 A final thread in Murdoch’s view of reality is that it is what metaphysics describes. She understands metaphysics as an all-encompassing view of a transcendent reality, of the universe, that the individual must then attempt to come to understand in order to work out her place in it (M&amp;E 1957/EM: 70). In “Metaphysics and Ethics” she mentions Thomism, Hegelianism, and Marxism as examples. These metaphysical systems and pictures are deeply ethical and evaluative, but, she implies, also provide a broader conception of reality. In her 1950s essays, she defends metaphysical thinking not so much as true, as capturing reality, but as a coherent way of thinking about the moral endeavor of life that is excluded by the linguistic turn in philosophical ethics, and which thereby refutes (Hare’s) universal prescriptivism’s claim to be the sole moral theory consistent with “the language of morals”. She is sympathetic to some moral, political, and philosophical/analytic criticisms of metaphysical systems (especially that they can lose a sense of the value of the individual [M&amp;E 1957/EM: 70; Antonaccio 1996: 115f], and an acknowledgment of ultimate contingency [MGM 1992: 490]). Nevertheless, her evolving moral views always leave room for some kind of transcendent structure beyond the individual that retains ethical authority over the moral agent. The title of her final summative work, Metaphysics as a Guide to Morals, expresses this continuing role for metaphysics in her thinking about morality and reality. As Diamond argues, she is not thinking of “metaphysics” as a non-morally-informed enterprise, as it is sometimes understood. In that form, Diamond says, Murdoch would not think it positioned to dictate what possibilities are open to moral philosophy (Diamond 2010). A metaphysics of actual reality cannot avoid being morally informed.