Abstract
This paper maps the concept of justice in Iris Murdoch’s thought with the dual aim of resolving critical dispute between Nussbaum and Antonaccio, and of exploring Murdoch’s gnomic statement that justice is ‘not in the moral spectrum’. Rooted in Murdoch’s annotations of works concerning justice by Plato, Kant, Schopenhauer, Weil and Foot (held in the Archive at Kingston University) which reveal their influence upon her developing thought, it analyses her presentation of this problematical concept in both her philosophy and fiction, with particular reference to Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, The Nice and the Good, A Word Child, Nuns and Soldiers, and The Green Knight. It concludes by corroborating Antonaccio’s claim that Murdoch’s work is strongly concerned with justice, though her aphorism remains unfathomable.
‘Do justice, love mercy, walk humbly with the Good’
With apologies to Micah 6: 8
‘Women are as a rule inferior to men in the virtue of justice’
Schopenhauer (1965: 151)
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Notes
- 1.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines justice as:
Exercise of judicial authority, quality of being right, rightfulness; uprightness, equity, vindication of right, administration of law, jurisdiction, infliction of punishment; the quality of being (morally) just or righteous; the principle of just dealing; the exhibition of this quality or principle in action; just conduct, integrity, rectitude; theol. Observance of the divine law; righteousness; the start of being righteous or ‘just before God’.
- 2.
The Oxford English Dictionary defines mercy as: Compassionate or kindly forbearance shown toward an offender, an enemy, or other person in one’s power; compassion, pity, or benevolence; the disposition to be compassionate or forbearing; the discretionary power of a judge to pardon someone or to mitigate punishment, especially to send to prison rather than invoke the death penalty; an act of kindness, compassion, or favour; something that gives evidence of divine favour; blessing.
- 3.
The Iris Murdoch Collections at Kingston University Archives are a diverse range of materials which have been presented over a period of time from a wide range of sources. Information on particular collections can be found on the Archive’s online catalogue at http://adlib.kingston.ac.uk.
- 4.
See, for example, Mark Luprecht’s essay, ‘A Most Uncritical Critique: Looking at Murdoch’s Textual Notes for Elias Canetti’s Crowds and Power (1962)’. Iris Murdoch Newsletter 19, 33–35.
- 5.
MLL 40, The Republic of Plato inscribed Iris Murdoch. St Anne’s, Oxford. October 1948.
- 6.
As it not possible to indicate sidelining, all markings are given as underlining here: there does not seem to be a significant distinction between Murdoch’s use of sideling and underlining.
- 7.
IML 14, Plato, Theaetetus. Unsigned, undated.
- 8.
IML 527, Plato Phaedrus & Letters VII AND VIII. Unsigned, undated.
- 9.
IML 3, Friedrich Solmsen, Plato’s Theology. Inscribed Iris Murdoch, Litton Cheney, July 15 1976.
- 10.
IML 2, Sir David Ross, Plato’s Theory of Ideas. Unsigned, undated.
- 11.
‘We have seen what the four possible attitudes towards, say, triangles and triangularity are:
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1.
looking at images (shadows or reflections) of sensible approximate triangles;
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2.
looking at sensible approximate triangles;
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3.
studying triangles with the help of sensible approximate triangles;
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4.
studying triangularity in the light of higher Ideas and ultimately the Idea of good.
What will be the corresponding attitudes towards, say, just acts and justice? We may conjecture that they will be:
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1.
contemplating shadows of εἴδωλα of justice, i.e. actions or institutions that are counterfeits of justice;
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2.
contemplating εἴδωλα of justice, i.e. particular approximately just acts;
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3.
contemplating the Idea of justice, but without seeing its logical dependence on the Idea of good;
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4.
contemplating the Idea of justice in its place in the whole hierarchy of Ideas and in its connexion with the Idea of good’ (Ross 1951: 77).
-
1.
- 12.
IML 17, Richard Lewis Nettleship (1846–1892: Fellow and Tutor of Balliol College, Oxford), Lectures on the Republic of Plato. Lonndon, Macmillan, 1962. Unsigned, undated.
- 13.
IML 263, Hugh Lloyd-Jones, The Justice of Zeus. Sather Classical Lectures, Volume 41. Unsigned, undated.
- 14.
Anthony Meredith Quinton (1925–2010) was Fellow of All Souls and New College and President of Trinity College, Oxford. Lady Marcelle Quinton is an alumnus of St Hilda’s College and an acclaimed sculptor. Herbert Lionel Adolphus Hart (1907–1992) was Professor of Jurisprudence at Oxford and Principal of Brasenose College. Jenifer Hart (1914–2005) was an historian and a colleague of Iris Murdoch at St Anne’s College. For an account of the intellectual atmosphere at Oxford in this era, see Nicola Lacey, A Life of H.L.A. Hart: The Nightmare and the Noble Dream (Oxford; Oxford University Press, 2014).
- 15.
Iris Murdoch, The Fire and the Sun: Why Plato Banished the Artists. This work was based on the Romanes Lecture which Murdoch gave in 1976.
- 16.
IML 1017 Kant, The Metaphysics of Ethics. Unsigned, undated.
- 17.
KUAS70/1/29.
- 18.
IML 1009 H.J. Paton (White’s Professor of Moral Philosophy in the University of Oxford), The Categorical Imperative: A Study in Kant’s Moral Philosophy. Inscribed Iris Murdoch, July 1947.
- 19.
IML 1005, Arthur Schopenhauer, On the Basis of Morality. Unsigned, undated.
- 20.
See David E. Cartright, Historical Dictionary of Schopenhauer’s Philosophy, Historical Dictionaries of Religions, Philosophies, and Movements, No.55 (series editor Jon Woronoff):
JUSTICE (GERECHTIGKEIT), Philanthropy and justice were Schopenhauer’s two cardinal virtues, the virtues from which all other virtues are derived. Neminem laede, the injunction to harm no one, summarized the virtue of justice, and he viewed the virtue of justice to be a person’s disposition to refrain from harming or injuring another. In a world populated by willful beings, all of whom are motivated to preserve their lives and satisfy their desires, conflict is inevitable, according to Schopenhauer. A just individual, he argued, is disposed not to act in ways that would cause others’ suffering, because of him or her compassion for another’s suffering. That is, the prospects of doing another misery would lead a just individual to refrain from doing as she or he had originally planned. Because Schopenhauer identified justice with not causing another misery or harm, as checking an individual’s natural egoism and malice, he saw it as the first degree of compassion, as a checking of egoistic or malicious motivations. Justice as the first degree of compassion is merely negative; it prevents a person from causing another suffering, something that does not yet exist.
- 21.
See, for example, Murdoch 1992: 63 and 364.
- 22.
Having met as undergraduates at Somerville, Murdoch and Foot shared the flat Seaforth in London during the war. They survived an emotional storm of Murdoch’s making, and Foot was the only person with whom Bayley could leave Murdoch in her last years. 250 letters from Murdoch to Foot from the early 1940s to the late 1980s document this remarkable relationship between two contemporary philosophers, and they also spent much time talking together.
- 23.
IML 931: The Notebooks of Simone Weil. Inscribed Iris Murdoch.
- 24.
IML 1047 Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices. Dedication: To Iris Murdoch. Inscribed Iris Murdoch Litton Cheney March 1979.
- 25.
See Hanna Fenichel Pitkin, Wittgenstein and Justice, Berkeley, Los Angeles and London University of California Press, 1972, chapter VIII, for an excellent unpicking of the quarrel between Socrates and Thrasymachus in Wittgensteinian terms of how the word justice is used.
- 26.
In Justice as a virtue: A Thomistic Perspective Jean Porter offers a usefully extensive account of justice in Aquinas’s thinking.
- 27.
White, F. 2010. Iris Murdoch and Hannah Arendt: Two Women in Dark Times. In Iris Murdoch and the Moral Imagination, ed. M.F.S. Roberts and A. Scott-Bauman, 13–33. Jefferson, NC: McFarland.
- 28.
The chapter, ‘Justice’, is 244 pages out of 472 which is 47.5% of the novel.
- 29.
Murdoch rejected Arendt’s forgiveness of Heidegger, but in The Green Knight she might be said to re-engage with Arendt’s thinking about the relationship between forgiveness and judgement—a sense that justice requires that evil-doers should not be released from the consequences of what they have done. Insight into this apparent impasse is offered in Arendt’s essay on Bertolt Brecht: ‘Every judgement is open to forgiveness, every act of judging can change into an act of forgiveness; to judge and to forgive are but two sides of the same coin. But the two sides follow different rules. The […] law demands that we be equal—that only our acts count, and not the person who committed them. The act of forgiving, on the contrary, takes the person into account; no pardon pardons murder or theft but only the murderer or the thief. We always forgive somebody, never something…’ (Arendt 1973: 245).
- 30.
Murdoch also informs Gaita’s study of remorse: see Frances White, ‘Past Forgiving?: the Concept and Experience of Remorse in the Writings of Iris Murdoch’, unpublished PhD Thesis, Kingston University, London (2010).
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White, F. (2018). ‘It’s like brown, it’s not in the spectrum’: The Problem of Justice in Iris Murdoch’s Thought. In: Browning, G. (eds) Murdoch on Truth and Love. Philosophers in Depth. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-76216-6_9
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