ABSTRACT
In this chapter, I aim to suggest that Murdoch has influenced the contemporary development of the ethics of care and contributed to the constitution of an alternative ethics that calls our attention to ordinary lives by attending to ordinary details of language and expression. In redefining ethics as attention to ordinary life and care for moral expressivity, Murdoch, also Stanley Cavell, and Cora Diamond refocus it on ordinary lives, creating a disruption within mainstream ethics, understood here as an impartial conception of justice based on the primacy of rights attributed to autonomous, rational individuals, and as the application of general principles to particular situations. This alternative ethics is hence not ‘another’ ethics within the realm of ethics: it is the refusal of a species of normativity that proves to be radical and places Murdoch’s conceptions ‘off the map’ of contemporary ethics. I examine the present legacy of Murdoch’s ethics of attention and the enduring transformative power of ordinary ethics.
