 A second difference from Plato (and Aristotle) is Murdoch’s rejection of the Greeks’ sense that virtue and virtuous action are good for their agent as well as for their own sake (but the former “good for” is not understood by Plato or Aristotle prudentially and is not separable from virtue being good for its own sake [Brewer 2009: 202]).  For Murdoch it is indeed good to act virtuously, and doing so helps to constitute the agent as morally good. But she does not understand this virtuousness as intrinsically good for the agent. Virtue is pointless, as Murdoch often says (OGG: 71/358; SGC: 78/364), and this is tied up with the view, which she sees as historically produced from Kant to Existentialism, that there is no inherent purpose in human life. “We are simply here” with no larger purpose or telos (SGC: 79/364). But in the face of this purposelessness, being and becoming a morally good person through a suppression or transcendence of self is the best aspiration we can have.