Article 9: Does Good Exist Without God?
Does good mean anything? Does goodness exist? Yes and yes argues Iris Murdoch in her 1970 book “The Sovereignty of Good”. Her target was contemporary existentialist philosophy of which she sees Hume and Kant (who abhorred history and its implied notion of privacy) as the patron saints. Hampshire, Hare, Ayer, Sartre et al (who identified the true person with the empty choosing will) – were more recent, but wrong, advocates.
Their deconstruction of the person involves the denial of the true self and the inner private life. Thought as an interior monologue is empty - the inner life is nothing, only decision & action matter. Making decisions about outward action is all that matters or is significant. The will alone takes the place of complex web of motives & virtues. There is no such thing as morality - empiricism, as moulded by Russell & Wittgenstein, has expelled ethics from philosophy. This of course is the same conclusion (although by a more complicated route) as the scientific atheistic view of humanity as merely animals.
For the ordinary postmodern early twenty first century “person in the street” this view is both familiar and alien. On the one hand familiar, as the idea of the autonomous self constantly making choices is fundamental to consumerism. On the other hand the idea that the self is of no importance is intensely alien – the self is of overriding importance in consumerism, through advertising, psychotherapy, self help and a thousand other manifestations.
For Murdoch the existentialist denial of morality is unacceptable because goodness and love exist. For her they do not exist in God whom she describes as the ”single perfect transcendant non representable and necessary real object of attention”. As for her God does not exist her question is whether philosophy can replicate goodness as a similar transcendant object. Her answer, which seems largely unconvincing, as that goodness must exist transcendently because we all know it does. She takes unselfish behaviour in the concentration camp as the apotheosis of this; and appeals to art and beauty as goodness’s best expression. Beauty in her scheme is seen as a substitute for prayer. Despite some attempts to seek support from Plato her arguments do not convince, not least because of her repeated acknowledgement that we ultimately cannot understand good. It is like trying to look at the sun. She refers to “the invisibility or non-representable blankness of the idea of Good itself”. This is much less coherent than belief in God.
Two critics, Wilson and Bidisha, took the view that Murdoch's philosophical output consisted of nothing but "GCSE-style" essays on Plato. The freestanding transcendant nature of Good is not proved by these essays. This attempt at a middle way falters, as do the contemporary effots of humanism (Grayling, Dawkins et al) leaving the two fundamental alternatives – either atheistic science explains everything and there is no ultimate reality, purpose or meaning to life and to human beings; or there is God.