For Iris Murdoch, morality is about love, not duties and rules

How does one precisely define love for purposes of defining morality?

The article’s author was very imprecise, defining love and morality in subjective terms relating to one’s personal outlook and perceptions of others.

I’m not at all interested in subjective morality.

The reason most philosophers have defined morality and ethics in terms of duties and obligations is precisely to try to remove subjectivity. I’m not saying anyone has been successful, but other approaches don’t appear to lead towards objective morality.

This concept isn’t actually particularly novel in ethics as the article suggests. I’d argue that Kantian ethics is based fundamentally on the notion of love for mankind, aka treating mankind as the ultimate end for all of our actions. Zizek and a lot of contemporary philosophers also talk about love’s power to transcend ourselves which is instrumental for being more altruistic.

The most common definition in Critical Theory right now for love is a willingness to expend effort for someone else’s wellbeing. Although this can be related to attachment, it can also be decoupled entirely from it, similar to the concepts in The Brothers Karamazov

This title may make Murdoch sound more didactic than she really was; her novels don't feature any traditional lovey-dovey happy endings.

The examples are a little flakey. For instance, a “change in perspective” can itself become a form of self-deception in which we choose to ignore or deny or distorts truths that are unpleasant to us. It’s one thing to be charitable and to restrain premature judgements or to recognize some kind of genuine prejudice operating within us. It’s another to be Pollyannish and to deny what you know.

But I didn’t come here to pick apart the article. Rather, I want to address the main thesis which concerns love, morality, and the relation between the two. The author mentions that there is precedent in certain religious traditions to link the two — it fact, you can also see precedent in philosophical thought, like that of the Greeks — but the terms are not really given anything resembling definitions.

So, what is morality? Morality concerns voluntary actions in relation to the good. What makes a good action? One that furthers the actualization of an agent’s nature, which is to say the good of the agent. This is why choosing to eat vegetables is generally morally good, because it provides us with nutrients that sustain and contribute to our flourishing, and morally bad to eat shards of glass, because these act in opposition to our flourishing, incompatible as they are with our metabolism and destructive given the composition of our digestive system. Morality is about the voluntary acts of the agent as they concern the good of the acting agent.

(Now, some may be surprised, given the common framing of moral questions as mostly or entirely concerning “the other”. The key is to understand that human nature is deeply social. To act in ways that are opposed to our social nature is detrimental to us. Thus, for a human agent to murder a human being, the most odious of acts, is for the acting human agent to do severe harm to themselves through the very act of murdering someone. The injustice of the act is deeply corrupting and destructive to the acting human agent.)

Now that we have a definition of what morality is, what is love? Love is a movement toward the good. Love can be classified into two kinds, namely, eros and agape. Eros is ascending love, or the agent’s willing of a good for the sake of his own good. The agent recognizes that he lacks some good that would perfect and actualize him as the kind of thing he is, recognizes it in another, and seeks that good for his sake. The agent seeks to receive. Apage, which in Latin is caritas from which we get “charity”, is descending love, or a willing of the good of the other. The agent seeks to give. Agape is a matter of actualizing the good of the other in some way, but acting for the sake of the good of the other also spiritually actualizes the good of the giver.

So, if morality concerns voluntary actions for the sake of the good, and love is a voluntary movement toward the good, then of course morality is intrinsically concerned with love.

The idea that morality is grounded in love rather than rules sounds appealing but it collapses once applied outside personal relationships. Love is subjective and unevenly distributed. People love their family more than strangers, their country more than foreigners. If morality is only love, then preference and bias become virtue. That is no foundation for fairness in law, politics, or daily life.

Rules and duties exist to correct for partiality. The point of justice is that it applies equally, even when love does not. A judge cannot acquit someone because she loves him, a doctor cannot favour a patient because he is charming. Love without principle too easily becomes nepotism or tribalism. The most brutal conflicts in history were driven by deep love for one’s own group, not lack of it.

Love matters for motivation. It can inspire people to act with kindness. But moral frameworks require more than sentiment. They need universality and consistency, which only rules and duties can provide. Murdoch’s vision mistakes a source of energy for the standard itself. Without shared norms, love does not scale beyond the private sphere.