Murdoch’s Platonistic virtue ethics

Abstract

In this paper I develop a thesis about normative ethics that we might call Platonistic virtue ethics (PVE): Good agency in the truest and fullest sense presupposes the contemplation of the Form of the Good. I explore PVE as an alternative to the more familiar Aristotelian virtue ethics, asking what it might mean, for us to day, to do anything like contemplate "the Form of the Good". In particular I suggest that Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy has at its heart a conception of contemplation or attention that genuinely is, as she thought it was, an inheritor of Plato’s key ethical concerns, and give some examples to show what is involved in this conception