Murdoch's ontological argument

Abstract

The image of God plays a conspicuous role in Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy. Like many of her contemporaries, she sees the idea of God as one which we can no longer be truly comfortable with -one which, in the words of Paul Tillich, has come to feel like a 'strange body' imposed on the human mind, or else like a simple impossibility. ii Unlike many of her contemporaries, however, Murdoch's attempts to reinvigorate morality in the absence of God do not do away with every aspect of the idea of God. She thinks that we have no need to abandon moral metaphysics in favour of moral anthropology or the analysis of moral language, for instance; and more generally, she disagrees with Nietzsche that without God we must now be plunging through an infinite nothing, with no up or down (Nietzsche, 1887, §125), such that we need to take a wholly different track from our thought about morality pre-mort Dieu. The moral philosopher, she believes, can and must still be a metaphysician, even a sort of theologian.The most direct exemplification of this quasi-religious approach to morality is Murdoch's re-fashioning of St Anselm's ontological argument for the existence of God as an ontological argument for the existence of the Good. Against contemporary popular opinion of Anselm's argument, she believes that the argument essentially succeeds -that it does nearly all that it's meant to do, just not in the way that it is popularly thought to do it, and not in service of the particular conclusion (about God) that Anselm intended. iii Our aim in the present paper is to explain Murdoch's conception of Anselm's argument and to show how she makes use of it for her own conclusion that the Good exists. More generally, as Kieran Setiya mentions in another piece on Murdoch, our aim is not so much to provide a definitive evaluation of her argument, as to make it 'plausible, intelligible, and, as far as possible, argumentatively sharp' (Setiya, 2013, p. 2). In doing Pre-print. Please cite published version, forthcoming in European Journal of Philosophy.2 so, we hope to illuminate some of the ways in which she is philosophically distinctive but also to suggest that her argument is one that contemporary moral philosophers should take seriously. iv We begin in §1 by outlining Murdoch's distinctive understanding of Anselm's argument.In §2 we compare her notion of the Good with the traditional notion of God. In §3 we offer an initial sketch of Murdoch's ontological argument, and in subsequent sections we examine its key moves. We begin to do so in §4 by examining an idea at the core of her argument -'degrees of goodness'. In §5 we explore how degrees of goodness are supposed to point us toward the idea of perfection, or the Good. And in §6 we examine the sense in which Murdoch believes that the Good is necessary. In doing so, we aim to shed light on these key Murdochian ideas, as well as to explain how they come together in her own ontological argument. v Murdoch on AnselmMost newcomers to Anselm's argument are introduced to it by way of contrast w...

Reconceiving Murdochian Realism

“…This is not to say that the answer to that ques-26. See Mason and Dougherty (2022) for the related idea that the reality of the Good consists in its reality as an ideal, i.e., the fact it is a genuine ideal rather than a false one (2022: 12).…”