The Sovereignty of Good is a book of moral philosophy by Iris Murdoch. First published in 1970, it comprises three previously published papers, all of which were originally delivered as lectures. Murdoch argued against the prevailing consensus in moral philosophy, proposing instead a Platonist approach. The Sovereignty of Good is Murdoch's best-known philosophy book.
Publishing history
The philosopher D. Z. Phillips commissioned The Sovereignty of Good from Iris Murdoch as a contribution to Routledge & Kegan Paul's series "Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion", of which Phillips was general editor. The book comprises three previously published papers, all of which were originally delivered as lectures.
The first essay, entitled "The idea of perfection", originated as Murdoch's 1962 Ballard Matthews Lecture in the University College of North Wales. It was published in The Yale Review in April 1964. "On 'God' and 'Good' ", the second essay, was Murdoch's contribution to the August 1966 meeting of the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity at Bowdoin College. It was published in 1969 in The Anatomy of Knowledge, a collection of papers presented at the Study Group's 1965 and 1966 meetings. The book's final essay is "The sovereignty of good over other concepts", which was the Leslie Stephen Lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 14 November 1967. The lecture was published as a 37-page pamphlet in the same year by Cambridge University Press.
The first edition of The Sovereignty of Good was in hardcover, published in London in 1970 by Routledge. The first English paperback edition came out in 1971. Schocken Books published it in the United States, where the hardcover and paperback editions were published simultaneously in 1971. Routledge reprinted the paperback edition in 1974 and 1980. In 2001 Routledge reissued The Sovereignty of Good in both England and the United States as part of its "Routledge Classics" series. In 2013 the book appeared as a "Routledge Great Minds" edition with a foreword by Mary Midgley.
Historical context
The dominant schools of philosophy at the time when The Sovereignty of Good and its component essays appeared were existentialism in Europe and analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world. Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy argues against what she takes to be the central ideas of both these schools.
Her first book, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, had been published in 1953. Murdoch met Jean-Paul Sartre after hearing him lecture in Brussels in 1945 when she was working for UNRRA, and was impressed with his existentialist philosophy at the time, although she later came to reject what she called his "Luciferian" view of a morality based on freedom and individual will rather than love and goodness.
The prevailing view among analytic philosophers at the time was that, as with physical science, statements about reality must be publicly verifiable as true or false, leading to the conclusion that the "states and activities of the soul in all their variety must be revealed in observed behavior" in order to be "classed as objective realities". Murdoch, on the other hand, disagreed with what she saw as analytic philosophy's consequent "rejection of the inner life".
Iris Murdoch's main influence in The Sovereignty of Good is Plato, at a time when, as her biographer Peter J. Conradi notes, to be "a Platonist in morals seemed as bizarre as declaring oneself a Jacobite in politics". Simone Weil, whose Notebooks Murdoch had reviewed in 1956, was an important influence on Murdoch's reading of Plato and on her philosophy generally. Weil's concept of "attention" to reality, including both other people and a transcendent Good, provided Murdoch with an alternative to the conventional view of an autonomous free agent's actions as the basis of morality.
The book is dedicated to Stuart Hampshire, Murdoch's fellow philosopher and former colleague at the University of Oxford, where she taught from 1948 to 1963. Hampshire's view of man as essentially "an object moving among other objects in a continual flow of intention into action", is also the main target of her argument in "The idea of perfection", the book's first essay.
Structure and arguments
The book's three essays were not originally intended to be published as a unit and do not depend on or refer to each other. They are united in their aim of demonstrating the inadequacies of the prevailing philosophical account of morality and replacing it with a new conception that includes a "moral reality external to ourselves", but each paper takes a different approach to this project. In "The idea of perfection", Murdoch describes an "ordinary and everyday" example of inner moral activity that cannot be accounted for within the current paradigm, and uses it to argue for a philosophical conception of morality that will allow us to say "what we are irresistibly inclined to say" about it. In "On 'God' and 'Good' ", acknowledging the influence of Simone Weil, she explores the Christian practice of prayer and its possible application to the Platonic concept of the Good. In "The sovereignty of good over other concepts" she uses Platonic imagery in arguing that art and intellectual pursuits can serve as training in the virtues.
The idea of perfection
Murdoch's argument in this paper progresses through three stages. She first describes what she takes to be the accepted philosophical view of man as a moral agent, referring mainly to Stuart Hampshire's Disposition and Memory and Thought and Action. She concludes that the contemporary paradigm of "man" in both analytic and continental philosophy (which she characterizes as Kantian and surrealistic existentialism respectively) is "behaviourist, existentialist, and utilitarian". The behaviourism relates to this view's "connection of the meaning and being of action with the publicly observable", existentialism to its "elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will", and utilitarianism to its "assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts".
After remarking that she objects to this characterization on empirical, philosophical and moral grounds, she goes on to examine the philosophical basis for the dominant view. She locates the source of its fundamental claim that "mental concepts must be analyzed genetically and so the inner must be thought of a parasitic upon the outer", in an argument within the British empiricist tradition about the ontological status of private sense-data. She credits Wittgenstein with having effectively put an end to the question by showing that "no sense can be attached to the idea of an 'inner object' ", but notes that he did not draw any "moral or psychological" conclusions based on this observation. Others, however, including Hampshire, Ryle, Hare, and Ayer, have illegitimately extended Wittgenstein's argument into these areas.
Murdoch then introduces, as an example of moral activity that has no outward manifestation, the changing attitude of a mother (M) toward her daughter-in-law (D). M at first dislikes D, but gives no outward hint of this and "behaves beautifully" toward her. Over the course of time, however, "by giving careful and just attention" to D, M comes to see her as "not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous .... and so on". Murdoch claims that while reflecting on D in this way, M has been engaging in moral activity, but the problem is that this cannot be said within the accepted paradigm.
In the second stage of the argument Murdoch rejects the underlying conception of reality that excludes everything that is not publicly observable, and proposes a different one. She argues that philosophy's attachment to observability as a criterion of reality stems from its adoption of an "uncriticized conception of science". The result is that philosophy is incapable of accounting for the living person who changes inwardly over time. Morality does not fit into the world describable by science, so philosophy needs to liberate itself from the limits of science. Murdoch argues that "the central concept of morality is 'the individual' thought of as knowable by love", and connects this concept with the idea of perfection since "morality is connected with change and progress" toward "an ideal limit".
In the third stage Murdoch applies her conception of morality to the idea of freedom. Both analytic and continental existentialist moral philosophy located individual freedom in the moment of choice, when a person decides to act in the world. According to Murdoch's view of morality as loving attention to reality, as displayed by M toward D, freedom comes from increasing knowledge of reality, which allows the individual to see clearly. With complete clarity of vision, one would not be distracted by one's own prejudices and biases and would be able to act simply in accord with reality instead of choosing more or less blindly. She notes that the "notion of will as obedience to reality, an obedience which ideally teaches a position where there is no choice" is one which is familiar to artists, and claims that her conception of moral psychology is uniquely able to accommodate both art and morals as compatible activities.
On "God" and "Good"
Murdoch begins by stating the need for a moral philosophy that, among other requirements, takes seriously the views of Freud and Marx, and gives its central place to "the concept of love". She characterizes the commonly accepted analytic and existential philosophical views of moral psychology as "unambitious and optimistic" compared to Christian theology with its representation of "goodness as almost impossibly difficult, and sin as almost insuperable and certainly a universal condition". She notes that philosophers have tried to ignore or deny Freud's pessimistic, but in her view realistic, account of "the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy" with a "deep tissue of ambivalent motive" in which "fantasy is a stronger force than reason". She sees the "fat relentless ego" as the secular analogue of original sin, and insists that moral philosophy's task should be "the discussion of this ego and of the techniques (if any) for its defeat".