Love, Respect, and Individuals: Murdoch as a Guide to Kantian Ethics

European Journal of Philosophy 25 (4):1844-1863 (2017)
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Abstract

I reconsider the relation between love and respect in Kantian ethics, taking as my guide Iris Murdoch's view of love as the fundamental moral attitude and a kind of attention to individuals. It is widely supposed that Kantian ethics disregards individuals, since we don't respect individuals but the universal quality of personhood they instantiate. We need not draw this conclusion if we recognise that Kant and Murdoch share a view about the centrality of love to virtue. We can then see that respect in the virtuous person cannot be blind to the individual, as critics of Kantian ethics contend. My approach contrasts recent efforts to assimilate Kantian respect to Murdochian love, which overlook Murdoch's distinctive claims about the singularity of moral activity. This idea is not as un-Kantian as it seems, and it should inform any Kantian ethics that aims to address the charge about individuals.

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Melissa M Merritt
University of New South Wales

Citations of this work

Getting the measure of Murdoch's Good.Clare Mac Cumhaill - 2020 - European Journal of Philosophy 28 (1):235-247.
The aesthetics of coming to know someone.James H. P. Lewis - 2023 - Philosophical Studies (5-6):1-16.
Art, Beauty and Morality.Chiara Brozzo & Andy Hamilton - forthcoming - In Mark Hopwood & Silvia Panizza (eds.), Murdochian Mind.
Virtue.Maria Silvia Vaccarezza - 2022 - In Silvia Caprioglio Panizza & Mark Hopwood (eds.), Murdochian Mind. Routledge. pp. 183-196.

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References found in this work

Two kinds of respect.Stephen L. Darwall - 1977 - Ethics 88 (1):36-49.
Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals.Immanuel Kant - 1785/2002 - In Practical Philosophy. Cambridge University Press. pp. 37-108.
Critique of Pure Reason.Wolfgang Schwarz - 1966 - Philosophy and Phenomenological Research 26 (3):449-451.
Love as a moral emotion.J. David Velleman - 1999 - Ethics 109 (2):338-374.
Metaphysics: A Contemporary Introduction.Michael J. Loux & Thomas M. Crisp - 1997 - New York: Routledge. Edited by Thomas M. Crisp.

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