Looking Again
Written by Studio AM.
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The philosopher Iris Murdoch imagined a mother-in-law, M, who behaves faultlessly toward her son's wife, D, while privately finding her shallow, pushy, and beneath him. Nothing in M's outward conduct ever slips. Yet over the years, suspecting her own snobbery and jealousy, M makes herself look again, and comes to see D differently: not shallow but direct, not pushy but alive. Murdoch then asks where the moral event in this story is, since an observer would find nothing to report.
Murdoch challenges accounts that concentrate on outward action or isolated moments of choice and leave too little room for inward moral effort. The example is engineered to break that picture. Something changed in M that took effort over years, could have failed, and was undertaken for the sake of justice rather than comfort; a theory of moral activity should, Murdoch argues, be able to account for this effort. Attention, in her sense, is exactly this work: the slow, disciplined attempt to see another person justly, against the steady pull of envy, vanity, and fear.
On this view, moral life includes the continuous task of seeing other people more accurately and fairly. That attention can shape which possibilities we notice when a visible choice eventually arrives.
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Questions
Choose an answer. The explanation appears after you answer.
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Question 1 of 4
What is the main claim of the passage?
The answer is A: Murdoch's example shows moral work happening entirely in how one person learns to see another.
M's outward conduct stays constant while her understanding changes; Murdoch treats that inward effort as morally significant.
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Question 2 of 4
Why is it important to the argument that M's outward conduct never changes?
The answer is C: It isolates the change inside M, so a theory that counts only actions has nothing to point to.
Keeping conduct constant makes the change in understanding the feature a theory must explain.
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Question 3 of 4
What does “engineered” mean in this passage?
The answer is D: deliberately designed for a purpose
The phrase to break that picture identifies the purpose for which the example was designed.
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Question 4 of 4
What does M suspect in herself that prompts her to look again?
The answer is B: Snobbery and jealousy
The passage states it directly: 'suspecting her own snobbery and jealousy, M makes herself look again'. Her doubt about her own motives starts the revision.
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