Principles

Iris Murdoch, drawing on Weil’s ideas, agreed that attention is a better method than willpower when it comes to remedying our faults. We often assume that we are free at any moment to make any decision we want. But by the time we find ourselves facing temptation or an ethical dilemma, we’ve already become the kind of person who is destined to make a particular choice. The moral life, writes Murdoch, is not about self-mastery in the crucible of moral struggle. It’s about conditioning our will through continuous acts of attention, turning our minds each day to virtue, so that in decisive moments we are automatically “compelled” in that direction. “If I attend properly,” Murdoch writes, “I will have no choices and this is the ultimate condition to be aimed at.” This is what it means for one’s will to be free. It is, granted, a very different kind of freedom from the sort that’s often celebrated: having as many options as possible.