Ethics, Identity and Culture: Some Implications of the Moral Philosophy of Iris Murdoch

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Abstract
As a moral philosopher Iris Murdoch has emphasized that the identification and description of our inner states of being should once more become part of the data of ethics, as it was in traditional ethics. There has been, in fact, an over‐emphasis on such activities as ‘making choices’ and ‘giving reasons’. I attempt to argue in this paper that Iris Murdoch does not simply imply a theory of language usage, but believes that the task of moral philosophers should be to try to describe our personal struggles to express our inner moral experience. She argues that the metaphor, as central to a living language, plays a vital part in this attempt. I try to show how important this view of the inner meaning of language is for both identity and culture, and to indicate the educational implications.

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