Moral Perception Beyond Supervenience: Iris Murdoch’s Radical Perspective

Psychedelic unselfing: self-transcendence and change of values in psychedelic experiences

“…Murdoch regards loving attention (and associated non-egocentric imagination) as a movement outward from the self, enabling progress toward a more accurate perception of the world ( Panizza, 2019 , 3–4, 15; Chappell, 2018 ; Driver, 2020 ). Loving attention—especially when combined with honest self-criticism—counteracts our egocentric fantasies and allows for overcoming our biased perspectives and those “convincingly coherent but false pictures of the world” that we so easily build ( Murdoch, 1997 , 329; see also Driver, 2020 , 174–175).…”

“…Through self-correction and learning enabled by the use of loving (or non-egocentric), one can refine one’s evaluations and moral concepts and conceptions, which largely dictate how one concretely understands good and other abstract values ( Murdoch, 1992 , 325; Murdoch, 1997 , 307, 313, 317–323). Wright (2005) denotes this process as “sensibility transcendence.” Thus, transcending the falsifying veil of self-absorbed fantasy is valuable for both moral and epistemic reasons ( Denham, 2001 ; Murdoch, 2001 , 84, 93, 97; Panizza, 2019 ).…”

Perception, Self, and Zen: On Iris Murdoch and the Taming of Simone Weil

“…By presenting Weil's concept of attention and the role of the self, I will also highlight significant differences between Weil and Murdoch. In most accounts of Murdochian attention, the concept is just presented as derived from Weil, taking Murdoch's own word, and without further questioning (see e.g., [14] (p. 140), [20][21][22][23], and my past self included in [8]). While these accounts do not claim that the concept is the same, they allow for the impression that it is, an impression which I believe has built up in Murdochian scholarship.…”

“…While it is true, as we shall see presently, that Murdoch's moral perception does not quite fit contemporary models, first, her talk of moral vision is not just an elaborate way to refer to a direct form of moral understanding, and second, Murdoch's idea of metaphor is not of something 'added on' to what is real, but rather for her metaphor is itself part of the way we understand, and indeed, perceive reality (see e.g., SGC 363-4) [6]. Several commentators have offered accounts of Murdochian moral perception (see [7][8][9][10]). One of the earlier and most sustained discussions of moral perception in Murdoch is Lawrence Blum's [11], which argues that moral perception is required both for the perception of a situation as moral (and hence, also for the application of theories which themselves do not rely on, or support moral perception), and for the perception of what is salient in a situation, which in turns allows us to construe the situation as something that can be correctly described in thick moral terms e.g., as racist, unjust, kind, selfish, careless, etc.…”

“…585-588). A third reason (as I defended in [8], is that Murdoch's conception of consciousness and moral reality is such that there is no distinction between natural and moral properties, and therefore, even the appeal to supervenience that characterises the more optimistic defences of moral perception, including Murdochian ones, is based on a distinction that she rejects. 7 Attention, paraphrasing Murdoch, is what allows us to see a flower as well as another person's needs (cf.…”