Murdoch has three big ideas, of which the first is key. She is fundamentally opposed to a view of “moral psychology,” the activity of deliberation and choice, that she associates with both existentialism and the Oxford moral philosophy of her time. On this view, we first come to a neutral description of our circumstance, which leaves open what to do, and then choose freely among our options, expressing our character or moral principles. For Murdoch, description is never neutral. The moral task is to describe one’s circumstance correctly. Once you find the right description, choice is virtually automatic, though not on that account unfree. This process calls for “unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention […] a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self”; once fully achieved, “true vision occasions right conduct.” “If I attend properly,” Murdoch writes, “I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.” Murdoch’s second idea is that the primary obstacle to attention is our natural egoism, the “fat relentless ego.” Her third idea is that the answer to egoism, the source of psychic energy that fuels our attention to reality, is love.
Wednesday, January 9, 2019
Setiya on Murdoch
Just as anyone who might like Kacey Musgraves has almost certainly already heard her most recent album, so anyone with an interest in Iris Murdoch has probably already read Kieran Setiya's review of Gary Browning on Why Iris Murdoch Matters. Still, if you haven't read it yet, I recommend it. Partly it's a nice example of how to write a generous review. And partly I think this is a useful statement of some key ideas from Murdoch:
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"If I attend properly, ... I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at."
ReplyDeleteIt may be only a facon de parler, but I disagree with the idea of acting and having no choice. Free choice is practically definitional for purposeful adaptive action; the problem is the reason for choosing a vs. b. If the agent has a (perhaps incomplete) understanding of the general ethical principles (which exist as categorical structures independently of the agent in perhaps Platonic fashion) and an intuitive grasp of their own (narrow) self-interest, what is the reason for choosing the one or the other as a basis for action? One can take the bigger piece of cake and give the one you love the smaller, or you can give the one you love the bigger piece and take the smaller; I think Murdoch is talking about what determines choice of the latter. (And by "the one you love" I mean any other person.)
JPL
I think she means "have no choice" in the sense of having nothing to think about, no hard decision to make, indeed not needing to think about what to do at all. If I'm a goalkeeper in soccer and a shot comes at me I will try to save it, perhaps even instinctively, without rehearsing the rules of the game before I do so. A more relevant example might be this. There was a village in France (I believe) where people saved a lot of Jewish people during WWII. When asked why they did this afterwards, many of the villagers couldn't really explain it. They couldn't seriously imagine doing anything else. Here were people in need, and they were able to help. So of course they helped them. This is still voluntary action, but it isn't chosen from a menu of options. Given the situation and the character of the people acting, nothing else is on the menu.
DeleteGood example! I guess it's just a pet peeve of mine. I would prefer an expression like, "If I attend properly, I will recognize that the alternative is unacceptable and then the choice will be automatic (fully determined)." On the intellectual level; but love is a "condition prealable" that also determines the choice and makes it "automatic", or at least demands a search for a clearer vision. I would like to keep 'choice' as a semi-technical term; and I hate it when in ordinary discourse people say "we have no choice" in justification for doing the worse on narrow selfish grounds, when actually we do have a choice. (I'm sure you've heard D. Trump use that expression.) (Also, I used the word "determined" above: I meant in the sense of retrospective causal explanation. At each point the agent could have done otherwise, so what is the reason the agent did not do otherwise?)
ReplyDeleteJPL
I think this is tricky. On the one hand, I don't want to prefer the expression, "If I attend properly, I will recognize that the alternative is unacceptable," because I want to acknowledge cases where no alternative is even considered. The child falls into the water and you immediately jump in to rescue them. There is no slight pause while you think, "Of course, the child's life is more important than my shoes." Nor do you have that thought, or anything like it, without even a slight pause. You simply see the child fall and react. (I think McDowell says something about virtue silencing other reasons to act, and there is a debate about this, but I want to recognize cases in which nothing is silenced because nothing else is in any way said or considered. There simply is, at this moment, no devil on the other shoulder advocating some other course of action.) Concern for the child is, at this point in time, your sole concern. I think that's a possible way to be, and in some ways a desirable way to be.
DeleteOn the other hand, like you, I want to reject the "we have no choice" kind of justification. But then saying that we have no choice mentions choice, thereby (is this right?) recognizing it. "I have no choice" means something like "I have a choice, but this is what I have to do". It's like saying "my hands are tied"--not something you'd be likely to say if your hands were actually, literally tied. It's often an excuse for doing something obviously bad, although to the extent that it works as an excuse there really might be cases in which it would be a reasonable thing to say. Perhaps I really am likely to be fired unless I (choose to) enforce some nasty rule. And perhaps the enforcement of the rule is (much) less bad, all things considered, than my losing my job would be. But when a choice can be rationalized in this way it is more consciously a choice than the kind of case in which one simply acts without thinking.
Her third idea is that the answer to egoism, the source of psychic energy that fuels our attention to reality, is love.
ReplyDeleteHere we see echoes of Schopenhauer who urged that the source of real moral decision making was compassion (which, arguably, is just another word for "love" in this context). But the real moral question isn't whether or not we feel love or compassion for the other but whether or not we should if we don't. Schopenhauer held that we can change ourselves, if we don't feel the requisite compassion to act morally, by thinking rightly about the world, i.e., by recognizing its ultimate badness for us as individuals and so, by shaking loose from the egoism that comes with attachment to the world, we become liberated from the bonds of selfhood as Hindus and Buddhists suggest. Losing those attachments (the self seeking to satisfy itself with things in the world) a sense of compassion naturally arises in us.
When we no longer see the world in personal terms, my needs and wants vs. his, hers or theirs, compassion replaces the more self-oriented motivations which drive us as selves.
But is this true? Why should we not simply attain a level of lofty indifference instead when we shake off worldly attachments? If the other is a victim of his or her own attachments, with all its self-harming implications, then the other is in the same boat we were in before we broke free. If the world is ultimately futile because it's a function of the Will that manifests in us, particularly in the sense of individual selfhood, and so the best any of us can hope for is disconnection from it, if everyone is born, suffers and dies, then the best to be hoped for is that we can free ourselves of the attachments which make that a trial for us. And the best others can hope for is the same.
So why think compassion, as in acting to help others or to amerliorate their suffering, is the natural outcome of this disconnection? Let each do his or her own thing and things will just go on as they would have until each individual achieves the same level of disconnection Schopenhauer things salutary.
Yet there is a case to be made that something along the lines of compassion must underlie real moral judgment, or "love" as Murdoch is saying.
No reasoning alone can move us to act for another if we don't have a reason to care about them.
ReplyDeleteKant thought the reason to care lay in the logic of reasoning itself, that because reasoning was a characteristic of the kind of creatures we are, caring about others through our actions (if not our sentiments) preserved a community of the rational. Thus we act from a duty to be rational on his view, a duty we possess just because being rational is our condition as human beings.
Yet Schopenhauer rightly saw that such an idea is not enough for "rational" admits of many different possibilities and one way to be rational is to preserve our own existence, even if it is at the expense of a community of the rational. There is a time for logical consistency and a time to act whether or not we can find consistency in the beliefs that underlie our actions. Schopenhauer's great contribution to moral discourse, I think, was to return our attention to the role of feeling in our judgments. And this Murdoch seems to pick up in the above quote.
But does that mean choice when confronted with particular situations is irrelevant in the end, that we must become the sort of person who is so thoroughly enrolled in the right sort of feeling (whether we name it "love" or "compassion"), that we don't have to think about what to do when confronted with choices that seem to involve a demand that we balance or choose between self-interest and other-interest?
Arguably a good person is one who routinely makes the right choices but in human life what counts as "right" is often an open question. Is it right to risk one's life to save another if doing so may result in a loss to one's own family (as their source of support say or the loss of a parent to one's child)? There certainly are cost/benefit considerations in any such decision but they are not always about the costs to ourselves vs. the costs to others. Sometimes it's a matter of costing out the implications to different others.
When does the feeling of caring for another carry the day in such decisions and why should we think it does? If the truly moral person just does the right thing most of the time, how are we to know what the right thing is without recourse to reasoning? And isn't that what moral questions are all about?
It's not whether we should feel compassion as a general rule or care about others in general but whether doing so is right in any given case and, if so, why and where should our compassion be directed? More, what if we don't happen to feel the requisite sense of caring (compassion, love for the other)? Should we be condemned for lacking that or are we let off the hook because of that lack?
In the end, isn't the real moral question not about whether or not any of us happen to feel compassion or love but when and why we should (and when and why we should act in accord with it) if we don't?
One further thought or, rather, line of thought:
ReplyDeleteSpeaking of Murdoch's moral view the writer says She is fundamentally opposed to a view of “moral psychology,” the activity of deliberation and choice, that she associates with both existentialism and the Oxford moral philosophy of her time. On this view, we first come to a neutral description of our circumstance, which leaves open what to do, and then choose freely among our options, expressing our character or moral principles. For Murdoch, description is never neutral. The moral task is to describe one’s circumstance correctly. Once you find the right description, choice is virtually automatic, though not on that account unfree.
Not "unfree" because who and what we are remains open to what we decide to do and then do. We have, that is, the capacity to decide to do things within certain parameters. That deciding is a function of the morally attuned self but also acts as to tune ourselves, a kind of spiritual tuning fork against which we adjust our decisions to act.
This process calls for “unsentimental, detached, unselfish, objective attention […] a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self”; once fully achieved, “true vision occasions right conduct.” “If I attend properly,” Murdoch writes, “I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.”
Is not the point, then, that the moral question, the thing we have to choose when deciding how to act, what to do, is not to do with something inherent in the act in itself but with the act as expression of what we are, of who we are?
Thus the moral question becomes one of self-guiding, self-training, and the underlying moral force (the logic for doing X rather than Y in any given situation) lies in discovering standards by which a self is to be assessed by itself.
Thus the force of moral judgment resides not in how actions seem to us (their goodness or badness observed objectively) but in how persons seem to us (how actions indicate the person underlying them, the person who chooses them.
Moral valuation then is seen to be grounded in what can best be thought of as a spiritual enterprise -- not necessarily religious sense, though not necessarily divorced from religiosity either, but in the sense of being a matter of selves discovering better ways to be in their world.