"Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy: Reframing the True, the Real and the Good" - Cathy Mason (Central European University)

Oxford University Press, 2026 (April)

By Cathy Mason

Iris Murdoch’s philosophical fortunes over the past fifty years have been volatile. Early in her career, she was received enthusiastically into the world of analytic philosophy. She was invited, for instance, to give talks at prestigious philosophical meetings such as the Aristotelian Society and gave a conference paper at the Joint Session to which Gilbert Ryle, one of Oxford’s most respected philosophers, was a respondent. After this highly successful entrance, however, she gradually withdrew from academic philosophy, and for much of the latter half of her life she occupied a peripheral position within that world. She was a passionate moral realist, a novelist, and a woman at a time when all three located her firmly outside the philosophical mainstream, and after leaving St Anne’s College in the mid-1960s, she remained influential primarily in literary circles. Over the past decade, however, her philosophical significance has once again begun to be recognised, and she now occupies an increasingly significant place within the philosophical canon, even within analytic philosophy. It would no longer be eccentric to put Murdoch on a philosophy syllabus, for instance, and her example of ‘M and D’ is well on its way to becoming a stalwart of the philosophical imagination.

However, despite this resurgence of interest in Murdoch, she remains difficult to read, and difficult to situate on philosophy syllabi. Certain key ideas she discusses such as moral vision or attention have been relatively popular within contemporary philosophical debates, but discussing Murdoch within or alongside such debates can feel jarring. Read merely as part of these conversations, some of her comments can feel random and unconnected, leaping from one seemingly unrelated idea to another.

In my book Iris Murdoch’s Moral Philosophy: Reframing the True, the Real and the Good, I suggest that her use of the same vocabulary as many mainstream analytic philosophers belies deep differences in her philosophical and ethical outlook. This explains why reading Murdoch can be such a puzzling experience. Her notions of moral vision and attention, for example, are located within a complex metaethical outlook which is at odds with many of the basic assumptions that metaethicists standardly make. Murdoch, I argue, is not merely a philosopher with a novelist’s eye, offering us picturesque and provocative isolated thoughts on love and the ego. Nor is she simply a morally serious person exhorting us to be less selfish and attend more carefully to reality. Rather, she is an ambitious and systematic thinker for whom these thoughts are part and parcel of a sophisticated story about reality as a whole. And the real interest in her thoughts on attention, love, the ego and so on can be fully appreciated only against this metaphysical backdrop.

In my book, I work to unearth the foundations of Murdoch’s ethical thought, the broad metaethical system within which her ethical thought is situated. My hope in doing so is to do greater justice to Murdoch as a thinker of real depth and ambition, and simultaneously to offer an account of metaethics that is refreshingly novel and attractive for us today. Murdoch’s metaethical theorising, as I see it, revitalises metaethics. Far from being an obscure and abstract endeavour, distant from our everyday moral lives, her framework connects it with our deepest moral concerns, offering a compelling re-configuring of some of our most important metaethical ideas.

Chapter-by-Chapter Overview

In the first chapter of the book, I consider Murdoch’s conception of the role of moral philosophy. She affirms both that moral philosophy is aimed at truth and that it should make us morally better – two commitments that can seem puzzlingly at odds. For Murdoch, I suggest, these are two faces of a single task, and the connection can be illuminated by considering her notion of truth.

In the second chapter I thus argue that Murdoch is using a non-standard conception of truth. Philosophers typically think that the fundamental truth-bearers are propositions (or something similar); that truth and falsity are binary; and that truth can be fully understood quite apart from notions of human character and activity. Murdoch, I suggest, upends all these assumptions. In their place, she instead offers a conception of truth on which it is bound up with the notion of truthfulness, a concept found within a network of ethical terms.

Where does this leave her realism? In the third chapter, I argue that Murdoch has something very different to contemporary realists in mind. Realism, for her, is an ethical ideal for human life and vision involving a kind of morally laden answerability to the world, not simply a claim about the metaphysical status of moral properties.

In what sense does Murdoch thus regard the Good as ‘real’? In the fourth chapter, I offer an interpretation of Murdoch’s ‘ontological argument’ and a discussion of the thing it is supposed to prove, the Good. Her ontological argument, I argue, is an argument from our experience of ubiquitous degrees of goodness to the reality of a perfect ideal, the Good. The Good, I argue, is an ideal, and therefore the standards for its reality are essentially moral standards.

Chapter five turns to ask how knowledge, our grasp of the truth, might be connected with motivation on Murdoch’s picture. I suggest that on her picture, knowledge can only be the result of virtuous truth-seeking, and therefore anything that counts as knowledge always already brings with it motivation to act according to what one sees.

Finally, in chapter six I turn to Murdoch’s puzzling insistence that despite the supreme importance of morality, it has no purpose and is for nothing. The Good, she suggests must be sought and loved simply for its own sake. I suggest that virtue is pointless, on her account, precisely because the Good is sovereign. To view it as serving any further purpose would be to see it as standing in need of some kind of external vindication, which would diminish it.