Consciousness, Vision, and Virtue: ris Murdoch on Moral Agency

In this dissertation I study the English novelist and philosopher Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy and develop an alternative account of moral agency by reconstructing her ethics of vision in terms of consciousness, vision, virtue and their relations. ccording to Iris Murdoch, the Sartrean existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon linguistic behaviourism (often called “the existentialist-behaviourist view”) embraces a constricted picture of morality and moral agency that not only pictures the moral agent as an isolated principle of rational will but locates the core of moral agency in the exertion of the will at the moment of choice, and in turn fails to take into account the moral significance of the agent’s inner lives, such as the quality of seeing, feeling and imagining. In order to broaden and deepen our understanding of the complexity and variety of human moral experience, Murdoch proposes an alternative model which conceives morality as the moral agent’s vision of and response to the complex moral world. In this model the locus of moral agency is broadened and the domain of ethics is extended in the sense that moral activities are no longer restricted to choice and action but include the agent’s perceptions, feelings, and imaginations of self and the world. y argument proceeds in three steps:fter examining briefly Murdoch’s criticisms of Sartrean existentialism and the Anglo-Saxon linguistic behaviourism, I argue that Murdoch retrieves the concept of consciousness which consists of rich inner lives and value system to be the fundamental mode of moral being so that the moral lives are no longer restricted to choice and action but include the agent’s inner mental activities. econd, I argue that Murdoch employs the metaphor of vision by which morality is conceived as the moral agent’s seeing of and response to the complex moral world. On this view, not only the willed choice and action but the quality of our vision, feeling and imagining are all morally significant in themselves.hird, resorting to Plato’s philosophy, Murdoch conceives moral growth involving a transformation of the agent’s moral vision that is at the same time a progressively reorientation of consciousness from egoistic concern towards a selfless perspective through a just and loving attention towards others.