Why love matters most

For Iris Murdoch, morality is not about duties and rules but stopping our ego fantasies and attending to others with love… she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil

Cathy Mason

Being in love is one of the most profound experiences we can have, one that can powerfully move us and irrevocably change the way we see ourselves, one another, and even the wider world. Literature and film often explore romantic love’s capacity to move us and radically alter our world (think of Romeo and Juliet, for instance), but this experience is not limited to romantic love: parents sometimes speak of experiencing overwhelming love at the first sight of their children, for example.

On the face of it, this powerful experience has little to do with morality. For many thinkers influenced by Immanuel Kant, there is no place for luck in morality, and accordingly little place for the emotions. Morality seems to have to do with helping others, regardless of who they are and whether we like or are emotionally connected to them or not. Morality, on this way of thinking, is about duties we have towards others, or demands that they can make of us. Love, on the other hand (whether romantic, familial, or love of friends) seems unpredictable, idiosyncratic and unique. We can love others for all sorts of reasons – Romeo and Juliet fall in love at first sight – and it is not something that anyone could demand of us, because it is not wholly under our control. As William Godwin memorably put it in 1793: ‘What magic is there in the pronoun “my”, that should justify us in overturning the decisions of impartial truth?’ I might especially love and care for my friends, my family and so on – but this might seem to have little to do with morality.

As a result, love (whimsical, unpredictable, unique) is often thought to be a rather separate matter from ethics (a matter of duties we hold towards all equally). At worst, the partiality that seems central to love can seem to conflict with the impartiality that seems to characterise ethics. And, at best, it may seem irrelevant to ethics. Few contemporary ethicists, in fact, give love a central role.

The philosopher and novelist Iris Murdoch, however, insists that love is not only morally relevant, but absolutely central to morality. She begins two of her most famous essays with assertions of the significance of love in ethics, claiming in ‘The Idea of Perfection’ (1962) that ‘love is a central concept in morals’, and in ‘On “God” and “Good”’ (1969) that ‘we need a moral philosophy in which the concept of love, so rarely mentioned now by philosophers, can once again be made central.’ Specifically, she suggests that, though our actual experiences of love may often fall short of it, attentive love is fundamental to morality.

But why does she think that love is so central? And is this an idea worth taking seriously today?…

https://aeon.co/essays/for-iris-murdoch-morality-is-about-love-not-duties-and-rules

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