Literature and Moral Thought

Philosophical Studies, 1986

In The Sovereignty of Good' Iris Murdoch suggests that the central task of the moral agent involves a true and loving perception of another individual, who is seen as a particular reality external to the agent. Writing in the 1960s she claimed that this dimension of morality had been "theorized away" in contemporary ethics. I will argue today that 20 years later, this charge still holds true of much contemporary ethical theory.

Budhi: A Journal of Ideas and Culture, 2014

Despite the initial strangeness of grouping Iris Murdoch (a Platonist), Martha Nussbaum (an Aristotelian), and Richard Rorty (a pragmatist) together, this paper will argue that these thinkers share a strong commitment to the moral purport of literature. I will also show that their shared idea of moral engagement through literature interlocks the individual’s sense of self and the world of others. After considering their accounts, I will conclude by raising the question of literature’s moral limits.

2016

This chapter reviews the two primary ways in which moral issues pertaining to literature are discussed in Anglophone philosophy of art. The first half of this essay looks at the morally relevant influences that literature is thought to have on its audiences, while the second half considers various positions on the question of whether a literary work's moral character affects its artistic value. Since several extensive and incisive surveys of this terrain are already available (Carroll 2000; Gaut 2009, chapter 7), this chapter focuses on points of contention and subsequent developments. Part One: Literature's Morally Relevant Influences Moral judgment is a common feature of interpreting, appreciating, and evaluating literary works. For example, we often attribute virtues or vices to characters and praise or condemn their actions on explicitly moral grounds. Moral judgment is even written into many of the concepts we use to understand literary works: just think, for instance, of the very notion of villain. A skeptic about the moral criticism of literature might point out that the moral judgments just mentioned pertain to diegetic elements of literary works-that is, to things within the world that a literary work describes-and that these judgments may diverge starkly from moral judgments we might make about the work itself. While a literary work might, for instance, tell the story of a mean and nasty person who deliberately hurts others, this does not make the work itself mean and nasty; the moral valence of diegetic elements, our skeptic is quick to point out, is conceptually distinct from the moral valence of the work itself. Further, our skeptic persists, while it is not difficult to acknowledge the moral valence of diegetic elements-after all, persons and their conduct are paradigmatic objects of moral assessment-it is far from obvious how a literary work itself-which is inanimate-can be the proper object of moral judgment.1 By what right, if any, do we make moral judgments about literary works themselves? Although few Anglophone philosophers of art directly attend to this question, the tradition does implicitly offer a compelling answer: namely that a literary work's moral valence lies in its influence on its audience. To be more specific, most philosophers working in this tradition appear to implicitly hold that a literary work is mmally meritorious or mmally flawed insofar as it has, or aims to have, a morally salutary or mmally deleterious influence,

Encyclopedia of Applied Ethics, 2012

Labyrinth

The main objective of this article is to reconstruct Iris Murdoch's criticism of the moral self as it was developed by liberalism, romanticism, existentialism and linguistic empiricism that interpreted the moral person as entangled either in a world of essences (Kant's view) or in a world of mere existence in which the interplay of both necessity and freedom is at stake. Thus what is missing from all these theories is a sufficient development of what it is to have a regard for others through aesthetic perception, which is the most important aspect of the moral self. At the difference of these conceptions Murdoch offers an alternative view, both to liberal ethics in the Kantian tradition and to contemporary ethics, as she argues that to have regard for others demands responsiveness which can also be explained in terms of aesthetic sensibility. Murdoch's ethics rests on an analogy between aesthetic sensibility and moral sensibility based upon the model of the artist's...

There has been a recent surge of interest in the moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch. One issue that has arisen is whether her view advocates a form of moral perception. In this paper I argue that her view does indeed advocate for a form of moral perception—what I call weak moral perception. In the process of moral reasoning weak moral perception plays a preparatory role for moral judgment, which means that moral judgment isn’t simply a matter of seeing what action to perform, but that the right kind of perception is crucial to being able to make good moral decisions. One aspect of Murdoch’s account that has aroused special interest is her suggestion that the right kind of perception relies on the agent’s being in a state of love. I give what I think is the correct account of Murdochian love, which then allows me to defend her view against red herring-type objections raised recently by David Velleman and Charles Starkey.

While a number of philosophers have argued recently that it is through our emotional response to certain literary works that we might achieve particular moral understanding, what has not been discussed in detail in this connection are works which generate conflicting responses in the reader; which is to say literary works in which there is significant element of ambiguity. Consider Joseph Conrad’s novel Lord Jim. I argue that in making sense of our potentially conflicting responses to this novel, and specifically to its central character Jim, we may gain a richer sense of the ways in which literature may contribute to moral understanding – in this case by contributing to an understanding of our own character, its blind spots and its limitations.

Minerva-An Internet Journal of Philosophy, 2003

One recent advance in contemporary moral philosophy is Iris Murdoch' s unique understanding of the concept of the moral self. Murdoch attempts to remedy the account of the moral self she associates with traditional ethics, which mainly focuses on the will. Drawing from the world of art appreciation, Murdoch holds aesthetic perception to be the necessary component of moral regard for others. She claims that a moral person becomes suitably other-directed through the practice of aesthetic perception through ego "unselfing." In contrast to the Aristotelian emphasis upon the rewards of virtue, Murdoch posits the selfinterested "ego" as the chief obstacle to correctly seeing others and, following from this, not rightly exercising virtue towards them, for the ego cannot love. Hence, Murdoch's concept of virtue is a rigorous one, since it advocates the perfection of one's moral vision as an end-in-itself, thus presenting a concept of virtue which comes much closer to the holiness of the saint than to the excellence of a hero. However, the critical question remains: Can an aesthetic construal of the goodness in others become a sufficient basis for knowledge claims about virtue? To answer this question, the article analyzes Murdoch's process of obtaining aesthetic "seeing" through development of a "virtuous consciousness," a process of empathic experiencing, that provides the only true path of practicing virtue towards others.