Iris Murdoch on the role of Art in Moral Perception

Abstract

First lines of the Introduction (as abstract not provided): Throughout her work, Iris Murdoch often touches on the intersection between ethics and aesthetics, in particular focussing on art’s role in moral perception. As a novelist and philosopher, Murdoch asks, “What is a good man like? How can we make ourselves morally better?”1 While she looks to aesthetics to address each of these questions, the literature to date has overwhelmingly focussed on the latter. Murdoch does not limit herself to the question of whether art can make us “morally better”. She also asks how art can help us understand what it is to be moral. The literature on Murdoch concerned exclusively with the intersection of aesthetics and ethics is limited. Moreover, within this literature, there is little debate about the role that art plays in moral perception. The dominant reading is that art is a vehicle through which we can achieve moral perception. On this view, critics including Anil Gomes and Elizabeth Burns argue that art, under certain conditions, can serve a practical purpose by allowing us to perceive of its subject matter morally. Therefore, looking at art can in some circumstances allow us to actually experience moral perception. Discussions here have in particular tended towards Murdoch’s role in “philosophy’s turn to literature”.2 While I do not dispute that this is a legitimate reading of Murdoch’s aesthetics, my concern is that it is not exhaustive. Rather, Murdoch’s account of the role of art in moral perception is more complex. Murdoch also argues that art plays a useful explanatory role insofar as aesthetic and moral perceptions are analogous. That is, in identifying the similarities between aesthetic and moral perception, we can come to a better understanding of what moral perception is.