What if the private linguist were a poet? Iris Murdoch on privacy and ethics

Abstract

The historical individual, or rather the absence of the historical individual, in modern philosophy is at the centre of the three lectures collected in The Sovereignty of Good and at the centre of Murdoch's moral philosophy taken as a whole. Murdoch is driven by the insight, and the anxiety, that the conceptual resources available to moral philosophy are catastrophically diminished by a picture of the human individual as 'an isolated principle of will, or burrowing pinpoint of consciousness, inside, or beside, a lump of being which has been handed over to other disciplines' (GG 338).Though her contemporaries might not recognise this rather grotesque character as the hero of their philosophy, Murdoch believes that the presence of this 'soul-picture' in their work is betrayed by the anaemic character of the moral scene they describe. Such a soul-picture, Murdoch argues, has left ethicists with the resources to speak only of reasonableness, rationality, authenticity, sincerity and correctness and has transformed moral progress from a demanding personal struggle towards unachievable perfection into a 'mediocre achievement' (GG 340) consisting in 'the making of sensible choices and the giving of sensible and simple reasons' (HT 177; GG 340; SG 364).Murdoch argues that moral philosophy must be able speak in terms of good and evil, piety and salvation, humility and love-concepts that are connected to perfection, not mediocracy-and she thinks that these concepts get application only against a background picture of humans as substantive individuals or selves, each with a personal history, and a rich, unique, and ultimately private, inner life (e.g., GG 343). She proposes such a soul-picture, one that foregrounds the privacy of individual consciousness and links both practical rationality and the moral significance of action to the irreducible particularity of 'an individual living in time' (MGM 273). This soul-picture, Murdoch thinks, will allow us to recognise that 'the area of morals, and ergo of moral philosophy [is not a] hole-and-corner matter of debts and promises, but [covers] the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world' (SG 380) Abbreviations: GG, 'On "God" and "Good"'.

Murdoch on ethical formation in a changing world

“…As Wiseman notes:

The historical individual, or rather the absence of the historical individual, in modern philosophy is at the centre of the three lectures collected in The Sovereignty of Good and at the centre of Murdoch's moral philosophy taken as a whole. Murdoch is driven by the insight, and the anxiety, that the conceptual resources available to moral philosophy are catastrophically diminished by a picture of the human individual as an isolated principle of will… (Wiseman, 2020, p. 224)

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Iris Murdoch, privacy, and the limits of moral testimony

“…However, she strongly objects to the idea that moral concepts could be adequately grasped solely via determining the rules for public usage of the words. Rachael Wiseman (2020) writes:

The claim that “mental concepts must be analysed genetically” is not the (mere) claim that to acquire mental concepts is to acquire techniques for the public use of words. It is this, plus the additional claim that the techniques learnt exhaust the meaning of mental concepts.

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“…As Murdoch puts it, it is the claim that “I do not ‘move on’,” that the “outer structure” that characterises the public practice for the use of the word, and that I learn at the beginning of my life as a language‐using animal, is (and remains) “the essence of the matter” (IP 309). (Wiseman, 2020, p. 228)…”

“…It is precisely this seeming disanalogy that has motivated some pessimists about testimony to be suspicious of it in the moral case.5 SeeHopwood (2017) andWiseman (2020) for discussions of Murdoch on privacy and universalisability.6 Hopwood (2017, pp. 250-253) discusses the differences between universality and generality.…”

“…5 5 See Hopwood (2017) and Wiseman (2020) for discussions of Murdoch on privacy and universalisability. …”