An Ethics of Attention

Abstract

This thesis defends Simone Weil’s ethics of attention while situating it within the framework of Anglo-American analytic philosophy. John McDowell’s argument that virtue is a sensitivity — or a perceptual capacity to recognize requirements that situations impose on one’s behaviour — is traceable through the work of Iris Murdoch back to Weil. All three thinkers are committed to some version of the Platonic thesis that virtue is knowledge. The putatively rival theory is the Humean theory of motivation. That theory maintains that motivation can be analysed into two different mental states — belief and desire — with different “directions of fit.” According to this picture, the moral agent is primarily a problem-solver and world-changer. But such a picture of agency assumes the post-Pauline doctrine of freedom of the will — a doctrine of which Plato and Aristotle were innocent. And their innocence has something to teach us. I argue that there is at least one genus of action, which modern philosophy has largely forgotten, which is not aimed at effecting changes in the world. This genus, which covers both aesthetic and ethical contexts, is attention; and it may be generally characterized as patient receptivity. Since this genus of action is not accurately analysed by the Humean theory, I suggest a more complex ethical psychology, which I call the “peripatetic contextualist” psychology. This psychology avails itself of at least two perspectives on the world: the integrative perspective of the virtuous or attentive agent, and the disintegrative perspective of the self-controlled or weak-willed agent. I do not reject the Humean theory; my ecumenical suggestion is that it is encompassed by the peripatetic contextualist psychology. The Humean theory provides a correct analysis of the disintegrative perspective: a state of agency undergoing internal conflict. Furthermore, I suggest that even the virtuous agent must have recourse to the disintegrative perspective, for it is only from that perspective that moral critique is possible. Finally, in defending the Platonic thesis that virtue is knowledge, I suggest that understanding this thesis requires us to re-imagine knowledge. Inspired by McDowell’s reading of Aristotle, I conclude that intellect and character are interdependent.