The Sovereignty of Good

Iris Murdoch

• Editorial: Routledge
• Año: 2013
• ISBN:
  9781134575701
• Edición: 1
• Categoría: Philosophy
• Categoría: Philosophy History & Theory

Iris Murdoch was one of the great philosophers and novelists of the twentieth century and The Sovereignty of Good is her most important and enduring philosophical work. She argues that philosophy has focused, mistakenly, on what it is right to do rather than good to be and that only by restoring the notion of 'vision' to moral thinking can this distortion be corrected. This brilliant work shows why Iris Murdoch remains essential reading: a vivid and uncompromising style, a commitment to forceful argument, and a courage to go against the grain.

With a foreword by Mary Midgley.

1 THE IDEA OF PERFECTION

DOI: 10.4324/9781315887524-1

It is sometimes said, either irritably or with a certain satisfaction, that philosophy makes no progress. It is certainly true, and I think this is an abiding and not a regrettable characteristic of the discipline, that philosophy has in a sense to keep trying to return to the beginning: a thing which it is not at all easy to do. There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement towards the building of elaborate theories, and a move back again towards the consideration of simple and obvious facts. McTaggart says that time is unreal, Moore replies that he has just had his breakfast. Both these aspects of philosophy are necessary to it.

I wish in this discussion to attempt a movement of return, a retracing of our steps to see how a certain position was reached. The position in question, in current moral philosophy, is one which seems to me unsatisfactory in two related ways, in that it ignores certain facts and at the same time imposes a single theory which admits of no communication with or escape into rival theories. If it is true that philosophy has almost always done this, it is also true that philosophers have never put up with it for very long. Instances of the facts, as I shall boldly call them, which interest me and which seem to have been forgotten or ‘theorized away’ are the fact that an unexamined life can be virtuous and the fact that love is a central concept in morals. Contemporary philosophers frequently connect consciousness with virtue, and although they constantly talk of freedom they rarely talk of love. But there must be some relation between these latter concepts, and it must be possible to do justice to both Socrates and the virtuous peasant. In such ‘musts’ as these lie the deepest springs and motives of philosophy. Yet if in an attempt to enlarge our field of vision we turn for a moment to philosophical theories outside our own tradition we find it very difficult to establish any illuminating connection.

Professor Hampshire says, in the penultimate chapter of Thought and Action, that ‘it is the constructive task of a philosophy of mind to provide a set of terms in which ultimate judgements of value can be very clearly stated.’ In this understanding of it, philosophy of mind is the background to moral philosophy; and in so far as modern ethics tends to constitute a sort of Newspeak which makes certain values non-expressible, the reasons for this are to be sought in current philosophy of mind and in the fascinating power of a certain picture of the soul. One suspects that philosophy of mind has not in fact been performing the task, which Professor Hampshire recommends, of sorting and classifying fundamental moral issues; it has rather been imposing upon us a particular value judgment in the guise of a theory of human nature. Whether philosophy can ever do anything else is a question we shall have to consider. But in so far as modern philosophers profess to be analytic and neutral any failure to be so deserves comment. And an attempt to produce, if not a comprehensive analysis, at least a rival soul-picture which covers a greater or a different territory should make new places for philosophical reflection. We would like to know what, as moral agents, we have got to do because of logic, what we have got to do because of human nature, and what we can choose to do. Such a programme is easy to state and perhaps impossible to carry out. But even to discover what, under these headings, we can achieve certainly demands a much more complex and subtle conceptual system than any which we can find readily available.

Before going on to consider the problems in philosophy of mind which underlie the inarticulate moments of modern ethics I should like to say a word about G. E. Moore. Moore is as it were the frame of the picture. A great deal has happened since he wrote, and when we read him again it is startling to see how many of his beliefs are philosophically unstatable now. Moore believed that good was a supersensible reality, that it was a mysterious quality, unrepresentable and indefinable, that it was an object of knowledge and (implicitly) that to be able to see it was in some sense to have it. He thought of the good upon the analogy of the beautiful; and he was, in spite of himself, a ‘naturalist’ in that he took goodness to be a real constituent of the world. We know how severely and in what respects Moore was corrected by his successors. Moore was quite right (it was said) to separate the question ‘What does “good” mean?’ from the question ‘What things are good?’ though he was wrong to answer the second question as well as the first. He was right to say that good was indefinable, but wrong to say that it was the name of a quality. Good is indefinable because judgments of value depend upon the will and choice of the individual. Moore was wrong (his critics continue) to use the quasi-aesthetic imagery of vision in conceiving the good. Such a view, conceiving the good on the analogy of the beautiful, would seem to make possible a contemplative attitude on the part of the moral agent, whereas the point about this person is that he is essentially and inescapably an agent. The image whereby to understand morality, it is argued, is not the image of vision but the image of movement. Goodness and beauty are not analogous but sharply contrasting ideas. Good must be thought of, not as part of the world, but as a movable label affixed to the world; for only so can the agent be pictured as responsible and free. And indeed this truth Moore himself half apprehended when he separated the denotation from the connotation of ‘good’. The concept ‘good’ is not the name of an esoteric object, it is the tool of every rational man. Goodness is not an object of insight or knowledge, it is a function of the will. Thus runs the correction of Moore; and let me say in anticipation that on almost every point I agree with Moore and not with his critics.

The idea that ‘good’ is a function of the will stunned philosophy with its attractiveness, since it solved so many problems at one blow: metaphysical entities were removed, and moral judgments were seen to be, not weird statements, but something much more comprehensible, such as persuasions or commands or rules. The idea has its own obviousness: but it does not depend for its plausibility solely upon its usefulness or upon an appeal to our ordinary knowledge of the moral life. It coheres with a whole moral psychology, much of which has been elaborated more recently. I want now to examine certain aspects of this psychology and to trace it to what I think is its origin and basis in a certain argument of Wittgenstein. First I shall sketch ‘the man’ which this psychology presents us with, then I shall comment on this man’s most important features, and then I shall proceed to consider the radical arguments for such an image.

I shall use for my picture of ‘the man’ of modern moral philosophy two works of Professor Hampshire, his book Thought and Action and his lecture Disposition and Memory. Hampshire’s view is, I think, without commanding universal agreement, fairly central and typical, and it has the great merit that it states and elaborates what in many modern moral philosophers is simply taken for granted. Hampshire suggests that we should abandon the image (dear to the British empiricists) of man as a detached observer, and should rather picture him as an object moving among other objects in a continual flow of intention into action. Touch and movement, not vision, should supply our metaphors: ‘Touching, handling and the manipulation of things are misrepresented if we follow the analogy of vision.’ Actions are, roughly, instances of moving things about in the public world. Nothing counts as an act unless it is a ‘bringing about of a recognizable change in the world’. What sorts of things can be such recognizable changes? Here we must distinguish between ‘the things and persons that constitute the external world and the sensations and impressions that I or anyone else may from moment to moment enjoy’. What is ‘real’ is potentially open to different observers. The inner or mental world is inevitably parasitic upon the outer world, it has ‘a parasitic and shadowy nature’. The definiteness of any thought process depends upon ‘the possibility of [its] being recognized, scrutinized and identified by observers from different points of view; this possibility is essential to any definite reality’. ‘The play of the mind, free of any expression in audible speech or visible action is a reality, as the play of shadows is a reality. But any description of it is derived from the description of its natural expression in speech and action.’ ‘The assent that takes place within the mind and in no process of communication when no question has been actually asked and answered is a shadowy assent and a shadowy act.’ ‘Thought cannot be thought, as opposed to day-dreaming or musing, unless it is directed towards a conclusion, whether in action or in judgement.’ Further: thought and belief are separate from will and action. ‘We do try, in ordinary speech and thought, to keep the distinction between thought and action as definite as possible.’ Thought as such is not action but an introduction to action. ‘That which I do is that for which I am responsible and which is peculiarly an expression of myself. It is essential to thought that it takes its own forms and follows its own paths without my intervention, that is, without the intervention of my will. I identify myself with my will. Thought, when it is most pure, is self-directing…. Thought begins on its own path, governed by its universal rules, when the preliminary work of the will is done. No process of thought could be punctuated by acts of will, voluntary switchings of attention, and retain its status as a continuous process of thought.’ These are very important assumptions. It will follow from this that a ‘belief’ is not something subject to the will. ‘It seems that I cannot present my own belief in something as an achievement, because, by so presenting it, I would disqualify it as belief.’ These quotations are from Thought and Action, the later part of Chapter Two.

In the Ernest Jones lecture, Disposition and Memory, Hampshire does two things: he puts the arguments of Thought and Action more polemically in a nutshell, and he introduces, under the protection of Freud, an idea of ‘personal verification’ which I shall discuss at length below. From Disposition and Memory: ‘Intention is the one concept that ought to be preserved free from any taint of the less than conscious.’ And ‘it is characteristic of mental, as opposed to physical, concepts that the conditions of their application can only be understood if they are analysed genetically’. These are succinct statements of what has already been argued in Thought and Action. Hampshire now gives us in addition a picture of ‘the ideally rational man’. This person would be ‘aware of all his memories as memories…. His wishes would be attached to definite possibilities in a definite future…. He would… distinguish his present situation from unconscious memories of the past… and would find his motives for action in satisfying his instinctual needs within the objectively observed features of the situation.’ This ideal man does not exist because the palimpsest of ‘dispositions’ is too hard to penetrate: and this is just as well because ideal rationality would leave us ‘without art, without dream or imagination, without likes or dislikes unconnected with instinctual needs’. In theory, though not in practice, ‘an interminable analysis’ could lay bare the dispositional machinery and make possible a perfect prediction of conduct; but Hampshire emphasizes (and this is the main point of the lecture) that such ideal knowledge would not take the form of a scientific law but would have its basis and its verification in the history of the individual. I shall argue later that the very persuasive image with which Hampshire has presented us contains incompatible elements. Roughly, there is a conflict between the ‘logical’ view of the mind and the ‘historical’ view of the mind, a conflict which exists partly because logic is still tied to an old-fashioned conception of science. But this is to anticipate.

I shall find it useful later to define my own view in fairly exact section-by-section contrast with Hampshire’s; and as his view is rich in detail, extensive quotation has been necessary. As I have suggested, Hampshire’s man is to be found more or less explicitly lurking behind much that is written nowadays on the subject of moral philosophy and indeed also of politics. Hampshire has thoroughly explored a background which many writers have taken for granted: and for this one is grateful. This ‘man’, one may add, is familiar to us for another reason: he is the hero of almost every contemporary novel. Let us look at his characteristics, noting them as yet without discussion. Hampshire emphasizes clarity of intention. He says ‘all problems meet in intention’, and he utters in relation to intention the only explicit ‘ought’ in his psychology. We ought to know what we are doing. We should aim at total knowledge of our situation and a clear conceptualization of all our possibilities. Thought and intention must be directed towards definite overt issues or else they are merely day-dream. ‘Reality’ is potentially open to different observers. What is ‘inward’, what lies in between overt actions, is either impersonal thought, or ‘shadows’ of acts, or else substanceless dream. Mental life is, and logically must be, a shadow of life in public. Our personal being is the movement of our overtly choosing will. Immense care is taken to picture the will as isolated. It is isolated from belief, from reason, from feeling, and is yet the essential centre of the self. ‘I identify myself with my will.’ It is separated from belief so that the authority of reason, which manufactures belief; may be entire and so that responsibility for action may be entire as well. My responsibility is a function of my knowledge (which tries to be wholly impersonal) and my will (which is wholly personal). Morality is a matter of thinking clearly and then proceeding to outward dealings with other men.

On this view one might say that morality is assimilated to a visit to a shop. I enter the shop in a condition of totally responsible freedom, I objectively estimate the features of the goods, and I choose. The greater my objectivity and discrimination the larger the number of products from which I can select. (A Marxist critique of this conception of bourgeois capitalist morals would be apt enough. Should we want many goods in the shop or just ‘the right goods’?) Both as act and reason, shopping is public. Will does not bear upon reason, so the ‘inner life’ is not to be thought of as a moral sphere. Reason deals in neutral descriptions and aims at being the frequently mentioned ideal observer. Value terminology will be the prerogative of the will; but since will is pure choice, pure movement, and not thought or vision, will really requires only action words such as ‘good’ or ‘right’. It is not characteristic of the man we are describing, as he appears either in textbooks or in fiction, to possess an elaborate normative vocabulary. Modern ethics analyses ‘good’, the empty action word which is the correlate of the isolated will, and tends to ignore other value terms. Our hero aims at being a ‘realist’ and regards sincerity as the fundamental and perhaps the only virtue.

The very powerful image with which we are here presented is behaviourist, existentialist, and utilitarian in a sense which unites these three conceptions. It is behaviourist in its connection of the meaning and being of action with the publicly observable, it is existentialist in its elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will, and it is utilitarian in its assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts. It is also incidentally what may be called a democratic view, in that it suggests that morality is not an esoteric achievement but a natural function of any normal man. This position represents, to put it in another way, a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud. But this also is to anticipate; what confronts us here is in fact complex and difficult to analyse. Let me now try to sort out and classify the different questions which need to be answered.

I find the image of man which I have sketched above both alien and implausible. That is, more precisely: I have simple empirical objections (I do not think people are necessarily or essentially ‘like that’), I have philosophical objections (I do not find the arguments convincing), and I have moral objections (I do not think people ought to picture themselves in this way). It is a delicate and tricky matter to keep these kinds of objections separate in one’s mind. Later on I shall try to present my own rival picture. But now first of all I want to examine in more detail the theory of the ‘inner life’ with which we have been presented. One’s initial reaction to this theory is likely to be a strong instinctive one: either one will be content with the emphasis on the reality of the outer, the absence of the inner, or one will feel (as I do) it cannot be so, something vital is missing. And if one thinks that somehow or other ‘the inner’ is important one will be the more zealous in criticizing the arguments concerning its status. Such criticisms may have far-reaching results, since upon the question of ‘what goes on inwardly’ in between moments of overt ‘movement’ depends our view of the status of choice, the meaning of freedom, and the whole problem of the relation of will to reason and intellect to desire. I shall now consider what I think is the most radical argument, the keystone, of this existentialist-behaviourist type of moral psychology: the argument to the effect that mental concepts must be analysed genetically and so the inner must be thought of as parasitic upon the outer.

This argument is best understood as a special case of a yet more general and by now very familiar argument about the status of what is ‘private’. Our tradition of philosophy, since Descartes until very recently, has been obsessed by an entity which has had various names: the cogitatio, the sense-impression, the sense-datum. This entity, private to each person, was thought of as an appearance about which the owner had infallible and certain knowledge. It was taken by Descartes as the starting point of a famous argument, and was pictured by the British empiricists as an instrument of thought. The conception of the cogitatio or sense-datum, oddly attractive and readily grasped, suggests among other things that what is inward may be private in one of two senses, one a contingent sense and one a logical sense. I can tell you, or refrain from telling you, a secret; but I cannot (logically) show you my sense-data.

After a long and varied history this conception has now been largely abandoned by philosophers. The general argument for abandoning it has two prongs. Briefly, the argument against the cogitatio is that (a) such an entity cannot form part of the structure of a public concept, (b) such an entity cannot be intro-spectively discovered. That is, (a) it’s no use, (b) it isn’t there. The latter point may be further subdivided into an empirical and a logical contention. The empirical contention is that there are very few and pretty hazy introspectabilia, and the logical contention is that there are in any case difficulties about their identification. Of the two moments in the general argument (a) has received more attention than (b), since as (a) has been regarded as knock-down (b) has been treated as subsidiary. If something is no use it does not matter much whether it’s there or not. I shall argue shortly that because something is no use it has been too hastily assumed that something else is not there. But let us first look at the argument in more detail.

I said that the argument about mental concepts was a special case of the general argument. The general argument is at its most felicitous when applied to some simple non-mental concept such as ‘red’. ‘Red’ cannot be the name of something private. The structure of the concept is its public structure, which is established by coinciding procedures in public situations. How much success we can have in establishing any given public structure will be an empirical question. The alleged inner thing can neither be known (Descartes) nor used (the British empiricists). Hume was wrong to worry about the missing shade of blue, not because a man could or couldn’t picture it, or that we could or couldn’t be persuaded that he had, but because the inner picture is necessarily irrelevant and the possession of the concept is a public skill. What matters is whether I stop at the traffic lights, and not my colour imagery or absence of it. I identify what my senses show me by means of the public schemata which I have learned, and in no other way can this be known by me, since knowledge involves the rigidity supplied by a public test. Wittgenstein in the Untersuchungen sums the situation up as follows: ‘If we construe the grammar of the expression of sensation on the model of “object and name”, the object drops out of consideration as irrelevant.’

This argument, which bears down relentlessly upon the case of ‘red’, might seem to be even more relentless in the case of the very much more shadowy inner entities which might be supposed to be the ‘objects’ of which mental concepts are ‘names’. After all, one might say to oneself in a quasi-nonsensical way, my sensation of red does, when I am doing ph...