Vision, Attention, and the Reality of Goodness
The Idea of Perfection
Murdoch opens by noting that it is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress, and she uses this remark as a way into diagnosing exactly where contemporary moral philosophy has gone astray. Her target is a picture she finds shared, despite their apparent disagreements, by existentialism and by the behaviourism of ordinary-language moral philosophy associated with writers such as Stuart Hampshire and R. M. Hare. On this shared picture, morality is located essentially in choice and action: what a person believes or feels privately is philosophically uninteresting unless it issues in an observable decision, and the moral agent is pictured as a bare will confronting the world, using reason merely as an instrument to calculate means to chosen ends. Facts and values are kept rigidly apart; the inner life, if it is acknowledged at all, is treated as morally inert until it produces behaviour.
Against this, Murdoch introduces her most famous illustration, the case of M and D. M is a mother who regards her son’s wife, D, with a certain hostile disapproval, seeing her as undignified, pert, vulgar, tiresomely juvenile. Nothing in M’s outward conduct toward D need alter at all; she treats her with the same courtesy throughout. But M, reflecting privately and honestly on her own jealousy and conventionality, gradually comes to see D differently — as fresh and spontaneously youthful rather than undignified, as gay rather than pert. No action occurs, no choice is made in the philosophers’ sense, and yet Murdoch insists that a real moral change has taken place, a change in vision. This example is meant to show that the inner activity of perceiving another person justly and lovingly is itself moral work, not a mere prelude to action that can be dismissed as philosophically irrelevant.
To capture this inner discipline, Murdoch borrows from Simone Weil the concept of attention, understood as a just and patient effort to see an object, especially another person, clearly, as it or they actually are, against the constant pressure of self-centred fantasy. Moral improvement, on this account, is primarily a matter of directing this kind of attention correctly, of struggling against what she calls, in a deliberately unflattering phrase, the fat relentless ego, the self’s tendency to distort reality into forms flattering or convenient to itself. She draws support from Freudian psychology, which she reads not as a rival to moral philosophy but as offering a more realistic picture of the human psyche than existentialism’s image of a free, transparent, self-legislating consciousness — a picture inherited, she argues, from Kant’s notion of the autonomous man, the rational agent who creates value through the sheer exercise of will.
Murdoch turns this realism against the existentialist account of freedom, which she associates with a picture of the will as an isolated, sovereign faculty exercised in discrete moments of decision, essentially detached from the agent’s history, desires, and vision of the world. She proposes instead that moral freedom is not adequately pictured as a leap performed at the instant of choice but is rather a matter of the quality of the whole continuous fabric of a person’s consciousness — what a person habitually attends to and how, over time, shapes what choices are even available to them. By the moment of ostensible decision, she suggests, the substantial moral work has usually already been done or left undone in the slow business of seeing rightly; the choice merely reveals what attention has already prepared. This reorientation is what leads her to conclude that ethics needs a more adequate psychology, one that takes seriously the inner, non-behavioural texture of moral life, and a renewed concept of goodness understood as something to be perceived and loved rather than simply willed into existence by isolated acts of choice.
On ‘God’ and ‘Good’
Here Murdoch begins from the historical situation of a culture in which belief in a personal God has receded for many people, and she asks what, if anything, can be salvaged of the traditional concept of transcendent goodness once its theological support is removed. Her contention is that something can indeed be preserved, and that philosophy has been too quick to assume that once God disappears, only relativism or existentialist self-creation of value remains. She wants to argue that Good itself can occupy something like the position vacated by God: a single, unifying, non-personal source of value that is nonetheless real, authoritative, and not simply the product of human choosing.
To make this case she returns to Plato, particularly to the image, from the Republic, of the Form of the Good as analogous to the sun, illuminating and making intelligible all the other virtues and objects of knowledge without itself being reducible to any of them. On this Platonic picture, goodness is not one value among others to be weighed and chosen but the very condition that makes other values visible and orders them; it is glimpsed only through arduous effort, an ascent out of the cave of self-serving illusion toward a reality that is initially blinding and painful to confront. Murdoch takes from this the idea that Good is properly conceived as transcendent — not existing as a supernatural entity but as a real, guiding, and demanding point of orientation, independent of any individual will, toward which moral effort is directed.
She sets this account explicitly against the existentialist picture in which value is created rather than discovered, in which the sovereign will confers significance on an otherwise valueless world through its own choices. For Murdoch this reverses the true relation: rather than the will conferring goodness, Good has authority over the will, judging and correcting it. Moral progress accordingly consists not in the assertion of will but in a kind of self-emptying she calls unselfing, a withdrawal of attention from the anxious, self-referring ego toward what is real and other than oneself. She gives as an example the experience of absorbed attention to something entirely outside one’s own concerns — watching a hovering kestrel, she suggests, can for a moment dissolve the whole edifice of vanity, resentment, and self-preoccupation, replacing it with pure disinterested seeing. Great art, she argues, performs the same office on a larger scale: works such as those of Shakespeare or Tolstoy train and reward exactly the kind of patient, loving, undeceived attention to reality that is also the substance of moral virtue, so that the discipline of aesthetic contemplation and the discipline of goodness are, for Murdoch, fundamentally the same discipline turned toward different objects.
The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts
Murdoch closes with the third and title-bearing essay, where the arguments of the previous two are drawn together into a direct confrontation with the reigning pictures of moral philosophy inherited from Kant and refined by the existentialists and the linguistic analysts of her own day. She restates the target with precision: the modern picture treats the self as an isolated, will-driven chooser, confronting a world of neutral facts and arriving at values only through the sovereign act of decision. On this picture, she writes, morality is essentially a matter of choice, and the central moral act is the discrete, publicly observable act of choosing between alternatives that are otherwise given, fixed, and inert. Freedom is understood as the ability of this will to leap in any direction unconstrained by anything outside itself, and the inner life — the slow work of attention, the quality of vision, the texture of how a person sees their situation — is dismissed as irrelevant to ethics, mere psychology rather than morality proper.
Against this Murdoch sets her own account, in which Good rather than choice or will occupies the sovereign position. She argues that the moral life is not most fundamentally a series of isolated choices but a continuous, largely invisible activity of attention, by which a person’s vision of the world and of other people is gradually clarified, purified, or else clouded and corrupted by fantasy and self-interested distortion. Choice, when it comes, is typically the more or less automatic outcome of how one has already been seeing; the real moral work has been done, or left undone, long before any dramatic moment of decision arrives. She writes of the need to picture moral progress not as a sequence of leaps of the will but as a slow reorientation of the gaze, so that what matters most is “attention” — a word she elevates, following Simone Weil, to near-technical status — meaning the just and loving direction of a person’s regard toward what is real, as opposed to what self-interest and egoistic fantasy would prefer to see.
She restates here the theme of selflessness central to her whole argument: moral improvement consists essentially in the progressive disappearance of the self as an obstructive, distorting presence between the perceiver and the world, so that one comes to see other people and situations as they actually are, freed as far as possible from the endless self-referring machinery of egoism. This is why she insists that the moral task is characteristically a task of realism — a hard-won, unsentimental seeing of what is actually there — rather than a task of imposing arbitrary value upon a valueless world through sheer will. Good, on her account, is not a name for whatever the will happens to choose but is real, is objective, and is the proper end toward which all genuine attention is drawn; it functions for her almost as an object of vision rather than a product of decision, something to be seen rightly rather than legislated.
She returns in this final essay to the figure of Good as replacing, in her argument, the role traditionally occupied by God in religious ethics, without herself endorsing any supernatural metaphysics: Good is unconditioned, authoritative, and never fully attainable, standing always beyond any particular good act or agent as a kind of magnetic north for the moral life, demanding but never satisfied. She emphasizes that this Good cannot be reduced to any set of rules, nor identified with the totality of good actions, nor captured by any theory that tries to make it useful or definable in ordinary empirical terms; its very indefinability, she argues, is not a philosophical embarrassment but is exactly what one should expect of a genuine transcendent value. The essay insists repeatedly that this is not mysticism for its own sake but an attempt at sober realism about the actual, felt structure of moral experience, which existentialist and analytic theories alike, in her view, have consistently falsified by making the human will too grand and too free, and the world too empty of intrinsic value.
