Cathy Mason at Aeon Magazine:
To see how Murdoch ends up thinking that love is central to morality, it is first worth asking a broader question: what is morality? Murdoch’s answer is that at the core of our moral life is the way we see the world, our ‘vision’ of it. We are always looking at something, in some manner, and in doing so we either build up a fairer, more just, more adequate picture of it, or we distort our vision of it. This is a continuous part of our lives.
Our vision, she thinks, largely determines how we go on to act: if I see you as my enemy, there will be no surprise when I start treating you like my enemy. If I had instead seen you as a potential friend, then I would naturally treat you with warmth and care. Acting rightly matters, she thinks, but how we act depends on how we see, principally on how we see other people.
Correspondingly, she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. On Murdoch’s picture, our most basic moral activities are activities of attending to particular things in particular ways, since this is the activity that shapes our vision of the world.
more here.
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