Murdoch argued in "The Sovereignty of Good" (1970) against the mid-century Oxford view, shared by prescriptivists and existentialists alike, that morality is fundamentally a matter of will and choice. She held instead that moral life consists primarily in patient, just, loving "attention" to particular people and to reality, a form of moral perception that shapes and often precedes deliberate choice, reviving a broadly Platonic conception of the Good as a real, unifying value that disciplines the self away from self-serving fantasy.
Intellectual setting
Murdoch wrote against the dominant mid-century Oxford moral philosophy of R. M. Hare's prescriptivism and against Sartrean existentialism, both of which she saw as reducing morality to acts of will, drawing instead on Plato, Simone Weil, and her own work as a novelist to develop a moral psychology centered on perception and attention.
Key ideas
Moral attention
Murdoch argued that the central moral task is a patient, realistic, loving attention to other people and to the world, which shapes what options even appear available to the will; morality is thus rooted in perception and characterized attention, not merely in the moment of choice.
The sovereignty of the Good
Reviving a broadly Platonic picture, Murdoch treated the Good as a real, transcendent, unifying value, analogous to light in the allegory of the cave, that draws the self away from egoistic fantasy through a process she called "unselfing."
Legacy
Murdoch's "Sovereignty of Good" is a foundational text in the late twentieth-century revival of virtue ethics and moral realism, and her account of moral attention influenced later philosophers of moral perception such as Martha Nussbaum and Cora Diamond.