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Thinkers

Iris Murdoch

Analytic · Europe · 1919 to 1999

Irish-born philosopher and novelist who held that goodness grows through patient, loving attention to other people.

What it is

Iris Murdoch (1919 to 1999) was an Irish-born British philosopher and novelist. As a philosopher she is best known for her moral philosophy, which draws on the analytic tradition she was trained in, on Continental thinkers, on Christianity and on Hindu and Buddhist thought, and which is built around a Platonic idea of the Good. As a novelist she wrote about good and evil, love and the power of the unconscious, and won the Booker Prize in 1978.

She was born in Dublin and moved to London as a small child. At Oxford in the early 1940s she studied alongside Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley, all of whom became important philosophers. She taught at Oxford from 1948 to 1963, and was made a Dame in 1987.

The main ideas

  • Against ethics as choice. Many philosophers of her time saw morality as free choice among values. She rejected this, and held that there is a moral reality outside ourselves that we can know.
  • Other people are real. To be moral, she said, is largely to see other persons as they really are, one at a time. What blocks us is fantasy and ego, what she called the "fat, relentless ego".
  • Attention. Moral life is mostly a matter of how we look. Her stress on attention, not just choice, is often named as her lasting contribution to moral philosophy.
  • The Good. She was a Platonist about the Good. We come to understand it by knowing and loving what is good in particular things, in people, in art, in nature and in ideas, and moving up towards the Good itself.
  • Love and unselfing. In her view, morality means turning attention away from the self and towards what is outside it.

What it looks like in practice

Think of a time you judged someone quickly, and later saw that you had not really looked at them. Murdoch would say that the moral work happened in the looking, before any decision was made. She would ask what in you, such as fantasy, resentment or vanity, was getting in the way of seeing. This is an illustration of her line of questioning, not a passage from her writing.

Books and moments

  • Under the Net (1954) was her first published novel.
  • The Sea, The Sea (1978) won the Booker Prize.

Questions and criticism

  • Hard to classify. Her ethics is linked with virtue ethics, care ethics and particularism, yet fits none of them, which makes it hard to place in debates.
  • Is the Good real? Her Platonic moral realism goes against the main current of twentieth-century Anglo-American ethics, which was sceptical of such a view.
  • Can attention be learned? If morality is about attention, it is fair to ask how one trains it, and whether it is enough on its own.

Close neighbours

Plato is the source of her idea of the Good, and Simone Weil and Jean-Paul Sartre both influenced her, one as a guide and one as a view she argued against. The pages on Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot and Mary Midgley show the other women philosophers who studied alongside her at Oxford.

Written by epchē in our own words, and checked against independent sources on 29 October 2026. The sources are listed below.

Who they connect to

Influenced

  • Mary Midgley · She belonged to the same circle of women philosophers at Oxford and shared her view of moral life. (scholars disagree about this link)

Influenced by

  • Plato · Her book on the Good draws on Plato's picture of the Good as a sun.
  • Simone Weil · She took from Weil the idea that attention is the heart of the moral life.

Other Analytic thinkers

Sources we used

  • Iris Murdoch · Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy, read on 29 October 2026
  • Iris Murdoch · Wikipedia, read on 29 October 2026
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