"Being good is just a matter of temperament in the end"
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Murdoch’s line lands like a gentle heresy: after all our moral striving, all our self-mythologizing, goodness may come down to the kind of person your nerves, appetites, and attention naturally make you. It’s disarming because it refuses the flattering modern story that ethics is mostly a set of choices we heroically author from scratch. “Temperament” drags morality back into the body and the psyche: the baseline level of patience you have, the ease with which you envy, the speed at which you forgive, the default direction of your gaze.
The subtext is not that morality is pointless, but that it’s less about grand decisions than about the slow, often invisible training of perception. Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy are obsessed with how people mis-see each other: they turn lovers into props, friends into mirrors, strangers into abstractions. If being good is temperament, then the moral battleground is not the courtroom of reason where we make arguments; it’s the everyday theater of attention where we decide what is real enough to matter.
Context matters here: Murdoch wrote against mid-century moral theories that treated ethics like rule-following or clean rational calculus. Her “temperament” is a rebuke to moral vanity and a warning about moral luck. Some people start closer to kindness; others start closer to cruelty. The unsettling implication is political as well as personal: any culture that treats virtue as pure merit will inevitably punish the wrong people and reward the merely well-disposed.
The subtext is not that morality is pointless, but that it’s less about grand decisions than about the slow, often invisible training of perception. Murdoch’s fiction and philosophy are obsessed with how people mis-see each other: they turn lovers into props, friends into mirrors, strangers into abstractions. If being good is temperament, then the moral battleground is not the courtroom of reason where we make arguments; it’s the everyday theater of attention where we decide what is real enough to matter.
Context matters here: Murdoch wrote against mid-century moral theories that treated ethics like rule-following or clean rational calculus. Her “temperament” is a rebuke to moral vanity and a warning about moral luck. Some people start closer to kindness; others start closer to cruelty. The unsettling implication is political as well as personal: any culture that treats virtue as pure merit will inevitably punish the wrong people and reward the merely well-disposed.
Quote Details
| Topic | Ethics & Morality |
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