Envisioning the Good: Iris Murdoch's Moral Psychology

Abstract

"The author's moral judgment," Murdoch once remarked, "is the air which the reader breathes" ("Literature" 28). It is at least true that if a reader engages properly with a novel or other literary work, and if the work is any good, then he will to some extent inhabit, albeit only episodically, the author's ethical perspective, his evaluative point of view. 1 This being so, it is natural for the reflective reader to attend to the values implicit in a work--to ask, for instance, whether it embodies any specific moral principles. Should he identify some such principles, he may be tempted to impute them to the author, and if the author happens also [End Page 602] to be a moral philosopher, as was Murdoch, this temptation could be especially difficult to resist. Are her novels, inter alia, veiled expressions of a philosophical moral theory? Do they betray her commitment to some normative system, some set of ethical convictions that she has elsewhere articulated in specifically philosophical terms?