The first essay, entitled "The idea of perfection", originated as Murdoch's 1962 Ballard Matthews Lecture in the University College of North Wales.

[4][5] The book's final essay is "The sovereignty of good over other concepts", which was the Leslie Stephen Lecture delivered in the University of Cambridge on 14 November 1967.

Murdoch met Jean-Paul Sartre after hearing him lecture in Brussels in 1945 when she was working for UNRRA, and was impressed with his existentialist philosophy at the time, although she later came to reject what she called his "Luciferian" view of a morality based on freedom and individual will rather than love and goodness.

[9] Iris Murdoch's main influence in The Sovereignty of Good is Plato, at a time when, as her biographer Peter J. Conradi notes, to be "a Platonist in morals seemed as bizarre as declaring oneself a Jacobite in politics".

Weil's concept of "attention" to reality, including both other people and a transcendent Good, provided Murdoch with an alternative to the conventional view of an autonomous free agent's actions as the basis of morality.

She first describes what she takes to be the accepted philosophical view of man as a moral agent, referring mainly to Stuart Hampshire's Disposition and Memory and Thought and Action.

She concludes that the contemporary paradigm of "man" in both analytic and continental philosophy (which she characterizes as Kantian and surrealistic existentialism respectively) is "behaviourist, existentialist, and utilitarian".

[2]: 9–10  She credits Wittgenstein with having effectively put an end to the question by showing that "no sense can be attached to the idea of an 'inner object' ", but notes that he did not draw any "moral or psychological" conclusions based on this observation.

Both analytic and continental existentialist moral philosophy located individual freedom in the moment of choice, when a person decides to act in the world.

[2]: 41 Murdoch begins by stating the need for a moral philosophy that, among other requirements, takes seriously the views of Freud and Marx, and gives its central place to "the concept of love".

[2]: 45  She characterizes the commonly accepted analytic and existential philosophical views of moral psychology as "unambitious and optimistic" compared to Christian theology with its representation of "goodness as almost impossibly difficult, and sin as almost insuperable and certainly a universal condition".

[2]: 49  She notes that philosophers have tried to ignore or deny Freud's pessimistic, but in her view realistic, account of "the psyche as an egocentric system of quasi-mechanical energy" with a "deep tissue of ambivalent motive" in which "fantasy is a stronger force than reason".

[2]: 51 Murdoch suggests the religious practice of prayer as an example of a technique for turning one's attention away from one's own egocentric desires and concerns, and goes on to explore its possible adaptation to a secular world.

[2]: 63 Having set up the concept of Good as analogous to God, Murdoch returns to her earlier question whether there can be a secular substitute for prayer.

[2]: 82 Murdoch describes a "progressive education in the virtues" which involves engaging in practices that turn our attention away from ourselves toward valuable objects in the real world.

She uses the example of learning a foreign language as the occasion to practice virtues such as honesty and humility while increasing one's knowledge of "an authoritative structure which commands my respect".

[10] The philosopher Renford Bambrough's review was originally published in The Spectator, appearing in the journal Philosophy in 1985 when The Sovereignty of Good was reissued in a new paperback edition.

He commended the final essay for its "valuable transposition into a more accessible medium of some of the central Platonic insights", while noting that some aspects of Murdoch's interpretation of Plato could be questioned.

He took issue with Murdoch's description of contemporary moral philosophy as claiming to be value neutral, saying that while this view had been influential in the recent past, it was "now rarely held in anything like such a pure form".

[14] The Heythrop Journal's reviewer found the book "truly spiritual reading", noting a similarity between her account of self-transcendence and St. Augustine's view of the soul.

[16] Colin Gunton's review in Religious Studies was generally positive but found her account of the Good unsatisfactory and reminiscent of "the broken-backed versions of the traditional theistic proofs that sometimes appear in modern natural theology".

Midgley identifies a "superstitious belief" in "a single, vast, infallible system called science which completely explains human existence" as fundamental to the philosophical views which Murdoch "debunked".