The Sovereignty of Good

The Sovereignty of Good is a book of moral philosophy by Iris Murdoch. First published in 1970, it comprises three previously published papers.

Publishing history
The philosopher D. Z. Phillips commissioned The Sovereignty of Good from Iris Murdoch as a contribution to Routledge & Kegan Paul's series "Studies in Ethics and the Philosophy of Religion", of which Phillips was editor. The book comprises three previously published papers, all of which were originally delivered as lectures.

The first essay, entitled "The idea of perfection", originated as Murdoch's 1962 Ballard Matthews Lecture in the University College of North Wales. It was published in The Yale Review in April 1964. "On 'God' and 'Good' ", the second essay, was Murdoch's contribution to the August 1966 meeting of the Study Group on Foundations of Cultural Unity at Bowdoin College. It was published in 1969 in The Anatomy of Knowledge, a collection of papers presented at the Study Group's 1965 and 1966 meetings. The book's final essay is "The sovereignty of good over other concepts", which was the Leslie Stephen Lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 14 November 1967. The lecture was published as a 37-page pamphlet in the same year by Cambridge University Press.

The first edition of The Sovereignty of Good was in hardcover, published in London in 1970 by Routledge. The first English paperback edition came out in 1971. Schocken Books published it in the United States, where the hardcover and paperback editions were published simultaneously in 1971. Routledge reprinted the paperback edition in 1974 and 1980. In 2001 Routledge reissued The Sovereignty of Good in both England and the United States as part of its "Routledge Classics" series. In 2013 the book appeared as a "Routledge Great Minds" edition with a foreword by Mary Midgley.

Historical context
The dominant schools of philosophy at the time when The Sovereignty of Good and its component essays appeared were existentialism in Europe and analytic philosophy in the English-speaking world. Iris Murdoch's moral philosophy argues against the central ideas of both these schools.

Her first book, Sartre: Romantic Rationalist, was published in 1953. Murdoch had met Jean-Paul Sartre after hearing him lecture in Brussels in 1945 when she was working for UNRRA, and was impressed with his existentialist philosophy at the time, although she later came to reject what she called his "Luciferian" view of a morality based on freedom and individual will rather than love and goodness.

The prevailing view among analytic philosophers at the time was that, as with physical science, statements about reality must be publicly verifiable as true or false, leading to the conclusion that the "states and activities of the soul in all their variety must be revealed in observed behavior" in order to be "classed as objective realities". Murdoch, on the other hand, disagreed with what she saw as analytic philosophy's consequent "rejection of the inner life".

Iris Murdoch's main influence in The Sovereignty of Good is Plato, at a time when, as her biographer Peter J. Conradi notes, to be "a Platonist in morals seemed as bizarre as declaring oneself a Jacobite in politics". Simone Weil, whose Notebooks Murdoch had reviewed in 1956, was an important influence on Murdoch's reading of Plato and on her philosophy generally. Weil's concept of "attention" to reality, including both other people and a transcendent Good, provided Murdoch with an alternative to the conventional view of an autonomous free agent's actions as the basis of morality.

The book is dedicated to Stuart Hampshire, Murdoch's fellow philosopher and former colleague at the University of Oxford, where she taught from 1948 to 1963. Hampshire's view of man as essentially "an object moving among other objects in a continual flow of intention into action", is also the main target of her argument in "The idea of perfection", the book's first essay.

Structure and arguments
The book's three papers were not originally intended to be published as a unit and do not depend on each other or refer to each other's arguments. They are unified by their aim of demonstrating the inadequacies of the prevailing philosophical accounts of moral life and replacing it with a new conception that includes a "moral reality external to ourselves" but each paper takes a different approach to this project. In "The idea of perfection", Murdoch describes an "ordinary and everyday" example of inner moral activity that cannot be accounted for within the current paradigm, and uses it to argue for a philosophical conception of morality that will allow us to say "what we are irresistibly inclined to say" about it.