Murdoch’s mother-in-law: is moral change mostly a matter of learning to see someone differently?
Its coordinates: 3.1.4 Moral Motivation · 3.4 Moral Psychology
I've been rereading Iris Murdoch's The Sovereignty of Good (1970) and I keep coming back to the example in its first essay. A mother-in-law, M, finds her son's wife, D, tiresome: a bit common, too familiar, juvenile. M behaves perfectly correctly throughout. Nothing she does changes. But over time, by making herself look at D carefully and fairly, she comes to see her quite differently: not vulgar but refreshingly simple, not undignified but spontaneous, and so on.
Murdoch's point is that something moral has happened even though there was no action and no decision. The work was done in attention, a word she takes from Simone Weil, and the moral life goes on continually, not only at the moments of choice that moral philosophy likes to study.
This matches something from my own work. As a translator I sometimes return to a writer I dismissed and discover that the fault was in my reading. Nothing on the page changed; I did.
Two things I'm unsure about. First, is this really moral improvement, or just a pleasanter picture? Second, how does M know her new way of seeing is more accurate and not merely more convenient? Murdoch clearly thinks the change is towards reality. I'd like to hear whether others find that convincing, and whether you've had an M-and-D experience of your own.