6. Contemporary Virtue Ethics: Iris Murdoch

About this Lecture

Lecture

In this module, we turn to another strand of virtue ethics, one that seems to derive more from the ethical thought of Plato than from Aristotle, focusing in particular on the work of Iris Murdoch.

Course

In this course, Dr Iain Law (University of Birmingham) thinks about virtue ethics, one of the three major normative ethical theories alongside utilitarianism and Kantian deontological ethics. We begin in the first module by providing a broad introduction to what virtue ethics actually is. After that, we turn to three methods of deciding what the virtues actually are: (i) the doctrine of the mean; (ii) the function argument, and (iii) the concept of eudaimonia. In the fifth module, we think about Aristotle’s views on how we might go about becoming more virtuous, before turning in the sixth and seventh modules to the arguments of two contemporary virtue ethicists: Iris Murdoch and Alasdair MacIntyre.

Lecturer

Iain Law is a Senior Lecturer in Philosophy at the University of Birmingham. His main interests are in meta-ethics, applied ethics and ethical theory, and he is currently working on papers in moral theory, moral psychology, the philosophy of medicine and applied ethics.