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Full Idea
God was (or is) a single perfect transcendent non-representable and necessarily real object of attention. ....Moral philosophy should attempt to retain a central concept which has all these characteristics.
Gist of Idea
Moral philosophy needs a central concept with all the traditional attributes of God
Source
Iris Murdoch (The Sovereignty of Good [1970], II)
Book Ref
Murdoch,Iris: 'The Sovereignty of Good' [RKP 1974], p.55
A Reaction
This is a combination of middle Platonism (which sees the Form of the Good as the mind of God) and G.E. Moore's indefinable ideal of goodness. Murdoch connects this suggestion with the centrality of love in moral philosophy. I disagree.
Related Idea
Idea 22339 Love is a central concept in morals [Murdoch]
| 1662 | A new concept of God as unswerving goodness emerges from Socrates' commitment to virtue [Vlastos on Socrates] |
| 2058 | God must be the epitome of goodness, and we can only approach a divine state by being as good as possible [Plato] |
| 6291 | No one is good except God [Jesus] |
| 8140 | God is love [John] |
| 8141 | He that does evil has not seen God [John] |
| 5757 | God is the supreme good, so no source of goodness could take precedence over God [Boethius] |
| 5758 | God is the good [Boethius] |
| 4825 | To say that God promotes what is good is false, as it sets up a goal beyond God [Spinoza] |
| 6250 | We say God is good if we think everything he does aims at the happiness of his creatures [Hutcheson] |
| 8105 | We can't exactly conceive virtue without the idea of God [Joubert] |
| 23816 | Attention to a transcendent reality motivates a duty to foster the good of humanity [Weil] |
| 23754 | The only choice is between supernatural good, or evil [Weil] |
| 22345 | Moral philosophy needs a central concept with all the traditional attributes of God [Murdoch] |
| 20702 | The goodness of God may be a higher form than the goodness of moral agents [Davies,B] |