PROGRAM:

24th September
THB G011
10.00am coffee

10.30-11 Chrysa Sachpazi
“The Sublime Reconsidered: Murdoch’s Critique of Kant”

11-11.30 Ian Kidd
‘Moral vanity and the admiration of animals’

Keynote 1: 12-1pm Ellie Robson
‘The biologist amongst philosophers’: Mary Midgley’s Zoological Approach to Aristotle’s Ethics
1-2pm lunch

2.30-3pm Priyansha Malik
“Being Seen: Iris Murdoch’s Ethics of Attention and Its Moral Significance in Contemporary Loneliness”

3-3.30pm Férdia Stone Davis ‘Attending to the whole: worlds of meaning and disciplinary knowledge’

discussion 3.30-4pm

Keynote 2: 4-5pm Lucy Oulton ‘
The details of our world deserve our respectful and loving attention’: how Iris Murdoch attends beyond the human.’

REGISTER HERE TO ATTEND IN PERSON OR TO ATTEND ONLINE:

https://tinyurl.com/airesymposium

ABSTRACTS:

Chrysa Sachpazi: The essay explores the conceptual and ethical transformation of the Kantian sublime in Iris Murdoch’s philosophy. While in Kant the experience of the sublime ultimately reaffirms the authority of reason and the moral law -elevating the subject above the sensible world- Murdoch challenges this framework by redirecting attention toward the moral significance of reality itself. The essay argues that Murdoch resists the abstract and formal character of Kantian ethics, proposing instead a vision of moral life grounded in attention, humility, and responsiveness to the particular.

Ian Kidd: “Recent work in philosophy, ethology, and comparative psychology has increasingly documented forms of behaviour in non-human animals that appear morally significant: cooperation, reconciliation, empathy, fairness, consolation, caregiving, and self-sacrifice. Yet philosophers and the wider public often remain reluctant to describe these behaviours as instances of moral excellence. While we are prepared to recognise impressive cognitive abilities in animals, we hesitate to admire them as morally good. This paper asks why this reluctance persists, and offers an answer that draws on Midgley and Murdoch.

Existing explanations typically appeal to anthropocentrism, speciesism, or carnism. These accounts rightly identify cultural and ideological structures that privilege human beings, but they leave an important question unanswered. Why do these outlooks continue to exercise such imaginative and moral force, even in the face of growing empirical evidence? I argue that one neglected part of the explanation is moral vanity: a self-regarding vice that resists acknowledging excellence in others whenever doing so diminishes one’s own perceived moral status.

The paper develops this argument through a dialogue between Iris Murdoch and Mary Midgley. Murdoch’s account of attention provides a powerful moral psychology of vanity. For Murdoch, moral progress depends less upon sovereign acts of choice than upon disciplined attention to reality. The chief obstacle to such attention is the ego, which continually replaces reality with flattering fantasies. Vanity is therefore not merely excessive pride but a self-regarding disposition that prevents truthful perception. I argue that recognising moral excellence in animals is itself an exercise in Murdochian “”unselfing””: it requires relinquishing comforting assumptions about human exceptionalism and allowing the world to disclose values that are not centred upon ourselves.

Midgley’s philosophy complements this account by explaining how vanity becomes culturally entrenched. Throughout her work, and especially in her reflections on myth, Midgley argues that human beings understand the world through large-scale imaginative frameworks that organise perception before explicit reasoning begins. Among the most influential of these is the myth of human exceptionalism—the picture of humanity as occupying a categorically distinct moral realm. Midgley does not deny distinctive human capacities, but she consistently criticises exaggerated conceptions of human uniqueness that obscure our continuities with other animals. I argue that this myth provides the imaginative framework through which moral vanity operates, directing attention away from animal virtues and preserving a flattering image of ourselves.

Murdoch and Midgley together illuminate a neglected vice of moral perception. Murdoch explains why the self resists reality; Midgley explains the myths through which that resistance is organised. The concept of moral vanity explains what these myths protect: a conception of ourselves as uniquely moral beings. Rather than merely producing false beliefs, moral vanity shapes habits of attention, interpretation, and admiration. We become disposed to reinterpret, minimise, or explain away morally significant behaviour in animals whenever acknowledging it would undermine human claims to moral pre-eminence.

A distinctive feature of the paper is its emphasis on admiration. Contemporary debates in animal ethics overwhelmingly ask whether animals deserve moral consideration, possess rights, or are owed duties. Comparatively little attention has been paid to whether animals can be appropriate objects of moral admiration. I argue that this question reveals something important about our moral psychology. Overcoming moral vanity requires more than extending moral concern to animals. It requires cultivating the humility to acknowledge—and to admire—their moral excellences.

Priyansha Malik: “Theories of moral philosophy have always rested on the notions and concepts of Choice, will, obligation, and action. Morality is often understood as something which occurs at the moment of action. Iris Murdoch challenges this fundamental assumption by arguing that the decisive work of morality precedes action. At the focal point of this reorientation is her conception of attention, the disciplined effort to see the world and other persons truthfully with justice and love. For Murdoch, moral failure begins not with wrongful action but with a distorted perception, in which the ego, sustained by fantasy and self-concern, prevents reality from appearing as it actually is, creating a distortion. Ethics, therefore, becomes an ongoing practice of vision rather than merely a practice of right action.
Murdoch’s view of attention, which she presents as a moral perspective, is significantly different from the dominant views of 20th-century moral philosophy. Prevalent theories placed greater emphasis on autonomy, rational deliberation, and choice in the moral life. In contrast, Murdoch holds that moral thought begins with how we observe the world. The notion of attention involves not just concentrating on something but also wanting to see the world around us, especially people, correctly and kindly. The examples of M and D in the chapter on the Idea of Perfection demonstrate that genuine moral transformation may occur without any outward change in behaviour.  M’s moral transformation cannot be reduced to outward changes but to inward moral vision regarding D, as she starts to see her not through a distorting lens of pride, resentment, or possessiveness, but as an independent reality deserving of justice. Murdoch does relocate the focal point of morality from outward conduct to inward vision, arguing that the quality of our action depends on the quality of our vision. What happens to our ability to attend justly and lovingly to others when contemporary isolation turns us inward?
Contemporary loneliness is not essentially characterised by a lack of people but by a lack of attention. Murdoch’s ethics of attention offers a complementary philosophical and ethical paradigm shift through which loneliness can be understood in new ways, as a lack of just and loving attention. The far-fetched reach of digital communication has expanded the scope of interaction among people, yet it also highlights a paradox: interaction doesn’t guarantee attention. Contemporary loneliness is fundamentally grounded in this essential paradox: it cannot be explained simply in terms of the quantity of social relationships, but can also be examined in terms of the ethical perception that those relationships make possible. Contemporary loneliness carries an ethical cost; it weakens our ethical attention to a just and loving perception. By aligning Murdoch’s ethics of attention with the contemporary experience of loneliness, the paper views loneliness as not just restricted to sociological or psychological paradigms but also as having an ethical dimension. As per Murdoch moral progress depends upon the patient development of attention through which an individual resists fantasy, acknowledges the reality of others and becomes capable of genuine ethical responsiveness, this when kept parallel to contemporary experience of loneliness the ethical void contemporary loneliness creates tends to get filled.
This paper brings Murdoch’s theory of attention into conversation with a defining condition of contemporary life, “loneliness”. Discussions about the concept of loneliness have largely centred on the psychological, sociological, or physiological aspects of the subject; although these perspectives are indispensable, they do not fully capture the deficits people face in contemporary times due to a lack of “ethical attention”.

Férdia Stone Davis: “Things which we desire as ends, entirely for their own sake, can be quite complex and prolonged states and activities … Good examples of these complex wholes are the aims we set before ourselves in our personal relations, and also in the arts – in music, say, or in dancing or in mountaineering. In such matters, the fulfilment is distributed over a great spread of time and activity, much of which may be not at all pleasant. And the satisfaction seems to depend on regarding all these elements as parts of a whole, rather than as mere neutral means to a valued end (Midgley 1989, 16–17)

When purposes and values are knit comfortably into the great and small practical activities of life, thought and emotion move together. When this is no longer so, when action involves choosing between worlds, not moving in a world, loving and valuing, which were once the rhythm of our lives, become problems (Murdoch 1953, 75)

Both Murdoch and Midgley are acutely aware of the dangers that arise when one loses sight of the whole. At its foundation, for each thinker, the whole is the human person considered as a complex of thought and emotion. Resisting this leads to a fragmentation wherein morality becomes reducible to the movement of the will in abstraction from feeling (Murdoch, 2001 [1970]; Midgley 1989), and knowledge is identified with function rather than value. In this contribution, I will examine how this lack of attention to the whole has impacted conceptions of knowledge in higher education, leading to over-disciplining. In particular, I will discuss how the emergence of artistic research, specifically, research in the arts, challenges certain conceptions of knowledge, and thus particular modalities of knowing and, indeed, being.
I will outline key synergies between Murdoch and Midgley, including the necessity of means and ends coalescing, as well as purposes and values, pointing towards their integration within what Polanyi calls personal knowledge (1964 [1958]). I will then demonstrate how research in the arts implicitly advocates for knowledge that involves the whole person, values both process and object in terms of the knowledge it produces (it does not simply seek to “extract” information), and values and integrates the researching subject with the artistic object. Despite the potential that such a model of research opens up, I will note how, perhaps due to the pressures exerted by hierarchies of research, theorisations of artistic research have largely been assimilated to the scientific paradigm.
Without saying unequivocally whether artistic research should draw on the sciences in conceiving its own task, I will note that ongoing conversations tend to dichotomise the two enterprises, creating a myopic and distorting binary. So, for example, it is widely recognised that science does not simply “uncover” how things are in a neutral fashion, but in conducting experiments, constructs what is uncovered, at least partially (cf. Arabatzis 2014). Yet perhaps this is not adequately reflected in discussions about artistic research. Likewise, there is much work that is being done on the aesthetic dimensions of scientific experimentation, including the role of aesthetic value in theory choice and experiment design (cf. Ivanova 2023).
Aside from distortions, the strict mapping of disciplinary domains can be to the detriment of knowledge as a holistic enterprise. It can lead to an over-determination of what counts as knowledge, snobbishness about certain kinds of knowledge, especially those, like artistic research, that might be said to involve emotion, and to the fragmentation of the epistemic endeavour. We must ask: why must we choose between worlds, as Murdoch notes, and in doing so favour modes of knowing that might be perceived as neutral? Moreover, what impact does this have on us and our ability to embrace our complex nature as thinking and feeling beings, and upon education and research as sites of personal formation and transformation.”