Iris Murdoch’s new book, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals,¹ is based on the 1982 Gifford lectures, the prestigious Scottish lecture series that was endowed, more than a hundred years ago, by the will of Lord Gifford. Adam Gifford (1820-87) prescribed in his will that the subject of the lectures should be natural theology, understood as containing within itself some account of the foundations of ethics. Gifford wanted his speakers to take up an empirical standpoint:

Here readers might be inclined to jeer (or wistfully groan) “but that was another country, and besides, ethics is dead”; for after Gifford came Nietzsche, and Viennese positivism, and scientistic materialism, and Leninism, and Derrida, not to mention consumerism, and television, and Holy Market, and as a result there are many people walking up and down the world who refuse to allow any meaning at all, let alone any scientific meaning—whatever that is—to moral ideas. Iris Murdoch has already had a few things to say about those who walk up and down the world in this way, for example in The Sovereignty of Good, and also (more slyly) in some of her novels.

Metaphysics as a Guide to Moralshas been both praised and slated by reviewers in London’s upmarket newspapers. In my opinion it has been misread by both kinds of critic. I think,