Why Love is Central to Morality

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch insists that love is not only morally relevant, but absolutely central to morality.

Our vision, she thinks, largely determines how we go on to act: if I see you as my enemy, there will be no surprise when I start treating you like my enemy. If I had instead seen you as a potential friend, then I would naturally treat you with warmth and care. Acting rightly matters, she thinks, but how we act depends on how we see, principally on how we see other people.

To see why this is, Murdoch asks us to imagine a fraught relationship between a mother and a daughter-in-law, ‘M’ and ‘D’. M, she imagines, cannot bear D: she sees her as common, unpolished, and ‘lacking in dignity and refinement’. D’s accent and the way she dresses grate against M’s sense of decorum, and, again and again, M finds herself annoyed at D’s tiresome childishness. M, however, is a very ‘proper’ person who would never dream of acting improperly. Does her unfair assessment of D morally matter here?

It seems very intuitive here to think that M is doing something morally bad in conceiving of D as juvenile and vulgar. It is a snobbish and unfair way to think about D, and it is shaped by class and gender prejudices in concerning ways. But M is stipulated to have behaved beautifully to D despite this; she doesn’t overtly express her disdain for D or act contemptuously towards her. Still, we might think that how M sees D matters in and of itself. Thinking about others in a hostile and condescending way is morally significant even if it never eventuates in outward action. Murdoch thus suggests that vision is itself morally significant.

For Murdoch, this little vignette is representative of our moral lives as a whole. …Ultimately, she’ll suggest that love is what enables us to grasp important truths about others. Love, on her picture, both enables and constitutes treating others rightly.

Why do we find it so hard to see one another truthfully? Murdoch argues that the key problem here is the ego. The ego, she suggests, prevents us from seeing truly because it leads us to self-deceive or fantasise. These fantasies prevent us from seeing others as they really are, a process that is shaped by both social convention and (what she calls) ‘neurosis’.

To start at the beginning, Murdoch suggests that the ego makes it difficult to properly attend to one another. We often fail to see others adequately because the ego gets in the way and obstructs or distorts such vision. On Murdoch’s very loosely Freudian picture of the human psyche, the ego is anxious and utterly self-centred, utterly absorbed in itself and focused on protecting itself at all costs. It therefore ignores or distorts anything not directly relevant to the self or inconvenient to it, even at the cost of losing one’s grasp of reality. 

Read more here: https://aeon.co/essays/for-iris-murdoch-morality-is-about-love-not-duties-and-rules