The Annual of the Society of Christian Ethics

Volume 20, 2000

Moral Change and the Magnetism of the Good

This paper enlists the resources of Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy to argue that much of contemporary ethical discourse has become inarticulate about the idea of moral change qua change of consciousness. Tracing this inarticulacy to the eclipse of a notion of consciousness in three dominant forms of current moral discourse (liberal ethics, various forms of moral particularism, and postmodern ethics), the paper argues that these forms of ethics neglect the idea of moral change in favor of an emphasis on public and communal forms of moral language and moral reasoning. The paper's constructive thesis is that Murdoch's retrieval of the idea of consciousness, guided by a twofold notion of the good, provides critical resources for a recovery of the idea of moral change. In particular, her normative account of the work of moral imagination encourages moral agency in a cultural situation in which consciousness is increasingly formed by abstract systems and a global flow of images that are seemingly impervious to moral evaluation.