Murdochian moral privacy

Abstract

Much 20th century philosophy in the analytic tradition can be characterized by a lack of concern for understanding moral claims. In the looming context of a world war, demonstrating that the human species is not necessarily progressing towards being more ethical, the rise of logical positivism meant that ethics were no longer considered to be an important part of philosophical discourse. As a result, moral discussions were dismissed as nonsense. Four female philosophers in particular—Iris Murdoch, Mary Midgley, Philippa Foot, and Elizabeth Anscombe— understood the dangers of this philosophical climate and shared a concern for objective, moral meaning. They wanted to respond to the loss of ethical concepts they experienced and they each argued (in their own way) that ethical statements can be grounded and objective. As Midgley writes in her memoir: In varying ways, we all attacked what may be crudely called the boo-hurray view of ethics—more politely, the idea that facts are split off from values by a logical gap that makes it impossible to think rationally at all about moral topics. […] ‘Values’ were treated as a kind of arbitrary opinions [sic], and it was widely held—not only by analytic philosophers—that, since all people are entitled to their own opinions, argument about them made no sense.2 Murdoch was particularly concerned about the loss of ethical concepts in understanding one’s own moral stance, and much of her philosophical work focuses on developing or strengthening our accounts of the moral person. Her work can be characterized as a search for a moral vocabulary that supports the ethical standard of living that she thinks is necessary to live a good life. In the aftermath of logical positivism, along with the ever-diminishing depth and social importance of the concept of God, Murdoch was searching for a language and collection of ideas that could support her moral convictions.3 Murdoch (and many others) could no longer turn to religious or theological language as a foundational discourse for ethics. In addition to this, the fact-value distinction that pervades much of analytic philosophy removes value from the sphere of things that can be empirically or objectively known. Here too, ethics loses its grounding in reality and is left to be a matter of preference. Hence, Murdoch’s work is a search for a new vocabulary, set of concepts, or framework for understanding the world that can ground ethical ideas.4