Ideas of the Good: Iris Murdoch's the Sea, the Sea

It is significant that the idea of goodness (and of virtue) has been largely superseded in Western moral philosophy by the idea of rightness, supported perhaps by some conception of sincerity. This is to some extent a natural outcome of the disappearance of a permanent background to human activity; a permanent background, whether provided by God, by Reason, by History, or by the self. --Iris Murdoch, The Sovereignty of Good In philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch's 1970 study of the nature of good and evil, she poses a series of questions: "What is a good man like? Can we make ourselves morally better?" These are the questions that Murdoch saw as important for the philosopher, in particular, to answer, while realizing that we know little about truly good men. She comments that "there are men in history who are traditionally thought of as having been good (Christ, Socrates, certain saints), but if we try to contemplate these men we find that the information about them is scanty and vague, and that, their great moments apart, it is the simplicity and directness of their diction which chiefly colours our conception of them as good" (SG 52). Goodness is difficult to find, even if we know what we are looking for. Can we define "goodness" even in ourselves, she asks? What one would need is a "purification and reorientation of an energy which is naturally selfish, in such a way that when moments of choice arrive we shall be sure of acting rightly" (SG 54). For the Christian this could be by devoting oneself to prayer, defined not as petition but as "an attention to God which is a form of love" and effected by "grace, [...] a supernatural assistance to human endeavour which overcomes empirical limitations of personality." Because Murdoch, at one time early in her life, was Anglican, then a full atheist, and finally a partial believer in Tibetan Buddhism, the practice of prayer to God is not a practical one. Murdoch creates her own definition of God in this small philosophical work: "God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention" (SG 55). Her moral philosophy is one in which the believer holds on to this central concept without believing in a Judeo-Christian God-concept. The religious believer has an easier time of it than the non-believer who is attempting to reach a purified state, in part because there is an object of focus. God becomes a powerful source of energy, but one can receive moral energy by focusing on things other than God, even the idea of goodness, which Murdoch does not see as denied to the non-believer. One can, after all, be good without believing in God. That God creates a single, supreme value system for humankind she finds unacceptable: "Why should there not be many different kinds of independent moral values? Why should all be one here?" (SG 56). Murdoch does not agree that the Judeo-Christian pattern of moral values is the only one that matters; rather, goodness matters, or what is considered good in the culture in which one lives. Her definition of goodness is summed up best in her favorite expression: "Do unto others as you would have them do unto you." Since the only proof for the existence of God is faith, a belief in not harming others would seem to accomplish the same thing as religious beliefs. Murdoch suggests that "the authority of the Good seems to us something necessary because the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self" (SG 66). There must be, suggests Murdoch, a substitute for prayer, "that most profound and effective of religious techniques" One must purify one's attention, one's energy and violence of will, employing not a "quasi-religious meditative technique" but "something which belongs to the moral life of the ordinary person" (SG 69). The idea of contemplation is one in which Murdoch believes modern man can find an answer. …