What happens when we can’t pay attention? As someone whose goals depend — perhaps too much — on my competence, the thought of not being able to pay attention upsets me.
But lapses in attention are inevitable. Whatever the cause — lack of sleep, stress, illness and so on — it’s impossible to pay attention to everything all the time.
But what happens morally when we can’t pay attention? If you believe that one must know what the consequences of an action are to act morally, then to be moral is to have at least some knowledge of the world. Even if your intentions are angelic, you can still end up doing a decent amount of harm without adequate knowledge. For example, you might neglect marginalized people for the benefit of the majority if you follow the most simplistic form of utilitarianism: Pursuing the greatest good for the greatest number of people — no further nuance. You could, as in a classic critique of the philosopher Immanuel Kant’s categorical imperative, answer truthfully when the polite inquiring murderer asks if your friend’s in the house and end up one friend down.
Yes, telling the truth is usually the moral thing to do, but did you really want to trade a friend for an inquiring murderer, even if they’re polite?
So if you accept that morality depends on knowledge of the consequences of your actions, then where does attention — which I’ll define as the conscious, present effort to grasp the reality or truth of something outside of one’s conscious self — fit into morality?
The philosopher Iris Murdoch, inspired by Simone Weil, places moral attention at the center of morality — moral attention meaning not the attention that one gives to the physical world (which I’ll loosely call intellectual attention) but instead attention to people, which Murdoch describes as a “just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality.”
According to Murdoch, attention helps us see moral reality more clearly by ridding ourselves of our egos. Similarly, journalist David Foster Wallace claims in his commencement speech “This is Water” that we become less solipsistic when we pay attention to the people around us. Both Murdoch and Wallace agree that moral attention helps one escape the gravity of self-centeredness to see the moral world more accurately. In practice, this could look like examining your own biases, giving others the benefit of the doubt or choosing to be kind.
Moral attention is different from intellectual attention in that its subject is not the physical body or any other scientific phenomena, but rather people’s inner minds. Moral attention concerns the reality-adjacent world we inhabit inside our heads, the felt part of consciousness that has no scientific equivalent, and the illusions our minds create for us that don’t exist in the real world. Whereas intellectual attention posits the individual as the subject and the rest of the world as the object, moral attention questions the very validity of one’s point of view. Take color, for example. Physically, color is nothing more than different intensities of electromagnetic wavelengths hitting the back of the eye. Experienced color exists only in the mind — sure, light of different wavelengths exists in the physical world, but it’s our brains that interpret these waves as red, green or blue. Who are you to say that your experience of color is objectively real, when another person may not see the world the same way — that is, from your point of view?
If there’s one upside to not being able to pay attention or to undergoing any other hardship, it’s being forced into a different perspective. This is the only sense in which the saying “what doesn’t kill you makes you stronger” is actually true. Now that you’ve experienced hardship, you are now uniquely situated to help others who go through the same thing. In all other respects, this saying could be untrue — maybe you’ve lost people you love, physical or metaphorical parts of yourself, or basic living necessities. The only thing that you’ve gained for certain is a new perspective on the world — a perspective that may be sorely needed.
I don’t think we can be morally responsible for paying attention if it’s physically impossible to pay attention. That’s why, I suppose, so many rules, regulations, checklists and instructions exist. We codify what is important so that competence doesn’t depend solely on our fluctuating ability to pay attention.
As a society, the best we can do is to establish moral rules that are well-founded and encourage people to pay moral attention. Simply following predetermined moral rules is not moral. If you don’t bother to pay attention to the rules and think for yourself, how do you know they’re moral?
The political thinker Hannah Arendt argues in her 1963 essay “Eichmann in Jerusalem: A Report on the Banality of Evil” that evil isn’t exceptional. Normal, average people who do not question rules but are complacent in the ordinary way, or who are encouraged more to be successful than morally reflective, are capable of doing awful things. Eichmann, for example, was by all accounts a normal, nice guy with friends and family who just also happened to be the officer in charge of deporting Jewish people to extermination camps during World War II. Arendt hypothesizes that one can commit horrible acts as an ordinary person simply by following the rules. If one doesn’t bother to think, one may not even realize that one’s actions are deeply wrong.
If I had to connect this article back to the Duke student — which unfortunately, being an opinion columnist for a college newspaper, I kind of have to — I’d have to echo Wallace. Part of the learning we do in school here is obviously intellectual, and intellectual attention is an important kind of attention. But what about moral attention? College is, as Wallace puts it, a journey of learning what to pay attention to. It’s not enough to just learn how to think, but also to learn where to direct one’s attention. To Murdoch, the direction of our moral attention is the only thing we have some control over.
The only moral responsibility we have regarding attention is to choose to pay attention when we can. Attention itself cannot be a moral responsibility. One may literally be unable to pay attention. But when we are able to, it’s our responsibility to pay attention to our lack of knowledge, to our prejudices conscious and unconscious and to all the people we interact with.
Jess Jiang is a Trinity senior. Their column typically runs on alternate Wednesdays.
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