ABSTRACT
This chapter explores love and its relation to Good in Murdoch’s philosophical thinking. With love at its heart, Murdoch’s moral vision is not easily relatable to modern philosophy’s characteristic oscillation between rationalist and emotion-based moral outlooks. Murdoch summons Plato, who holds that eros both orients us and attracts us towards the Good. The chapter teases out and reflects on Murdoch’s distinctive version of those Platonic themes. Murdoch also invokes the role of love in Christian thinking and life. She reads Christian love through Plato, however, and thereby partly misreads it. That love is ‘knowledge of the individual’ is a profoundly important Murdochian theme. Even so, Murdoch’s ‘progressivist’ formulations of it—e.g. love is an ‘endless task’ of knowing another—risk deflecting appreciation of love as genuine presence, here, now, to the reality of another. Martin Buber’s I-Thou orientation is also invoked to spell out this concern. Murdoch does not say that ‘love is all you need’. She recognises duty and axioms as other important ‘modes of ethical being’. The chapter ends by asking whether, despite the merits of this framing, another element of loving encounter with others is deflected by it.
