Viewers get to trace the inevitably perverse consequences that ensue when the characters act upon a particular moral principle. These principles are the work of a lineup of heavy hitters. Along with Plato, there is Aristotle, Hume, and Kant—batting cleanup, of course—as well as other perennial all-stars like Bentham, Mill, Kierkegaard, and more recent acquisitions like John Rawls and Tim Scanlon. 
 
Yet this roll call not only lacks a woman, but also—with the exception of Plato—a figure who was a creative artist as well as a moralist. As the centenary of her birth in 1919 approaches, the Anglo-Irish writer Iris Murdoch merits an audition. Not only is she the author of remarkable philosophical essays such as The Sovereignty of Good Over Other Concepts, The Sublime and the Good, and On God and Good, but also more than 20 novels including The Nice and the Good, The Philosopher’s Pupil, and The Good Apprentice. Clearly, The Good Place seems the right place for Dame Iris.

Murdoch faced the question of goodness during World War II and its immediate aftermath. Between 1944 and 1946, the recent Oxford grad went to work in war-torn Belgium and Austria with the United Nations Relief and Rehabilitation Administration. Not only did Murdoch encounter scenes of utter devastation and despair—nothing short, she reported, than the “total breakdown of human society”—but she also met Jean-Paul Sartre. Impressed by his person and principles—diving into his work, she exclaimed it was “the real thing”—Murdoch was perfectly situated to ride the great wave of existentialism churning across the Channel. Fluent in French, she pored over the works of Albert Camus, Simone de Beauvoir, and Maurice Merleau-Ponty and, in her lucid and sinewy language, introduced these thinkers to an Anglo-American audience.

Nevertheless, Murdoch’s fascination with this strand of French thought faded. By the late 1950s, while she taught philosophy at Oxford, Murdoch became dissatisfied with existentialism’s more flamboyant claims, especially in regard to radical freedom. In the end, she declared, it was not “the philosophy we need.”

The philosophy that she now believed we needed was the one that existentialism and the postwar analytic turn had left in the dust. Though close to the thinkers attached to Ludwig Wittgenstein, Murdoch declared herself a Platonist.

What Murdoch found most compelling in Plato’s thought are the core claims that along with concepts like “Beauty” and “Justice,” the “Good” is real, but exists as an eternal standard in a transcendental sphere. No less important for Plato, once you truly perceive the “Good,” you have no choice but to act on it.

While Murdoch was a serious student of Plato, it was Simone Weil, another French thinker, who made Murdoch rethink the nature of goodness. In particular, it was Weil’s notion of attention. For Weil, attention is another word for the supreme effort to truly know our fellow human beings. Ultimately, understanding the other comes only when we fully attend to her, and we can do this only by first suppressing our own concerns and needs.
 
In the end, attention is another word for prayer for Weil—an activity that brings one to God. Does this mean that atheists are left out in the existential cold? That they have no worthy object of attention? While Murdoch gladly came out as a Platonist, she drew the line at deism. She once joked that her philosophy tended to end up as theology—a problem, she noted, as she didn’t believe in God. As a result, Murdoch added a second “o” to God and, by placing the Good at the center of a moral person’s activity, seemed to harken to the Platonist playbook. As she told an interviewer, Plato is “not only the father of our philosophy, he is our best philosopher.”

Nevertheless, in offering a Platonism for our age, Murdoch refined the architect’s original plans by moving the concept of the Good from the transcendental to the personal plane. Murdoch does not question that the Good exists outside of one’s private world—that it is real. What she does question is what we usually understand by reality and realism. The only reality worth its salt is the one where we hold the saltshaker—one that depends, in other words, on the working of our minds. Rather than conceiving of realism as a photographic or mirroring response to the real world, Murdoch argues that realism means that we inevitably introduce value into the world we confront. When we attend rightly to the world, we see it as it truly is.

If only it were so easy. Getting in our way and blocking our vision are our very own selves. What makes the work of attention so hard, for Murdoch, is the “fat relentless ego.” She identifies the enemy, personal fantasy, as nothing more than “the tissue of self-aggrandizing and consoling wishes and dreams that prevents one from seeing what is there outside one.” In her formulation, the crux to the moral life is not our willing to do good, but instead our seeing the good.

By pulling off the filter of selfish concerns, we wrest ourselves from what Murdoch calls the “mire” of egotistical desires and look at the world and others as they really are. One consequence of unfettering our vision is that we find that our self becomes a smaller and less compelling object.

No less consequential for Murdoch is that seeing well is tantamount to doing well. Discerning the good—the way the world truly is—whittles down our range of choices to just one. As she explains, “I can only choose within the world that I can see, in the moral sense of ‘see’ which implies that clear vision is a result of moral imagination and moral effort.”

Consider the well-known case, recounted by Philip Hallie in his book Lest Innocent Blood Be Shed, of André Trocmé. Pastor of the French hamlet of Chambon-sur-Lignon, Trocmé and his fellow villagers managed to save the lives of about 3,000 Jewish refugees during the Occupation. Several years later, when Hallie first visited the village, he kept asking the locals why they did what they did. Did they not know the great risks? Were they not more concerned about their own lives, or those of their own loved ones? The villagers, in turn, were at a loss over how to answer Hallie’s persistent questions. Why the fuss, one replied: We did what we had to do. This was an echo of the simple, yet staggering answer Trocmé gave the police when they demanded he hand over the Jews he was hiding: “We do not know what a Jew is. We know only men.”
 
In the end, Chambon-sur-Lignon became a place of goodness not because Trocmé and his parishioners read the great moral thinkers, but instead because they knew how to read the world. Their vision was clear because their egos were, if not suppressed, at least contained.

Can one conceive of a more desirable, and simultaneously more demanding effort in our age? Though social media has increased our connections with one another, it has simultaneously made the task of seeing beyond the self more arduous—and also more urgent—than it was ever before.

To read Murdoch is to be reminded of a standard—a standard that requires the putting of our fat relentless ego on a crash diet. If we had world enough and time, this would not be so pressing an issue. Murdoch’s claim that when we see clearly we have, in effect, already chosen what is good is wonderfully compelling. Yet as she also warns, we can only choose within the world we can see.

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The Irish prison service states one of its key missions is to protect human rights—the rights of the public and the rights of the offender. A tour of a temperature-controlled prison in the Irish city of Cork revealed prisoners had access to Wi-Fi, educational programs, drug treatment, and counseling. Clients interact with staff on a first-name basis. Prison food is high-quality and health care is equivalent to what is available to the general public. As you may know, none of this is true in American prison systems.

As a criminology professor and U.S. prison system researcher, I get a front row seat to the atrocious conditions that American prisoners live in, day in and day out, which include overcrowding, violence, rape, a program funding deficit, and a disappointing health care system.

As I toured through the Irish prison, I began to formulate a simple thought. In all common law countries—countries that are legally guided by judges—except the United States, going to prison is the punishment. Because that is the punishment, the prison does not have to “add to” the punishment.

In the Irish prison, workout rooms, in-cell TVs, and quality food were all present. As the prison staff discussed their jobs, they mentioned several concepts. All of their prisoners eventually return to society and the staff’s job is to keep them from returning to prison after their release.

Having studied prisons in the United States, I’ve found it is clear we do not share that ideology. In the United States, we view prison not only as the punishment, but also as the place for punishment, deliberately making prison more difficult in hopes of reducing recidivism. However, when comparing Ireland, which had a recidivism rate of 62 percent in 2007, and the United States, which had a recidivism rate of 67 percent in 2005, you quickly see that our “get tough” strategies have actually made return to prison rates higher.

Could this difference in the idea of punishment be related to some foundational ideology rooted in the religious history of these countries?

I started to reflect upon German sociologist Max Weber’s “A Protestant Ethic and a Spirit of Capitalism” during my time in Ireland. In it, Weber suggests that a major branch of Protestantism called Calvinistic Christianity laid the foundation for modern industrial capitalism by proposing beliefs and values that would lead adherents to adopt a “spirit of capitalism.”

Calvinistic Christianity is the belief that Calvinists took on as a reaction to the Lutheran movement and the Roman Catholic Church, with a theology that proposed a strict adherence to the Bible and “right” living. While other sects of Christianity preach right living, early Calvinists were known for their intolerance of others’ perspectives. In addition, they dropped the more sacramental notions of sin and forgiveness found in Anglicanism, Catholicism, and Lutheranism and adopted a personal relationship of understanding between the penitent and God.

With Weber’s theory in mind, I began to consider the role of religion in the creation of the modern American criminal justice system. Of all the common law nations, only the United States had its origins rooted in a form of religious fundamentalism, known as Puritanism. Puritans believed that strict adherence to sacred scripture was the only real faith. A “pure” faith was a biblical faith, and that was generally rigid and unwavering in its adherence to their interpretation of scripture. Although the United States was and is a country without a dominant religion, many colonists incorporated beliefs rooted in Calvinistic Christianity into the new nation—and its laws.

Even though Pew Research Center data from 2015 shows 70 percent of the U.S. population practices Christianity, down from 78 percent in 2007, the religion—in particular, Calvinist Christianity—remains a cultural power in the country. Foundational ideologies of right and wrong, punishment and redemption, remain rooted in this religious tradition. These concepts are at the forefront of our in country’s attempt to deal with criminals. While it is certainly true that religion is weakening in the United Kingdom, with 46 percent of citizens identifying as Christian in 2012, down from 59 percent in 2011, the U.K. and all other common law countries do not house their cultural roots in Calvinist Christianity. This difference is a plausible explanation for some of the differences in punitive social policies between the United States and its common law cousins around the world.

The Church of England, like the Roman Catholic Church, recognizes the role of private and public confession for the forgiveness of sins. In these institutions, the penitent acknowledges his or her sin to a priest and is absolved, or washed clean, by the act of the Church. Once the sinner is forgiven, he or she is assured to be “right with God,” will never again need to confess that sin, and is free to go on with life, assured of salvation.

In Protestant sects, such as Calvinist Christians, Weber points out that the sinner has no such assurance of divine forgiveness or acceptance. In fact, Protestants who join a non-sacramental sect must trust that their confessions of guilt were heard by God, accepted as valid, and actually absolved. They are told that their confession to God is “heard,” but no human being is touching them, absolving them, or telling them that a sacramental change has occurred. The forgiveness for most Protestants happens not in the public arena of a church, but in the private recesses of the mind. This personal confession, according to Weber, creates a level of insecurity about whether or not one has actually received God’s forgiveness, which then forms a collective anxiety for Protestants who are not in sects that believe in a sacramental type of forgiveness.

Calvinists dealt with this anxiety by strict adherence to rules for “right living.” For example, Puritan punishment in Nathaniel Hawthorne’s The Scarlet Letter is to force a woman caught in adultery to wear a red letter “A” around her neck. Violations of the rules were dealt with authoritatively. Since Calvinist sects and their deviants dominated the American religious ideology for hundreds of years, could this be one reason for the differences in punishment ideologies that trickled into criminal justice systems?

What emerges in the United States is a penal system grounded in a Protestant fundamentalist religious history, with a strong sense of right and wrong and a penchant for justifying abuse of some, writing people off, and suggesting they are going to hell because they didn’t practice Christianity strictly enough.

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