Miscellaneous Articles - The Sovereignty of Good

The Sovereignty of Good

“There is a void,” Iris Murdoch, the author of this book avers, “in present-day moral philosophy.” Her book aims at providing a fresh analysis of normative experience and certain basic ideas and framework for moral philosophy in which the concept and experience of “good” is assigned sovereignty. The book analyses three major themes, viz., “the idea of perfection,” “God and Good” and “the sovereignty of good over other concepts”. While dealing with these three themes, she subjects moral theories being advanced in our contemporary times to severe criticism, viz., behaviorism, existentialism and utilitarianism, as also logical empiricism. She points out that all of them profess to be analytic and neutral, but underlying all of them, there is a theory of human nature which carries a particular value- judgment which is being sought to be imposed upon philosophical world. They advocate the idea of “good” as a function of will, acting in a world from where metaphysical entities are removed and where moral judgments are seen to be emotive responses or as persuasions or commands or rules. Referring to  Hampshire’s books, “Thought and Action”, and “Disposition and Memory”, she points out that the picture of man that is drawn in these books is to be found more or less explicitly lurking behind much that is written nowadays on the subject of moral philosophy. This picture, the author comments, “is behaviorist in its connection of the meaning and being of  action with the publicly observable, it is existentialist in its elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will, and it is utilitarian in its assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts. It is also incidentally what may be called a democratic view, in that it suggests that morality is not an esoteric achievement but a natural function of any normal man. This position represents, to put it another way, a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.” (pp 8-9).

Murdoch’s main contention is that something vital is missing in the view of the moral life that has been presented, and her central point is to draw attention to the question of “what goes on inwardly” in between moments of overt “movement” and the resultant view of the status of choice, the meaning of freedom, and the whole problem of the relation of will to reason and intellect and desire. Apart from her forceful arguments that successfully show that the behaviorist, existentialist and utilitarian views fail to provide an adequately accurate description of search of value and of deeper processes of moral experience, she provides an analysis of those aspects of moral experience, which are so internal to the moral agent that they can never be seized by any framework of thought which is independent of outer verbal communication and yet which makes genuine difference in the progress of the individual which is most valuable in terms of moral transformation or mystic experience. By means of  an illustration, she refers to an activity which is not observed by any external observer, an activity which is hard to characterize not because it is hazy but precisely because it is moral. In this analysis, she shows that “freedom is not the sudden jumping of the isolated will in and out of impersonal logical complex, it is a function of the progressive attempt to see a particular object clearly”. What happens when a person is gradually seized by the idea of justice and love or by an idea of perfection towards which one is attracted as though by magnet and begins to progress towards the ideal of justice and love and gradually transforms himself, as a result of which the facts about the world and about individual to whom one is related undergoes radical change? As a result of the progress, new perceptions arise and new actions and reactions begin to manifest which are filled with vibrations of ideal love and justice. According to her, this transition and this change are genuine moral experiences, quite different from the experience that one has when one goes for shopping and exercises freedom of choice and makes right decisions in the context of alternatives and makes purchases of the right goods. That shopping experience, whatever its merits, can hardly be compared with what genuinely undergoes as a result of a moral change and an enlargement of vision of things in the world which actually corresponds to true reality.

Murdoch lays a great stress on an idea of attention, looking. She points out that one can choose within the world one can see where the word ‘see’ in the moral sense means the clear vision that comes about as a result of moral imagination and moral effort. But she adds that this activity of attention is not sporadic and does not occur only when one faces alternatives and one is required to choose. According to her, the work of attention goes on continuously, it builds up imperceptibly structures of value around oneself, and one is not surprised that at crucial moments of choice, most of the business of choosing is already over. In this process, exercise of freedom is a small piecemeal business which goes on all the time, and it is not a grandiose leaping about unimpeded at important moments. Moral activity is continuous activity, freedom itself grows and becomes more and more informed by knowledge or by refined and honest perception what the case is really. She points out that man is not a combination of an impersonal rational thinker and a personal will. He is a unified being in whom perceptions, desires, choices, free-will continuously progress, and by the magnetic idea of perfection he tries to see justly, to overcome prejudice, to avoid temptation, to control and curb imagination, to direct reflection towards a growing vision of reality, - reality as it emerges when one looks at it in an attempt to be just and to love.

Against this background of moral experience, Murdoch attempts to describe what a good man is like. A good man, according to her, constantly asks the question as to how he can make himself morally better. And in this context, he is in search of techniques for the purification and reorientation of an energy which is naturally selfish, and with practice, one is able to surmount selfishness and make a choice when moment of choice arrives in the right direction.

In this connection, she refers to the technique of religion, of which the most widely practiced is prayer. In religion, she points out, God is a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention. The technique of prayer connects man with God, from whom sense of unity arises. From the idea of transcendence of God, two separate ideas arise, namely, perfection and certainty. From the idea of perfection arises the idea of order, and one is able to compare one’s actions with something that is connected in a systematic manner with the one who is conceived as perfect. In regard to concept of certainty, from the necessary existence of God, one derives guarantee that one can improve oneself and one can become better and better, since God uniquely excludes doubts and relativism. Hence, even if one perceives misery and evil, one is able to continue towards perfection and one continues to do better and better. Prayer in this context is an attention to God, who is a form of love, and with this goes the idea of grace, of a supernatural assistance to human endeavor which overcomes empirical limitation of personality.

But what if one does not accept the existence of God? Then, indeed, according to Murdoch, there is no problem of evil, but there is the almost insuperable difficulty at looking properly at evil and human suffering. But still, the concept of the good has a magnetic force for the human beings. It is that which suggests that “there is more than this” which can lift us from selfishness. One can be led to unselfish behavior in the concentration camp. According to Murdoch, this sense of the good which is indefinable, is a tiny spark of insight, and she maintains that that spark is real and that reality is evidenced clearly in great art and on account of which the artist is able to present the reality of the world. She points out that morality has always been connected with religion and religion with mysticism, but when religion disappears, morality is certainly more difficult but essentially the same. The background to morals, she holds out, is properly some sort of mysticism, if mysticism means a non-dogmatic essentially unformulated faith in the reality of the Good, occasionally connected with experience.

The world, according to Murdoch, is a matter of necessity and chance. And yet in this world, the Good can be imaged as a transcending magnetic centre, - the image which is least corruptible and most realistic which one can use in reflections upon the moral life. Murdoch assumes that there is no God and that the influence of religion is waning rapidly. In spite of this, according to her, one can appeal to certain areas of experience pointing out certain features, and using suitable metaphors and using suitable concepts where necessary, one can make these features visible. There is, she points out, a very small area of freedom which attains to the real and is attracted by the good. It is that freedom and that attraction to the good that is responsible for moral experience, and she maintains that there can be no substitute for pure, disciplined, professional speculation on that freedom and that which is attracted by the good. The only thing that is required is, according to her, the ability to see the world and the situation clearly and respond to it justly which is inseparable from virtue. She further suggests that the concepts which are central to morality are justice, truthfulness and humility. She points out that it is difficult to keep the attention fixed upon the real situation and to prevent it from returning surreptitiously to the self with consolations of self-pity, resentment, fantasy and despair. But duty has context and morality demands that the context is seen truly and justly. The operation of freedom is not like a shot arising as a leap without a context; the process by which the situation is sought to be seen accurately is accompanied by the growth of freedom, and the whole activity of our consciousness is relevant.

In analyzing the moral experience, Murdoch refers to Plato’s metaphor of the den. She points out that Plato’s description and vision of the Good which results in right action is an image of the journey of the soul as an ascent through several stages of enlightenment, progressively discovering at each stage that what it was treating as realities were only shadows or images of something more real still, and at the end of the quest, the soul reaches a non-hypothetical first principle which is the form of our idea of Good, which enables it then to descend and retrace its path, but moving only through the forms or true conceptions which have now been formed. It is through this process that the good man sees the way in which the virtues are related to each other, and in the process, he passes through a hierarchy of forms, and in this hierarchy Truth and Knowledge come fairly closely underneath Good. According to Plato, a complete unity is not seen until one has reached the summit, but moral advance carries with it intuitions of unity which are increasingly less misleading.

Having analyzed the process of moral experience as a journey through the Platonic image, she concludes that “the area of morals, and ergo of moral philosophy, can now be seen, not as a hole— and—corner matter of debts and promises, but as covering the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world.” (p. 95)

In Murdoch’s view, the world is chance, and chance is really subdivision of Death. Nonetheless, on account of a genuine sense of morality, we are able to see the value of the good as the only thing of worth. The Good is a magnetic centre, and it obliges us to be drawn towards it, and there is a place both inside and outside religion for a sort of contemplation of the Good, in which one attempts to look right away from self towards a distant transcendent perfection, a source of uncontaminated energy, a source of new and quite undreamt of virtues. This contemplation is, according to Murdoch, the true mysticism which is morality, a kind of undogmatic prayer which is real and important, though perhaps also difficult and easily corrupted.

She maintains that love may seem to come close to Good, and yet, Good and Love should not be identified. In her view, love is the tension between the imperfect soul and the magnetic perfection. Love is the energy and passion of the soul in its search for Good, and in the process of this search, love becomes purified and becomes just. And it is that force that joins us to Good and joins us to the world through Good. She concludes: “Its existence is the unmistakable sign that we are spiritual creatures, attracted by excellence and made for the Good. It is the reflection of the warmth and light of the sun.” (p.100)

Considering the sweep of the vast areas that are covered in it, the book is too brief, and that is perhaps its great merit. This book is a penetrating critic of the view that value has its source in will and that when choices are presented to that will, rational considerations are made, and since will is free, that freedom is exercised and the possibility of making a right choice arises. According to Murdoch, this account, despite its being described and approved in different formulations of existentialism, behaviorism, and utilitarianism, fails to square with a genuine moral experience. According to Murdoch, moral experience is much more profound and that experience, as it matures, becomes the characteristic of the whole of our mode of living and the quality of our relations with the world. In this sense, one can speak of the pervasiveness of morality with which she identifies mysticism and a kind of un-dogmatic prayer which is real and important. She has, it seems, quite successfully shown that moral experience is so profoundly inward that that inwardness cannot be captured by behaviorism which, by its untenable assumption, restricts itself to the observable external behavior and conduct. Morality, she contends, is a matter of inner change; it is a matter of achieving accurate vision of the world as it is, a vision which is arrived at by the striving of one’s inmost soul that has irresistible attraction towards non-hypothetical reality of Good. A genuine moral experience goes much deeper than the experience of making right choices, rationally and freely, in our visit to a shop for making purchases. Morality, according to her, is not merely an experience, but a process of growth, which is not merely connected with making choices but, in first place, of arriving at accurate vision, of removing shadows. This process of growth is not a pursuit of enjoyment of this result or that result, as utilitarianism makes us believe. It is a pursuit of the sovereign value of Good, irrespective of any consequences; it is a process in which what comes to the moral agent is the justness, kindness and love with which one strains to perceive and appreciate the reality, situation and other human beings. It is an experience in which the egoistic self is lost; the sense that “I determine the good by my free will” is transcended in utter humility that confesses that “I am nothing in this world of chance”. One is driven to that magnetic centre, having reached which, one finds that freedom which has grown through a progressive development by means of which one is   purified of pride and prejudice and in which the vision of the good shines and the right action shoots from there. This account transcends the existentialist’s analysis of self, angst and free will.

All this is brilliant and revelatory, and the analysis is more penetrating than what we find in contemporary study of moral experience. In a sense, it penetrates into the moral experience much more deeply than the Kantian idea of the categorical imperative. It must, however, be said that Murdoch does not do full justice to the rich insights that Kant has provided in the experience of categorical imperative, of the real nature of free will, and of the postulation of God, Freedom, and Immortality. Kant’s categorical imperative is neither utilitarian nor existentialist nor behaviorist. Like the Platonic Good, Kant perceives The Categorical Imperative as universal and as the magnetic centre which activates in man the drive towards the good and the right; and it is that which generates the operation of free will as good will. Kant’s free will does not spring all of a sudden, but it is seen embedded in our perception of the ought. One defect of Murdoch’s analysis appears to be her neglect of possibility of comparison between Kant and Plato. The sense of universality which is present in Kant’s perception of good needs to be underlined. Similarly, Kant’s “I” has also not been sufficiently appreciated in Murdoch’s analysis. The “I” in Kant is not merely the “I” that wills, having only one quality of freedom. That “I” becomes so imbued with goodness, purified from all desires, that it seeks no gains but a pure reflection of the highest good, in action which is universalisable. To do fair justice to Kant, one ought to bring out Kant’s view that the individual is not a mere instrument but an end in himself.

A question has been raised by Murdoch as to whether the Idea of the Good exists. In reply, she states: “No, not as people used to think that God existed.” ‘All one can do is to appeal to certain areas of experience pointing out certain features, and using suitable metaphors and inventing suitable concepts where necessary to make these features visible.’ Murdoch makes a distinction between God and Good, and as far as God is concerned, she really states that she assumes that ‘there is no God’. She maintains that if one does not believe in personal God, there is no ‘problem’ or evil, but there is almost insuperable difficulty of looking properly at evil and human suffering. But she goes farther and points out that realism demands a clear-eyed contemplation of the misery and evil of the world, and it is that clear-eyed perception which, combined with compassion, automatically suggests that there is ‘more than this’, and that very tiny spark of insight is real, and it is that insight which enables us to pursue the Good, in spite of the existence of evil and suffering and utter lack of finality in human life. She points out that the only genuine way to be good is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every natural scene, including one’s own mind is subject to chance, that is, to necessity. She adds: “that ‘for nothing’ is indeed the experienced correlate of the invisibility or non- representable blankness of the idea of Good itself”.

What are we to make of this analysis? Does it describe accurately moral experience? As far as Platonism is concerned, the concept of the Good is a culmination of a certain metaphysical argument. It is true that his metaphysical system can be questioned on the ground that although the entire trend in that metaphysical system tends towards monism, it is unable to connect the transient world with that transcendent Good, and thus there remains an unreconciled dualism. But the metaphysical framework is important for Plato. Murdoch, on the other hand, does not attempt to formulate any metaphysical theory, and therefore she does not need to defend her position within the frame of a metaphysical theory. Hers is a moral philosophy of moral experience, and she is content with a mere statement of what she thinks is the indubitable content of moral experience. We may admit that she has succeeded in her attack on existentialism, behaviorism and utilitarianism by showing that none of them provides an accurate account of moral experience. We may also admit that her account of moral experience is in many ways more accurate than that in the rival theories that she has attacked. But one can ask whether, despite the great degree of accuracy that we find in her analysis of moral experience, whether a more complete account is desirable and can be provided.

At one stage of her argument, Murdoch presents a few insightful dilemmas connected with moral experience, and although these dilemmas are more complex than those that a buyer in a shop faces and resolves, we do find at higher levels of moral experience, more complex dilemmas than those presented by Murdoch. Answers to these dilemmas are extremely difficult to find, and in respect of them we are obliged to go beyond what Murdoch is content with. Murdoch maintains that one can have genuine and accurate attention, that this attention can become progressively more and more intense, until after passing through stages of enlightenment, as in Plato’s picture of ‘soul’s journey’, and we are able to reach a non-hypothetical first principle which is the form or idea of the good. She goes further and says that mind which has ascended to the vision of the Good can subsequently see the concepts through which it has ascended in their true nature and their proper relationship to each other. And then, it is suggested that the dilemmas which she had spoken of earlier are resolved. Murdoch says: “The good man knows whether and when art or politics is more important than family. The good man sees the way in which the virtues are related to each other…True conceptions combine just modes of judgment and ability to connect with an increased perception of detail. The case of the mother who has to consider each one of her family carefully as she decides whether or not to throw aunty out. This double revelation of both random detail and intuited unity is what we receive in every sphere of life if we seek for what is best…A serious scholar who is also a good man knows not only his subject but the proper place of his subject  in the whole of his life. The understanding which leads the scientist to the right decision about giving up a certain study or leads the artist to the right decision about his family is superior to the understanding of art and science as such.”  As we ponder over these contentions of Murdoch, we begin to feel that she may be right in her contentions as far as these examples are concerned. But can we be sure? Does our moral experience show that within the field of that experience, we can acquire the vision of the good, even if try our very best? When Plato speaks of the vision of the good, he speaks of a revolutionary effort of the whole being by which one is able to untie the knots by which one is tied up to a post from where one could see only the wall in front of him and the shadows cast upon it, the source of which it was impossible for him even to imagine. Theoretically, one may grant the possibility of acquiring such a vision of Good, but one can grant it only if we have some kind of assured knowledge of the methods by which that vision of good can be acquired. And it is here that Murdoch’s canvas of moral experience seems to be limited. She speaks of the methods of all attention, for striving of the best, of looking at reality with justice and love and compassion.  The science of mystic experience, while appreciating all these methods, uncovers the need for a number of radical methods in the process of application of which more complex dilemmas occur in human life, the solution of which does not allow us to leave most fundamental metaphysical questions unresolved and unanswered. Murdoch asserts that the world is a world of chance. Is this accurate and true? The world, she says, is vanity. Is this accurate and true? What is the soul, and why is it caught up in this mire of evil and suffering? One may try to avoid these questions, saying that the answers are not required, since the pursuit of the good is independent of these answers.  But is this accurate and true? Unless I know the process by which I find myself in this would of evil and human suffering, how can I effectively reverse that process or undo that process? Merely by looking accurately? Surely much more is at stake. Religions may be waning and we may feel that it is good that they are waning. But does religion not provide a much larger field of the analysis of moral experience or mystic experience? We may agree that religions are dogmatic and that dogmatism must be transcended; we may agree that religions have failed to answer the problem of evil. But can we skirt the problem? And should we skirt the problem? Once again, the great science of mystic experience all over the world has affirmed something more and has opened up more avenues of experience and solutions of more and more complex dilemmas than what we find in Murdoch’s exposition of moral experience.

A more full-fledged account of moral experience brings out, indeed, greater height than Kant’s categorical imperative and Murdoch’s sovereignty of good. The ethical demand of our nature demands in the individual life and in collective life progressive actualization not only of justice, of right, of purity, and love but absolute justice, absolute purity, absolute love or selflessness of an action. But knowing that human action is always relative, mixed and uncertain and perplexed in its occasion, there is a deeper demand to actualize the union of inner being to the eternal and absolute good and to make our sense and will full of it so as to act out of its impulsions or its intuitions or its inspirations. It is here that moral effort and moral experience tends to rise into higher realms towards inalienable purity of the Divine Being and unity with the law of the divine knowledge and will, and a movement towards infinity and unity of divine love as also edification of divine strength and power. It is to the study of these possibilities which we find in the science of mystic experience that we are driven to move. In the context of these greater and profounder possibilities, Murdoch’s forceful and brilliant exposition of the moral experience can be seen only as an inspiring and elaborate introduction.