TheDaak review

Justice as a ‘Moral Vision’: Discussing Murdoch’s Alternative to the Politico-Legal Language of ‘Liberal Justice’  

By Ratika Gaur

Abstract: The radical ‘inwardness’ of the modern self creates a two-fold problem for ‘liberal justice’. One, in the absence of all moral notions of an external (impersonal) ‘Good’, it operates using the dry politico-legal language of rather incompatible ‘rights’. Two, it struggles to justify an atomised individual’s moral obligation towards others. In this regard, Iris Murdoch’s The Sovereignty of Good (1970) presents an alternative picture of justice as a ‘moral vision’ that enables individuals to see outside (not inwards) their egos and engage with the world as is out of a pure non-possessive love.  

1. Introduction

It may be that things would be wonderfully harmonious in the perfectly engineered society, but why should I work for its distant realisation today, even at the cost of my life and well-being?

-Charles Taylor (2001, 336)

Dominant Western liberal discourses¹ on the idea of justice are usually premised upon a bipartite inquiry: (i) the inherent incommensurability between the competing pulls of absolute freedom and substantive equality within heterogeneous liberal-democratic societies; (ii) the subsequent challenge of delineating the foundations of political obligation amongst autonomous modern individuals. In response, scholars have developed a politico-legal language of justice that attempts to harmonise the contradictions of liberty and equality by developing what may be called a ‘civility toolkit’ that fixes situations and conflicts through the ideational nuts and bolts of ‘autonomous will’, ‘rationality’ and ‘tolerance’. But a dive into the historical and philosophical genealogy of these quick fixes reveals that it is the very perpetuation of these ideas (of free will, rationality and tolerance) that exaggerates, rather than resolves, the inherently liberal problem of incommensurability between freedom and equality.

In this regard, the first section of this paper postulates that the underlying rationale of this ‘civility toolkit’ is premised upon a theologically rooted anthropocentric tendency of liberal justice to celebrate the nature of the ‘modern individual’ as a radically inward Lockean ‘punctual’² self. The identity of this modern self is comprised of two important features: one,that its ‘will’ is the ultimate moral source of action/obligation, to the exclusion of (what Charles Taylor calls) any external background or ‘constitutive good’; two, in the absence of an external higher Good, the modern self has become inherently contradictory in the sense that it is at once rationally disengaged from, as well as deeply immersed into, its subjective experiences. This duality of the modern self creates, in turn, a serious weakness in the operations of justice within contemporary societies wherein an individual’s particularistic demands for acknowledging unique embodied experiences (substantive differentiation) are dealt within liberal institutions through procedural demands for disengaged objective impartiality (universal proceduralism). In simpler words, the problem of liberal-democratic justice is that it attempts to resolve conflicts by evaluating unique/subjective embodied claims of individuals through impartial/rational formal procedures. Owing to this ill-fitted response, conflict resolution within liberal-democracies tends to suffer from an inherent crisis of political obligation, which, in turn, is addressed by liberal institutions through an equally problematic discourse that offers “tolerance” (i.e. a bare minimum balance of power arrangement) as a concealed version of condescending discipline akin to Foucault’s model of governmentality. 

The next section, then, presents a resolution to this problem of liberal justice by contending for a shift in perspective towards the arguments of Iris Murdoch (1970), forwarded in her excellent work The Sovereignty of Good. Murdoch’s work begins with a critique of the utilitarian-existentialist conception of an atomistic, self-centred modern self who is heavily reliant within, i.e. upon one’s radically inwardness and ‘disenchanted’ will for deriving notions of moral good and political obligation. She contrasts this with her singular assertion that justice entails a moral goodness which operates best when it is independent of one’s self-interest. Her alternative version of justice accordingly involves a ‘moral vision’ wherein individuals see the world more clearly or attentively. This attentive vision entails a conscious process of ‘unselfing’ so as to allow for a loving, just, and detailed contemplation of reality through which an individual apprehends the moral good as is, irrespective of one’s personal goals. Her arguments therefore borrow from the Platonic idea of the Good as an objective reality which operates as a transcendent, unifying principle that guides just moral understanding and political obligation. Therefore, through the alternative arguments of Iris Murdoch, this article advocates for an active re-evaluation of the role of justice within moral philosophy beyond a mere politico-legal rule-following or consequentialist calculations of ‘tolerance’, towards a more holistic and ethical understanding of ‘moral vision’.

2. Tracing the Genealogical Rise of the Individual, Will & Autonomy Within Western Liberalism

[…] every human being (as being self-directed/autonomous by the law of reason) is an end in herself/himself and deserves to be singled out from the non-human universe to receive the respect befitting such an end. This respect/treatment involves the selective recognition of the human being as the bearer of rights rather than an owning of kinship with the non-human other.

Bindu Puri (2022, 37)

That the western liberal ideas of liberty, equality, rationality and tolerance derive from a particularly theological nature of the ‘will’, shaped through the precepts of the New Testament, is well-accepted (Sidentop 2014). As the story goes, the Pauline interpretation of the incarnation of ‘The Christ’ challenged the hierarchical order of antiquity by creating a brand new and equal social role – the ‘individual’. Within this worldview, each individual was equal in social status because within each person lay an innate capacity to exercise one’s God-ordained agency or ‘autonomous will’. In other words, it was the possession of a ‘free will’ – or (what was called) ‘Christian Liberty’ – that granted all individuals a universal claim to equality. It is this early theological belief – that liberty is what guarantees equality – which has subconsciously shaped the natural inclination of the liberal discourse to accord a first-order priority to an individual’s liberty over equality. For it is assumed that individuals are equal because they are absolutely autonomous, such that in the absence of liberty there could be no claim to equality. Furthermore, by claiming that the ‘Kingdom of God is within you’, Paul interpreted the source of this liberty to be essentially ‘inward’. He accordingly inaugurated a movement towards the inner depths of the self where each individual would find a personal connection with the divine in the form of one’s “free will”. But the problem of this ‘will’ was that it was inherently hedonistic or ‘weak’. 

This implied that contrary to what was hitherto believed, antiquity’s impersonal Reason could no longer out of its own resources decipher the ancient notion of the ‘Good’ and command the moral authority to motivate an individual’s free will to act virtuously. This humbled the ancient notion of Reason which could no longer command reality by subduing sensory experiences in the pursuit of abstract transcendental ‘forms’. The usefulness of reason, rather, was democratised and internalised. For it was asserted that each individual was endowed with a rationalising ability – the power of deliberation – that could identify the ‘right reason’ amongst alternating desires to allow the will a choice to be virtuous. On the one hand, this shifted the position of ‘motivation’ – that unique bridge between intention (deliberation) and consequence (action) – within an individual’s will which was hedonistically weak. On the other hand, Reason was transformed into ‘rationality’ – an inner deliberative agency endowed equally among moral agents to aid the operations of their free will.

This implied that the ancient Platonic conception of justice, that believed in the rule of Reason over appetite, could no longer justify determining the degree of punishment for an act through an exclusive focus on the consequence of that act. The new-found Christian belief in an individual’s free moral agency or ‘inner conviction’ (along with the limited role of rationality to grasp the entire truth) created a new room for focusing on human intention, by identifying the difference between ‘internal’ reasons for acting and the physical causes of ‘external’ events. Hence, individuals were not to be judged as per the consequences of their faulty actions since there were many external causal events outside of one’s control. Rather, true justice entailed focusing upon an individual’s upright intention. For each individual working upon the authority of one’s inner convictions or will was a self-responsible agent. Free will accordingly became a new self-sustained source of moral authority which did not require external control or mediation. This was because moral perfectionism (mediated through the church, law or state) for a hedonistic will was unattainable. Instead, understanding the complexities of the ‘will’ required delving into one’s conscience with humility.

But a recognition of this need for individuals to go as deeply inwards as possible to find salvation, called upon a new spirit of disengagement with the outer world. Legally, it implied subordinating all external demands to the commands of one’s inner conscience and creating a formal protection for the latter against the onslaughts of the former. This gave rise to a discourse on natural rights which legalised the definition of an individual as a person born with an inner conscience – a will – characteristically hedonistic and self-dependent in its motivation. Only the dictate of Justice could moralise the exercise of this will through ‘right reason’. But the meaning of the right reason was itself personalised to each individual’s inner conviction. This emphasis on the ‘innerness’ of justice would eventually pave the way for the birth of liberal secularism³ in the political sphere: “[…] a sphere resting on the ‘rightful’ claims of individual conscience and choice, a sphere of individual freedom protected by law” (Siedentop 2014, 292).

2.1. The Growing Supremacy of ‘Inner’ Over The ‘Outer’: Rise of The Modern Liberal Self

This happened by the fifteenth and sixteenth century, when Christianity’s hitherto anthropocentric move towards innerness (to derive certainty and conviction from one’s will) and disengagement came to be significantly radicalised. For the secularising arguments of Descartes’ Cartesianism, Lockean Deism, Enlightenment naturalism, Kant’s humanism and Romantic expressivism took the innerness and hedonism underlying these theological moral intuitions to its atomistic and subjective extremes as they steadily transformed the external reality into an observer-specific sensory knowledge constructed through a disengaged method of empirical observations. 

This was because a preference for an inner moral conviction as against the ancient logic of an external cosmic order dictating the supreme ‘Good’, nudged these secular traditions into discovering a self-contained and inward source of morality which allowed individuals to stipulate their subjective ‘good’ through the exercise of their natural rights. For it had been increasingly claimed throughout previous centuries that it is only through the language of rights that individuals could exercise their divinely-endowed human agency and appreciate, in the bargain, God’s ultimate sovereign will. This ‘will’, decisively revealed through the incarnation, had equally ordained each person as one’s own moral source, independent in discovering their moral ‘good’ through the exercise of their rationality and free will. In this regard, rights became indispensable for upholding this will through the recognition and protection of an individual’s God-ordained equal and autonomous agency. This implied that the very definition, and dignity, of an individual became rights-dependent, for the basic objective of the latter was to protect the two fundamental criteria (i.e. liberty and equality) which had helped invent the individual in the first place.

But if the epistemology of liberalism is evidently founded upon this Christian moral claim of equal moral agency, what explains the contemporary liberal conflict between an individual’s rightful claim to absolute freedom as against another’s claim to equal dignity, particularly when the negation of even one of these rights can disintegrate liberalism’s (Christian) moral claim to universality? Reading through the intellectual trajectory of these ideational developments stipulates a few causal explanations. Most significantly, Paul’s conviction had envisioned each individual with a moral freedom to act as per the judicious commandments of love, reciprocity and equality: ‘Love thy neighbour’. Only a human agency premised on the right intentions of love and reciprocity could have produced a truly compatible version of substantive human equality as encompassed in the idea of ‘care of souls’. But Augustine’s subsequent naturalisation and centralization of the imperfect hedonistic nature of human agency led to the conception of a will which was essentially premised on self-love. This eliminated the possibility for creating anything more than a mere abstract or formal equality amongst hedonistic free wills. 

With the result, Augustine’s call for disengagement or an ‘otherworldly attitude’ dominoed over centuries to raise questions regarding the grounds for an individual’s moral obligation. This crisis was exaggerated further through the fourteenth and fifteenth century nominalist arguments of Henry of Ghent and Dun Scotus who, following Augustine, made the requirement of just intentions (entailing reciprocity and equality through love) merely optional in articulating their defence of an individual’s absolute autonomy. The ultimate objective of justice [termed as the natural law] was now re-oriented towards protecting each individual’s absolute right to make conscientious mistakes in search of one’s inner convictions. Correcting one’s mistaken beliefs and actions was a matter of self-discipline and could not have been externally enforced ‘from above’ on the basis of any commonly applicable notion of the ultimate moral Good. This assertion was rooted within the nominalist claim that inner convictions arise as individuals rationalise their subjective experiences of the world gained through the exercise of their absolute agency. Beliefs and experiential reality of individuals were therefore rendered as mental constructs, while ideas of justice and equal moral obligations were internalised within an individual’s rationalising ability. As a result, the possibility for devising a collectively applicable vision of an ultimate Good which could substantially tie absolute human autonomy with claims for equal moral obligation began disappearing. Moral good was no longer dependent upon the experiences of the outer world. Its nature was contingent, hypothetical and subject to revision through more empirical evidence. 

But, while this explains the contradiction between the competing claims of liberty and equality, the cause of their incommensurability within modern liberal democratic society stems from the fact that despite originating from the same theological intuition towards innerness, the plurality of secularised moral sources – ranging from dignity of disengaged rationality, providential order, nature, sentiments etc. – that have subsequently developed with the two dominant streams of Enlightenment’s rationalism and Romantic humanism have come to epistemically contradict and negate each other. For, in their need to eliminate any external source of motivation (like antiquity’s Reason or the role of grace), these secular intellectual traditions came to treat each individual’s inner moral depth as a source awesome enough to motivate action. 

2.2. Situating the Problem of ‘Liberal Justice’ in Contradictions of the Rational-Expressivist Modern Self 

Thus, on the one hand, the radical inwardness inaugurated by Descartes created a self-sufficient, detached, and atomistic notion of a responsible self who drew its source for moral action from within its capability of a disengaged rational self-control. This inwardness later developed into an extreme version of hedonistic atomism with the subsequent rise of social contract theories, utilitarianism and naturalism post the Enlightenment period, collectively calling for a disengaged procedural control of one’s innate hedonistic constitution in order to shape moral action. On the other hand, however, this mechanistic view of an individual came to be contradicted by the opposing demands emanating from the Montaignian trend towards subjective radical inwardness which celebrated the unique particularities of individual experiences. This version called for an opposite quest towards self-discovery and articulation through an immersion into one’s embodied feelings and sentiments. As Charles Taylor (2001, 184) notes in Sources of the Modern Self – The Making of the Modern Identity, “From the seventeenth century onwards there bursts on to paper a torrent of words about intimate thoughts and feelings set down by large numbers of quite ordinary English men and women . . .” in the form of confessional autobiographies. For, given that sentiments triggered one’s will to act, they provided the most authentic peek into the good one sought as per one’s unique constitution: “It is a search now for what I am, what I want and what I will to be for myself” (Puri 2022, 73). The resultant ‘three-sided individualism’ (as Taylor calls it) emerging during this early modern period not only demanded an ability to express and articulate the depth of one’s inner self, but also mandated a sphere of positive rights to be able to protect and conserve this unique nature independent of external moral sources. But, in the absence of any common background framework or ‘constitutive good’ to situate these assumptions, claims legitimising the rights of individuals on the basis of these radically inward moral sources were at best tautological and unstable. With the result, in modern societies “people are often at a loss to say what underpins their sense of the respect owed to people’s rights” (Taylor 2001, 93). 

Theorists have accordingly felt a pressing need to consistently articulate and defend how their preferred moral source can substantiate an individual’s moral obligation to uphold the liberty and equality rights of another independent of one’s personal desires/needs. Furthermore, since secular modern trend towards internalisation and subjectivisation of moral sources has completely negated the existence of any one ultimate moral Good, heterogeneous liberal-democratic societies have been compelled to maintain an equi-distance (touted as ‘freedom’) from all moral sources that compete for allegiance within the public space. This has created a moral vacuum within liberal-democratic societies wherein articulating the notion of ‘good’ becomes very difficult and problematic. Consequently, continuous attempts have been made to fill in this moral vacuum with the competing, rather incommensurate, epistemic claims of divergent moral sources that cancel out each other at their core.⁴ This has produced a  contradiction amongst modern individuals regarding the rational limits of their moral obligation in tolerating the expressive-particularistic claims of others. This, in fact, has been a central argument of Charles Taylor’s work, wherein he states that there is an “[…] inner conflict in the modern subject – one between the tendency to radically individual (essentially disengaged) rational control and the power of expressive self-articulation involving lived experience – which both ‘complicates and enriches the modern moral predicament’” (Taylor 2001, 390). With the result that  claims for justice within contemporary societies have constantly pendulated between procedural demands for disengaged objective impartiality (universal proceduralism) and particularistic demands for acknowledging unique embodied experiences (substantive differentiation). In fact, the liberal habit of premising this version of justice on an appeal for tolerance is also deeply problematic, for it is rooted in a condescending sense of discipline that exemplifies Foucault’s model of governmentality.⁵ Hence, the liberal solution of defining justice using the politico-legal language of free will, rationality and tolerance in order to mitigate the problem of incommensurability between the competing demands of liberty and equality appears to be merely superficial, contingent and brittle. For, at a deeper level, this promise of justice is symptomatic of an atomistic self which is extremely self-centred (i.e., deeply immersed in one’s own subjective experience – either rationally or phenomenologically) and incapable of viewing an impersonal reality. 

The next section, accordingly, attempts to present an alternative definition of justice through a review of Iris Murdoch’s seminal philosophical work, Sovereignty of Good. Herein she claims that the prevailing trend within contemporary moral philosophy – notably behaviouralism, utilitarianism, existentialism and analytic philosophy – places an excessive emphasis upon the autonomy of an individual’s will and rational choice that has decisively negated the potential of individuals to conceive of an external moral reality outside of their egoistic (wilful) sense of self. Her alternative, in contrast, is to return to the role of ‘moral vision’ or ‘attentive perception’ of an external (independent) Good in shaping an individual’s sense of justice.

3. Justice as a ‘Moral Vision’: “‘Good’: ‘Real’: Love’”

It is significant that the idea of goodness (and of virtue) has been largely superseded in Western moral philosophy by the idea of rightness . . . This is to some extent a natural outcome of the disappearance of a permanent background to human activity: a permanent background, whether provided by God, by Reason . . . or by the Self. 

– Iris Murdoch (1970,52)

A central assumption of Sovereignty of Good is that (contrary to the nominalist claim) “morality, goodness, is a form of realism” (Murdoch 1970, 57), and its role is to help individuals answer a simple question, “How can we make ourselves better?” Murdoch 1970, 76). In other words, to make sense of Murdoch’s moral philosophy, one must accept ‘reality’ as an end in itself and the pursuit of betterment/morality/‘Good’ is to be understood as a continuous quest for attentively perceiving this reality as it is. For an individual’s pursuit of seeing reality in its most ‘real’ form translates into a conscious attempt at freeing oneself from one’s personal fantasies or self-aggrandising distortions of the egoistic free will. Why this serves as a moral goal that helps individuals strive for betterment is because Murdoch concedes that the nature of reality is acutely complex and unfathomable, which makes the idea of Good an ‘indefinable’ teleological end of an individual’s moral striving: “Good is indefinable … because of the infinite difficulty of the task of apprehending a magnetic but inexhaustible reality.” (Murdoch 1970, 41) Hence, Murdoch’s understanding of the Good/morality as the ultimate moral source that ‘lies always beyond’ (p. 61), endows it with the attributes of necessary existence and perfection.

3.1. The ‘pointlessness’ of Good

Murdoch’s (2014) assertion that the Good is a “necessary existence” comes from her belief that, akin to the Platonic vision, it is an objective, eternal reality that exists as an independent and immutable truth because it transcends the construct of the human mind, social conventions, and contingent circumstances; it is independent of the human recognition and approval. Therefore, as inherent in the very fabric of reality, it is a fixed point of moral reference that provides an ultimate standard against which everything else exists contingently. This attribute of Good eliminates doubt and relativism for, “[. . .] the realism (ability to perceive reality) required for goodness is a kind of intellectual ability to perceive what is true, which is automatically at the same time a suppression of self” (Murdoch 1970, 64). In other words, it is only with a conscious suppression of one’s sense of self (uniqueness) that one can hope to attain an increasing awareness of ‘Good’ ,i.e., an increasing awareness of an underlying unity and interdependence of the moral world. For it allows individuals to overcome their inherent biases to be able to perceive the interconnectedness of all beings in their unanimous vulnerabilities (arising from the every-present possibility of death and chance). This fosters amongst individuals a deeper sense of empathy and moral responsibility as they come to perceive the intrinsic value of others, independent of their own goals and desires (given that one realises that every being is simply trying to survive their vulnerabilities). Murdoch (2014, 64) accordingly states that the more one realises “[. . .] that another man has needs and wishes as demanding as one’s own, the harder it becomes to treat a person as a thing”.

Hence, in her contention a “moral vision” of the Good ,i.e., an attentive vision of reality humbles one’s sense of self, and invokes a morality premised upon love and empathy for the other⁶. The code of conduct derived from this “morality as empathetic love” is always aimed at perfection and betterment, because (as already mentioned) suppression of the self in pursuit of reality as is remains an unending pursuit. With the result, two outcomes follow: one, this quest for Good as ‘moral perfection’ inspires a form of love that produces an increasing sense of direction for moral action, such that the love of moral perfection becomes “a natural producer of order” in human societies. Two, moral actions premised upon this love for perfecting one’s attentive vision of reality becomes characteristically non-possessive. As Murdoch (2014, 64) explains using the analogy of art: 

[…] great art teaches us how real things can be looked at and loved without being seized and used, without being appropriated into the greedy organism of the self.

Hence, Murdoch surprisingly claims that a moral action inspired by the idea of Good “[. . .] has nothing to do with purpose, indeed it excludes the idea of purpose. [This is because] The only genuine way to be good is to be good ‘for nothing’ in the midst of a scene where every ‘natural’ thing, including one’s own mind, is subject to chance, that is, to necessity” (Murdoch 1970, 69). In other words, Murdoch (2014) argues that true goodness is “pointless”; it is detached from personal motives or pursuits of rewards, such that, to be good “for nothing” is to detach the logic of one’s moral actions from the rational calculations of personal gains, recognition, or from the egoistic self-pat of fulfilling one’s duty. Interestingly, this form of goodness ‘for its own sake’ is possible only when one fully recognises the contingency of human existence, given the vicissitudes of the natural world. For only when one chooses to act despite the nihilistic implications of the temporality of existence for one’s sense of self, can an individual actually claim to have acted truly from the love of goodness and moral perfection. She therefore states that the possibility for being morally good arises only through the aspiration for an exactness of vision ,i.e., an attentive pursuit of reality through the humbling of one’s sense of self. In other words, to be good is to love reality in its most real form: “‘Good’: ‘Real’: ‘Love’” (Murdoch 1970, 41).

3.2. Freedom, Equality & Justice: An Alternative Worldview 

Now, what is the implication of this moral framework of Good as love for the real for an individual’s quest for equality, freedom and justice? How can it resolve the incommensurability between absolute freedom and substantive equality within liberal-democratic societies without reducing the meaning of justice to mere ‘tolerance’? To understand this, it is imperative to begin with a distinction that Murdoch draws between two versions of freedom: 

Freedom is, I think, a mixed concept. The true half of it is simply a name of an aspect of virtue concerned especially with the clarification of vision and the domination of selfish impulse. The false and more popular half is a name for the self-assertive movements of deluded selfish will which because of our ignorance we take to be something autonomous (Murdoch 1970, 97).

Having identified these two halves of ‘freedom’ – one true and the other false – Murdoch’s moral framework re-situates the meaning of freedom from the contingent choices of one’s free will to a conscious quest for exactness or attentiveness in the perception of reality and the subsequent harbouring of a moral love which is ‘purposeless’ in the sense that it remains independent of one’s personal fantasy. “The freedom which is a proper human goal is the freedom from fantasy, that is the realism of compassion” (Murdoch 1970, 65). She accordingly defines freedom of action as the liberation of one’s motives from the fantasies of one’s will. For, once liberated from the will, such actions are rather motivated by an independent ‘moral vision’ of reality of individuals which comprises attention, love and humility. Furthermore, this selfless perception of reality reveals an underlying substantive equality amongst all individuals (owing to peoples’ collective vulnerability in the face of death and chance), the “[. . .] idea of a patient, loving regard, directed upon a person, a thing, a situation, [which this perception inspires], presents the will not as unimpeded movement but as something very much more like ‘obedience’” (Murdoch 1970, 39). Murdoch therefore reiterates the French philosopher and mystic, Simone Weil’s argument that ‘will is obedience not resolution’ (Murdoch 1970, 39, emphasis added).

Hence, within Murdoch’s framework, against an incommensurability between the striving for freedom and equality, it is the very pursuit of absolute freedom from one’s egoistic perception of reality, that produces a strong vision of substantive equality of all, such that actions of one’s free will arise out of an obedience to this ultimate Good, as an exercise of love. This is because Murdoch contends that an individual is not a product of one’s free will, but “[. . .] is a unified being who sees, and who desires in accordance with what he sees . . .” (Murdoch 1970, 39). Therefore, “By the time the moment of choice has arrived the quality of attention [what one sees] has probably determined the nature of the act” (Murdoch 1970, 65). Murdoch asserts that, “What should be aimed at is goodness, and not freedom or right action, although right action, and freedom in the sense of humility, are the natural products of attention to the Good” (Murdoch 1970, 69).This, then, is Murdoch’s alternative moral approach to liberalism’s politico-legal justice. Its nature, contrary to the liberal notion of rational discernment, is ‘pointless’. For it is equivalent to a quest for perfection towards an impersonal Good that determines the moral worth of individuals through the development of the right moral vision comprising of attention, love and humility. This conception of justice – which ‘connects goodness with attention to individuals’ (Murdoch 1970, 36) – does not evaluate the utility or dignity of ‘the other’ through a disenchantment or disengagement of the observing egoistic self from the world. Rather, by attentively indulging in an intimate affair with the unpredictability of reality from a humble, selfless standpoint, individuals come to premise their principles of justice upon an underlying sense of sameness stemming from their unanimous vulnerability: “We are all mortal and equally at the mercy of necessity and chance. These are the true aspects in which all men are brothers” (Murdoch 1970, 72). Her approach is accordingly a defense against a philosophical reduction of justice to a matter of balancing harms and benefits or exacting punishment proportional to the offense. Murdoch’s moral vision rather entails developing social institutions and practices that promote an environment where individuals are encouraged to see outside (not inwards) of their egos and engage with the world as it is out of a pure non-possessive love. She therefore equates the quality of an individual’s moral life or justice, with the quality of one’s attention.⁷

4. Conclusion

This paper argues that the crisis of ‘liberal justice’ stems from the perpetual incommensurability between the rights of disengaged rational-expressive modern selves who consistently question the legitimate grounds of their political obligation as liberal institutions tend to poorly address their subjective demands through rational procedures. To mitigate this problem, an alternative is proposed through Murdoch’s moral framework of restorative justice which addresses the importance of developing an approach to conflict resolution that integrates structural and institutional change with an individual’s moral and spiritual growth. This is because Murdoch’s justice stems from an alternative version of freedom and equality which pursues a liberation from one’s personal biases to see individuals as innately the same in their desire to survive their many vulnerabilities. Since this requires cultivation of empathy, attention, and a deep recognition of the humanity of others, it encourages individuals towards the virtue of ‘unselfing’ (Murdoch 1970, 82), i.e., towards developing a moral quality that focuses on reality without the distortions of self-interest, such that the “attentive perception” that is eventually attained helps individuals form a loving regard for the inherent worth of others. This view of justice then, not only arises from, but also aims to inspire love in the highest part of the soul; a love for personal perfection that invites a non-possessive contemplation of the Good by resisting absorption into the selfish dreams of the consciousness. Murdoch’s just individual is, therefore, a humble individual who ‘sees himself as nothing, [hence] can see other things as they are’ (Murdoch 1970, 101).

Notes

1.  This paper will particularly focus upon the classical liberal, liberal-democratic, utilitarian, perfectionist, behaviourist and existential arguments. ↩︎
2. A rational agent whose identity is based on continuous consciousness and personal experiences, rejecting innate ideas in favour of knowledge acquired through sensory experience and reflection. ↩︎
3. This paper highlights ‘liberal secularism’ as a distinct version of secularism given that the former is mostly focused upon structural separation, such that it may or may not emphasise upon individual rights to the same extent, whereas the latter categorically justifies this separation by harping upon the primacy of protecting individual rights, personal freedom, and autonomy. ↩︎
4. However, presently, the most acceptable approach seems to emphasise upon each individual’s unmediated, uninfluenced ‘personal commitment’ to form socio-political associations. Interestingly, the origin of this philosophical belief is also closely tied to the successive Protestant movements (especially Calvinist and Puritans) that varyingly recognised only that social order to be most stable which was brought about through a disciplined personal commitment of regenerated souls premised upon notions of responsibility and self-control. The ultimate moral objective of this social order was believed to be instrumental, i.e. to serve God’s purpose of preserving human happiness. Much as God deployed one’s self-love (the hedonistic instinct of the Fallen soul) to regenerate individuals, so can regenerated responsible souls establish a social order by instrumentalizing their self-love to strengthen personal commitment towards others. As is well known, Locke played a crucial role in secularising this theological claim and making the hedonistic human instinct for self-love and self-preservation as the basis for a universal socio-political order based on personal commitment.
   Today, more normative variants of this approach are found in the formulations of Kant, Rawls and even Nussbaum, among others, such that in their own conceptual frameworks, each of these thinkers emphasis upon the personal commitment of rational humans as sufficient enough to sustain a socio-political order through logics of benevolence and compassion. For, these emotional/rational responses originate from their self-responsible autonomous reason which, in turn, is instrumentalized to perverse the larger order of things. The previously held role of grace in sustaining this social order has therefore been replaced with the instrumental reason of humans. ↩︎
5. For an exploration of this argument, see Wendy Brown, Regulating Aversion – Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008.
   ↩︎
6. I would like to draw substantive distinctions here between Murdoch’s approach and another seemingly similar framework of Martha Nussbaum (2001, 2013). While the latter also alleviates the role of emotions within her normative framework, Nussbaum remains entrapped within the aforementioned rational-expressivist tussle even as she attempts to somehow bridge this distinction. With the result, despite the centrality she accords to love and empathy, Nussbaum continues to view them instrumentally, as one possible moral source of personal good (as against the ultimate ‘Good’) to guide human actions. Hence, Nussbaum’s heavy reliance upon the rational potential of emotions remains arguably subjective and morally self-centered. This contrasts with Murdoch’s belief that true moral development requires a constant striving for ‘unselfing’, i.e. moving beyond personal feelings and desires to a more objective vision of an external Good. ↩︎
7. Interestingly, Murdoch’s emphasis on perceiving reality as it truly is—independent of personal biases—to recognize the permanent existence of a transcendent Good that inspires purely unselfish love, ontologically parallels foundational assertions in classical Indian philosophy. In these traditions, primarily of Vedanta and Sankhya, attentiveness or ‘mindfulness’ to reality (prakriti) reveals its impermanence, contrasting with a more fundamental source of existence (Brahman, Paramataman, Siva, etc.). Consequently, individuals seek liberation by overcoming their erroneous sense of self, choosing instead to drive political/moral action out of love and duty detached from selfish ends. Furthermore, both philosophies tend to reject any public-private dichotomy when demanding morally disciplined action from individuals. For, Murdoch’s vision of moral improvement through selfless love of the Good influences all aspects of life, just as in Indian philosophy, the realization of higher truth and the practice of selfless duty (dharma) integrate seamlessly into both personal and public spheres. Hence, despite their underlying metaphysical differences, both perspectives converge to view morally disciplined actions as universal, permeating every facet of human interaction without being confined to either private or public domains. In fact, a comparative analysis of these frameworks to draw out alternative notions of justice serves as a rich arena for scholarly research.   ↩︎

References: 

Brown, Wendy. Regulating Aversion – Tolerance in the Age of Identity and Empire. Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2008.

Murdoch, Iris.  Sovereignty of Good. London & New York: Routledge Great Minds, 1970. 

Puri, Bindu. The Ambedkar-Gandhi Debate: On Identity, Community & Justice.Singapore: Springer, 2022. 

Siedentop, Larry. Inventing the Individual: The Origins of Western Liberalism. Cambridge, Massachusetts:  The Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2014.

Taylor, Charles. Sources of the Self – The Making of the Modern Identity. Cambridge, Massachusetts: Harvard University Press, 2001.