Morality starts with vision

An introduction to Iris Murdoch's ethical imagination

The Book:

The Sovereignty of Good
By Iris Murdoch
Routledge
First published in 1970

The Talk:

Everyone agrees that morality is about right action. Ethical problems are problems about what to do. Should I eat animals or not? Should I give my money to the poor or invest it? Should I ride a bike instead of a car?

Philosophers might argue about the specifics, but most discussions of ethics focus on moral actors who have free wills who make choices based on reasons. And what really matters—what needs to be figured out—is which actions are moral or which actions are not.

But it’s worth asking what we might be leaving out of the picture. In her 1970 collection of lectures, The Sovereignty of Good, novelist Iris Murdoch thinks we are leaving out something very important—mainly, morality itself.

For Murdoch, the true ethical event happens long before we reach an ethical dilemma. Ethics, for Murdoch, is all about attention. “I can only choose within the world I can see,” Murdoch writes.

In the stereotypical ethical dilemma above, the important facts of the world are obvious and clearly perceived. It’s “public” in the technical sense; any observer sees the same thing when looking at the same situation. Moral reasoning is simply a matter of plugging the parts into the correct ethical formula to spit out a result.

But the real world is nothing like that, argues Murdoch. It’s actually really hard to see other people clearly. We are constantly blinded by our own fantasies, our own selfishness, our own comforting illusions. Moreover, people themselves are complicated. If you have a child or a spouse or parents, you might realize that it can take years—and focus and effort—to really see them. And this discovery of people we spend every day with seems to go on and on. And it’s often that attention, that seeing clearly, that transforms our relationships, even if the behaviors don’t appear to change all that much.

So how does this relate to morality? For Murdoch, it’s what we see that often determines how we act, not our will. Consider those people who we celebrate as heroes. When asked why they did what they did, they seem to misunderstand. It wasn’t a choice for them. They feel as if they acted out of necessity—almost as if they perceived a moral reality that most of us only glimpse dimly, and they simply followed its invisible logic. This, for Murdoch, is the goal—to not have ethical dilemmas at all. “If I attend properly,” she writes, “I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.”

So in order to get ethics right, we have to get our attention right. How do we go about doing that? By orienting ourselves towards The Good. But The Good is not something we can see with our eyes directly. We experience it indirectly through nature, beauty, art, contemplation, and in the presence of good people. Unless we are playing sophistic games, we have an innate sense that some things have more goodness than others, and as we set our mind on these more excellent things, we orient the complex, chaotic, mysterious system of our inner selves in a way that outputs good actions, and this happens, more often than not, without our conscious will. We emit goodness far more often than we choose it.

Murdoch—herself an agnostic—quotes the Apostle Paul, “Whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are lovely, whatsoever things of good report; if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think of these things.”

To put it another way: The fix in many of life’s problems is to guide (with difficulty) one’s attention away from trouble. It’s no good to tell ourselves to stop being angry. Nor does it work to say, “It’s OK to feel angry, as long as you don’t have angry behaviors.” You’ve got to move your attention—though it be no easy task. The sober alcoholic has filled their attention with something else, not simply made a choice to not drink.

Murdoch’s talk of beauty and The Good may seem wildly idealistic to the modern behaviorist-utilitarian, and yet Murdoch claims it’s the behaviorist-utilitarian view that’s optimistic—optimistic that we can we can see the world and ourselves so clearly and that ethics is merely a matter of working out puzzles and activating our will.

For Murdoch, we all have a sense of The Good, we all experience it and know it to some degree, but “it is a task to come to see the world as it is.” Our imagination is constantly stirring up comforting stories about ourselves that keep us blind to that invisible, transcendent reality all around us, blind to the people standing right next to us.

In this way, Murdoch’s Platonic views seem well-supported by contemporary discoveries in psychology, which show that we are clouded by a host of biases and false narratives all the time, that much of our ordinary behavior is more auto-pilot than agency, and that our thinking and behaving is highly sensitive to our immediate environment.

Great art and literature—”goodness by proxy,” in Murdoch’s words—help point the way. But to become good also takes patience and humility and time; it means figuring out how to get around our own daydreams and self-serving illusions and to love others in their complexity, day in and day out. “Will cannot run very far ahead of knowledge,” writes Murdoch, “and attention is our daily bread.”

At one point, Murdoch mentions who might be our ideal good person, and she suggests they are likely to be found among “inarticulate, unselfish mothers of large families.” So much for the introspective free moral agent, calculating his reasons, making his choice, asserting his will in public! The mother we imagine is not making choices at all, simply doing “what needs to be done,” not thinking of herself as the central actor or flexing her will but loving others with effort and yet a lack of self-awareness, a love that is simply a given, an obvious fact.

It reminds me of my favorite quote from Dickens’ novel Dombey & Son. It’s delivered by Mrs. Chick, who is a woman who gets the right thing done on autopilot without thinking much about it:

“I say, if any misanthrope were to put, in my presence, the question, ‘Why were we born?’ I should reply, ‘To make an effort.’”

Mrs. Chick couldn’t tell you what The Good is. She probably wouldn’t even know how respond to an ethical thought experiment in the abstract. But her actions reveal that goodness for her is simply a fact of the world and that acting in accord with it is the most practical, pragmatic way of living.

The implications of Murdoch’s view, for individuals and society at large, are interesting to think about: How might we become better people by orienting our lives, our attention, toward more excellent things—and by putting our daily effort into quieting our internal self-serving stories and paying closer (and more humble) attention to those around us?