Attention, Self and The Sovereignty of Good

Abstract

In 1958, Elizabeth Anscombe’s ‘Modern Moral Philosophy’1 forcefully launched the idea that character traits and states of mind are morally important in ways that could not be seen from the point of view of the contemporary moral psychology. ‘[M]oral philosophy’, she wrote, ‘should be laid aside […] until we have an adequate philosophy of psychology, in which we are conspicuously lacking’ (p. 1). This idea influenced many ethicists in Iris Murdoch’s Oxford, and provides one of the motives for Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good, and in particular, for Murdoch’s attempt to establish that states of mind (construed broadly, so as to include character traits) are morally important for their own sake: that their moral importance is not exhausted by the importance they derive from the actions they might lead one to perform or the states of affairs that they might help to bring about.2 KeywordsCharacter TraitDirected AttentionAccurate PerceptionVirtuous AgentMoral FailureThese keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.