Murdoch's metaethics: perceptual activities are and should be the objects of moral evaluation
By Teresa Macey-Dare, for University College London, 2023
Introduction
If we hold, as Kekes, that “accurate perception (...) is the precondition of any reasonable judgement”[1], it seems plausible that our activities of looking, listening and so on, are or should be the objects of moral evaluation. I shall hereafter refer to these as ‘perceptual activities’. For Iris Murdoch, however, perception does not just have logical priority (ie. occurs before and informs our judgements), but normative priority too. As Blum summarises: “it is precisely because the situation is seen in a certain way that the agent takes it as one”[2] in need of moral deliberation. This leads me to an artificial but clarificatory distinction: moral perception is one’s “construal of a moral situation”[3], whilst Murdoch’s ‘moral vision’ refers both to this and the dialectical activity[4] of self-reflection and moral improvement itself. In this way, perceptual activities may be both ‘extrinsically’ and ‘intrinsically’ evaluated. By this I mean that perceptual activities directly inform action (extrinsic), but moreover, “the inner activity of discernment is itself part of moral life, and such inner activity has [independent] moral value”[5] (intrinsic).
In this essay, I argue for the thesis that perceptual activities are and should be the objects of moral evaluation. I begin by outlining Murdoch’s theory of moral vision as a way to readily capture the appropriateness of evaluating perceptual activities, before questioning the very possibility of doing so. In turn, I conclude that the evaluation of perceptual activities can only be understood in terms of a moral life, involving interconnected intrinsic and extrinsic evaluative processes.
1) The moral relevance of evaluating perceptual activities
a) Moral vision in theory
It is helpful to think of ‘moral vision’ as distinct from moral perception, insofar as it synthesises both ‘moral perception’ and ‘moral attentiveness’.[6] Moral perception may be thought of as using our perceptual activities to interpret the facts of a moral situation. Failures of moral perception are hence either what I call ‘failures of absence’ that change “the salience of facts”[7], or ‘failures of interpretation’ that “distort [them]”.[8] The former relates to not perceiving a moral feature - for example, not recognising that an old man on the bus may want a seat. Meanwhile, the latter involves perceiving a feature incorrectly - refusing to offer your seat because you take difference in skin colour to be morally relevant, so racially discriminate. In this way, the quality of the perception (eg. its clarity and aptness to the situation) “plays a formative role in the quality of the deliberation, judgement, choice, and conduct which follow”.[9]
Integral to the development of this is moral attention, which, more cryptically, “consists of suspending our thought, leaving it detached, empty, and ready to be penetrated by the object”.[10] Hence, whilst its object is nonetheless the external world, moral attention designates the internal effort required to see that external world with a “refined and honest perception.”[11] On my interpretation, moral attention is the reflective perceptual process simultaneous with and directed towards moral perception that informs that perception. This highlights the ambiguity of ‘perception’ as both the act of perceiving (process) and the perception that results (product), and furthermore its ability to occur on multiple ‘levels’. As Locke captures: “it is impossible for anyone to perceive, without perceiving that he perceives.”[12]
Synthesising moral attention and moral perception, I interpret ‘moral vision’ as Gomes suggests: “an awareness of reality shaped by the scheme of concepts in which we operate”.[13] It is possible to take ‘moral vision’ ambiguously - ‘vision of moral things’ or ‘vision that is itself moral’. The first sense relates to distinguishing moral features in the environment (as moral perception suggests), whilst the second, to the fact that this way of thinking and perceiving is worthy of moral appraisal[14] (as moral attention suggests). Yet, since paying proper (ie. careful) moral attention facilitates more accurate perception, I agree with Gomes that both interpretations of moral vision ultimately converge: “moral vision is vision that deploys the right concepts”.[15] ‘Vision of moral things’ suggests perceiving in some clear way, and ‘vision that is itself moral’ warrants positive appraisal insofar as one pays attention and perceives clearly. The backdrop to this is Murdoch’s moral “realism[:] a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, […] true vision occasions right conduct.”[16] For Murdoch, moral properties - for example, goodness - are a knowable part of reality, but “mediated by the concepts [...] available to us”.[17] Hence, deploying the ‘right concepts’ is equivalent to ‘perceiving clearly’.
b) Moral vision in practice
Resonating with the sense in which looking, listening and so forth, are perceptual activities, moral vision too is integral to living a moral life - it provides the “total vision of a life” or “vision of a good life”.[18] As I read it, ‘vision’ in the first quotation refers to seeing the whole of the other individual (ie. moral perception), and hence ‘life’ is their very being. Meanwhile, in the second, ‘vision’ refers to the inner reflective process (ie. moral attention) involved in the ‘good life’ of the moral agent themself. In this way, ambiguous word choice serves to unify the inner and outer, the self and the other. Moral vision may thus be practically framed as the process of “sustained imaginative engagement with”[19] external particulars (namely individuals), through a ‘loving gaze’ which prohibits “overvaluation[: …] project[ing] onto our object various excellences borrowed from our ego”.[20]
Though more will be said on how to interpret the ‘loving gaze’, Bagnoli’s suggestion of its Kantian echoes is a useful starting point: “‘realism of compassion’ [...] means to be able to respect others’ bounds, and appreciate the manifestation of their personalities.”[21] Resonating with Murdoch’s conception of “moral reality [as] other persons”[22], the loving gaze entails coming to see the other for what they really are.[23] Murdoch captures this with the following paradigmatic example: a mother-in-law (M) feels hostile towards her daughter-in-law (D) because she perceives her as, among other things, “positively rude, [and] always tiresomely juvenile”.[24] Upon self-reflection, M comes to see herself as jealous and snobbish, in turn deciding to reconsider D with a more charitable outlook. Though “nothing new is seen [...] the new way of seeing”[25] yields novel positive conclusions about D. Much like the duck-rabbit optical illusion[26], the intentional object of M’s perception stays the same (hence ‘nothing new is seen’), but different features of the object become salient, facilitating a reconceptualisation of the object (‘new way of seeing’). D’s being and behaviour remains unchanged, though M comes to “see her as a human being” of a different kind.[27] Recalling the normative priority of perception for Murdoch, “coming to see other people and the world at large correctly or lovingly is [hence] the goal of the moral life”.[28]
This emphasis on active and connected life, captures the sense in which evaluation of perceptual activities involves ‘intrinsic’ and ‘extrinsic’ processes. Let us consider the racist bus case once more. Directing moral attention to the process of moral perception (ie. the perceiving as facilitated by perceptual activities of seeing, hearing and so on), the agent would, I postulate on behalf of Murdoch, come to recognise their ‘failure of interpretation’ - the result of their deployment of incorrect concepts. In this way, the evaluation of their perceptual activities is intrinsic; it is in relation to the conceptual framework they rest on, and thus calls it into question. Extrinsic evaluation, on the other hand, relates to how their perceptual activities construed the initial (false) perception in comparison to a new perception that employs different concepts, and likely occasions different action (for example, offering the seat to the old man). As Holland captures: moral vision “moves in two directions, inward toward oneself and outward toward an aspect of independent reality.”[29]
2) The possibility of evaluating perceptual activities
To comprehend how one evaluates perceptual activities in practice, I explore both how we should interpret the ‘loving gaze’, and according to what standard it facilitates moral vision.
a) Interpreting the ‘loving gaze’
Murdoch construes the ‘loving gaze’ as one of moral effort and careful attention to the reality of the situation, allowing one to perceive in a way unclouded by “the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams which prevents one from seeing what is there outside one.”[30] Moral vision thus tends towards an ideal of perfection, since “a perfect scheme of concepts is one which enables true vision of individual realities”.[31] Following prior comments, this means coming to see the moral beings and therefore the situations which involve those beings, as they actually are. The ideal of perfection thereby sets a standard according to which one can evaluate their perceptual activities and the perceptions they yield. As Murdoch’s emphasis on “giving careful and just attention”[32] suggests, we may interpret the loving gaze as the use of our perceptual activities to see more positively. Velleman supports this more explicitly: “favouring someone in particular seems like the very essence of love”.[33] Applying this notion to Murdoch’s example: positively attending to D in particular, M is able to see her same traits more favourably.
Yet, herein a tension seems to arise with “the moral point of view [that] is impartial and favours no particular individual”.[34] This is particularly salient given Murdoch’s commitments to moral realism. Clifton highlights, however, that the challenge involves a conflation between ‘impartial’ and ‘impersonal’; this ultimately leads to a misconception of what it is to ‘favour’ the individual via the loving gaze. Murdoch intends, I think, that the moral agent favours the individual insofar as they pay close attention to them. In fact, it seems “we have to be partial - in the sense of non-objective - in order to see the individuals in the way they [actually] are”[35], though nonetheless impersonal in our attempt to ‘unself’ and see the situation clearly. This impersonality extends to the way we look upon the individual charitably but not necessarily positively - ie. what it is to favour them.[36] Although more rare, benevolent prejudice is also the deployment of an incorrect concept in one’s moral perception. Think of the racist bus case in reverse - where the old man is the one who holds discriminatory prejudices against your skin colour. Imagine that after offering your seat, he hurls racial abuse at you, rather than expressing gratitude. Coming to see him as admirable for expressing his beliefs, would not be what the ‘loving gaze’ prescribes.
The particularity of the loving gaze allows it to tend towards the ideal of perfection, insofar as it involves both justice and care. Again the ambiguity of word choice does explanatory work: ‘just’ captures both the sense in which the loving gaze is one of fairness towards the features and facts of the situation, and the sense in which this occasions appropriate moral behaviour. I hence endorse the interpretation of Cooper et.al that the loving gaze of moral vision is not one of seeing individuals more favourably, but rather involves “thinking imaginatively to find new ways in which [...to] see and understand”.[37] This captures the sense in which one is engaging with the external world, via different perceptions of that world, and thereby actively refining one’s perceptual activities. The process might be understood as a kind of empathising: stepping outside of oneself to adopt the perception of the other. I reject this take, however, since it is possible to imagine cases of individuals with a vastly different self-perception compared to how they present themselves and are perceived by others in turn. For example, the racist old man thinking of himself as a noble advocate for free speech. The objects of our moral perception are fundamentally other subjects, also bound by the requirements of moral vision and hence tasked with freeing themselves from the “fat, relentless ego”.[38] It is therefore unsurprising that accurate perception often involves actively challenging people’s self-perceptions.
b) The problem of ‘intrinsic’ evaluation
This once more highlights the sense in which partiality need not imply undue positivity; “attention does not involve casting something in a more favourable light than it merits, but may involve seeing something that is unpleasant, painful, or repugnant.”[39] Moral vision rests on a conception of “love [as] the extremely difficult realisation that something other than oneself is real”.[40] The ideal of perfection may thus be thought of as the most accurate or clear perception of reality - almost akin to a correspondence theory of truth on which a proposition F is true iff it corresponds to a fact about how the world actually is.[41] Hence perceptual activities can be evaluated extrinsically; we can assess their success in generating correct perceptions of moral situations, not least in terms of the kinds of actions they result in. However, because it is possible to act rightly without moral vision - for example, “[M’s] behaviour, beautiful from the start, in no way alters”[42] - Murdoch emphasises the intrinsic value of moral vision. Through “engaged attention with the world” one “direct[s] love at the self”[43] - forming a “lifelong journey of trying to see with a wider and clearer vision.”[44] This speaks to my previous comments about the significance of perceptual activities being activities, and furthermore the internal and external directedness of moral vision. More significantly, it sheds light on the way in which we understand the example; M assesses and shifts her own conceptual framework, thereby showing herself love and coming to develop a more accurate picture of herself as a moral being in the world. As such, the intentional object of her perception is both D (situation) and herself (M as a part of that situation).
I agree with Taylor that the possibility of such “reflective self-evaluation [...] depends on there being a certain distance between what we do or fail to do and our evaluation of it”.[45] For M to be able to come to see D through a loving gaze, she must first engage in self-critical activities - realising, for example, that her snobbishness is likely the product of jealousy. Hence, she is at once, both the subject and object of her moral perception. However, this raises a challenge for intrinsic evaluation. Given that the subject doing the perceiving is still M, what is to stop features of the object perception (ie. the “blinding interests”[46] of her ego contained in her prior conceptual framework), infiltrating into her subject (meta-)perception? In other words, it is unclear from which ‘lens’ M can engage in the evaluation of her perceptual activities, if not through one that they create. What complicates things further, is that even if the attainment of an objective perspective were possible and facilitated intrinsic evaluation, recall that we must be non-objective to see individuals as they are (fn.35).
c) Unified moral reality
Viewing what it is to unself - an exercise of “moral effort and moral imagination”[47] - in light of Murdochian moral realism, directs us towards a solution. I propose that coming to see oneself as other is facilitated by adopting the perspective of external moral reality - namely of other moral beings. This cluster of perspectives forms the impersonal ‘lens’ (subject) through which intrinsic evaluation of perceptual activities (object) is possible. However, because imagination can operate to distort vision - for example creating the psychological fantasies of our ego that cloud perception - it must be ‘disciplined’. Aligning with Murdoch’s idea of the loving gaze being one that is both attentive and just[48], such imagination involves “both the correction of defective tendencies that lead to mistaken evaluations and the exploration of available possibilities in order to form a realistic view”.[49] In this way, disciplined imagination allows one to engage in different perceptual possibilities and thereby explore different ways of using their perceptual activities to construct new perceptions. From this imaginative vantage point, the agent can reflectively evaluate their perceptual activities and the perceptions they manifest - not least their imagination itself. This illuminates how we understand the loving gaze.
Coming to see oneself as other not only facilitates intrinsic evaluation, but reveals moral reality: “the continuous fabric of being”[50] - “the peculiar way in which our actions are linked to our inner thoughts”[51] and thus we are connected to others. Here, I take ‘actions’ to mean both physical behaviours, and cognitive processes (eg. the reflection involved in unselfing and disciplining imagination). I thereby suggest that the ideal of perfection for intrinsic evaluation, is again the world as it really is: the reality of moral beings as they actually are. Although it is impossible to transcend perception and thus seeing the world as it ‘really’ is involves continually fine-tuning one’s moral vision, by coming to know others through the self and the self through others, the gap between subjective perceptions and objective truth is bridged. Nonetheless bound to perception, the concept of intrinsic evaluation highlights the nature of the evaluative standard as an ideal; in this way, it serves to capture the sense in which developing moral vision is a process of continuous moral effort.
However, what is still unclear is how one can discipline their imagination such that it can facilitate intrinsic evaluation of perceptual activities towards correspondence with (moral) reality - given that imagination is an inherently perceptual activity. Considering the necessity of extrinsic evaluation, or more precisely, engagement with the extrinsic world for evaluation, is instructive once again. I hypothesise that the moral agent may use a combination of external and internal cues to evaluate and adjust their perceptual activities. For example, imagine that M feels ashamed about her jealousy; this might convey that she was, implicitly by way of her being part of moral reality, “committed to [the] ideal of a good life”[52] which she has failed to actualise. Thus her “self-respect suffer[s]”.[53] To this end, she at once fails to realise herself and others as both moral beings and ones unified in reality (fn.22). Given that she is a part of the moral reality according to which she evaluates her perceptual activities, but this also exists outside of her perceptions, the evaluation is continually intrinsic and extrinsic. As Murdoch articulates: “moral tasks are characteristically endless not only because ‘within’, as it were, a given concept our efforts are imperfect, but also because as we move and as we look our concepts themselves are changing.”[54]
The process of developing moral vision is a dialectical way of being (in turn life); viewing all evaluation of perceptual activities as extrinsic insofar as moral reality is others, of which the self is one, yet intrinsic insofar as the perceptions through which one ‘unselfs’ are inherently imaginative, allows us to see the way in which the moral life is, for Murdoch, life - an active, interconnected whole.
Conclusion
The moral relevance of perceptual activities becomes salient if we consider the ‘moral vision’ required for both internal moral development and external moral action. As Murdoch suggests, failures in perception resulting from failures in attention, lead to misconceptualisations of moral situations. Hence, developing one’s moral vision according to a “regulative ideal of perfection”[55] involves the continual evaluation of one’s perceptual activities and the conceptual framework they both manifest and reflect. Difficulties arise in interpreting how the loving gaze operates so as to facilitate one’s tending towards this evaluative standard, along with what such a standard means in itself. Yet, paying close attention to Murdoch’s theory itself - the ambiguity of word choice used to capture it and the context of her moral realism - provides clarity on how to understand it. Seeing moral reality as both human and other, dynamic and unified, inner and outer, it is only appropriate to understand intrinsic evaluation in light of extrinsic evaluation. The two are importantly bound together. Viewing oneself as a feature of reality - a moral object - yet bound to perception - a moral subject - is crucial to the development of moral vision. In this way, the evaluation of perceptual activities appears to be both normatively significant and practically possible.
- [1] Kekes,J. 1989, pg.131
- [2] Blum,L. 1991, pg.707
- [3] Holland,M. 1998, pg.301
- [4] Ie. process moving towards some goal (moral reality)
- [5] Holland,M. 1998, pg.299
- [6] Holland frames these as two different aspects of ‘moral awareness’
- [7] Cooper,S; Lawson-Frost,S. 2021, pg.69
- [8] Ibid.
- [9] Holland,M. 1998, pg.302
- [10] Weil,S. 1951, pg.11
- [11] Murdoch,I. 1971, pg.38
- [12] Locke,J. 2017[1689], pg.115
- [13] Gomes,A. 2020, pg.6
- [14] In either a good or bad sense
- [15] Sorgiovanni,B. 2022, verbal
- [16] Murdoch,I. 1971, pg.64 - my emphasis
- [17] Gomes,A. 2020, pg.4
- [18] Murdoch,I. 1956, pg.21;39
- [19] Cooper,S; Lawson-Frost,S. 2021, pg.72
- [20] Velleman,J.D. 1999, pg.350
- [21] Bagnoli,C. 2003, pg.506
- [22] Blum,L. 2022, sect.5.1
- [23] And thereby, the situation for what it really is
- [24] Murdoch,I. 1999, pg.312
- [25] Sparks,J. 2018, pg.23 - my emphasis
- [26] Fig.1
- [27] Cooper,S; Lawson-Frost,S. 2021, pg.65
- [28] Sparks,J. 2018, pg.23
- [29] Holland,M. 1998, pg.309 - framing this in terms of ‘moral attention’
- [30] Murdoch,I. 1971, pg.59
- [31] Gomes,A. 2020, pg.17
- [32] Murdoch,I. 1971, pg.17
- [33] Velleman,J.D. 1999, pg.338
- [34] Ibid.
- [35] Clifton,W.S. 2013, pg.214
- [36] Ie. non-equivocate to favouring them
- [37] Cooper,S; Lawson-Frost,S. 2021, pg.72
- [38] Murdoch,I. 1971, pg.51
- [39] Holland,M. 1998, pg.309
- [40] Murdoch,I. 1997, pg.215 - again following Murdoch’s moral realism
- [41] Honderich,T. 2005, pg.178
- [42] Murdoch,I. 1999, pg.313
- [43] Clifton,W.S. 2013, pg.214
- [44] Cooper,S; Lawson-Frost,S. 2021, pg.69
- [45] Kekes,J. 2006, pg.182 - where I take ‘do’ to include inner cognitive activities
- [46] Clifton,W.S. 2013, pg.214
- [47] Gomes,A. 2020, pg.18
- [48] Ie. proportionate to its object, and placing limitations on ones agency
- [49] Kekes,J. 2006, pg.182
- [50] Murdoch,I. 1999, pg.316
- [51] Bagnoli,C. 2003, pg.498
- [52] Kekes,J. 2006, pg.184
- [53] Ibid. - cf. fn.21
- [54] Murdoch,I. 1971, pg.27
- [55] Gomes,A. 2020, pg.17
Bibliography
Primary sources
- Murdoch, Iris. “Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature”, Penguin (1997 & 1999 Editions), ISBN: 0713992255, 0140264922
- Murdoch, Iris. “Symposium: Vision and Choice in Morality” Aristotelian Society Supp. Volume (1956 Edition, Vol.30), pg.14-58, DOI:10.1093/aristoteliansupp/30.1.14
- Murdoch, Iris. “The Sovereignty of Good”, Routledge (1971 Edition), ISBN: 9780415854733
- Bagnoli, Carla. “Respect and Loving Attention” from the “Canadian Journal of Philosophy”, Cambridge University Press (2003 Edition, Vol. 33) pg.483- 515, DOI: 10.1080/00455091.2003.10716552
- Blum, Lawrence. “Moral Perception and Particularity” from “Ethics”, University of Chicago Press (1991 Edition, Vol.101), pg. 701-725, DOI: 10.1086/293340
- Blum, Lawrence; Zalta, Edward.N. & Nodelman Uri (Eds) “Iris Murdoch”, The Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy (2022 Edition), Sect. 5
Appendix
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