attitude to Syria, Guardian 16 April 2018.
18 Julian Knight MP, referring to Facebook: Guardian 27 April 2018.
19 Op. cit. note 9, MTE 73.
20 Op. cit. note 9, 64, quoting Murdoch, SG op. cit. note 1 64.
21 Op. cit. note 9, MTE 52.
22 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 495.
23 Simone Weil: An Anthology, ed. Siân Miles (London: Penguin, 2005), 231.
24 Diamond (expounding Murdoch), MTE, op. cit. note 9 71.
25 ‘Having a Rough Story about What Moral Philosophy Is’, in The Realistic Spirit: Wittgenstein, Philosophy, and the Mind (1991; hereafter ‘RS’), 376.
26 Op. cit. note 25., 374.
27 Op. cit. note 8, WPM 93, 100; ‘Martha Nussbaum and the Need for Novels’, Philosophical Investigations 16:2 (1993) 128–53CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 139–40, 147, 152. The relevant notion of ‘mystery’ is illustrated by a passage from Wordsworth, The Prelude; ‘extraordinary adventure’ comes from G. K. Chesterton, who also contributes a view of the world as ‘filled with the wonder of fairy tales’.
28 Op. cit. note 25, RS 380.
29 Notably in her Love's Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (Oxford, 1990; hereafter ‘LK’).
30 Op. cit. note 29, 163 (quoting James, The Art of the Novel).
31 Op. cit. note 29, 162.Nussbaum has argued in detail for the recognition of this novel as a ‘major or irreplaceable work of moral philosophy’ (LK op. cit. note 29 138).
32 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 190, emphasis added.
33 Op. cit. note 8, WPM 82, 106.
34 See Findlay, J. N., Axiological Ethics (London: Macmillan, 1970)CrossRefGoogle Scholar. Scheler, 1874–1928; Hartmann, 1882–1950.
35 ‘Hopefully’, in that non-instrumental attitudes to education are not to be taken for granted. See Collini, Stefan, What Are Universities For? (London: Penguin, 2012)Google Scholar.
36 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 495.
37 ‘Missing the Adventure: Reply to Martha Nussbaum’, op. cit. note 25, RS 376.
38 Op. cit. note 29, LK 148, quoting James's preface to The Princess Casamassima. Nussbaum refers to the attempt to become such a person as ‘our highest and hardest task’ – an ‘ethical’ task, as she explicitly describes it.
39 Op. cit. note 25 315.
40 Op. cit. note 25, 315.
41 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 267; compare also 227, ‘Hegel's authoritative monism’; 235, ‘the authoritarian aspiration to a unique systematic truth’.
42 Op. cit. note 1, SG 50. To supply some context for the confession: Murdoch has just stated that it is a ‘great merit’ of philosophy in the Oxford and Cambridge tradition, ‘and one which I would not wish to lose sight of, that it attacks every form of spurious unity … Perhaps it is a matter of temperament whether or not one is convinced that all is one’.
43 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 168.
44 Op. cit. note 1, SG 93 (emphasis added).
45 See for example Republic Bk X, 604e–605a and context.
46 The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (Oxford University Press, 1977).
47 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 169, 170. See also below, note 61 and context.
48 Op. cit. note 9, MTE 55, quoting Darwall, Stephen, Gibbard, Allan and Railton, Peter, ‘Toward Fin de siècle Ethics: Some Trends’, Philosophical. Review 101:1 (1992), 115–89CrossRefGoogle Scholar, at 119; emphasis added.
49 Op. cit. note 9, MTE 52.
50 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 293 (emphasis added).
51 SG, op. cit. note 1 97.
52 SG, op. cit. note 1 52.
53 Compare Murdoch, MGM, op. cit. note 2 301 (quoting Paul, Philippians 4:8).
54 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 170–1.
55 James, Henry, The Golden Bowl (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1987; hereafter ‘GB’), 486Google Scholar.
56 Op. cit. note 55, GB 524: ‘awful’, that is, from Charlotte's (presumed) point of view. (She too is American, but a thorough-going expatriate.)
57 Op. cit. note 55, GB 553.
58 Op. cit. note 55, GB 473, 483, 487, 469.
59 Op. cit. note 55, GB 359, 543, 399.
60 Diamond, op. cit. note 8, WPM 82.
61 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 205 (emphasis in original).
62 Findlay, op. cit. note 34, 4.
63 Wording suggested by Findlay, op. cit. note 34, 74–5 (discussion of Hartmann).
64 See Kirk, G. S. and Raven, J. E., The Presocratic Philosophers: A Critical History with a Selection of Texts (Cambridge University Press, 1963)Google Scholar, fragment 247.
65 Thanks to David Garrard for helpful written commentary on this point.
66 Compare Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus, translated by Pears, D. F. and McGuinness, B. F. (London and Henley: Routledge and Kegan Paul, 1961), 5.64Google Scholar: ‘Here it can be seen that solipsism, when its implications are carried out strictly, coincides with pure realism. The self of solipsism shrinks to a point without extension, and there remains the reality co-ordinated with it’. The Tractatus is an important influence on the moral philosophy of Diamond, though hardly on that of Murdoch. However, there does appear to be some affinity between the ‘extensionless point’ idea and Murdoch's ‘unselfing’ theme, an affinity which might repay study alongside the element of contingency - that is, the contingent or unstable aspect of the two philosophers’ intellectual alliance - touched on in §6 below.
67 See note 53 and accompanying text above.
68 In Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education (Harvard, 1997: 35 for the idea just mentioned) Martha Nussbaum presents an account of the value of literary culture very different from the one suggested by Love's Knowledge, but similarly non-autonomous.
69 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 259.
70 Op. cit. note 9, MTE 75. Compare MGM op. cit. note 2 194; and for an earlier statement of Murdoch's unorthodox line on the relation between ‘moral’ and ‘factual’ thinking, see ‘Metaphysics and Ethics’ (1957) in her Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, ed. Peter Conradi (Harmondsworth: Penguin, 1999), 59–75.
71 Op. cit. note 2, MGM 257, 484, 495.
72 Republic Bk VI, 505e.
73 Op. cit. note 72., Bk VII, 537c7: the mark of the dialektikos (the naturally philosophical or ‘dialectical’ person) is to be sunoptikos (disposed to see things as a unified whole). For ‘intuitions of unity’ see SG 93, discussed in §3 above.
74 Op. cit. note 2, 259 (emphasis added).
75 Op. cit. note 2., 260.
76 Thanks are due to the Honorary Director of the Royal Institute of Philosophy, Professor Anthony O'Hear, and to all who took part in discussion at the lecture at which this paper was given.