ABSTRACT
This chapter examines the significance of Iris Murdoch’s work on moral perception for the literature on moral agency in psychiatric ethics. I use my concept of evaluative perception as being essentially relational in character by comparison with the idea of virtuous uptake to the stance of the other in the therapeutic encounter in clinical practice. I identify the challenge of giving uptake to the other in therapeutic understanding with Murdoch’s perceived difficulty of loving attention in concept application more generally as a form of moral responsibility, which points to a discursive clinical tool for shared decision-making in psychiatric ethics. This deliberate move away from an overly individualistic conception of the moral self to an intersubjective one creates opportunities for self-cultivation in concept application and the normative grounding of concepts in the ethics of recognition across the standard patient/doctor dichotomies in mental health.
