Fields of Force: Murdoch on Axioms, Duties, and Eros (MGM Chapter 17)

Getting the measure of Murdoch's Good

“…The philosophical picture Wittgenstein paints, when taken up a certain way—by the analytic behaviourist existentialist for whom consciousness is “empty” and the will is all—risks the loss of certain concepts: those of the Good, love, consciousness and attention. But this loss amounts not just to a way of describing the world, but as Mark Hopwood insightfully comments, “the loss of a way of being in it ”, a loss that is of moral concern (, p. 255). And this is because, if I am on the right track, the way in which a person comes to resemble the pictures he makes and valourizes is not best understood as a matter copying those pictures.…”