Samuel Filby

Iris Murdoch thought that her contemporaries operated with an overly narrow conception of what ethics is. She maintained that this narrowness restricted their capacity to see the variety of forms ethical thought can take. To correct for this myopia, she recommended that moral philosophers engage more imaginatively and historically in ethical inquiry. This dissertation seeks to take up Murdoch’s recommendation by exploring ways the imagination and history can reshape our sense of what ethics might be about. In the first part, I argue that dominant views of the ethical imagination presuppose questionable conceptions of ethical thought. These conceptions are problematic insofar as they elude more fundamental exercises of the ethical imagination, exercises that are exhibited in our characterizations of what the world is like. I argue that suchcharacterizations situate us in an ethical space and serve as the background for our practical reasoning, hence they are deserving of the honorific “ethical.” In the second part, I explore two ways we might approach concepts historically. The first concerns how concepts alter over historical eras. To bring this out, I examine Murdoch’s claim that our moral thinking will be impoverished until it possesses a secular conception of original sin. Beginning with the Pelagian controversy, I offer a genealogy of “original sin” and tell a story about how it might be secularized. I contend that this story brings out how tracing the history of a concept can open our sense of which concepts are available to contemporary ethical thought. The second approach concerns how a concept alters throughout the history of an individual life. I argue that a subject’s personal history can render a given concept’s meaning only graspable by those who can understand how that concept fits within that history. If we cannot grasp that subject’s history, we will be unable to understand their use of the concept.

In The Sovereignty of Good, Iris Murdoch argues that our moral thinking will be impoverished until it possesses a secular conception of original sin. Such a notion would need to remove unacceptable Christian baggage while retaining a genuine claim to be a descendant of the original Christian concept. Unfortunately, Murdoch does not tell a story of how this secularization is supposed to go. This paper picks up where Murdoch left off by offering such a story. It begins by unpacking the Christian conception of original sin via a genealogy of how the concept arose in Western theological thinking. This genealogy shows that original sin captures a cluster of interacting concepts: primal sin, original guilt, and fallenness. I argue that the best candidate for secularization is fallenness, understood primarily as a state of distorted vision and disordered desire. The Christian tradition further maintains we can grasp the depth of fallenness only insofar as we understand our thorough need for grace. A natural question is whether a secular descendent of original sin can preserve some notion of grace. I argue that a notion of grace can be preserved through encounters with beauty.