The Ethics of Attention: Engaging the Real With Iris Murdoch and Simone Weil

Description

This book draws on Iris Murdoch's philosophy to explore questions related to the importance of attention in ethics. In doing so, it also engages with Murdoch's ideas about the existence of a moral reality, the importance of love, and the necessity but also the difficulty, for most of us, of fighting against our natural self-centred tendencies. Why is attention important to morality? This book argues that many moral failures and moral achievements can be explained by attention. Not only our actions and choices, but the possibilities we choose among, and even the meaning of what we perceive, are to a large extent determined by whether we pay attention, and what we attend do. In this way, the book argues that attention is fundamental, though often overlooked, in morality. While the book's discussion of attention revolves primarily around Murdoch's thought, it also engages significantly with Simone Weil, who introduced the concept of attention in a spiritual context. The book also engages with contemporary debates concerning moral perception and motivation, empirical psychology, animal ethics, and Buddhist philosophy. The Ethics of Attention will be of interest to researchers and advanced students working on Iris Murdoch, Simone Weil, ethics and moral psychology, and the philosophy of attention. Cover Half Title Series Page Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Table of Contents Acknowledgements Abbreviations Introduction This book Weil, Murdoch, and me Attention and Murdoch’s philosophy The difficulty of attention Vision and touch, body and metaphor A non-anthropocentric ethics Attention, now Notes Bibliography Chapter 1: What is ethical about attention? Introducing attention in Weil and Murdoch The varieties of attention Selectivity The faculties of attention Consciousness The morality of attention Attention and agency Attention not all the time The vertical axis: the presence and absence of attention The value of truth Attention as joining (eros) Attention as allowing to be (unselfing) Attention is love, but it is not blind Attention as gift Motivation and action The horizontal axis: the objects of attention The good Objects within the world Good things Beauty Other people Responsibility Presence Diffuse attention The ethics of attention: implications and limitations Notes Bibliography Chapter 2: Attention without self-concern Murdochian conceptions of the self Unselfing The self as only a source of fantasy The self as the only source of fantasy The Tame View Cognitive penetration: good and bad Combining the personal and the objective Unselfing as reorientation of consciousness Looking away from the self Caring away from the self Forms of self-concern Direct self-concern Indirect self-concern We are all a bit ‘neurotic’ Attention beyond the self Notes Bibliography Chapter 3: Attention without self Worries about the Tame View Mutual influences between our view of the self and attention Fighting the bad self Attending to improve me The radical view Simone Weil and decreation Murdoch’s temptations of impersonality Overcoming dualism Attention and no-self Attention: with or without self? Notes Bibliography Chapter 4: Self-knowledge The impossibility of attending to the self Against introspection Knowing ourselves from the outside The publicly available self Seeing ourselves through others Public testing of perception Private self-knowledge without introspection Removing the inner datum—or more? Transparency Engaged self-knowledge Notes Bibliography Chapter 5: Moral perception Attention to animal suffering The meanings of moral perception Moral perception: actual or experienced The moral as object or as quality of perception Moral perception in Murdoch’s philosophy Fact and value Seeing meat, seeing someone Meat and suffering as moral concepts Perceiving smartly Beyond supervenience Sharpening our tools in attention Direct perception of the cow’s suffering Rich perception of the cow’s suffering Attending to the cow Creating the object of attention Notes Bibliography Chapter 6: Motivation and action We are part of reality too Empathy and motivation Obstacles to empathy Looking away Enjoying suffering Perceiving possibilities Affordances Action Motivational internalism Perceptual motivation Obedience From one individual to another Conclusion Notes Bibliography Coda Notes Bibliography Index