The Elusiveness of the Ethical: From Murdoch to Diamond

Abstract

AbstractCora Diamond is a powerful witness to the originality of Iris Murdoch's writings on ethics, showing how Murdoch is at variance with contemporary orthodoxy not just in respect of particular doctrines (no ‘ought’ from an ‘is’, etc.), but in her questioning of mainstream assumptions as to what constitutes the subject-matter of moral philosophy. Diamond celebrates Murdoch as an ally in her campaign against the ‘departmental’ conception of morality – the idea that moral thought is just one branch of thought among others – and highlights Murdoch's enduring belief in the ‘ubiquity of the moral quality inherent in consciousness’. In keeping with this belief, both philosophers affirm the value of general humanistic reflection on experience, an enterprise in which traditions of imaginative literature as well as of self-conscious theory can invite us to participate. While welcoming this vindication of the claims of ordinary (existentially embedded) moral intelligence, I will explore some difficulties flowing from the associated idea that ‘morality’ (in the guise of value-saturated human consciousness) is all-pervasive, and from the ‘perpetually-moralist’ account of our incentive to engage with fictional worlds.