ABSTRACT
In The Sovereignty of Good Iris Murdoch identifies a picture of the human which she claims underlies contemporary moral and political philosophy and which is too ‘the hero of almost every contemporary novel’.2 In this picture the human being ‘ought to know what he is doing’ and so aims at ‘total knowledge of our situation and a clear conceptualization of all our possibilities’. This knowledge is of ‘reality’ which is potentially available to different observers, an impersonal world of facts. Within the facts as he apprehends them, the individual must choose to act. Our essential being is the ‘overtly choosing will’ which is independent of what is the case in the external world or with ourselves. ‘Will is pure choice, pure movement’ essentially to be distinguished from ‘thought or vision’.3 Morality is ‘a matter of thinking clearly and then proceeding to outward dealings with other men’. Since morality is concerned with action and so with the operation of merely the pure will, its vocabulary requires fundamentally only the most abstract of terms, ‘good’ and ‘right’. This conception of morality as concerned with publicly observable action is supported by a theory of meaning for mental concepts, that they ‘must be analysed genetically and so the inner must be thought of as parasitic upon the outer’.4 That is, we learn concepts, and can do so only by watching other people. I learn, for example, ‘decision’ by observing someone who says ‘I have decided’ and then acts: the term can only have for me such a publicly observable sense. ‘A decision does not turn out to be, when more carefully considered, an introspectible movement. The concept has no further inner structure; it is its outer structure.’5 Similarly, anger is distinguished from jealousy not by reference to private mental experiences. I had to learn these notions and I could only do so by referring them to outward behaviour and publicly observable contexts. From this conception of the meaning of mental terms, and, therefore, of moral ones concerned with the operation of the will, two conclusions are drawn about the nature of morals. First, morality must be action, a matter of publicly observable activity, since this is
required for moral concepts to be learnable. ‘Salvation by works is a conceptual necessity.’6 It is, therefore, not possible ‘to take up an idle contemplative attitude to the good’.7 Second, reasons are essentially public and derive from the rules of public institutions and their purposes. They become reasons for the agent through his own free choice.
