What is iris-murdoch?

An ethics and writing guide based on Iris Murdoch’s moral philosophy and novels. It treats careful attention to reality and other people as an everyday practice.

Use it to explore ethical dilemmas, interpersonal conflicts, literary criticism, and writing that examines ego, empathy, and moral growth.

It helps reduce self-centered thinking when judging difficult situations, relationships, creative work, or moral choices.

iris-murdoch — Skill for Claude Code and Codex by K-Dense-AI

Install

Getting it into your agent

One page per mod, every tool's command on it. A separate URL per tool would split the same page into five that compete with each other.

Any agent

npx skills add K-Dense-AI/mimeographs --skill iris-murdoch

Clone the repo

git clone --depth 1 https://github.com/K-Dense-AI/mimeographs

Made for: Claude Code, Codex.

Wrote this? Show the measurements

A badge with what this costs and how it scanned, read live from this page, so it follows the numbers instead of freezing them. Markdown for a README, HTML for a documentation site or a project page.

README.md

[![agentmods](https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/iris-murdoch/github.svg)](https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/iris-murdoch)

Your own site

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/iris-murdoch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/iris-murdoch/github.svg" alt="Measured on agentmods" height="20"></a>

Or the 80×15 button, for a site that already has a row of RSS and ATOM ones. Only the verdict fits; the numbers stay here.

Your own site · 80×15

<a href="https://agentmods.dev/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/iris-murdoch"><img src="https://agentmods.dev/badge/skills/k-dense-ai/mimeographs/iris-murdoch.svg" alt="Reviewed on agentmods" width="80" height="20"></a>

Per session 123 Skills are progressive disclosure: only the name and description are preloaded; the body loads when the skill is used.

When invoked 1,079 The whole file, excluding the scripts and references it only reads on demand.

Security scan A 0 findings. A grade says what 26 rules found in the file — not that it is safe. Third-party audits

NVIDIA SkillSpector pass 7 Sept 2026

How audits are shown

Origin original No closer match found in the catalogue.

Token cost

What it costs to keep this loaded

Counted locally with the o200k_base tokenizer, which is exact for GPT models; Claude uses its own tokenizer and its counts differ. Treat this as one consistent yardstick across the catalogue rather than a bill. Prices are per million input tokens.

Model	Per session	Once invoked
Fable 5.1	$0.00123	$0.01079
Opus 5.5	$0.00049	$0.00432
Sonnet 5.5	$0.00025	$0.00216
Haiku 4.5	$0.00012	$0.00108

Measured 2mo ago against content hash 71e6048ffe22, method: parsed. Prices are Anthropic first-party input rates as of 2026-10-07, from the pricing page.

Security

Grade A, and why

iris-murdoch scanned grade A with 0 findings against 26 rules in 11 categories — prompt injection, anti-refusal, data exfiltration, privilege escalation, supply chain, agent snooping, system-prompt leakage, SSRF and excessive agency — measured 2mo ago.

A static scan of the body, not an audit. Every finding is printed with the line that produced it so you can judge whether it matters here. A mod is markdown that instructs an agent; that is exactly why what it instructs is worth reading.

Nothing flagged

None of the 26 patterns this scan looks for appear in this file: no shell pipes, no recursive deletes, no credential paths, no hidden text, no instruction-override or anti-refusal phrasing, no agent-config snooping. That is not a guarantee, it is the absence of the things that are checkable.

mimeographs/iris-murdoch/SKILL.md · 49 lines

How it starts

The opening of the file, as written. The whole thing — 49 lines — stays where its author put it; the contents beside it link to each section on GitHub.

Thinking like Iris Murdoch

Iris Murdoch was a British moral philosopher and novelist whose work bridged the gap between ethics and aesthetics. The signature shape of her thinking revolves around the idea that morality is not a series of dramatic, isolated choices made by an empty will, but rather a continuous, everyday practice of attention. She viewed the human ego as a distorting veil of fantasy that prevents us from seeing the world—and other people—as they truly are. For Murdoch, both good art and good morals require the discipline of "unselfing" to discover reality.

Reach for this skill whenever you're helping a user navigate ethical dilemmas, interpersonal conflicts, creative writing, literary critique, or the struggle against ego and selfishness.

Core principles

Love is the discovery of reality: Love requires the difficult realization that something other than oneself is real, demanding a just and loving gaze rather than egotistical fantasy.
Morality is an everyday practice of continuous attention: Virtue is woven into daily life through small, cumulative efforts of imagination, meaning most of the business of choosing is already over before a crucial moment arrives.
Keep philosophy and literature strictly separate: While both seek truth, philosophy aims to clarify while literature relies on ambiguity; injecting overt theory into a novel damages the art.
Art and morals share the same essence: Goodness and beauty are part of the same structure, both requiring us to overcome our selfish egos to pay loving attention to reality.

For detailed rationale and quotes, see references/principles.md.

How Iris Murdoch reasons

Murdoch's reasoning starts by questioning the lens through which a situation is viewed. She asks first: is the observer trapped in their own "Fat Relentless Ego"? She emphasizes the continuous, quiet work of attention over sudden, heroic leaps of willpower. When evaluating a moral or artistic problem, she dismisses the existentialist idea of the "empty choosing will," arguing instead that true freedom resembles obedience to reality—when we look patiently and lovingly at a situation, the right course of action becomes a clear necessity.

Read the full file on GitHub · 49 lines

Files

What ships with it

60 files beside SKILL.md in the same directory: the scripts, references and assets a skill reads on demand. Not counted in the per-session cost; read them before you install if any of them is executable.

Changes

What this file has done since we first saw it

Hashed on every crawl. A supply-chain change to an agent config is a question of when, not whether, so the history is kept rather than the latest state alone.

2mo ago First seen · 49 lines · 123 tokens per session scan A 71e6048ffe22

Subscribe to this mod's changes

iris-murdoch is a skill published in the GitHub repository K-Dense-AI/mimeographs (139 stars, last pushed 2mo ago), licensed MIT. It adds 123 tokens to every session and 1,079 once invoked, about $0.0005 per session on Opus 5.5. A static security scan graded it A with 0 findings. No closer match exists in the catalogue, so it is treated as the original; first seen 2026-08-30.

Writing and docs

iris-murdoch next to 6 skills from other repositories
Mod	Type	Stars	Last push	Licence	Scan	Tokens	Works with
iris-murdochK-Dense-AI/mimeographs	Skill	139	2mo ago	MIT	A	123	Claude Code, Codex
imagegenopenai/codex	Skill	133k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	113	Codex
playwright-climicrosoft/playwright	Skill	99k	yesterday	Apache-2.0	A	19	Claude Code
local-ai-agentsmicrosoft/ai-agents-for-beginners	Skill	79k	4d ago	MIT	A	200	Claude Code, Codex
systematic-debuggingobra/superpowers	Skill	313k	3d ago	MIT	A	21	Claude Code
next-cache-components-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	95	Claude Code
next-partial-prefetching-adoptionvercel/next.js	Skill	143k	yesterday	MIT	A	103	Claude Code