Iris Murdoch's Moral Philosophy: Reframing the True, the Real, and the Good

This book explores Iris Murdoch’s metaethical thought. She is, it suggests, not simply a novelist with picturesque and provocative thoughts on love and attention, but an ambitious and systematic thinker whose work challenges some of the most deeply held assumptions of moral philosophy today. Murdoch’s insistence on the pervasiveness of the moral and the significance of ideas of perfection, it argues, lead to a sea change in metaethics. Implicit in her work are novel conceptions of key concepts such as truth, realism and the Good, and these come together to form an imaginative and attractive metaethics. The book examines her conceptions of these central philosophical ideas, as well as her answers to other questions that arise out of this system, such as the relation between knowledge and motivation and the purpose of morality.