The obligation to share from the throne of attention
The very powerful image with which we are here presented is behaviourist, existentialist, and utilitarian in a sense which unites these three conceptions. It is behaviourist in its connection of the meaning and being of action with the publicly observable, it is existentialist in its elimination of the substantial self and its emphasis on the solitary omnipotent will, and it is utilitarian in its assumption that morality is and can only be concerned with public acts. It is also incidentally what may be called a democratic view, in that it suggests that morality is not an esoteric achievement but a natural function of any normal man. This position represents, to put it in another way, a happy and fruitful marriage of Kantian liberalism with Wittgensteinian logic solemnized by Freud.
Murdoch's big claim within "Sovereignty of the Good" is that morality is not calculated by public acts of will; rather, your private way of seeing is the seed of morality. The interior frames within your days, months, and years will inevitably shape your character, and your character shapes the legible actions you make. To me, this resolves some of the free-will / determinism debates: any particular hinge-point of a decision may be already determined, but not because everything runs on some universal clockwork, but because you are unconsciously sedimented in your character, which is slowly accumulated from the ways you decide to direct your attention in each moment. In this light, every private minute is a moral act. The throne is in perception itself.
I obviously resonate with this—I am mapping a whole architecture for attention—but also, I personally feel some moral obligation to be publicly legible. Consider if Pessoa of Thoreau had never written their journals or essays. They would have existed, and their attention might have been just as rich if they hadn't written (though even that is debatable), but they wouldn't be knowable to us. They wouldn't be seeds that go onto inspire so many millions of people. A seed may be perfectly self-content knowing it has the genetic future of a tree within it, but it's unrealized if it doesn't become the forest and its fruits.
This gets into the philosophy of art, which Murdoch does touch on in here. I hear repeated from so many angles that "process is all that matters:" It's the nature of the attention you bring to the object you're making, not the finished object you share with your culture. This feels myopic. Of course, new artists should focus more on process. And of course, you probably won't make anything worthwhile if you are obsessed with how it will be received. But again, this is classic case of using the extreme end of a spectrum to negate the entire half.
The process of summoning inspiration from the void is often presented in shamanic language, but an equal part of the shamanic act is the obligation to present the found object to your culture! To hoard your art for yourself feels like an invention of an individualistic culture. This probably comes down to whether you see yourself as an isolated being within your body, or as an entity that is a member of the species. When you see yourself as a part of a larger universal engine, then the way your work is received through the body of the organism is more real that the private experience within the isolated cell of yourself, especially if you expand your time horizon.
What I think I'm reaching here is that it's wrong to think morality lives in only the public or the private sphere; the two are intimately connected.