477 MURDOCH’S MORALITY: VISION, WILL, AND RULES The Journal of Value Inquiry 35: 477–491, 2001. © 2001 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands. Murdoch’s Morality: Vision, Will, and Rules NANCY SCHAUBER Department of Philosophy, University of Richmond, Richmond, VA 23173, USA There is a two-way movement in philosophy, a movement toward the build- ing of elaborate theories, and a movement back again toward the consid- eration of simple and obvious facts. . . . I wish. . .to attempt a movement of return. 1 In the opening pages of Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch says that there are certain facts, essential to moral philosophy, that have been forgotten, with the result that moral theorizing has gone off course. One of the important facts which Murdoch mentions is that love is a central concept in morals. In broad outline, Murdoch objects to the conception of ethics according to which morality is understood not in the image of vision, but of movement, and according to which goodness is not the object of insight or knowledge, but a function of the will. The sort of moral theory to which she objects typi- cally promotes the universal over the particular, action over character, and the impersonal over the personal. This sort of theory has not always dominated moral discourse. But the modern reorientation of moral theory has resulted in our forgetting important aspects of our lives. Murdoch identifies Kant as a catalyst for our collective moral amnesia. Murdoch objects to the Kantian idea that our moral duty can be discovered by the application of rules, and to the neglect of virtue in the Kantian and post- Kantian conception of morality. The Kantian insistence that moral agents must follow rules causes us to be insufficiently attentive to other individuals: dif- fering from one another, people warrant different treatment. Furthermore, a Kantian moral agent is too self-absorbed, since his actions focus on himself instead of others. Murdoch objects to rule-oriented moral theories because they employ a mere caricature of a moral agent’s concerns and they provide an inaccurate account of practical reason. By contrast, Murdoch holds that normative moral theorists must make room for the worth of inner experience. Moral philosophers have been beguiled by the elegant simplicity of formal moral theories. In fact, morality is beautiful, but messy, because ethical life is in the details. Murdoch thinks that the pitfalls of Kantian-style moral theory can best be addressed by reconceiving the moral life as centered around love. Because love draws us out of ourselves, in loving, we focus on others. The selfless attention of love enables us to see things as they really are. The per-