ABSTRACT
Iris Murdoch’s discussion of void can illuminate issues of violence, moral injury, and community that remain urgent matters globally. She offers a philosophical account of the psychological way in which certain forms of suffering can give rise to violence. It is an important contribution because Murdoch, who develops a phenomenology of moral experience, can thereby provide to other disciplines and discourses, which may lack an analytically ethical language, the means to bring forth the moral dimension of everyday life and how this dimension connects with violent extremism. Using Murdoch’s conception of void, this chapter engages Murdoch’s work with that of moral injury to provide the beginning of an account for political extremism grounded in her own philosophical anthropology, one that attempts to connect the experiential with the political.
