Recent discussions of moral testimony have focused on the acceptability of forming beliefs on the basis of moral testimony, but there has been little acknowledgement of the limits to testimony's capacity to convey moral knowledge. In this paper I outline one such limit, drawing on Iris Murdoch's conception of private moral concepts. Such concepts, I suggest, plausibly play an important role in moral thought, and yet moral knowledge expressed in them cannot be testimonially acquired.

In the past few years, we have seen emerging new work that brings into focus the role of historical change and its moral implications in Iris Murdoch's philosophy. This paper strengthens this reading of her work and investigates the implications of this aspect of Murdoch's thinking for education in general and for moral education in particular. It resituates the Platonic imagery of the individual's ascent towards the true and the good in a framework where our conceptions of the true and (...) the good are in a process of historical reconfiguration. (shrink)

I offer a reading of Murdoch's conception of concrete universality as it appears in 'The Idea of Perfection', the first essay in the Sovereignty of Good. I show that it has British Idealist overtones that are inflected by Wittgenstein, a thought I try to illuminate by drawing an analogy with Wittgenstein's discussion of the metre stick in Paris in Philosophical Investigations §50. In the last part of the paper, I appeal to the work of Murdoch's erstwhile tutor Donald MacKinnon to (...) respond to an objection to my strategy, which I draw from Murdoch's later work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals. (shrink)