Iris Murdoch comes under attack from Martha Nussbaum for tending ‘to veer sharply away from’ what Nussbaum calls ‘the big questions of social justice and human well-being’ and further for tending ‘even to suggest that in the end they did not matter, that the only important thing was each person’s struggle for self-perfection’ (2001). Maria Antonaccio springs to Murdoch’s defence against this charge, averring that ‘such a judgement represents a distortion of Murdoch’s philosophy which was in many respects infused with a concern for justice’ (2004: 5); she develops her rebuttal in A Philosophy to Live By: Engaging Iris Murdoch (2012). The antithetical readings of Murdoch exhibited by this dispute between Nussbaum and Antonaccio suggest that mapping the concept of justice in Murdoch’s work will prove a fruitful undertaking.
A piece of juvenilia, ‘How I Would Govern the Country’, written for Badminton School Magazine in 1935, presents the 15-year-old Murdoch’s naive approval of Burke’s notion of ‘“social freedom” as “that state of things in which liberty is secured by equality of restraint”, a “kind of liberty” which “is indeed but another name for justice”’, and concludes that ‘Government is the combination of knowledge of the nation with the ideals of freedom, justice and Christianity, and those countries are happiest whose rulers combine these essentials in the best proportion’ (Murdoch 1988: 6–8). After gaining a first class degree in Greats at Oxford and working for the Civil Service in Whitehall against the background of World War II, Murdoch wrote from Vienna where she was working for UNRRA (United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration) to the Mistress of Newnham College, applying for the Sarah Smithson Studentship. Among the ‘problems which have interested me’, she includes ‘the selfishness of love weighed against the coldness of an impartial justice’ (Murdoch 1946). Sexual and spiritual entanglements, personal loss and grief, life in wartime London and experience of refugee camps on the Continent had forced Murdoch to mature rapidly. The touchingly jejune simplicity of the teenage optimist has, eleven years later, become a darkened, emotive and nuanced sense of how justice may be in conflict with other things in life. The springboard for my enquiry in this essay comes from Nuns and Soldiers (1980), the twentieth of Murdoch’s twenty-six novels, in which the dying civil servant Guy Openshaw makes this gnomic statement to the ex-nun Anne Cavidge: ‘Justice is such an odd thing […] it cuts across the other virtues, it’s like brown, it’s not in the spectrum, it’s not in the moral spectrum’ (Murdoch 2001b: 69). Quite what do Guy, and Murdoch, mean by this?
Justice is not only an under-remarked aspect of Murdoch’s philosophy and fiction but also consideration of justice in her moral vocabulary and narrative construction relates to contemporary critical views of her work: her difference of approach from the formalism of liberal theorists—which has led to criticism of Murdoch’s philosophy, identified and countered by Antonaccio; her neo-theology on which Anne Rowe has focused; and her concern with loss of language and of concepts which has been explored by Niklas Forsberg, who sees ‘Murdoch as a fellow philosopher who consistently struggled with this difficulty that we seem to have lost the sense of our own language and who also held the view that this loss of language has happened more or less unbeknown to us’ (2013: 1). But first to set etymological and conceptual boundaries to the words being put under the microscope in this essay, justice and its concomitant, or adversary—the relationship between these two concepts proves complex—mercy. Justice, one of the four cardinal virtues, is an ancient concept, rooted in both classical antiquity (Plato), and in Jewish and Christian theology. Justice, in its broadest context, includes both the attainment of that which is just and the philosophical discussion of that which is just. The concept of justice is based on numerous fields, and encompasses many differing viewpoints and perspectives including the concepts of moral rightness based in ethics, rationality, law, religion, equity and fairness. Discussion of justice can be divided into the realm of social justice as found in philosophy, theology and religion, and procedural justice as found in the study and application of the law. But it is a slippery concept which resists simple definition. In her study of Plato, The Fire and the Sun, Murdoch considers justice as a Platonic Form or Universal: ‘The Form represents the definiendum as it is “in itself” (αύτό καθ αϑτό): and Protagoras, 330c even tells us that Justice is just’ (1997a: 408). That was in 380 B.C. and attempts at pursuing a working definition of justice have got little further in another 2390 years. Etymologically, the word justice derives from Latin, Justitia which means righteousness, equity.1 The other term needing consideration at the outset is mercy, derived from Latin Merces, merced meaning reward and in Christian Latin meaning pity, favour, heavenly reward.2 Justice and mercy conflict with one another, as Murdoch enigmatically demonstrates in The Green Knight. With these areas of multi-disciplinary discourse in mind, I explore influences on Murdoch’s thinking about justice, consider justice in her philosophical works, what she says about justice and religion and about justice and art, before engaging with her novels in which intriguing comments are made not only about justice, but also about judging and being judged.
The wealth of material that has accrued in the Iris Murdoch Special Collections in Kingston University Archives, thanks to the work of Anne Rowe, provides an unsurpassed resource for Murdoch scholars from around the world that supports research of a biographical, philosophical and exegetical nature.3 Letters, journals and notebooks all form a rich seam of ore to be mined, but the element of the archive which offers most to this study of Murdoch’s conception of justice is the vast and heavily annotated library of books which she used throughout her working life. There is deep fascination in watching her mind at work in the under-linings, side-linings and annotations which trace the development of her thinking about many subjects.4 From her books we can uncover influences upon her thoughts about justice. Plato and Kant are seminal, as one might expect from someone inclined to agree with Wittgenstein who ‘held that the dialogue between Plato and Kant underlies the whole of western philosophy’ (Murdoch 1992: 57). But Schopenhauer, Simone Weil and Murdoch’s contemporary and friend, Philippa Foot, also impact on her thinking as analysis of her annotations reveals.
First, Plato, to whom Murdoch did not take as an undergraduate but whose influence on her mature philosophy was formational. This is clear both from primary texts and commentaries. She acquired her copy of Harry Spens’s translation of Plato’s Republic in October 1948 when she began teaching at St Anne’s College, and, as it was kept in the library in her London flat which was her chief working collection, we can tell that she kept it close to hand.5 It is heavily marked, and many of her underlinings pertain to the subject of justice, thus6:Likewise, in Plato’s Theaetetus, she notes this remark by Socrates at 174c: ‘But things are different when […] when he finds someone prepared to give up asking “What injustice am I doing to you, or you to me?” in favour of an investigation of justice and injustice themselves—what each of them is, and in what respect they differ from each other and from everything else…’ (Plato 1973a: 52).7 In Phaedrus & Letters VII AND VIII,8 she marks this passage from Phaedrus, 247, ‘The region of which I speak is the abode of the reality with which true knowledge is concerned, a reality without colour or shape, intangible but utterly real, apprehensible only by intellect which is the pilot of the soul. So the mind of a god [….] in the course of its journey it beholds absolute justice and discipline and knowledge’ (Plato 1973b: 52–3). And in The Seventh Letter, 336, this passage: ‘… the truth that neither a state nor an individual can be happy whose life is not lived wisely under the guidance of justice’ (Plato 1973b: 128).
- ‘The just man, then, said I, resembles the wise and the good …’ (Plato 1906: 30).
- ‘… did we not agree that justice was the virtue of the soul and injustice its vice?’ (Plato 1906: 35).
- ‘… I was first to speak of: what justice is and whence it arises; for they say that, according to nature to do injustice is good, but to suffer injustice is bad, but that the evil which arises from suffering injustice is greater than the good which arises from doing it. So after men had done one another an injustice, and likewise suffered it, and had experienced both, it seemed proper to those who were not able to shun the one and choose the other to agree among themselves neither to do injustice nor to be injured, and that hence laws begun to be established …’ (Plato 1906: 39).
- ‘For what reason, then, should we still prefer justice before the greatest injustice?’ (Plato 1906: 46).
- ‘Shew us then, in your discourse, not only that justice is better than injustice, but in what manner each of them by itself affecting the owner, whether he be concealed or not concealed from Gods and men, is, the one good, and the other evil’ (Plato 1906: 48).
- ‘Do we not say there is justice in one man, and there is likewise justice in a whole state?’ (Plato 1906: 49).
Murdoch’s enduring interest in Plato’s theory of justice is corroborated when we look at her copy of Plato’s Theology by Friedrich Solmsen, one of the most heavily annotated books in her library, acquired on her 57...