Johannes Baer
Universität Hildesheim
Iris Murdoch argues that moral action depends on and is preceded by moral attention, an epistemic state that makes us aware of the world around us and enables us to grasp the moral demands of a given situation. She then claims that moral attention is often clouded by egocentrism and proposes love as a means for overcoming the epistemic obsession with one’s self.
In this paper, I critically assess and ameliorate the moral psychology underlying Iris Murdoch’s concept of “”attention”” by applying Plato’s model of the soul as an hermeneutical framework. My argument proceeds in three steps. (I) I identify two problems in Murdoch’s theory that hinder its practical implementation. (I.a) She fails to identify alternative resources for overcoming egocentrism other than love, a state that is famously hard for human beings to cultivate. (I.b) She disregards the motivational importance of the moral agent’s personal well-being. In sum, these two factors make Murdoch’s theory too demanding. (II) Through a close reading of Murdoch, I identify fear and desire as driving forces of egocentric delusion. (III) I argue that we can parallelize Murdoch’s moral psychology with Plato’s: (a) a fear and (b) a desire-related faculty coexist with (c) an epistemic faculty. By cultivating the respective virtues of (a) and (b), courage and temperance, we ensure that they do not interfere with (c), entailing clear epistemic states (Plato’s wisdom, Murdoch’s attention) and psychological harmony. With regard to Murdoch, this solves the identified problems: two virtues (courage, temperance) are identified as additional resources for overcoming egocentrism (ad I.a). Actualizing these virtues harmonizes the psyche (i.e., entails happiness) which aligns this interpretation of Murdoch’s theory with the human pursuit of personal well-being (ad I.b). I close the paper by analyzing Murdoch’s famous example of M and D in light of my findings.
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SOPhiA 2026 