ABSTRACT
Plato, according to Murdoch, sees life as a spiritual journey from attachment to particular temporal (or quasi-temporal in the case of the rewards and punishments of conventional religion) goods to attachment to the transcendent good. Contingencies, what happens to an individual rather than what she does, have significance within this vision in their capacity to disrupt the pursuit of illusory goods which is why such pursuit is inevitably enmeshed in suffering. In so far as we maintain a relation to the transcendent Good, however, they do not have the power to affect the value of our actions or lives: hence the ‘rapture’ Murdoch speaks of in our experience of tragedy where even the power of death itself is overcome. Now, as I have noted, her ‘proof’ of the truth of this vision lies in an appeal to self-recognition, to our finding that we can make sense of our multifarious experience in its terms. This appeal is a necessary feature for her of the pursuit of the truth about the good for human beings. We are ourselves at issue in this question: the truth of our condition must be what can precipitate such recognition and can lead to our living in terms of the measure it provides. The ‘proof’ is to that extent both ‘empirical’ (we recognize our lives in the vision) and ‘practical’ (the selfrecognition is at the same time that of the measure for our lives and so involves us emotionally and practically). Now, Martha Nussbaum agrees that the ‘proof’ of the truth about the good life must be both empirical and practical in this way. Yet she will suggest that Plato’s characterization of life is provoked by what he regards as unacceptable features of an alternative vision, called by her ‘Aristotelian’, which would in fact more readily pass the empirical and practical tests. These features concern the Aristotelian acceptance that contingency can affect and indeed determine the ethical value of a life. ‘Plato’s elaboration of radical ethical proposals is motivated by an acute sense of the problems caused by ungoverned luck in human life.’2
