Iris Murdoch, Dorothy Emmet, and Bernard Williams: Convergences and Divergences in Counter-Traditions in 20th Century British Moral Philosophy

Lawrence Blum (University of Massachusetts, Boston)

Iris Murdoch, Dorothy Emmet, and Bernard Williams: Convergences and Divergences in Counter-Traditions in 20th Century British Moral Philosophy

Lawrence Blum, University of Massachusetts Boston

17th December 2025, Wednesday, 3pm - 4.30pm BST

Zoom link:https://zoom.us/j/91391091203?pwd=wXUGpcGflTvlc5Gqvmb8yVK3JEUsAL.1

Abstract

After introducing Emmet, I attempt a three-way comparison of some central themes in Emmet, Murdoch, and Williams. Emmet and Murdoch share a spiritual/religious interest not separated  from philosophy, that Emmet articulates. But Emmet, influenced by the British Hegelian-Idealist tradition and Henri Bergson, and with an unusual (for philosophers) grounding in anthropology and sociology, has a much more social conception of morality than Murdoch (or Williams), with the notion of a “role” as central. Morality concerns living together in organized societies. (I discuss some different notions of “social” in relation to morality.) By contrast, for Murdoch morality fundamentally concerns the unique individual encountering another unique individual. 

In two widely-discussed articles, “Critique of Utilitarianism” and “Persons, Character, and Morality,” Williams criticizes utilitarianism for both undermining and rendering incoherent human agency, and “impartial morality” (in Kantian and utilitarian forms) as making unreasonable demands on the moral agent. (His argument also reflects several other major themes in his later work, especially Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy.) But, though these criticisms are valid and deep, his overall conception of agency is too individualistic. It misses Emmet’s emphasis on the agent as embedded in webs of relationship, partly moral in character. And the impartialist view of morality he criticizes also fails to recognize as aspects of morality both Murdoch’s distinctive particularistic, non-impartialist, emphasis on attentive love toward the individual other, and Emmet’s social role morality. Thus the three have three differing critiques of Kantianism and utilitarianism/”impartial morality”. 

Emmet’s social conception is concerned with “the individual” in a manner that the social science focus on structures and institutions does not always take account of, but this is a different notion of "the individual" than the overly individualistic notion of the moral agent I am using her views to criticize in Murdoch and Williams.