The Sovereignty of Good

This new edition contains an introduction by Mary Midgley, who was an exact contemporary of Iris Murdoch at Oxford during the war. She likens the text to CS Lewis's The Abolition of Man, which is also a debunking of the reductive ideas of mainstream culture that one also finds reflected in the personalities of heroes in contemporary novels. There are three essays on Perfection, God and Good, and the sovereignty of Good over other ethical concepts. They are lucid and erudite disquisitions accessible to the more informed general reader. Murdoch transcended the usual restrictions of Oxford philosophy by including existentialism. At the beginning of her third essay, she makes the interesting remark that the development of consciousness in human beings is inseparably connected with the use of metaphor, especially space, movement and vision. As Mary observes, defence of the good is unfashionable, but it is well worth revisiting and more satisfactory then many of the substitutes proposed since then.