Iris Murdoch Quotes on Love

Iris Murdoch's Sovereignty of Good (1970) treats love — the just and disciplined attention to the reality of another person — as the principal moral activity and the primary access of the moral agent to the Form of the Good that magnetizes the moral life. Against the prevailing Oxford emphasis on choice and the language of moral judgment, Murdoch's Platonist framework focuses attention on the inner work of unselfing — the slow correction of fantasy and the projecting ego through which the morally serious person comes to see persons and situations as they actually are. The framework, developed across the philosophical essays and the late Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (1992), supplies the systematic background of the philosophical novels and remains one of the most influential contemporary philosophical accounts of love as a moral concept.