The Philosopher-Novelist

Along with Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch was one of the “Oxford Quartet” of moral philosophers. Most famous for her novels like The Bell, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea (which won the Booker Prize in 1978), Murdoch also made hugely important contributions to moral philosophy.

Murdoch believed that morality is objective—that is, that there are truths about it, regardless of what anyone thinks or does; the only problem is that it’s hard to grasp. Even with the best will in the world, we don’t always perform the best actions. For instance, you decide to surprise your friend with flowers, only to find that this friend is allergic. But that actually gets to one of Murdoch’s further points: if we want to be kind to each other, we have to get to know each other. Really seeing people is a crucial aspect of morality—and a difficult one. After all, how can you ever really know another person’s experience? You’ve never been inside their head; you’re trapped in the prison of your own subjectivity.

On that score, Murdoch really liked what Simone Weil (another thinker in our series) had to say: we have to set aside our own wants and needs and biases, and open ourselves up to other people. Murdoch called this “un-selfing,” and said we need to get out of our own head, get out of our own way, and come to know the person we’re talking to. Then we can fully love and care for them. As Murdoch put it, “We cease to be, in order to attend to the existence of something else.”

Murdoch acknowledges that it can be hard, in the real world, for people to do all this. After all, we human beings are lazy; we’re egocentric; and we’re not born with the capacity to read other minds. But even though we start out that way, Murdoch believes that if we work hard enough, we can become better people. She’s calling us to a lifetime of effort on our souls, so that someday we’ll have an easy time doing the right thing.

But what about now? How do we do the right thing in this moment, as the fallible people that we are? Interestingly, Murdoch wanted us to zoom out and stop focusing so much on these isolated moments of decision. Sure, we have to make choices, but that’s not the most important part of morality. The key thing is gradually turning ourselves into better people. And even if the point of turning ourselves into a better people is ultimately to make better choices, we can’t just focus on moment-to-moment decisions. That would be like getting better at sprinting by focusing really hard on the starting gun. We’ve got to train, practicing on low-stakes situations so that we’ll perform better in high-stakes situations.

We may still be left with a worry. Paying closer attention to those around us may well make us better friends, better partners, and better family members. But what about the people we don’t know and will never meet? How should we make ourselves more moral in relation to them? Our guest, Eva-Maria Düringer from the University of Tübingen, will surely have an answer.

So is Thomson saying that even if the consequences are good, it’s never ok to cause harm to another person? Not quite! Here’s where yet another fascinating thought experiment comes in.

Here, you wake up in a hospital room and discover a whole bunch of tubes and wires coming out of your body. Where do those tubes go to? Answer: a violinist! It’s the greatest violinist of your age, and that violinist is very ill. The doctors have hooked the two of you up so that you can keep the violinist alive. The treatment will last, oh, about 9 months, at which point you’ll be free to go. But for now you are the violinist’s life support system. 

Do you need to stay in the hospital, hooked up to all these tubes? Or are you ethically entitled to leave? You never agreed to this. And as Thomson argues, no one is entitled to use your body without your consent—not even the greatest violinist in the world. Here, it seems, you are permitted to cause a degree of harm to another person, just as you were in the trolley case.

Believe it or not, the violinist thought experiment is designed to teach us something about the ethics of abortion. We’ll find out more about that, about Thomson’s moral theory, and about her delightfully outlandish thought experiments from our guest, who actually studied with Thomson. It’s Elizabeth Harman from Princeton University, author of “Creation Ethics: The Moral Status of Early Fetuses and the Ethics of Abortion.”