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Misplacing freedom, displacing the imagination: Cavell and Murdoch on the fact/value distinction

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  08 January 2010

Stephen Mulhall
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Extract

The view that matters of fact and matters of value are categorically distinct, and that any credible account of ethics must begin from an acknowledgement of that distinction, has been a constant topic of debate in analytical moral philosophy throughout the twentieth century. It is not, however, as simple as it may at first appear to establish an uncontroversial articulation of the view under discussion, because in the course of the debate's evolution that view has been defined in a number of very different and not obviously equivalent ways.

Type
Papers
Information
Royal Institute of Philosophy Supplements , Volume 47 , September 2000 , pp. 255 - 277
Copyright
Copyright © The Royal Institute of Philosophy and the contributors 2000

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References

1 Now collected in Conradi, (ed.), Existentialisists and Mystics (London: Chatto and Windus, 1997).Google Scholar

2 Murdoch, Iris, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (London: Chatto and Windus, 1992)Google Scholar - hereafter MGM.

3 ‘“We are Perpetually Moralists”: Iris Murdoch, Fact and Value’, in Antonaccio, and Schweiker, (eds), Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness (University of Chicago Press, 1996)Google Scholar - hereafter WPM

4 WPM, pp. 80–2.

5 Cavell's criticisms were first published as chapter XII of The Claim of Reason (Oxford University Press, 1979)Google Scholar - hereafter CR: but that chapter, essentially as it stands in CR, formed part of Cavell's Ph. D dissertation, submitted in 1961.

6 Cf. Conditions Handsome and Unhandsome (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1990).Google Scholar