Moral, Good and Art in Iris Murdoch’s Thought

Abstract

The moral philosophy of Murdoch presents an important challenge to current ethical inquiry: the effort to reclaim a notion of the self as individual and to reconceive its relation to an idea of moral value or the good. Murdoch believes “the self, the place where we live, is a place of illusion. Goodness is connected with the attempt to see the unself, to see and to respond to the real world in the light of a virtuous consciousness.” According to Murdoch, moral philosophy at the first should provide an accurate picture of man and show how, man may improve morally. In The Sovereignty of Good Murdoch refers to some techniques of unselfing. This paper aims to show in brief that how good effects moral change and how art provides an occasion for unselfing. It will be shown that how some characters in her novels become far from their self and close to the reality.