Imagine a woman setting herself the task of liking her son’s choice of wife. At first she finds her daughter-in-law unbearable, but through the effort of seeing her clearly and justly she comes to accept and even appreciate the younger woman. For Iris Murdoch this is an example of moral labour, the struggle to achieve virtue that is understood intuitively by all of us. In her 1970 book The Sovereignty of Good, a collection of three lectures, Murdoch rejects the unambitious, ‘milk and water’ ethics of her fellow English moralists at Oxford in favour of a Platonic system in which morality has the same objectivity as mathematics. In this episode Jonathan and James discuss Murdoch’s lifelong philosophical project to establish what the rational unity of morality might be like without God. They consider her ideas of ‘unselfing’ and of goodness as a replacement for God, and what she got wrong about Sartre’s distinction between authenticity and sincerity.

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Further reading in the LRB:

Alexander Nehamas: John Bayley's 'Iris': https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch1

James Wood: Existentialists and Mystics: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch2

Rosemary Hill on Iris Murdoch: https://lrb.me/cipep12murdoch3

Audiobooks from the LRB

Including Jonathan Rée's 'Becoming a Philosopher: Spinoza to Sartre': https://lrb.me/audiobookscip