DOI: 10.1111/ejop.

12260

‘The Extremely Difficult Realization That

Something Other Than Oneself Is Real’: Iris
Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency
Mark Hopwood

Abstract: In the last few years, there has been a revival of interest in the philosophy
of Iris Murdoch. Despite this revival, however, certain aspects of Murdoch’s views
remain poorly understood, including her account of a concept that she famously
described as ‘central’ to moral philosophy—i.e., love. In this paper, I argue that
the concept of love is essential to any adequate understanding of Murdoch’s work
but that recent attempts by Kieran Setiya and David Velleman to assimilate
Murdoch’s account of love to neo-Aristotelian or neo-Kantian theories of moral
agency are misconceived. We will not understand what Murdoch is trying to do
unless we understand her position as a radical alternative to such theories. Here,
I present a reading of Murdoch’s account of love as a form of Platonic eros directed
toward two objects: the Good and the particular individual. It is in navigating the
tension between these two objects that we find ourselves facing what Murdoch
famously described as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other
than oneself is real’. When properly understood, Murdoch’s account of love opens
up conceptual space for an alternative approach to some of the central questions in
contemporary moral theory.

1. Introduction

Much of the best work in contemporary moral theory has been concerned with
recovering the insights of Aristotle and Kant. On the Aristotelian side, writers
including Philippa Foot, John McDowell, and Martha Nussbaum have argued for
a return to the concepts of ‘virtue’, ‘character’, and ‘practical wisdom’.1 On the
Kantian side, writers including Barbara Herman, Christine Korsgaard, and David
Velleman have developed subtle and complex accounts of ‘duty’, ‘autonomy’,
and the ‘rational will’.2 In recent years, philosophers from both camps have begun
to take a renewed interest in the work of Iris Murdoch but have often found it
difficult to know exactly where to place her. Murdoch’s psychological insights,
her development of the notion of ‘moral vision’, and her often extraordinarily
prescient critiques of emotivism, behaviorism, and existentialism have made her a
figure of considerable interest to contemporary philosophers, but her work has
sometimes been regarded as eccentric and difficult to understand.3 In this paper, I
want to suggest that, although Murdoch’s writing is not always easy to interpret,
the main reason that Aristotelian and Kantian philosophers have had difficulty
accommodating her within their theories is that the point of her work is to develop

European Journal of Philosophy 26:1 ISSN 0966-8373 pp. 477–501 © 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd
478 Mark Hopwood

an account of moral agency that is radically different from these theories. It owes its
primary inspiration neither to Aristotle nor to Kant but to Plato, and its central
concept is neither duty nor practical wisdom but love. If this account can be made
to stand up in its own right—as I aim to show that it can—then it will offer us a
novel account of a fundamental form of moral awareness that has so far been left
unexplored by Aristotelian and Kantian theorists.4
The importance of the concept of love for Murdoch is hard to miss. In her essay
‘On “God” and “Good”’, Murdoch writes that ‘we need a moral philosophy in
which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again
be made central’.5 One of the keys to understanding Murdoch’s work, as I will aim
to show here, is to see her account of love as an attempt to revive something like the
Platonic notion of eros.6 In placing the concept of love or eros at the center of her
theory, Murdoch is making a self-conscious effort to draw upon the insights of the
Platonic dialogues—in particular the Symposium and the Phaedrus—where moral
progress is associated with the development of erotic love. It is important to note
that, although Murdoch—like Plato—does associate eros with sexual love, she takes
it to have a significance that goes far beyond sexual or romantic relationships. When
Murdoch talks about love or eros, she does not take herself to be giving an account of
a specific kind of personal, private relationship, but of a fundamental form of moral
awareness that colors all of our relations with others. Indeed, for Murdoch, eros is
arguably the most fundamental form of moral awareness. It is eros that is responsible
for our sense of being subject to a normative demand imposed upon us from outside
the self: what Murdoch memorably describes as ‘the extremely difficult realization
that something other than oneself is real’ (SBL 215).
In the last few years, there have been a number of attempts to assimilate
Murdoch’s account of love to an Aristotelian or a Kantian theory of moral agency.
In the first part of this paper, my goal will be to argue that two of the most prominent
such attempts—by Kieran Setiya and J. David Velleman, respectively—are
unsuccessful. Both Setiya and Velleman base their readings of Murdoch around
her association of the concept of love with the concept of vision. Their strategy is to
present love as a form of rational awareness of the moral contours of one’s situation
(Setiya) or the rational agency of others (Velleman). The problem for both accounts is
that Murdoch explicitly and repeatedly contrasts the vision that is occasioned by
reason and the vision that is occasioned by love. What I hope to show in the first part
of the paper is that Murdoch cannot be doing what Setiya and Velleman take her to
be doing; the challenge that I will take up in the second part is to give a positive
account of what she is up to and why we should take that project seriously.

2. Reading Murdoch as a Rationalist

2.1. Murdoch and Aristotelianism

In his article ‘Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good’, Kieran Setiya presents a

reading of Murdoch that attributes to her an account of moral vision very similar

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 479

to the neo-Aristotelian account offered by John McDowell. According to this view,

the difference between the virtuous person and the nonvirtuous person is that the
virtuous person perceives her situation differently. As McDowell writes in his classic
1979 paper ‘Virtue and Reason’ (using the example of the virtue of kindness):
A kind person has a reliable sensitivity to a certain sort of requirement that
situations impose on behavior. The deliverances of a reliable sensitivity are
cases of knowledge; and there are idioms according to which the
sensitivity itself can appropriately be described as knowledge: a kind
person knows what it is like to be confronted with a requirement of
kindness. The sensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity.7
As Setiya notes, McDowell’s deployment of the metaphor of vision was
originally inspired by Murdoch. The following passage from Murdoch’s essay
‘The Idea of Perfection’, cited by Setiya, brings out the similarity quite clearly:
I suggest [that] we introduce into the picture the idea of attention, or
looking […] I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral
sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is the result of moral
imagination and moral effort. […] One is often compelled almost
automatically by what one can see. (IP 36/ 329)
This view, according to which the virtuous person sees her circumstances
differently from the nonvirtuous person, is an intuitive and attractive one. ‘Its only
flaw, you might suspect’, Setiya remarks, ‘is that it is false, indeed obviously so’.8 It
seems to be a ‘fact of life’, as he puts it, that sometimes people really do see the
morally relevant facts before them quite clearly and still fail to act in accordance
with them. For example, imagine a person who is well known as a chauvinist.
He makes lewd comments to female acquaintances, constantly disparages their
achievements, and so on. Although people complain to him about his behavior,
no amount of criticism seems to make any difference. It’s not that he’s unaware
that his comments are chauvinistic—in fact, he positively glories in the title, often
introducing himself as a ‘male chauvinist pig’. It is tempting to say that there is
nothing morally relevant that this person is failing to perceive. He sees his
chauvinism just as clearly as everyone else—he just doesn’t care about it.
In order to rescue the position that he attributes to McDowell, Setiya thinks that
we need to appeal to a further element of Murdoch’s view—what he calls her
‘Platonic theory of concepts’. The basic idea here is this. For any given moral
concept, there are at least two ways in which an agent could be said to
‘understand’ it. The first sense is the ‘ordinary, public’ sense in which the agent
is capable of using the concept in conversation, deploying it in explanations of
her action, etc. The second sense, however, corresponds to a deeper sense of
‘understanding’. Murdoch writes that, in our understanding of certain concepts,
‘a deepening process, at any rate an altering and complicating process, takes place’
(IP 28/322). This idea is easier to understand in the context of an example. Let us
say that our self-proclaimed ‘male chauvinist pig’ finally makes the mistake of
uttering a lewd comment in the workplace and is disciplined and suspended.

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

480 Mark Hopwood

Before he is allowed to return to work, he is required to attend a series of

workshops, part of which consists in a series of video testimonies from women
who had their lives and careers affected by sexism. The experience, as we might
say, opens his eyes to what sexism and chauvinism really are. Although he had
never denied that he was a chauvinist and was capable of using the term in
conversation, there was a sense in which he had never really understood what
chauvinism was. Now that his understanding of the concept has been deepened,
his behavior is likely to be altered accordingly. He might not act perfectly, but he
is no longer going to go around looking out for opportunities to say something
offensive.
The advantage of the Platonic theory of concepts, as Setiya understands it, is
that the possibility of different levels of understanding allows us to account for a
sense in which the virtuous and the nonvirtuous agents do have a common
conception of their circumstances and a sense in which they do not. The
nonvirtuous agent is aware that his actions are chauvinistic but not in the way that
the virtuous person is aware of it. If the nonvirtuous person really understood what
it meant to act chauvinistically, he wouldn’t do it.9 As Setiya writes:
In outline, the theory is this: each concept is associated with norms for its
proper use, both practical and theoretical; these norms describe when the
concept should be applied and what follows from its application, both
cognitively and in relation to the will; to grasp a given concept is to
approximate, in one’s dispositions of thought, a conformity with these
norms. Concept-possession thus comes by degree, and points to a limit
we may never reach: perfect compliance with the norms by which our
concepts are defined.10
The ‘norms’ that Setiya has in mind here are the norms ‘of practical and
theoretical reason’.11 To attempt to perfect one’s grasp of a concept is to aspire to a
standard of ‘ideal rationality’.12 Virtue consists in a kind of conceptual competence,
where the truly virtuous agent is the one who sees all of the aspects of her situation
just as they are and acts in accordance with the relevant moral reasons.
I think that there is much about Murdoch’s view that Setiya’s reading gets right.
Here, I want to focus on what he seems to be missing. The most obvious problem is
that his interpretation does not seem to leave any role for the concept that
Murdoch takes to be a ‘central concept in morals’, i.e., the concept of love. It seems
much more natural to understand the kind of conceptual mastery that Setiya
attributes to the virtuous agent in terms of the concept that McDowell uses—i.e.,
phronesis, or practical wisdom. Why should we think that we need love to gain
an accurate understanding of the moral contours of our situation? Indeed, why
shouldn’t we think that love is precisely the kind of emotion that is likely to get
in the way of seeing things as they are? Setiya’s response to this problem is
unconvincing. He writes that ‘the love that interests Murdoch is the love that
one should have for one’s neighbor, that is, for anyone with whom one interacts’.13
Setiya is right to distinguish Murdoch’s use of the concept of love from the usage
more familiar in contemporary moral philosophy, where it is generally used to pick

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 481

out a certain kind of relationship in which I stand to my close friends and family
members. As I suggested above, when Murdoch says that love ‘ought to be a
central concept in morals’, her point is not (or at least, not primarily) that we ought
to devote more attention to these close familial relationships. It is not clear,
however, whether the understanding of love that Setiya attributes to Murdoch
has any real content. If love is just the mode of relation that I ought to have toward
anyone with whom I interact, what distinguishes it from respect or benevolence?
Setiya does not have much to say about these questions. He admits that his
analysis must ‘leave unanswered’ the question of ‘whether we can treat Murdoch’s
use of “love” in the moral context as more than quixotic’.14 The main problem here,
as Setiya recognizes, is that love is hardly a peripheral concern for Murdoch. What
is more, she explicitly contrasts acting lovingly with acting rationally. As she writes:
‘Will not “Act lovingly” translate “Act perfectly”, whereas “Act rationally” will
not? It is tempting to say so’ (SG 99/384). Setiya’s reading, according to which
Murdoch thinks of virtue in terms of the ‘mastery of the norms of theoretical and
practical reason’, offers us no way of even beginning to make sense of what might
motivate her to make such a claim. At best, then, his interpretation is incomplete;
at worst, it appears to attribute to Murdoch a position that she is explicitly
committed to denying.

2.2. Murdoch and Kantianism

David Velleman’s interpretation of Murdoch has one immediate advantage over

Setiya’s—it puts the concept of love front and center. One of Velleman’s primary
concerns in the article ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, is to undermine the idea
(common to many contemporary critiques of Kantian moral theory) that there is
a fundamental tension between love (as a way of seeing particular individuals as
special or unique) and morality (as a way of seeing all moral agents as equally
valuable). A number of writers have sought to show that the demands of love
can be reconciled with the demands of morality, but Velleman thinks that Kantians
ought not to settle for this response.15 ‘We have made a mistake’, he writes, ‘as
soon as we accept the assumption of a conflict in spirit. Love is a moral emotion
precisely in the sense that its spirit is closely akin to that of morality’.16
What Velleman finds particularly attractive about Murdoch’s account of love is
that—on his reading of her view—love is not a ‘syndrome of motives’ to be with or
do things for the object of one’s love but a detached exercise of truthful vision aimed
at seeing the other person ‘as she really is’. The following passage from one of
Murdoch’s essays (quoted by Velleman) seems particularly congenial to this line
of interpretation:

Should a retarded child be kept at home or sent to an institution? Should

an elderly relation who is a trouble-maker be cared for or asked to go
away? Should an unhappy marriage be continued for the sake of the
children? … The love which brings the right answer is an exercise of justice
and realism and really looking. (SG 89/375)

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

482 Mark Hopwood

‘If love is indeed a matter of “really looking”’, Velleman writes, ‘then it ought to
resemble other instances of valuation as vision, including Kantian respect’.17 The
basic idea here is that, if love is a matter of ‘really looking’, then there must be
something that the lover is looking at, and the most plausible candidate for this
role is that which also functions as the object of respect, i.e., the rational will.
Respect and love, for Velleman, are thus ‘the required minimum and optional
maximum responses to one and the same value’.18
On Velleman’s view, then, love and respect take precisely the same object: the
rational will. The distinction between them turns on the nature of the ‘arresting
awareness’ of rational nature that each provokes. Respect, Velleman writes, checks
‘our empirical motives—in particular, the motives in whose service we might be
tempted to put the person to use’.19 Love, on the other hand, ‘disarms our
emotional defenses—it makes us vulnerable to the other’:
This hypothesis would explain why love is an exercise in ‘really looking’,
as Murdoch claims. Many of our defenses against being emotionally
affected by another person are ways of not seeing what is most affecting
about him. This contrived blindness to the other person is among the
defenses that are lifted by love, with the result that we really look at
him, perhaps for the first time, and respond emotionally in a way that’s
indicative of having really seen him.20
There are various concerns that one might raise about Velleman’s view as an
account of love.21 What I want to focus on here are some problems with it as a
reading of Murdoch. The best way to see the incompatibility between Murdoch’s
position and Velleman’s is simply to quote directly from the passage where she
most explicitly contrasts her view with Kant’s. In ‘The Sublime and the Good’,
Murdoch writes:
The shortcomings of Kant’s aesthetics are the same as the shortcomings of
his ethics. Kant is afraid of the particular. […] He attempts to make the act
of moral judgment an instantiating of a timeless form of rational activity;
and it is this, the empty demand for a total order, which we are required
to respect in each other. Kant does not tell us to respect whole particular
tangled-up historical individuals, but to respect the universal reason in
their breasts. In so far as we are rational and moral we are all the same,
and in some mysterious sense transcendent to history. (SBL 214-15)
Murdoch does not merely articulate her view in different terms to Kant; she
articulates it in opposition to Kant. Velleman actually cites Murdoch’s line about
the ‘realization that something other than oneself is real’ in support of his view
but does not include the beginning of the paragraph, which reads: ‘Let me now
briefly and dogmatically state what I take to be, in opposition to Kant’s view, the
true view of the matter’ (SBL 215). It is hard to imagine a more explicit repudiation
of a position than that. What is more, the aspect of Kant’s view that Murdoch
rejects is precisely that aspect on which Velleman relies—i.e., the idea of respecting
the ‘universal reason’ in the other person’s breast. Whatever Murdoch’s view is

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 483

supposed to be, it would certainly surprise her to see it presented as compatible

with any form of Kantianism.

3. Love as Eros

3.1. Murdoch as a Platonist

As I have already suggested, I think that there is a certain amount that Velleman
and Setiya get right about Murdoch’s position. Murdoch does speak of love as a
form of vision, and she does think that this vision admits of a process of refinement
and improvement. What she quite clearly does not think, however, is that this
process of refinement and improvement can be understood in terms of the
development of the faculty of practical reason. Murdoch is not antireason, but
neither is she a rationalist. She does not believe—as both contemporary
Aristotelians and Kantians do—that what it is to be a good person can be
understood solely in terms of what it is to be a good practical reasoner. The only
way to present her views as a version of neo-Aristotelianism or neo-Kantianism
is to interpret them in a very partial and selective way, glossing over the places
in which Murdoch very explicitly attempts to distance herself from any form of
rationalism.
Neither Setiya nor Velleman, of course, need to be particularly concerned about
any of these interpretative issues. It is open to them simply to say that they are
trying to make the best sense they can out of Murdoch’s work, without denying
that there are strange and idiosyncratic aspects of her views that do not fit
comfortably with their readings. Bringing out these interpretative tensions is
one task; giving a positive account of how to resolve the tensions is another. In
the remainder of the paper, this is the task that I want to take up. Murdoch’s
insistence on the centrality of love is no accident—it is part of an entirely
self-conscious and systematic attempt to present her work as part of a tradition
with important connections to the Aristotelian and Kantian traditions but also
with important differences. We will not understand Murdoch correctly, I want
to suggest, unless we understand her in the way that she presents herself: i.e.,
as a Platonist.
The label ‘Platonism’, of course, connotes many different things. In
contemporary moral philosophy, it is perhaps most commonly understood to refer
to a form of ‘non-naturalist’ moral realism according to which moral judgments are
made true or false by virtue of their correspondence with a set of ‘moral facts’
existing independently of the agent.22 Murdoch’s relation to such views is
complex. She certainly subscribes to some form of realism (to the extent that she
thinks that moral judgments are judgments about the world) but, although at
various points, she describes her own view as a form of ‘naturalism’, her
understanding of what ‘naturalism’ means is so different from that assumed by
contemporary philosophers that it is difficult to say exactly where to place her in
relation to such writers.23 There are, however, a number of questions on which

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

484 Mark Hopwood

Murdoch’s views are very clearly different from those of contemporary naturalist
and non-naturalist moral realists. In particular, the idea that virtuous agents will
converge upon a single, shared understanding of the moral facts is one that
Murdoch explicitly rejects, emphasizing the personal, imaginative aspects of moral
judgment and the profound ‘differences in moral vision’ that can exist between
agents equally receptive to moral reality.24

3.2. The Nature of Eros

I will return to some of these issues later, but for the time being, the main point is
that, when Murdoch aligns herself with Plato, she is doing so for very different
reasons than contemporary non-naturalist moral realists. What Murdoch gets from
Plato, perhaps above all else, is the notion of eros. When Murdoch emphasizes the
role of love in moral agency, she is (as I have argued) not thinking of Aristotelian
phronesis or Kantian respect, but neither is she thinking of philia (i.e., the love that
we have for our close friends and family). She is thinking of eros as it is portrayed
in Plato’s Symposium and Phaedrus—a powerful yet ambiguous desire for the good.
In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, she writes:
I have taken here the image (concept) of Eros from Plato. ‘Eros’ is the
continuous operation of spiritual energy, desire, intellect, love, as it moves
among and responds to particular objects of attention, the force of
magnetism and attraction which joins us to the world, making it a better
or worse world: good and bad desires with good and bad objects. It gives
sense to the idea of loving good, something absolute and unique, a
magnetic focus, made evident in our experience through innumerable
moments of cognition. Good represents the reality of which God is the
dream. It purifies the desire which seeks it. This is not just a picturesque
metaphysical notion. People speak of loving all sorts of things, their work,
a book, a potted plant, a formation of clouds. Desire for what is corrupt
and worthless, the degradation of love, its metamorphosis into ambition,
vanity, cruelty, greed, jealousy, hatred, or the parched demoralising deserts
of its absence, are phenomena often experienced and readily recognized. If
we summon up a great energy, it may prove to be a great demon. People
know about the difference between good and evil, it takes quite a lot of
theorizing to persuade them to say or imagine that they do not. The
activity of Eros is orientation of desire. Reflecting in these ways we see
‘salvation’ or ‘good’ as connected with, or incarnate in, all sorts of
particulars, and not just as an ‘abstract idea’. ‘Saving the phenomena’ is
happening all the time. We do not lose the particular, it teaches us love,
we understand it, we see it, as Plato’s carpenter sees the table, or Cezanne
sees Mont Ste Victoire or the girl in the bed-sitter sees her potted plant or
her cat. (MGM 496-97)
As this passage makes evident, Murdoch’s identification of love with the
Platonic notion of eros is not exactly hidden between the lines—it is right there

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 485

on the surface. The reason that so few of her commentators have picked up on this
aspect of her view, I suspect, is that it only really comes to the surface toward the
end of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, a long and difficult text that even
Murdoch’s defenders have rarely discussed in any depth.25 In The Sovereignty of
Good, Murdoch does not use the word ‘eros’, preferring instead to stick with the
English word ‘love’, but a comparison of the two texts makes it clear that she must
have something like the same concept in mind. The following passage, from the
end of the essay ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’, brings out the
parallel quite clearly:
We are dealing here with very difficult metaphors. Good is the magnetic
centre towards which love naturally moves. False love moves to false
good. False love embraces false death. When true good is loved, even
impurely or by accident, the quality of the love is automatically refined,
and when the soul is turned toward Good the highest part of the soul is
enlivened. Love is the tension between the imperfect soul and the
magnetic perfection which is conceived of as lying beyond it. (In the
Symposium Plato pictures Love as being poor and needy.) And when we
try perfectly to love what is imperfect our love goes to its object via the
Good to be thus purified and made unselfish and just. The mother loving
the retarded child or loving the tiresome elderly relation. Love is the
general name of the quality of attachment and it is capable of infinite
degradation and is the source of our greatest errors; but when it is even
partially refined it is the energy and passion of the soul in its search for
Good, the force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through
Good. Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures,
attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is a reflection of the
warmth and light of the sun. (SG 100/384)
These two passages, I think, give expression to an understanding of the role of
love or eros in moral agency that is consistent throughout Murdoch’s work. Given
the density of Murdoch’s prose, however, the underlying ideas require some
explanation. I think that it makes sense to organize this explanation, at least
initially, in terms of a single question. It is clear that Murdoch regards love as a
central concept in morals, but love for what exactly? One possible answer is simply
that eros is love of the good. In the passages I have quoted above, Murdoch talks
about ‘loving good’, describes love as ‘the energy and passion of the soul in its
search for good’, and says that ‘good is the magnetic center toward which love
naturally moves’. These remarks might lead us to think of Murdochian eros as
being directed not toward any concrete particular object but toward goodness
itself—something like the Platonic form of the good. This reading, however, is
immediately complicated by the presence of an equal number of references to love
for particular objects: Murdoch talks about people loving ‘their work, a book, a
potted plant, a formation of clouds’ and invokes the example of ‘the mother loving
the retarded child or loving the tiresome elderly relation’. What is going on here?
When Murdoch talks about love or eros, are we supposed to be thinking about

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

486 Mark Hopwood

our love for ordinary everyday people and objects, or a higher, more generalized
kind of love for goodness itself?
The answer, I want to suggest, is both. On Murdoch’s view, eros has two objects:
the particular individual and the good. These two objects are not unconnected,
however: Eros is always directed toward both of them at the same time. To put it
in the form of a slogan: We love particular individuals in the light of the good,
and we love the good through particular individuals. When, in the passages above,
Murdoch says that ‘we see “salvation” or “good” as connected with, or incarnate
in, all sorts of particulars, and not just as an “abstract idea”’ or that ‘when we
try perfectly to love what is imperfect our love goes to its object via the good to
be thus purified and made unselfish and just’, it is this basic dynamic between
the individual and the good that I take her to have in mind.
In order to understand the nature of the dynamic between the individual and
the good, it is helpful to look back to the primary inspiration for Murdoch’s
account of eros—i.e., Plato. In the Symposium, Diotima claims that love is ‘wanting
to possess the good forever’ (206a11). Since we are human beings and not gods,
however, we are not capable of simply gazing directly at goodness itself, so our
love is always directed toward some particular object. A philosophical lover,
Diotima tells Socrates, will begin by devoting himself to the beauty of one
particular body and ‘beget beautiful speeches there’ (210a6). Eventually, however,
he will realize that ‘the beauty of all bodies is one and the same’ and consequently
come to think that ‘this wild gaping after one body is a small thing and despise it’
(210b1-6). Thus begins the famous ascent through a whole series of beautiful
bodies, souls, laws and customs, and ‘various kinds of knowledge’ until, finally,
the philosophical lover catches sight of the form of beauty itself.
In a well-known article, Gregory Vlastos criticizes Plato’s account of love for
making the individual little more than a stepping-stone to higher and purer forms
of goodness and beauty. On Diotima’s account, he claims, ‘the individual, in the
uniqueness and integrity of his or her individuality, will never be the object of
our love’.26 The concern here is not difficult to understand. In his pursuit of the
true forms of beauty and goodness, the philosophical lover seems to be required
to leave behind the world of the messy, contingent, and human. It is notable that
Martha Nussbaum—a reader who is more sensitive than most to the Platonic
character of Murdoch’s position—very explicitly levels a very similar charge
against Murdoch’s account of love:

One might … suspect that Murdoch’s Platonism, like Plato’s, sets her in an
ambivalent relationship to the sight of the human, that her intense love of
the good militates against a loving embrace of the particular in its
everyday nonsymbolic realness. Insofar as the good itself is love’s focus,
there is bound to be much that is unsatisfying in a mere human being.
We see this in the loves that Murdoch describes: for both Blaise and
Bradley [characters in Murdoch’s novels The Sacred and Profane Love
Machine and The Black Prince respectively], insofar as they love in the
reverential inspired Platonic way, do look beyond the real people whom

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 487

they love to an obscure image of a metaphysical source of that reverence

and awe.27

Nussbaum is surely right to see Murdoch’s account of love as fundamentally

Platonic in its inspiration, but there are at least a couple of reasons to be skeptical
about the line of criticism that she is advancing here.28 The first reason is that
Murdoch’s alleged distaste for the ‘mere human being’ has relatively little in the
way of solid textual support. Nussbaum’s main evidence for the reading of
Murdoch that she is relying on here comes from an analysis of two novels—The
Sacred and Profane Love Machine and The Black Prince—but there is, as Nussbaum
accepts, an ‘evident difficulty [in] finding Murdoch among her characters’.29 Even
if one were to accept, for the sake of argument, that Nussbaum is right that both
Blaise Gavender and Bradley Pearson are guilty of looking ‘beyond the real people
whom they love to an obscure image of a metaphysical source of that reverence
and awe’, it is a significant leap from there to conclude that these characters are
supposed to represent Murdochian love in its truest form. Indeed, it seems equally
if not more likely that Blaise and Bradley are intended to illustrate characteristic
forms of the failure to love. The second reason for skepticism is that Murdoch
repeatedly and explicitly emphasizes the significance of attending to the particular
individual throughout her philosophical works. In the passage from Metaphysics as
a Guide to Morals that I cited above, she writes that: ‘we see “salvation” or “good”
as connected with, or incarnate in, all sorts of particulars, and not just as an
“abstract idea”. “Saving the phenomena” is happening all the time. We do not lose
the particular, it teaches us love, we understand it, we see it, as Plato’s carpenter
sees the table, or Cezanne sees Mont Ste Victoire or the girl in the bed-sitter sees
her potted plant or her cat’ (MGM 496–97). If it turns out that Murdoch’s account
of love ‘militates against a loving embrace of the particular’, then that will have
happened quite contrary to Murdoch’s own explicitly stated intentions.
Nussbaum, I think, is aware of these difficulties for her argument. She accepts
that ‘the vision of all that is human, including the comic and absurd, is not alien
to Murdoch’s art’, and that Murdoch ‘repeatedly insists on the connection of art
to the ordinary and the funny’.30 Her position, I think, has to be that Murdoch
attempts to do justice to the contingent messiness of human life but ultimately
cannot quite bring herself to embrace it. As Nussbaum writes: ‘I frequently feel,
reading Murdoch, that she wishes to discipline her characters, and that she does
not really like them as they are’.31 This may be so, but it is hardly a satisfying place
to leave the argument. If Murdoch had never really addressed the tension between
love of the good and love of the individual in her philosophical work, then we
might have to settle for doing the best we could to discern her views from her
novels, but in fact, we do not need to be content with any such compromise.
Murdoch is very much aware of the tension that Nussbaum is concerned about.
Indeed, it would not be too much of an exaggeration to say that the question of
how to resolve this tension is central to her work. The following passage from
‘The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts’ brings out her concern with this
problem very clearly:

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

488 Mark Hopwood

Because of his ambiguous attitude to the sensible world … and because of

his confidence in the revolutionary power of mathematics, Plato
sometimes seems to imply that the road toward the Good leads away from
the world of particularity and detail. However he speaks of a descending
as well as an ascending dialectic and he speaks of a return to the cave. In
any case, in so far as goodness is for use in politics and the market place it
must combine its increasing intuitions of unity with an increasing grasp of
complexity and detail. False conceptions are often generalized,
stereotyped and unconnected. True conceptions combine just modes of
judgment and ability to connect with an increased perception of detail.
The case of the mother who has to consider each one of her family
carefully as she decides whether or not to throw auntie out. This double
revelation of both random detail and intuited unity is what we receive in
every sphere of life if we seek for what is best. (SG 93/378)

This notion of a ‘double revelation of random detail and intuited unity’ is key to
understanding Murdoch’s account of eros.32 In the next section, I want to look more
closely at some examples of how this ‘double revelation’ works in practice, but I
think it will be helpful first to map out the central features of the position to which
I take Murdoch to be committed:

(1) Eros is the desire for good. As Murdoch puts it in The Fire and the Sun: ‘Eros is
the desire for good and joy which is active at all levels of the soul and through
which we are able to turn toward reality’ (FAS 415). Like Plato, Murdoch tends
to assume that the desire for the good comes naturally to human beings. The
main source of our errors is not that we fail to desire what is good but that
we are led astray by ‘false good’. This explains the significance of the metaphor
of vision for Murdoch: To see clearly is to be oriented toward what is truly
good.
(2) Eros naturally seeks unity and completion. As Murdoch puts it on the very first
page of Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals: ‘The urge to prove that where we
intuit unity there really is unity is a deep emotional motive to philosophy, to
art, to thinking itself. Intellect is naturally one-making’ (MGM 1). As we
observe goodness and beauty in their various concrete instantiations, we
experience ‘increasing intuitions of unity’—i.e., the sense of some kind of
common form lying beyond these concrete instances. Just as in the Symposium,
the desire for unity is an essential part of what spurs us on to feats of artistic
creativity and moral progress: ‘Plato’s image implies that complete unity is
not seen until one has reached the summit, but moral advance carries with it
intuitions of unity which are increasingly less misleading’ (SG 93/378).
(3) Eros is vulnerable to being degraded by selfishness and possessiveness.
Although the desire for unity and completion is a powerful spur to progress,
it is also dangerous. As Murdoch writes in The Fire and the Sun: ‘Plato’s Eros
inspires us through our sense of beauty, but Eros is a trickster and must be
treated critically. We have been told in the Laws (687b) that the human soul

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 489

desires omnipotence. The energy which could save us may be employed to

erect barriers between ourselves and reality, so that ‘we may remain
comfortably in a self-directed dream-world’ (FAS 420). The great danger of eros
is the temptation to console oneself with false unities—fantasies created by the
psyche as a protective shield against reality. It is crucial to Murdoch’s view that
the energy harnessed by the ‘fat relentless ego’ to create and maintain these
fantasies has exactly the same source as the ‘energy and passion of the soul in
its search for good’. It is the same desire, but wrongly directed. When Murdoch
writes that love ‘is capable of infinite degradation and is the source of our
greatest errors’, I take it that this is what she has in mind.
(4) Eros can be purified by attention to the particular. If the original sin of eros is
the creation of false and consoling unities, then salvation is found in attention
to the particular. As Murdoch puts it, attention to the particular ‘teaches us
love’. In the next section, I will try to explain in more detail exactly what this
process is supposed to look like, but at this stage, the main point to emphasize
is that attention to the particular is supposed to transform our capacity to love.
Murdoch often refers to this transformation as the ‘purification’ of eros. As she
puts it in the passage I quoted above: ‘when we try perfectly to love what is
imperfect our love goes to its object via the Good to be thus purified and made
unselfish and just’. The point of attending to particular individuals, on this
view, is to draw oneself away from one’s attachments to false and consoling
images and bring oneself back to reality.

Since Murdoch’s account of eros is easiest to understand in the context of

concrete examples, in the remainder of this paper, I want to dwell briefly on two
such examples in order to elaborate on the general outline that I have given here.
Murdoch claims that eros is ‘active at all levels of the soul’ (FAS 415) and that
‘the low Eros is the high Eros’ (FAS 428). In other words: The fundamental drive
that is at work in our moral relationships is also at work in our sexual and romantic
relationships and in our relationships with art and beauty. If this characteristically
Platonic claim is right, we ought to be able to see precisely the same kind of
dynamic—the same ‘double revelation of random detail and intuited unity’—at
work in each of these cases. Here, I will consider two examples—one drawn from
Murdoch’s novels, the other from her philosophy—in order to illustrate what it
might look like to read Murdoch’s account of love in this way.

3.3. Romantic Eros

In ‘The Fire and the Sun’, Murdoch gives an account of sexual and romantic love
that explains why both she and Plato regard it as a particularly good starting point
for thinking about eros:
‘Falling in love’, a violent process which Plato more than once vividly
describes (love is abnegation, abjection, slavery) is for many people the
most extraordinary and most revealing experience of their lives, whereby

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

490 Mark Hopwood

the center of significance is suddenly ripped out of the self, and the
dreamy ego is shocked into awareness of an entirely separate reality. Love
in this form may be a somewhat ambiguous instructor. Plato has admitted
that Eros is a bit of a sophist. The desire of the sturdy ego (the bad horse) to
dominate and possess the beloved, rather than to serve and adore him,
may be overwhelmingly strong. We want to de-realise the other, devour
and absorb him, subject him to the mechanism of our own fantasy. But a
love which, still loving, comes to respect the beloved, and (in Kantian
language again) treat him as an end not a means, may be the most
enlightening love of all. (FAS 417)
This passage does a particularly nice job of bringing out Murdoch’s
indebtedness to Plato at the same time as it establishes the distance between them.
For Plato (at least on Vlastos’s reading), the purification of eros involves the ascent
beyond the single individual to the ‘great sea of beauty’ and eventually to the form
of Beauty itself. Murdoch never suggests that a purified sexual eros will lead us
beyond the single individual—what she suggests instead, as we see here, is that it
will be transformed into a love which ‘still loving, comes to respect the
beloved’. A purified sexual eros, on Murdoch’s view, does not seek out higher
objects beyond the beloved but seeks to appreciate the beloved in a more lasting
and stable way.33
The kind of aspiration that Murdoch is articulating here is familiar enough.
Love begins with passionate desire, but if it is to be sustained in the long term, this
desire will need to be transformed into a respectful appreciation of the beloved as
an end in himself. What is particularly important for our purposes here is the
language that Murdoch uses to describe the relation between lover and beloved,
i.e., the language of reality and fantasy. When falling in love, we are ‘shocked into
awareness of an entirely separate reality’ but are constantly subject to the
temptation to ‘de-realise the other’ and subject him to ‘the mechanism of our
own fantasy’. It would probably be possible to find examples of this phenomenon
of ‘de-realisation’ in almost any of Murdoch’s novels, but Charles Arrowby in The
Sea, The Sea provides a particularly clear case. Having retired to a house by the sea
to write his memoirs, Charles discovers that his long-lost love Hartley, whom he
has not seen since the two of them were teenagers, is living in the village nearby.
Although Hartley is married and resistant to his advances, Charles conducts an
increasingly obsessive campaign to ‘rescue’ her, culminating in a bizarre
kidnapping in which Hartley ends up locked in an upstairs room in Charles’s
house while he attempts to build a fatherly relationship with her adopted son
Titus. By the end of the novel, with Titus drowned (after Charles failed to warn
him about the dangers of the sea) and Hartley emigrated with her husband to
Australia, Charles finally begins to reflect critically upon his own actions:
I accused Hartley of being a ‘fantasist’, or perhaps that was Titus’s word,
but what a ‘fantasist’ I have been myself. I was the dreamer, the magician.
How much, I see as I look back, I read into it all, reading my own dream
text and not looking at the reality. Hartley had been right when she said

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 491

of our love that it was not part of the real world. It had no place. But what
strikes me now is that at some point, in order to ease things for myself, I
decided, almost surreptitiously, to regard her as a liar. In order to release
myself from the burden of my tormented attachment I began, with the
half-conscious cunning so characteristic of the self-protective human ego,
to see her as a poor hysterical shrew; and this debased pity, which
I tried to imagine was some sort of spiritual compassion, was the half-way
house to my escape. I could not bear the spectacle of that whimpering
captive victim in that awful windowless room which I still see in
nightmares. My love’s imagination gave up the real Hartley and consoled
itself with high abstract ideas of blindly ‘accepting it all’. That was the exit.
(SS 493)
When Murdoch says that ‘we want to de-realise the other, devour and absorb
him, subject him to the mechanism of our own fantasy’, I take it that it is this kind
of situation that she has in mind. Faced with an object that cannot be fully
possessed or assimilated, the ego creates for itself an object that can be possessed
—a dream image or fantasy that gradually comes to substitute for the real person.
Here, we see how the temptation to take refuge in ‘false unities’ may arise. It was
too difficult for Charles to believe that his long-lost love could possibly prefer
remaining in her marriage to running away with him, so the only recourse was
to create an image of her as a ‘poor hysterical shrew’ in need of rescue. To
acknowledge the ‘reality’ of the other person, on Murdoch’s view, is to resist such
temptations—to see the other person as they are, even when that gets in the way of
our own selfish purposes.
Charles, of course, is an extreme character, but Murdoch quite clearly takes the
temptation to subject others ‘to the mechanism of our own fantasy’ to be a
fundamental part of the human psyche. As she puts it: ‘The chief enemy of
excellence in morality (and also in art) is personal fantasy: the tissue of self-
aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing
what is there outside one’ (OG 57/347). What is particularly interesting about
her view, as I have suggested, is that it is the very same drive that is responsible
both for the creation of such illusions and fantasies and for our capacity to be
genuinely concerned about others for their own sake. At the beginning of The
Sea, The Sea, Charles is happy to live a solitary, almost solipsistic life in his remote
house by the sea. Seeing Hartley, to use Murdoch’s own words, shocks him ‘into
awareness of an entirely separate reality’. All of a sudden, the center of the world
is shifted. In the Phaedrus, Plato’s philosophical lover feels his skin itching and
burning as the sight of the beautiful boy causes wings to begin sprouting from
his shoulders. Similarly, Charles is possessed by a frenzy of activity and creativity,
desperate to find Hartley and to make her happy:
I woke up next morning to an instant sense of a changed world. The awful
feeling was less, and there was a new extremely anxious excitement and a
sheer plucking physical longing to be in her presence, the fierce
indubitable magnetism of love. There was also a weird hovering joy, as

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

492 Mark Hopwood

if I had been changed into the night into a beneficent being powerful for
good. I could produce, I could bestow, good. I was the king seeking the
beggar maid. I had power to transform, to raise up, to heal, to bring
undreamt-of happiness and joy. (SS 109-10)
In this passage, it is clear that Charles’s love for Hartley is already well on its
way to being degraded into self-aggrandizing fantasy. In the picture of the ‘king
seeking the beggar maid’, Charles is already laying the foundations for the image
of Hartley as a ‘poor hysterical shrew’ that will allow him to dismiss her protests as
confusion and lies. Nevertheless, this passage also contains indications of what
Charles’s love might have been, had he been capable of it. A man who only the
previous day had harbored almost no interests outside of himself is suddenly
yearning to ‘bestow good’ and bring happiness to others. The problem is that
Charles is incapable of receiving the second part of the double revelation of eros
—i.e., the perception of random detail. Despite his increasingly passionate
professions of love for Hartley, he is notably uninterested in the details of her life.
This lack of interest sometimes takes a comic form—as when Charles repeatedly
offers Hartley olives despite being told again and again that she doesn’t like
them—but is also evident at crucial moments in their conversations with each
other. The following exchange, as Hartley tries to explain why she has stayed with
her husband, Ben, is particularly revealing:
‘You see we really were very wrapped up in each other, we are very – ‘

‘Wrapped up! Yes! I can see it all’.

‘No, you can’t see it all’, she said, suddenly turning towards me, blinking
and drawing her fingers across her eyes and her mouth. (SS 226)

Later, when Charles is trying to convince Hartley that Ben wouldn’t care if she
left him, she replies: ‘You want to make him unreal, but he’s real’ (SS 299). It is only
toward the end of the book, when Charles’s friend Rosina tells him mischievously
how attractive she finds Ben, that Charles even considers the question of what Ben
and Hartley might have seen in each other: ‘It then occurred to me for the first time
to wonder: had Ben and Hartley come together through sexual attraction?’ (SS 431,
emphasis in original). The idea that Hartley and Ben might have lives of their own,
with thoughts and desires that are hidden from Charles, is an extremely difficult
one for him to arrive at. It represents the first glimmerings of what Murdoch
describes as ‘the extremely difficult realization that something other than oneself
is real’. What makes this realization so difficult, at least in Charles’s case, is that
it comes into tension with the very conception of the good that his eros for Hartley
has set up for him. Once he has cast himself as the king seeking the beggar-maid,
there is simply no room for the thought that Hartley might actually be happier
with someone else. The perception of random detail is made difficult by the natural
tendency of eros to seek out unity and completion. In other words: At least in
Charles’s case, the main obstacle to love is love itself.

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 493

3.4. Moral Eros

Murdoch has no illusions about the difficulty of getting beyond illusion and
fantasy. Our loving, she concedes, ‘is more often than not an assertion of self’
(SG 77/364). Murdoch’s novels contain many characters like Charles but very
few whose love for others seems to come anything close to the ideal of
unselfishness that she holds up in her philosophical works. Indeed, when she is
looking for examples of purified, unselfish eros, Murdoch tends to reach first for
examples from the realm of art. Beauty, Murdoch writes, ‘is the only spiritual thing
we love by instinct’ (SG 83/370). It ‘shows itself to the best part of the soul as
something to be desired yet respected, adored and yet not possessed’ (FAS 417).
The famous example of the hovering kestrel in ‘The Sovereignty of Good Over
Other Concepts’ is supposed to illustrate the capacity of natural beauty to ‘clear
our minds of selfish care’ (SG 82/369). The case of beauty in art is ‘more difficult’,
since the experience of art is ‘more easily degraded than the experience of nature’
(SG 83/370). Nevertheless, good art retains the capacity to ‘[inspire] love in the
highest part of the soul’ (SG 83/370). As Murdoch writes:
Good art reveals what we are usually too selfish and too timid to
recognize, the minute and absolutely random detail of the world, and
reveals it together with a sense of unity and form. This form often seems
mysterious to us because it resists the easy patterns of fantasy, whereas
there is nothing mysterious about the forms of bad art since they are the
recognizable and familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream. Good art shows
us how difficult it is to be objective by showing us how different the world
looks to an objection vision. […] Art transcends selfish and obsessive
limitations of personality and can enlarge the sensibility of its consumer.
It is a kind of goodness by proxy. Most of all it exhibits to us the
connection, in human beings, of clear realistic compassion. The realism of
a great artist is not a photographic realism, it is essentially both pity and
justice. (SG 84/371)
This last point is essential. For Murdoch, loving attention does not aim at
photographic realism. The point of attending to random detail is not to represent
the object in the way that it would appear to some kind of ideal observer. Rather,
the point of attending to random detail is to break up the ‘easy patterns of fantasy’
and to escape the ‘familiar rat-runs of selfish day-dream’. Attention is important
because of its capacity to purify eros by resisting its natural tendency to seek out
unity and completion. In order to bring out the implications of this point for moral
philosophy, I want to look again at Murdoch’s most famous thought-experiment:
the case of the mother and daughter-in-law, M and D. What I want to suggest is
that the standard way of reading this story gets Murdoch wrong in certain crucial
respects and that a corrected reading will help us to see why her view is so
radically different from the Aristotelian and Kantian theories to which she is often
assimilated.
Here is the way that Murdoch sets up the story:

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

494 Mark Hopwood

A mother, whom I shall call M, feels hostility to her daughter-in-law,

whom I shall call D. M finds D quite a good hearted girl, but while not
exactly common yet certainly unpolished and lacking in dignity and
refinement. D is inclined to be pert and familiar, insufficiently
ceremonious, brusque, sometimes positively rude, always tiresomely
juvenile. M does not like D’s accent or the way D dresses. M feels that
her son has married beneath him. (IP 16/312)

‘Thus much’, Murdoch writes, ‘for M’s first thoughts about D’. Time passes,
however, and gradually, M’s impression of D begins to change:
[M] is an intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism,
capable of giving careful and just attention to an object which confronts her.
M tells herself: ‘I am old fashioned and conventional. I may be prejudiced
and narrow-minded. I may be snobbish. I am certainly jealous. Let me
look again. Here I assume that M observes D or at least reflects
deliberately about D, until gradually her vision of D alters. […] D is
discovered to be not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but
spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully
youthful, and so on. (IP 17/313)
The standard reading of this example runs as follows. As she attends more
closely to D, M’s vision of her becomes more accurate, reflecting a better grasp of
the concepts ‘vulgar’, ‘simple’, ‘noisy’, ‘gay’, etc. (this is where the ‘Platonic theory
of concepts’ articulated by Kieran Setiya comes in). At the end of the story, M is
seeing D more truthfully, which is to say that she is seeing her in something closer
to the way that an ideally virtuous agent would see her. Setiya’s reading of the
example explicitly cashes out the notion of the ideally virtuous agent in terms of
rationality: ‘a central thread runs from the example of M & D to the conclusion that
our grasp of concepts can be more or less ideal, where the limit is perfect rationality
or responsiveness to reason’.34 As we have already noted, one problem with
Setiya’s reading (and the standard reading more generally) is that it makes the role
of love here something of a mystery. Why not just think of M’s progress purely in
terms of rationality or practical wisdom? This would make perfect sense for a
neo-Aristotelian like McDowell, but Murdoch very explicitly insists on the role of
love: ‘[what] M is ex-hypothesi doing is not just to see D accurately but to see her
justly or lovingly’ (IP 22/317). Any reading of the M and D case that does not leave
any role for love in M’s vision of D is one with which we ought not to be entirely
satisfied.
The problems for the standard reading do not end here, however. Something
that students (at least in my experience) invariably note when confronted with this
case is that the second version of M’s description of D just looks like a slightly nicer
way of saying the same things. What is the difference, at the end of the day,
between being ‘noisy’ and being ‘gay’ or being ‘tiresomely juvenile’ as opposed
to ‘delightfully youthful’? The standard reading, which asks us to imagine that
seeing D as ‘gay’ rather than ‘noisy’ constitutes progress toward an ideal of perfect

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 495

rationality, begins to look rather implausible here. Do we really want to say that
any rational agent with a perfected grasp of the relevant concepts would see D as
‘gay’ rather than ‘noisy’? Judgments such as these seem much more personal in
nature; we do not expect everyone to agree on them any more than we expect
everyone to like the same kind of music. If you find Susan’s cheerful optimism
to be uplifting while I find it rather exhausting, does one of us really have to be
guilty of some kind of moral failing? Doesn’t it seem more reasonable simply to
put the disagreement down to differences in personality? When one pauses for a
moment to look at the specific descriptive terms that Murdoch chooses to use in
her example—‘not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but
spontaneous, not noisy but gay, not tiresomely juvenile but delightfully
youthful’—one might say the same kind of thing about all of them. Indeed, a
number of these descriptions are quite explicitly subjective—‘refreshingly simple’,
‘tiresomely juvenile’, etc. Is Murdoch’s point really supposed to be that, in an ideally
rational world, all of us would find precisely the same things refreshing and
tiresome? For someone who is at such pains to emphasize the inexhaustible
particularity and variety of human experience, this would seem an
uncharacteristically dogmatic stance to take.
The root of the problem here, I think, is that the standard reading depends on
the ideal of photographic realism that Murdoch very explicitly rejects. She is
careful to point out that what M is trying to do is ‘not just to see D accurately
but to see her justly or lovingly’ (IP 22/317, my emphasis). What does this mean,
exactly? Murdoch writes (in a sentence that David Robjant rightly pinpoints as
crucial) that M is ‘imprisoned’ by a ‘cliché’—namely, ‘my poor son has married a
silly vulgar girl’ (IP 17/312).35 My suggestion is that we ought to understand M
to be imprisoned by this cliché in much the same way that Charles is imprisoned
by the cliché of ‘the king seeking the beggar-maid’. Just as Charles needs to see
Ben in a certain way in order to accommodate him within the narrative in which
he (Charles) swoops in to save Hartley, so M needs to see D in a certain way in
order to accommodate D within the narrative in which M acts as the guardian of
her son’s best interests. Like Charles, M is motivated initially by love, but her love
is degraded by selfishness—specifically, her jealousy of D. This jealousy leads her
to attempt to make D ‘unreal’ by replacing her with the image of the ‘poor silly
girl’. As with the picture of the ‘nasty tyrannical husband’ that Charles associates
with Ben, this image is designed very carefully to serve the needs of the ego,
making it possible for M to see her jealousy of D as nothing more than a mother’s
natural protectiveness and care for her son.
The main difference between Charles and M, of course, is that M is ‘an
intelligent and well-intentioned person, capable of self-criticism, capable of giving
careful and just attention to an object which confronts her’. When M looks again at
D, what she sees are all the random details that the image of the ‘poor silly girl’ had
obscured. Perhaps she really takes the time to listen to D or simply attempts to
notice the things that her son loves about her. This process leads her to see D as
‘delightfully youthful’ rather than ‘tiresomely juvenile’ and so on, but it would
be a mistake to focus too much on the descriptions themselves here. As Murdoch

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

496 Mark Hopwood

herself more or less admits, there is no reason why the image of D as ‘delightfully
youthful’ and ‘refreshingly simple’ could not turn out to be a fantasy in its own
right. Perhaps, as Murdoch suggests, M could be motivated primarily by
unwillingness to see her perfect son as having made any kind of mistake, in which
case loving attention to detail might reveal the various ways in which D can
actually be rather tiresome. The question is not which description corresponds
more closely to the description that would be given by an ideally rational agent,
but which description constitutes a genuine attempt to go beyond the easy patterns
of fantasy to engage with D as a real individual.
There is a radical consequence of all of this that Murdoch herself is more than
ready to embrace. On the standard reading, virtue simply consists in arriving at
the same description of one’s situation that an ideally rational agent would give.
On my reading, the description itself is not what is most significant. Morality is less
about the attempt to master a set of rational norms, and more about the attempt to
do justice to the reality of other individuals. What that means in practice, however,
is that what it looks like to be virtuous depends very much upon the individual in
question. Murdoch is quite explicit about this: ‘M’s activity is peculiarly her own.
Its details are the details of this personality; and partly for this reason it may well
be an activity which can only be performed privately. M could not do this thing in
conversation with any other person’ (IP 22/317). What Murdoch seems to be
saying here is that, in order to understand whether M’s description of D truly
constitutes an attempt to acknowledge the reality of D, we need to know a great
deal about M as a particular individual. The question is not so much ‘is D really
noisy or is she really gay?’, but rather, ‘what does it mean for M specifically to call
D noisy (or gay)?’ Murdoch offers an illuminating comparison with art criticism
to emphasize this point:
If a critic tells us that a picture has ‘functional colour’ or ‘significant form’
we need to know not only the picture but also something about his general
theory in order to understand the remark. Similarly, if M says D is
‘common’, although the term does not belong to a technical vocabulary,
this use of it can only be fully understood if we know not only D but M.
(IP 32/325)
I mentioned earlier that Murdoch’s Platonism differs in certain important
respects from the kind of non-naturalist realism that is generally associated with
Platonism in contemporary moral philosophy. One way to think about the
difference is in terms of Murdoch’s rejection of the idea of ‘photographic realism’.
Murdoch is certainly a moral realist to the extent that moral realism involves a
commitment to the idea of moral agents being subject to an independent reality.
Where she differs from many contemporary moral realists is in the way that she
understands the nature of this independent reality. For Murdoch, the reality to
which we are subject as moral agents is the reality of other people. Given the
infinite complexity of this reality, doing justice to it is an ‘endless task’ that may
require the use of highly individual forms of understanding. Murdoch consistently
rejects the attempt to model moral discourse on scientific discourse, choosing

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 497

instead to foreground the comparison with the creative work of the artist. In
judging whether an artist has succeeded in doing justice to her subject matter,
we do not focus on whether her work closely resembles the work of other artists
on the same subject. Instead—Murdoch thinks—we focus on whether her work
resists the easy patterns of fantasy in a way that manifests a genuine attention to
the complexity and random detail of the world. One consequence of applying this
model to the moral case is that it makes goodness considerably more difficult to
identify. M’s moral progress may be invisible to anyone who does not know her
quite well. Murdoch’s point, however, is that the personal and mostly invisible
nature of M’s progress does not make it any less real.

4. Murdoch and Moral Philosophy

If the reading of Murdoch that I have given is correct, then I think that it constitutes
a case for taking her views seriously as a genuine alternative to the dominant neo-
Aristotelian and neo-Kantian theories of moral agency. Before concluding,
however, it is worth inserting an important qualification to what has been said
so far. Murdoch does think that love is ‘a central concept in morals’, but she does
not think that it is the only concept in morals. It would be a serious mistake to take
her to be committed to the view that any tricky moral problem can be resolved
simply by asking ourselves ‘what would be the most loving thing to do?’ As she
writes in ‘The Idea of Perfection’: ‘I have several times indicated that the image
which I am offering should be thought of as a general metaphysical background
to morals and not as a formula which can be illuminatingly introduced into any
and every moral act. There exists, so far as I know, no formula of the latter kind’
(IP 41/334). In Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, Murdoch expands upon this point,
arguing that there are at least three ‘modes of ethical being, divided under the
headings of axioms, duties, and Eros’ (MGM 492).36 By ‘axioms’, Murdoch means
such principles as ‘the greatest happiness for the greatest number’ or ‘do no harm’.
By ‘duties’, she means a set of relatively inflexible rules telling us what are to do
‘irrespective of inclination’ (MGM 494). In certain cases, Murdoch thinks, we
will be best served by axioms—social and political questions associated with
large-scale problems like disease or famine come to mind here. Equally, there are
regions of life in which the observance of duty is helpful for forming good ‘moral
habits’—we might think of honesty and promise-keeping under this heading. All
that Murdoch is claiming is that eros is also an essential mode of moral being,
without which our account of the moral life will be incomplete.
Exactly what kind of contribution might the Murdochian notion of eros have to
make to our understanding of our lives as moral agents? The most important
aspect of Murdoch’s account of love that her interpreters have tended to miss, at
least in my view, is its ambiguity. Love is ‘the force that joins us to Good’, but it
is also ‘the source of our greatest errors’ (SG 100/384). Without the desire to pursue
our ‘intuitions of unity’ all the way to the summit, we would not be inspired to
engage in reflection on our moral lives, but that desire for unity and completion

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

498 Mark Hopwood

carries with it the danger of obscuring the individuality and particularity of other
human beings. Murdoch’s account of love is—as she characterizes it herself—a
tragic vision. Every step of progress that we make opens up the possibility of
new and more sophisticated forms of illusion and fantasy. As Murdoch puts it:
The tragic freedom implied by love is this: that we all have an indefinitely
extended capacity to imagine the being of others. Tragic, because there is
no prefabricated harmony, and others are to an extent we never cease
discovering, different from ourselves. Nor is there any social totality
within which we can come to comprehend differences as placed and
reconciled. We have only a segment of the circle. Freedom is exercised in
the confrontation by each other, in the context of an infinitely extensible
work of imaginative understanding, of two irreducibly dissimilar
individuals. Love is the imaginative recognition of, that is respect for, this
otherness. (SBL 216)
Given Murdoch’s account of the endless difficulty of love, it ought not to be
surprising that the virtue she places above all others is humility. Although the
humble man ‘is not by definition the good man’, she writes, he is perhaps ‘the kind
of man who is most likely of all to become good’ (SG 101/385). Against the
backdrop of Kantian assertions of autonomy and rational self-mastery,
Murdochian humility represents a genuinely different kind of ideal. Although, in
this paper, I have sought primarily to explain Murdoch’s position rather than to
argue for it, I hope at least to have provided some grounds for thinking that it is
an ideal that moral philosophers have good reason to take seriously.37

Mark Hopwood
Department of Philosophy
The University of the South
USA
mhopwood@sewanee.edu

ENDNOTES

1
See McDowell (1998), Nussbaum (1990), and Foot (2000).
2
See Korsgaard (2009), Herman (1996), and Velleman (2006).
3
Kieran Setiya, for example, says that Murdoch’s writing can be ‘opaque’ and her
views ‘obscure’ (Setiya 2013: 1).
4
To characterize Murdoch as a Platonist and not a Kantian is not to deny the
profound impact of Kant’s thought on her writing. My claim here is that Plato is the primary
influence on Murdoch, and in particular on her view of love.
5
Murdoch (2001b): 45). Hereafter, I will refer to Murdoch’s works by the following
abbreviations: IP: ‘The Idea of Perfection’; OG: ‘On ‘God’ and ‘Good”; SG: ‘The Sovereignty
of Good Over Other Concepts’ (all from The Sovereignty of Good); LP: ‘Literature and
Philosophy: A Conversation with Brian Magee’; ME: ‘Metaphysics and Ethics; VCM: ‘Vision
and Choice in Morality; SBL: ‘The Sublime and the Good’; SBR: ‘The Sublime and the
Beautiful Revisited; FAS: ‘The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists (all from

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 499

Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature); MGM: Metaphysics as a Guide
to Morals; SS: The Sea, The Sea (see references below for full citations). I will use the helpful
convention adopted in Broakes (2012) of giving page references to papers that appear in
both The Sovereignty of Good and Existentialists and Mystics in the following format: OG
45/337 (where this indicates that the passage in question from ‘On “God” and “Good”’
can be found on p 45 of The Sovereignty of Good and p 337 of Existentialists and Mystics).
6
There has been surprisingly little philosophical commentary on Murdoch’s use of
the notion of eros; Nussbaum (1996) is an exception whose interpretation of Murdoch I
discuss below. Tony Milligan (2013) also emphasizes Murdoch’s Platonism and her
identification of love with eros.
7
McDowell (1998: 331–32).
8
Setiya (2013: 8).
9
This idea is familiar from discussions of judgment-internalism; Setiya (2013)
describes Murdoch as a ‘hyper-internalist’.
10
Setiya (2013: 12).
11
Setiya (2013: 13).
12
Setiya (2013: 13).
13
Setiya (2013: 19).
14
Setiya (2013: 19).
15
As, for example, in Herman (1996).
16
Velleman (1999: 74).
17
Velleman (1999: 77).
18
Velleman (1999: 101).
19
Velleman (1999: 94).
20
Velleman (1999: 95).
21
See Kolodny (2003) for an influential critique of Velleman’s view as an account of
romantic/familial love. Harcourt (2009) offers a perceptive analysis and critique of
Velleman’s views on love and rational agency more broadly. Others to have criticized
Velleman’s interpretation of Murdoch include Elijah Millgram (2004) and Tony Milligan
(2013).
22
For example, see Wedgwood (2007).
23
See VCM 92–96 for a discussion of Murdoch’s ‘naturalism’.
24
See VCM 81–82 and ME 75.
25
As noted above, Milligan (2013) is an exception here. He rightly emphasizes
Murdoch’s use of the concept of eros and the fundamentally Platonic character of her
account of love. Milligan, however, does not say a great deal about what I take to be one
of the central features of Murdoch’s account of eros—i.e., the tension between love of the
good and love of the particular individual.
26
Vlastos (1973: 31).
27
Nussbaum (1996: 47).
28
Although Nussbaum does identify Murdoch as a Platonist, it is worth noting that
she also claims to find a ‘residual Aristotelianism’ in her account of love. See Nussbaum
(1996: 52). It is also worth saying that, although I am critical of Nussbaum’s reading here,
the main reason for singling her out is that I believe she gets much closer to the fundamental
questions concerning Murdoch’s account of love than most other interpreters. (I am very
grateful to Martha Nussbaum for her extremely helpful and productive discussions of an
earlier version of some of the material in this paper.)
29
Nussbaum (1996: 37).
30
Nussbaum (1996): 47).

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

500 Mark Hopwood
31
Nussbaum, (1996: 48).
32
I have been helped considerably in understanding the importance of this basic
dynamic by Antonaccio (1996). Although Antonaccio is talking about the relationship
between form and contingency rather than the idea of the individual and the Good as the
objects of eros, I have found her analysis extremely helpful in formulating my own.
33
Murdoch’s use of Kantian terminology in this passage may understandably offer
encouragement to those, like Velleman, who want to interpret her views through a Kantian
lens. I have already argued that Murdoch, although she does make occasional use of
Kantian language, explicitly disavows Kant’s actual position; later, in the paper, I will have
more to say about the differences between her view and any form of Kantianism.
34
Setiya (2013: 13).
35
Robjant (2011) is also someone who takes seriously the claim that M is trying not
merely to see D accurately but to see her lovingly.
36
There is also a fourth mode, ‘void’, which is important to Murdoch’s broader view
but which I do not have the space to discuss here. See MGM chapter 18.
37
For helpful comments, criticisms, and suggestions, I am extremely grateful to an
anonymous referee for this journal. I am also grateful to Candace Vogler, Jonathan Lear,
Dan Brudney, Agnes Callard, Martha Nussbaum, Dhananjay Jagannathan, Matt Teichman,
Micah Lott, and Raja Rosenhagen for their help with previous versions of this material.

REFERENCES

Antonaccio, M. (1996), ‘Form and Contingency in Iris Murdoch’s Ethics’, in W. Schweiker

and M. Antonaccio (eds) Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.
Broakes, J. (ed.) (2012), Iris Murdoch: Philosopher. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Foot, P. (2000, 2000), Natural Goodness. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Harcourt, E. (2009), ‘Velleman on Love and Ideals of Rational Humanity’, The Philosophical
Quarterly, 59: 349–356.
Herman, B. (1996), The Practice of Moral Judgment. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University
Press.
Kolodny, N. (2003), ‘Love as Valuing a Relationship’, Philosophical Review, 112: 135–189.
Korsgaard, C. (2009), Self-Constitution: Agency, Identity, and Integrity. Oxford: Oxford
University Press.
McDowell, J. (1998), ‘Virtue and Reason’, in Mind, Value, and Reality. Cambridge, MA:
Harvard University Press.
Millgram, E. (2004), ‘Kantian Crystallization’, Ethics, 114: 511–513.
Milligan, T. (2013), ‘Valuing Love and Valuing the Self in Iris Murdoch’, Convivium: Revista
de Philosophia, 26: 109–122.
Murdoch, I. (1999), Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature.
New York: Penguin.
—— (2001a), The Sea, The Sea. London: Penguin.
—— (2001b), The Sovereignty of Good. London: Routledge Classics.
—— (2003), Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. London: Vintage Classics.
Nussbaum, M. (1990), ‘The Discernment of Perception: An Aristotelian Conception of
Private and Public Rationality’, in Love’s Knowledge. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
—— (1996), ‘Love and Vision: Iris Murdoch on Eros and the Individual’, in W. Schweiker
and M. Antonaccio (eds) Iris Murdoch and the Search for Human Goodness. Chicago:
University of Chicago Press.

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd

 Iris Murdoch on Love and Moral Agency 501

Robjant, D. (2011), ‘Is Iris Murdoch a Closet Existentialist? Some Trouble With Vision,
Choice, and Exegesis’, European Journal of Philosophy, 21: 475–494.
Setiya, K. (2013), ‘Murdoch on the Sovereignty of Good’, Philosophers Imprint, 13: 1–21.
Velleman, D. (1999), ‘Love as a Moral Emotion’, Ethics, 109: 338–374.
—— (2006), ‘A Brief Introduction to Kantian Ethics’, in Self to Self: Selected Essays.
Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Vlastos, G. (1973), ‘The Individual as an Object of Love in Plato’, in Platonic Studies.
Princeton: Princeton University Press.
Wedgwood, R. (2007), The Nature of Normativity. Oxford: Oxford University Press.

© 2017 John Wiley & Sons Ltd