The Saint’s Dilemma: When the Good Turns Away from Reality in Murdoch’s Tallis

Abstract

In A Fairly Honourable Defeat, Iris Murdoch portrays Tallis Browne—whom she herself described as her only “saint”—as the ultimate embodiment of her moral ideal of “unselfing.” Yet the “success” of this portrayal paradoxically exposes the inherent dilemma of her ethics when applied in practice. Drawing upon Aristotle’s doctrine of the “mean” as its theoretical lens, this paper argues that Tallis’s conception of the Good systematically deviates from τό μέσον (the mean) of key virtues, thereby rendering his goodness powerless, passive, and even “masochistic” when confronted with reality.