On Murdoch’s very loosely Freudian picture of the human psyche, the ego is anxious and utterly self-centred, utterly absorbed in itself and focused on protecting itself at all costs. It therefore ignores or distorts anything not directly relevant to the self or inconvenient to it, even at the cost of losing one’s grasp of reality.

ove is not only morally relevant, but absolutely central to morality

Correspondingly, she sees the key moral activity not as choice but as attention – an idea she gets from the activist, mystic and philosopher Simone Weil. On Murdoch’s picture, our most basic moral activities are activities of attending to particular things in particular ways, since this is the activity that shapes our vision of the world.