Life & Wisdom Quote by Iris Murdoch

Moral passion, even when it’s wrong, at least admits that other people are real. That’s the provocation in Murdoch’s line: the world is messy, ethics are slippery, but the greater danger is the modern drift into a fog where nothing feels worth judging, wanting, or defending. “Misguided” is doing double duty here. It concedes that zeal can curdle into cruelty, dogma, or self-righteousness, yet it also implies a mind still attempting contact with the Good - Murdoch’s lifelong obsession, and not in the slogan sense. She’s arguing for moral attention as a discipline: to care, to look, to be corrected by what you see.

The subtext is a critique of a certain sleek, postwar sophistication: the stance of being above it all, treating values as private tastes and convictions as embarrassing. “Confused indifference” isn’t calm neutrality; it’s a failure of perception dressed up as tolerance. Murdoch, who wrote both philosophy and novels, understood how easily the self makes a cozy room out of its own preferences, calling that comfort “freedom.” Indifference becomes a moral alibi: if nothing matters, you can’t be responsible.

Context matters: writing in a mid-century landscape marked by ideological catastrophe, Murdoch refuses the fantasy that the answer is simply less feeling. She’s betting on a harder hope: passion can be educated. Indifference can’t, because it won’t even show up to class.