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Cotugno, Albert

University of British Columbia

Attention has recently become an important topic in many academic disciplines as well as in society more broadly. Cognitive scientists, including philosophers, have learned much about attention’s nature and functioning, but its normative dimension has been underexplored. Meanwhile, in moral philosophy, virtue ethics has emerged as a compelling alternative to consequentialist and deontological approaches. Important to this school of thought is a psychologically realistic characterization of the virtuous person, yet the role that attention plays in such a person’s life has also been underexplored. This dissertation is motivated by the idea that the lacunae in these two fields can be productively filled through interconnection. Insights from cognitive science can help to illuminate how attention might be directed toward ethical ends, and virtue ethics provides a framework for expressing the full normative significance of so directing it. The following three papers, though independent, jointly motivate the following thesis: reflexive attention paid to one’s mental life, explicitly apprehended as such, can reveal and alter one’s attentional dispositions, and this is a way of cultivating a virtuous perspective on the world. The first presents a novel reading of Hume’s developmental moral psychology and argues that Hume advocated reflexive attention as part of the process of developing a virtue he called “strength of mind.” The second then highlights important developments in the cognitive psychology of affect-biased attention in order to reveal the influence of historical factors on present attentional dispositions. Finally, the third paper describes how, in a virtuous person, attention functions to accentuate opportunities for moral behavior. Taken together, these chapters suggest a view of why attention matters that is insufficiently appreciated in contemporary academic philosophy. Attention is deeply historically situated, and the consequences of present attention ramify well into the future of our mental lives. Attention in the moment thus matters not only because attending is how we connect with things of value but also because it is how we express and form our characters. Once this idea is appreciated, we can see that future normative investigations into attention must include a strong developmental focus.

Text

2025-01-06

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International

http://hdl.handle.net/2429/90054

Philosophy

University of British Columbia

UBCV

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc-nd/4.0/