‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency

Abstract

In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch's views remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch's work but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate Murdoch's account of love to neo‐Aristotelian or neo‐Kantian theories of moral agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here, I present a reading of Murdoch's account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch's account of love opens up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in contemporary moral theory.

New Philosophical Essays on Love and Loving

“…Mason also considers Mark Hopwood's sympathetic exegetical work on Murdoch (Hopwood 2014(Hopwood , 2017 and finds that, while it acknowledges Murdoch's view of the particularity of the subject of love, and describes an epistemic role for love, that role is not the one Murdoch intended. Hopwood says love reveals normative demands on the lover, but, Mason contends, Murdoch insists that love's role is primarily to reveal facts about the person being loved.…”

Iris Murdoch and the Epistemic Significance of Love

“…Some philosophical discussions of love have assumed that there is a tension between morality and love. 4 By contrast, both Velleman (1999) and Hopwood (2014;2017) follow significance, and that make some place for love's epistemic significance. However, both square Murdoch's thought that love is a moral activity with her thought that love is epistemically rich only at the expense of denying further aspects of her view; they connect love and morality but fail to explain the broader connection between love and knowledge.…”

“…In §3, I then explore two contrasting interpretations of Murdochian love proposed by Velleman (1999) and Hopwood (2014Hopwood ( , 2017 and discuss the ways in which each fails to do justice to the full epistemic role Murdoch assigns to love. In §4, I explore the notion of objectivity that underlies Murdoch's account.…”

Moral decisionism and its discontents

“…But in harmony with much virtue ethics, ethics of being, Wittgensteinian ideas, and Buddhist ideas. At stake is the very object and point of ethics (Abend, 2013;Anscombe, 1958;Crary, 2016;Diamond, 2010;Frankena, 1973;Hopwood, 2014Hopwood, , 2018Keown, 1992).…”