All Judges on the Couch? On Iris Murdoch and Legal Decision-Making

Drawing upon our everyday experiences, there is nothing radical about thinking that moral life is largely taken up by our efforts to obtain a clear vision of the situations we find ourselves in and to respond accordingly. However, despite having experiential plausibility, vision-based approaches to morality are quite rare within moral philosophy.

The moral philosophy of Iris Murdoch, in which ‘vision’ commands center stage, is a notable exception. However, as Murdoch herself was largely evasive on matters of public morality, thus far the potential relevance of Murdoch’s moral philosophy for the law - a public institution par excellence - has hardly been addressed. In this chapter, the author investigates what a Murdochian approach to legal decision-making might amount to and identifies some crucial issues that such an approach must further explore.