Talk 1: Moral Vision and The Idea of Perfection
(Wednesday 11th March, 10:00-12:00 - Room: CTC.2.02)
Murdoch presents a ‘rival soul-picture’ to the one that (she thinks) dominates modern moral philosophy. At the centre of Murdoch’s account of moral freedom is not concepts of will, choice, and action, but attention, imagination, and vision. As she puts it: ‘I can only choose within the world I can see, in the moral sense of “see”, which implies clear vision’. Crucial to Murdoch’s account of moral life is the idea of the infinite perfectibility of our vision.
Talk 2: God, the Good, and the Fat Relentless Ego
(Wednesday 11th March, 13:00 -15:00 - Room: CTC. 2.02)
Drawing on Freud and Christian thought, Murdoch identifies the key obstacle to our attaining a clear vision of reality: the fantasies of ‘the fat relentless ego’. Freedom, on her view, involves the struggle to escape the consoling fantasy-constructions of the ego. This, Murdoch suggests, requires a transcendent notion of the Good in reference to which we are pulled out of ourselves. The question here is whether we can maintain a notion of such a Good in a world without God.