'Seeing' human goodness. Iris Murdoch: A contemporary inquiry into the moral self

One recent advance in contemporary moral philosophy is Iris Murdoch's unique understanding of the concept of the moral self that remedies the enervated account of the other she associates with traditional ethics. This study demonstrates Murdoch's contribution to the field of ethical theory through her account of the moral self as becoming suitably other-directed through the dual practices of aesthetic perception and ego "unselfing." She explains the process as analogous to art appreciation. The study then compares and contrasts Murdoch's phenomenological vision of virtue ethics to the neo-Aristotelian conception of moral virtue as articulated by Philippa Foot, among others. Foot emphasizes the human will as central to the moral self and makes social rewards a necessary result of virtue. Foot's conception of virtue echoes the ancient effort to correlate well-being and character through the heroic struggle of an isolated ego, while Murdoch discounts the ego as the chief obstacle to seeing others clearly, and instead of emphasizing the rewards of virtue, she argues that it must express selfless love.;After examining the ethical ground occupied by Foot, the study turns to an extended analysis of Murdoch's process of aesthetic "seeing" through virtuous consciousness that leads to "unselfing" by acts of compassionate love. A chief advantage of this alternative account is that it explains how the aesthetic "seeing" of the other (and the de-centering of the self that follows) can be profitably understood in our endeavor to ethically treat others as they really are.