Moral philosophy, fiction
Iris Murdoch
1919 – 1999
Moral life happens in how we see, long before we choose. Just attention is the work; the decision is only its residue.
Read alongside: Stay
- Start with
- The Sovereignty of Good (1970)
- Where they resist the book
- Murdoch is sceptical of will and of technique. Any practice sold as a method would be, for her, the wrong shape of answer.
Works worth the time
The Sovereignty of Good · 1970
Three essays. The middle one is the clearest account of attention as moral work.
Read further
- Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy: Iris Murdoch ↗
Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy
Where Murdoch appears
II. StayPhilosophy
Attention is a moral act.
Weil treats attention as the rarest form of generosity: the willingness to let a situation be what it is before deciding what to do about it. Merleau-Ponty adds the body — perception is not a camera but a stance. Staying, in these terms, is not stoic endurance but an unusually accurate form of looking.