Iris Murdoch on the Fact/Value Distinction

I had occasion this week to revisit some of Iris Murdoch's writings while working on a professional article, and I found myself meditating on the rich opening passage of her chapter on "Fact and Value" from Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. The final remark of the passage--focusing on what she takes to be the work of the moral philosopher--struck me as particularly significant for my own work. And it was especially resonant in light of a complementary account of the aims of moral philosophy offered by Murdoch in an earlier essay, "Vision and Choice in Morality." Since her thoughts connect with issues that tend to inspire the regular readers of this blog, I share both passages here (with some elipses, simply because it would otherwise be a lot of typing). (Note that while Murdoch was not a naturalist, she was also not a theist. She ended up embracing something like a Platonic conception of "the Good" as the ground for morality as we encounter it.)

From Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals:

A misleading though attractive distinction is made by many thinkers between fact and (moral) value. Roughly, the purpose of the distinction (as it is used by Kant and Wittgenstein for instance) is to segregate value in order to keep it pure and untainted, not derived from or mixed with empirical facts. This move however, in time and as interpreted, may in effect result in a diminished, even perfunctory, account of morality, leading (with the increasing prestige of science) to a marginalisation of 'the ethical'...This originally well-intentioned segregation then ignores an obvious and importan aspect of human existence, the way in which almost all our concepts and activities involve evaluation. A post-Kantian theory of morals: survey the facts, then use your reason. But, in the majority of cases, a survey of the facts will itself involve moral discrimination...The moral point is that 'facts' are set up as such by human (that is moral) agents...In many familiar ways various values pervade and colour what we take to be the reality of our world....To say all this is not in any way to deny either science, empiricism or common-sense. The proposition that 'the cat is on the mat' is true, indicates a fact, if the cat is on the mat. A proper separation of fact and value, as a defence of morality, lies in the contention that moral value cannot be derived from fact. That is, our activity of moral discrimination cannot be explained as merely one natural instinct among others, or our 'good' identified with pleasure, or a will to live, or what the government says (etc.). The possession of a moral sense is uniquely human; morality is, in the human world, something unique, special, sui generis, 'as if it came to us from elsewhere'. It is an intimation of 'something higher'. The demand that we be virtuous. It is 'inescapable and fundamental'. The interpretation of such phrases, including less fancy versions of the same intuition, has been, and should be, a main activity of moral philosophers.

And then this from "Vision and Choice in Morality":

There are situations which are obscure and people who are incomprehensible, and the moral agent, as well as the artist, may find himself unable to describe something which in some sense he apprehends. Language has limitations and there are moments when, if it is to serve us, it has to be used creatively, and the effort may fail. We we consider here the role of language in illuminating situations, how insufficient seens the notion of linguistic moral philosophy as the elaboration of the evaluative-descriptive formula. From here we may see that the task of moral philosophers has been to extent, as poets may extend, the limits of the language, and enable it to illuminate regions of reality which were formerly dark.

In both passages, Murdoch finds a problem with the "evaluative-descriptive formula" according to which facts are the reality "out there" and value is nothing but the subjective act of commending this or that fact or possible fact. We have intimations that this way of representing matters, which flows so readily out of modernism and scientism, is inadequate to characterize our experience with morality and goodness. But we lack the language to do more than gesture to the nature of the inadequacy. To characterize morality more truly, we need to stretch our language in new ways. For Murdoch, concepts and conceptual schemes offer us new ways of seeing things. The trick is to explore alternative conceptual schemes, hoping to find one that "clicks into place" in a way that existing ones fail to do (the nagging sense of their inadequacy). And "where the attempt fails," Murdoch tells us, "the virtues of faith and hope have their place."