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For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love

For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love

Section titled “For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love”

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  • Correspondingly, she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. On Murdoch’s picture, our most basic moral activities are activities of attending to particular things in particular ways, since this is the activity that shapes our vision of the world.
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  • In lovingly attending to others, we attend to them as sources of interest and value in their own right, not as things we care about merely in relation to our own concerns. We come to care about such things, as it’s often put, ‘for their own sake’. This, she suggests, frees us from the grip of our fantasies. Love draws us out of ourselves and our concerns towards the world, and especially towards other people. Such loving attention therefore enables us to get to the truth in a way that our ordinary looking – distorted as it often is by the ego’s fantasies – does not. Loving attention is a kind of discerning attention that allows us to see things as they really are.
  • The way to do so is via attention to others. Though it is often difficult to do so, we can consciously devote our time and energies to focusing away from the busy throng of our own tasks and towards others. Simply dragging ourselves away from our own concerns and paying patient attention to another person helps. For example, attending to a frustratingly arrogant acquaintance may allow me to realise that their arrogance is in fact a symptom of social insecurity, and thus provide me with an opportunity to respond to them with greater insight and compassion.