Attention & Ethics

Photo by Li-An Lim on Unsplash

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In the last section we looked at what attention is. This is a descriptive question—one about the role that attention plays in human cognition. As we have seen, we have some control over what we pay attention to. As a result, we face choices about what we should pay attention to, or what deserves our attention [15]. Should we pay attention to the cute cat videos on Tiktok, or should we instead pay attention to the climate crisis? These are ethical questions, or questions of value.

Suppose that Charly pays a lot of attention to TikTok, where they spend much of their time watching cat videos. Oliver, on the other hand, pays a lot of attention to the climate crisis. Is Charly doing something morally wrong and Oliver something right by focusing their attention as they do? Do we think that the climate crisis is more deserving of attention than cat videos on TikTok are?

To help us answer these questions, we can draw on normative ethical theory. In philosophy, normative ethics is concerned with what makes actions right and wrong and can help us to determine how we are, morally, to act. One broad distinction between normative ethical theories is between consequentialism and deontology. 
 

Consequentialism

Consequentialists hold that the rightness or wrongness of actions lies solely in the consequences of those actions [16]. According to consequentialism, morally correct actions are those actions that result in better consequences than their alternatives.

But what kind of consequences are we talking about? That depends on what kind of consequentialist one is. Utilitarianism is probably the best-known type of consequentialist moral theory [17-20].  For the utilitarian, happiness is the only thing that is intrinsically good, or what matters for its own sake.[21] (Compare this to money, which is instrumentally valuable—that is, valuable not for its own sake but for what it can buy us.) Roughly, utilitarians think that actions are morally good when they maximize happiness for everyone impartially considered. “Impartially considered” means that everyone’s happiness is to count for the same.  My own happiness or the happiness of my friends and family, for example, does not matter more than the happiness of strangers, or of people halfway around the world. Everyone is to count for one and none for more than one.

Let us take a simple example. Suppose that I have some extra money to spend. I can spend this money on another new pair of jeans (which I do not need) or I can donate it to a charity, which will use that money to help provide food to those who need it. While buying a new pair of jeans will make me happy, donating the money to the charity clearly will maximize the happiness for a greater number of people, impartially considered. In this case, according to the utilitarian, I am therefore morally obligated to donate the money, and it would be wrong for me to instead buy a new pair of jeans.

To return to our example about Charly and Oliver, let us suppose that what they each pay attention to influences how they act. Oliver’s attention on the climate crisis causes him to create a student group that organizes climate protests. Charly’s attention to cat videos on TikTok, on the other hand, prevents them from watching the news or otherwise engaging in important social issues. In this case, since Oliver’s attention on the climate crisis results in actions that have better consequences than other actions (e.g., sitting at home and watching cat videos), then, according to the utilitarian, Oliver’s choice to pay attention to the climate crisis is morally correct and Charly’s choice to watch cat videos is morally wrong.

Let’s consider another case. Suppose again that Oliver pays a lot of attention to the climate crisis. But let’s suppose that this causes him to have a lot of climate anxiety and is unable to act. He sits in his room all day and worries about climate change, but is unable to do anything about it. In this case, according to utilitarianism, it would be better for him not to pay attention to the climate crisis. Indeed, it would be morally wrong for him to do so, because of the bad consequences of his doing so.

Deontology

Another moral theory we can make use of to evaluate Charly’s focus of attention is deontology. Unlike consequentialists, deontologists think that actions are not made right or wrong only by their good or bad consequences.  

Suppose that you could develop a drug that would save the lives of millions of people but only by performing dangerous and painful experiments on a small handful of people without their consent. For the utilitarian, since the drug would provide great benefit to large number of people, it would be morally obligatory to develop it—and thus to perform the dangerous and painful experiments on the handful of people.

Many deontologists, by contrast, would think that these experiments are wrong, always, regardless of the good consequences that they produce.  Most think instead that we have strict duties—or rules—that must be followed [22].18th-century philosopher Immanuel Kant, for example, thought that we should act in ways that are “universalizable”—that is, act in ways that we would want everyone else to act [23, p.20; 24]. To illustrate this, consider again the earlier example of how to spend your extra money. When you are deciding whether it would be morally wrong to buy a new pair of jeans instead of donating the money to charity, you can ask yourself: “What if everyone did this?” If you would not want it if everyone did what you are about to do, then you are not morally allowed to do it.

We can test now whether it would be morally wrong to buy a pair of jeans in the above example. If everyone bought a pair of jeans instead of donating money to charity, then charity organizations would never get the money they needed to help other people. Would you want that? What if you ever found yourself in need of help from a charitable organization? Most of us would agree that we would not want everyone to buy a pair of jeans instead of donating to charity. And if so, it would then be wrong for to do so.

Let’s return to the example of Charly. What if everyone only paid attention to cat videos? Would we want that? Again, most of us would likely agree that this would not be something we would want. If everyone cared only about cat videos, all other important social and political matters like the climate crisis would be ignored. Deontologists like Kant may therefore say it is wrong for Charly to only pay attention to cat videos.

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Virtue Ethics

Virtue ethics is a third major approach to normative ethics that we can consider. While consequentialism and deontology are chiefly concerned with what principles or rules we should follow, virtue ethics emphasizes moral virtue or character. Unlike deontology and utilitarianism, virtue ethics does not aim to reduce morality to a simple formula. Instead of asking “What principles should I follow?”, the virtue ethicist asks: “What would the virtuous person do?”

According to ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle [25], virtues are character traits that are good for anyone to have; they are essential for a person to achieve a state referred to in Greek as “eudaemonia,” or a state of happiness or flourishing.  Examples of virtues include courage, kindness, generosity, and modesty. Aristotle described virtues as means between extremes. Courage, for example, is a character trait midway between cowardice and foolhardiness.

According to Aristotle, the virtuous person becomes virtuous through habituation. In other words, one needs to practice being virtuous. Once virtue becomes habit, an individual will be able to display virtue (or act virtuously) in a range of different circumstances. In the face of adversity, the virtuous person will exhibit courage; when faced with someone in need, they will display generosity and kindness. The virtuous person need not consult a set of rules before acting morally; they simply do so out of habit.

In recent years, some philosophers have drawn connections between attention and virtue ethics. On some accounts, there are ways of attending virtuously [26]. One might suggest, for example, that person who pays attention to the right things, in the right way, for the right amount of time displays virtue in the way they attend. Compare this to someone who pays attention to the wrong things or who attends to something for longer than they should. Someone who focuses too much attention on a job candidate’s appearance, for example, fails to pay attention virtuously. (Of course, we might still here ask what the right thing to pay attention to is, or how much time we should be spending paying attention to it! This is a common criticism of virtue ethics in general—namely that it does not specify exactly how we should act to act virtuously [27].)

On other accounts, virtue requires that individuals pay attention in certain ways. In order to exhibit the virtue of modesty, for example, one needs to pay attention in certain kinds of ways [28]. In particular, one should not focus too much attention on one’s strengths and skills. If Matilda focuses too much attention on her superior skills as a driver, for example, she fails to exhibit modesty.

Returning to our example of Charly and Tik Tok videos, instead of asking whether it is wrong that Charly pays so much attention to watching cat videos on Tik Tok, the virtue ethicist will ask how the virtuous person would pay attention. But what this means in terms of whether Charly should pay attention to cat videos – and, if so, how much they should pay attention to cat videos—is not entirely clear.

One might suggest that finding a mean between extremes would entail that an individual sometimes pursue what is politically important and sometimes engage in personal pursuits. If so, it may be permissible for Charly to spend some of their time watching cat videos on Tik Tok (and some of their time attending to more socially important matters).