ABSTRACT
Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals (MGM) is a challenging text. It has been dismissed by its critics as a ‘rambling, repetitive ragbag of a book’, and even Murdoch’s staunchest defenders have sometimes struggled to incorporate it into their readings of her work. In this chapter, I suggest that if we approach the book in the light of Murdoch’s own guidance on what she is trying to achieve, the text will make a great deal more sense. MGM may be difficult, but it is also an extraordinarily original and ambitious attempt to confront some of the most fundamental problems of moral philosophy and of moral life itself. The goal of the text, as Murdoch articulates it herself, is to explore the way in which philosophical theory connects with our ‘day-to-day and moment-to-moment pilgrimage’—or in other words, the connection between moral philosophy and everyday life. In order to understand the book correctly, we need to see Murdoch as addressing us not merely as moral philosophers, but as human beings. Rather than a failed attempt to provide a systematic moral theory, MGM is a carefully and intentionally structured exploration of the possibilities—and limits—of philosophical theorizing itself.
