Along with Elizabeth Anscombe, Philippa Foot, and Mary Midgley, Iris Murdoch was one of the "Oxford Quartet" of moral philosophers. Most famous for her novels like The Bell, The Black Prince, and The Sea, The Sea (which won the Booker Prize in 1978), Murdoch also made hugely important contributions to moral philosophy.

Murdoch believed that morality is objective—that is, that there are truths about it, regardless of what anyone thinks or does; the only problem is that it’s hard to grasp. Even with the best will in the world, we don't always perform the best actions. For instance, you decide to surprise your friend with flowers, only to find that this friend is allergic. But that actually gets to one of Murdoch’s further points: if we want to be kind to each other, we have to get to know each other. Really seeing people is a crucial aspect of morality—and a difficult one. After all, how can you ever really know another person’s experience? You’ve never been inside their head; you’re trapped in the prison of your own subjectivity.

On that score, Murdoch really liked what Simone Weil (another thinker in our series) had to say: we have to set aside our own wants and needs and biases, and open ourselves up to other people. Murdoch called this “un-selfing,” and said we need to get out of our own head, get out of our own way, and come to know the person we’re talking to. Then we can fully love and care for them. As Murdoch put it, “We cease to be, in order to attend to the existence of something else.”

Murdoch acknowledges that it can be hard, in the real world, for people to do all this. After all, we human beings are lazy; we’re egocentric; and we're not born with the capacity to read other minds. But even though we start out that way, Murdoch believes that if we work hard enough, we can become better people. She’s calling us to a lifetime of effort on our souls, so that someday we’ll have an easy time doing the right thing.

But what about now? How do we do the right thing in this moment, as the fallible people that we are? Interestingly, Murdoch wanted us to zoom out and stop focusing so much on these isolated moments of decision. Sure, we have to make choices, but that’s not the most important part of morality. The key thing is gradually turning ourselves into better people. And even if the point of turning ourselves into a better people is ultimately to make better choices, we can’t just focus on moment-to-moment decisions. That would be like getting better at sprinting by focusing really hard on the starting gun. We’ve got to train, practicing on low-stakes situations so that we’ll perform better in high-stakes situations.

We may still be left with a worry. Paying closer attention to those around us may well make us better friends, better partners, and better family members. But what about the people we don’t know and will never meet? How should we make ourselves more moral in relation to them? Our guest, Eva-Maria Düringer from the University of Tübingen, will surely have an answer.