Last updated 09/07/24: Online ordering is currently unavailable due to technical issues. We apologise for any delays responding to customers while we resolve this. For further updates please visit our website: https://www.cambridge.org/news-and-insights/technical-incident
We use cookies to distinguish you from other users and to provide you with a better experience on our websites. Close this message to accept cookies or find out how to manage your cookie settings.
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 02 June 2020
Iris Murdoch believes that unselfing is required for virtue, as it takes us out of our egoistic preoccupations, and connects us to the Good in the world. Love is a form of unselfing, illustrating how close attention to another, and the way they really are, again, takes us out of a narrow focus on the self. Though this view of love runs counter to a view that those in love often overlook flaws in their loved ones, or at least down-play them, I argue that it is compatible with Murdoch's view that love can overlook some flaws, ones that do not speak to the loved one's true self. Unselfing requires that we don't engage in selfish delusion, but a softer view of our loved ones is permitted.
1 Murdoch, From Iris, The Sovereignty of the Good, (Routledge Classics, 1970), 82Google Scholar.
2 Foot, Philippa, ‘Virtues and Vices’ in Virtues and Vices (Oxford: OUP, 1978) 1–18Google Scholar.
3 Murdoch, Iris, The Nice and the Good (Penguin Books, 1968)Google Scholar.
4 Hume, DavidA Treatise of Human Nature, ed. Norton, David Fate and Norton, Mary (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2007)Google Scholar.
5 Op. cit. note 1, The Sovereignty of the Good, 50.
6 Murdoch, IrisThe Sovereignty of the Good (Routledge, 1970) 17Google Scholar.
7 Op. cit. note 5.
8 Murdoch, Iris, The Sea, the Sea (Penguin Books, 1980)Google Scholar.
9 Mole, Christopher ‘Attention, Self, and The Sovereignty of the Good,’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Rowe, Anne (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 75Google Scholar.
10 Op. cit. note 8, 83.
11 Midgley, Mary, Beast and Man (New American Library, 1978), 359Google Scholar.
12 Samantha Vice criticizes Murdoch for the erasure of self in her ‘The Ethics of Self-Concern,’ in Iris Murdoch: A Reassessment, ed. Anne Rowe (Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 60–71. Mole is trying for a reconciliation between two strands he sees in Murdoch's work.
13 Wolf, Susan ‘Loving Attention: Lessons in Love from The Philadelphia Story,’ in Understanding Love: Philosophy, Film, and Fiction, ed. Wolf, Susan and Grau, Christopher (Oxford University Press, 2014), 369–386CrossRefGoogle Scholar.
14 Abramson, Kate and Leite, Adam, ‘Love as a Reactive Emotion,’ The Philosophical Quarterly, 6 (245), 677Google Scholar.
