Cora Diamond:

A great difference between Murdoch and contemporary moral philosophy lies in the very idea of moral philosophy as such a set of debates. From Murdoch’s point of view, these debates are set up, in the sense in which she speaks of the “world of facts” as something which philosophers have “set up.” What are taken to be “the problems of the field” will invariably involve background ideas — ideas taken to be unproblematic, not in question in the debates that define the field as it is taught. The shaping of such debates depends on a picture of the world and a picture or group of related pictures of the soul; deep moral attitudes are embedded in these pictures. The bringing to awareness of such compelling pictures and of their historical and cultural connections, the opening up of alternative ways of understanding moral philosophy, is itself a task of philosophy, to be set over against the conception of it in terms of a set of debates.

Here I shall borrow an argument made by Talbot Brewer, in relation to Elizabeth Anscombe and her radical criticism of moral philosophy. The force of such criticism is utterly missed, Brewer argues, when an attempt is made to fit it into the structure of moral philosophy as a set of debates. When moral philosophy is set out and taught as involving a “well-defined field of questions,” with “a series of competing answers to these questions,” we make it unnecessary for ourselves or our students to take seriously the “fundamentally conflicting views concerning … the main questions and concerns of the field itself” — a field that is “perpetually concerned with the proper specification of its own focal preoccupations.” He speaks of moral philosophy as having a “fundamentally reflexive subject matter,” a reflexiveness that is inconsistent with setting out the subject in terms of such a set of debates. When we try to take the ideas of a radical critic like Anscombe as a contribution to such debates, we “normalize” her views, pull the sting from them.

While Brewer’s argument — about how radical criticism can be normalized by being fitted into “the debate” — refers directly to Anscombe, it applies also to Murdoch; indeed Brewer brings out the similarity of some of their central concerns. Their view of analytic moral philosophy was that of insiders, but they had double vision: they saw it also in its cultural context, saw its unacknowledged commitment to specific values. They were themselves committed (though in quite different ways) to an understanding of the moral realm deeply at odds with the conventional understanding, hence their sharp awareness of what was taken for granted and what was hidden from view in that understanding of moral philosophy — of what its problems were, how they could be addressed, and what would constitute progress in their resolution.

Brewer brings out the generality of the issue that surfaces in their writings and in the reception of their writings: when moral philosophy is normalized, the problematic character of the relation between the wider culture and the construction of moral philosophy is suppressed. Normalization is a continuing process, as emerges in the recent construction of a debate about the relevance of empirical investigation to moral philosophy, so far as the construction of the debate excludes a conception of empirical investigation like Murdoch’s and takes serious attention to what is available in human experience to be attention to what is available through the methods of the various empirical sciences. Murdoch the explorer begins from the felt tension between moral philosophy shaped in a taken-for-granted way, moral philosophy as we present it to students and to ourselves, these problems, these arguments, these possible approaches — and moral philosophy as continually needing to question what its own concerns are or may be, what modes of thinking it may have cut off from consideration, what conceptual configurations it has built into its own understanding of the world it investigates.

(Cora Diamond, “Murdoch the Explorer”)