Julius Geissler: 'What is the “central area of moral philosophy”? – Religious orientation and the shortcomings of contemporary ethics in Iris Murdoch'
Abstract: In her seminal 1954 essay, “The Idea of Perfection” (IP), Iris Murdoch criticises a particular “picture of the soul,” which she characterises as combining a ‘behaviourist’ outlook based on particular trends in linguistic philosophy, an ‘existentialist’ view of the will, and a ‘utilitarian’ conception of practical reasoning. Murdoch illustrates how this dominant behaviourist-existentialist-utilitarian picture (BEU) leads to an impoverished, inaccurate and inarticulate conception of the ethical, rendering unintelligible those concepts that Murdoch thinks truly matter for the ethical life: attention, love, and the Good. In this talk, I aim to shed light on a further significant shortcoming that Murdoch attributes to BEU, which she voiced in an interview with Jonathan Miller in 1988: “I think that one effect of the development of linguistic philosophy was to diminish the central area of moral philosophy, where it could possibly connect with religion.” I seek to argue that the relation between ethics and religion that Murdoch gestures towards in this remark is crucial for her understanding of the ethical as developed throughout her mature writings. In explaining the role that Murdoch ascribes to a ‘religious’ orientation in the ethical life and how this crucial feature of morality is undermined by BEU, I suggest that this underappreciated flaw, as described by Murdoch, bears important lessons for contemporary ethical theory and reveals interesting connections between Murdoch’s analysis and other influential critiques of ‘modern moral philosophy’ in the second half of the twentieth century.
