Arts, Faculty of
Philosophy, Department of
DSpace
UBCV
Cotugno, Albert
Doctor of Philosophy - PhD
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.
Attention and VirtuebyAlbert CotugnoB.A., New York University, 2012M.A., New York University, 2017A THESIS SUBMITTED IN PARTIAL FULFILLMENT OF THE REQUIREMENTS FORTHE DEGREE OFDOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHYinThe Faculty of Graduate and Postdoctoral Studies(Philosophy)THE UNIVERSITY OF BRITISH COLUMBIA(Vancouver)December 2024© Albert Cotugno, 2024The following individuals certify that they have read, and recommend to the Faculty of Graduateand Postdoctoral Studies for acceptance, the dissertation entitled:Attention and Virtuesubmitted by Albert Cotugno in partial fulfillment of the requirements forthe degree of Doctor of Philosophyin PhilosophyExamining CommitteeEvan Thompson, Professor, Department of Philosophy, UBCSupervisorMatthew Bedke, Professor, Department of Philosophy, UBCSupervisory Committee MemberChristopher Mole, Professor, Department of Philosophy, UBCSupervisory Committee MemberEdward Slingerland, Professor, Department of Philosophy, UBCSupervisory Committee MemberScott Anderson, Associate Professor, Department of Philosophy, UBCUniversity ExaminerDavid Silver, Associate Professor, Entrepreneurship, Sustainability and Innovation Group, UBCUniversity ExaminerWayne Wu, Professor, Department of Philosophy, Carnegie Mellon UniversityExternal ExamineriiAbstractAttention has recently become an important topic in many academic disciplines as well as insociety more broadly. Cognitive scientists, including philosophers, have learned much aboutattention’s nature and functioning, but its normative dimension has been underexplored.Meanwhile, in moral philosophy, virtue ethics has emerged as a compelling alternative toconsequentialist and deontological approaches. Important to this school of thought is apsychologically realistic characterization of the virtuous person, yet the role that attention playsin 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 productivelyfilled through interconnection. Insights from cognitive science can help to illuminate howattention might be directed toward ethical ends, and virtue ethics provides a framework forexpressing the full normative significance of so directing it.The following three papers, though independent, jointly motivate the following thesis: reflexiveattention paid to one’s mental life, explicitly apprehended as such, can reveal and alter one’sattentional dispositions, and this is a way of cultivating a virtuous perspective on the world. Thefirst presents a novel reading of Hume’s developmental moral psychology and argues that Humeadvocated reflexive attention as part of the process of developing a virtue he called “strength ofmind.” The second then highlights important developments in the cognitive psychology ofaffect-biased attention in order to reveal the influence of historical factors on present attentionaldispositions. Finally, the third paper describes how, in a virtuous person, attention functions toaccentuate opportunities for moral behavior.Taken together, these chapters suggest a view of why attention matters that is insufficientlyappreciated in contemporary academic philosophy. Attention is deeply historically situated, andthe consequences of present attention ramify well into the future of our mental lives. Attention inthe moment thus matters not only because attending is how we connect with things of value butalso because it is how we express and form our characters. Once this idea is appreciated, we cansee that future normative investigations into attention must include a strong developmental focus.iiiLay SummaryThat attention matters morally is something that most people know, if not explicitly, then at leastintuitively. But what is less understood is that patterns of attention are habitual, that how wedirect our attention in the present affects how we will do so in the future. This fact is importantfor at least two reasons. First, it helps us to see that one’s patterns of attention form a centralelement of one’s character, and second, it reveals the fuller consequences of how we direct ourthoughts and perceptions.This dissertation explores the question of why attention matters from perspectives generallyabsent from contemporary popular discussions. In three independent but related papers, it beginsto make the case that an important part of living a good life is turning attention inward, not justto understand how one’s mind works but also to shape it in positive ways.ivPrefaceThis dissertation is original, independent work by Albert Cotugno. Chapters One, Three, Four,and Five are unpublished.Chapter Two is published as:Cotugno, A. (2024). Hume on self-government and strength of mind. Hume Studies, 49(1),53-75.vTable of ContentsAbstract .............................................................................................................................. iiiLay Summary ..................................................................................................................... ivPreface ................................................................................................................................ vTable of Contents ............................................................................................................... viAcknowledgments .............................................................................................................. viiDedication ........................................................................................................................... viii1. Introduction ................................................................................................................... 1A Recent History of Attention Scholarship ............................................................. 5The Rise of Virtue Ethics ........................................................................................ 18Ethics and Attention ............................................................................................... 20Metacognition and Meta-Awareness ...................................................................... 26Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 272. Hume on Self-Government and Strength of Mind ........................................................ 29Strength of Mind and the Passions ......................................................................... 32Cultivating Strength of Mind: Direct and Indirect Methods .................................. 36Self-Government ..................................................................................................... 44Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 573. Hedonic Pull and the Guidance of Attention ................................................................ 59Implicit Sources of Attentional Salience ................................................................ 62Attentional Guidance by Hedonic Pull ................................................................... 67Voluntary Attention and Attentional Bounding ...................................................... 78Personal-Level Attention Revisited ........................................................................ 83Conclusion .............................................................................................................. 874. Attention, Affordance, and Virtue ................................................................................. 88Attention: Cognitive Priority and Phenomenological Centrality .......................... 91Attention to Affordances ......................................................................................... 97Motivated Attention and Solicitations .................................................................... 108Perceptual and Affective Alternatives to the Attention-Affordance Hypothesis ..... 1125. Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 124Bibliography ....................................................................................................................... 127viAcknowledgmentsIn reflecting on this project, I find myself thinking of all of the wonderful teachers who havehelped me in myriad ways over the years. I am especially grateful to my supervisor, EvanThompson, for his steadfast support. Evan helped me to appreciate the full reach (and limits) ofphilosophy. His impact on my intellectual and ethical outlook cannot be overstated. I am alsoquite grateful to my supervisory committee, Matt Bedke, Chris Mole, and Ted Slingerland, forhelping me to sharpen my thinking and express my ideas more clearly. Their variousperspectives were invaluable to me, especially during the long and difficult process of settling ona proper framing for my dissertation. Margaret Schabas taught me about Hume and rigorousscholarship, and she devoted a great deal of time and effort to helping me transform a nascentcuriosity first into a term paper and then into a publishable work. I am very thankful for herdedication. I would also like to thank Murat Aydede and Eric Margolis for their influence in themore formative stages of my doctoral studies.Prior to attending the University of British Columbia, I had the privilege of learning from manybrilliant and generous minds. In rough reverse chronological order, I would like to thankJonardon Ganeri, Sharon Street, Paul Horwich, David Chalmers, Peter Unger, MihailisDiamantis, John Sexton, John Soriano, and Joe DiGiacomo.Lastly, thank you to Phyllis Pearson, my joy, my partner, and my teacher in so many ways.viiFor my parentsviii1 IntroductionThe following dissertation draws on two distinct academic strands that can bemeaningfully traced back to the mid-twentieth century: the renewed focus in moral philosophyon the idea of virtue and the reclamation in psychology of attention as an object of study. As isoften the case in intellectual history, both of these strands emerge out of dissension: the firstlargely a result of G. E. M. Anscombe’s (1958) critique in “Modern Moral Philosophy” of thehegemony of utilitarianism and deontology in anglophone moral theory and the second aproduct, in psychology, of cognitivism’s rise in the wake of behaviorism’s downfall. Since then,virtue ethics has become a third major approach in analytic moral philosophy and attention oneof the most widely studied phenomena in cognitive science. Yet the role attention plays in avirtuous agent’s life has been underexplored, as has the normative dimension of attention.In what follows, I explore these topics in three independent but related papers. Whatunites them primarily is the idea that reflexive attention paid to one’s mental life, explicitlyapprehended as such, can reveal and alter one’s attentional dispositions and that this is a way ofcultivating a virtuous perspective on the world.In the first chapter, “Hume on Self-Government and Strength of Mind,” I present onehistorical foundation for this view. David Hume is famous for, among much else, his explicitfocus on mentality. Rather than theorizing about the ultimate nature of reality, Hume mainlyconcerned himself with reality as it is presented to minded entities. He thus sought in his Treatiseto give a systematic account of the principles governing mental life. But Hume was alsointensely interested in normative matters, including those about how one ought to shape andmanage one’s own mental life. Here Hume departs sharply from earlier influential thinkers suchas Anthony Ashley-Cooper, commonly known as the 7th Earl of Shaftesbury, and Francis1Hutcheson, both of whom believed that a person should aim to strengthen the influence of theirrational capacities over their emotional tendencies. In contrast, Hume famously declared that theemotions were and ought to be the guiding force behind the unfolding of mental life. Hisapproach to developing the mind accordingly involved an active engagement with one’semotional life as it is experienced. In the first chapter, I elaborate this approach. I argue thatHume advocated close, phenomenological attention paid to the patterns that exist betweenmotivating emotions and the experiences that result from acting on them. This is not done merelyin the service of understanding one’s mind but also in order to transform it: to the extent that aperson can recognize how acting from calm emotions leads to greater personal advantage andsocial harmony, the governing principles of the mind reinforce this tendency, leading to thedevelopment of what Hume considers a mental virtue and refers to as “Strength of Mind.”The second chapter, “Hedonic Pull and the Guidance of Attention,” brings the overalldiscussion to the present day and focuses on important findings in the contemporary psychologyof affect-biased attention. I explain how these findings challenge the traditional distinctionbetween top-down and bottom-up attention and also reveal attention as fundamentally motivatedby a history of affective interactions with the environment. I argue that this motivational forcehas an experiential manifestation, which I call hedonic pull. We thus see in the second chapter asort of empirical vindication of some of Hume’s ideas, since the reviewed findings suggest thatwe can glean through introspection some of the factors influencing our mental tendencies.Because it is a history of attending that determines present attentional dispositions, the door isalso open for mental transformation via the careful direction of attention in the present, a processthat closely fits the model Hume advocated.2In the third chapter, “Attention, Affordance, and Virtue,” I skip forward from the processof altering one’s attentional dispositions to one possible normative endpoint by describing indetail the attentional tendencies of a virtuous agent. This chapter is about where a person mightend up mentally if they successfully bend their attentional habits toward virtuous ends. I arguethat a virtuous person experiences a landscape of affordances for moral action. In other words, avirtuous person’s attention is regularly and reliably drawn toward opportunities to act virtuously.This view, which I call the Attention-Affordance Hypothesis, is grounded in contemporaryphilosophical, psychological, and phenomenological accounts of attention, and accordingly itgives a satisfying analysis of the perceptual conception of virtue developed and advocated byJohn McDowell (1979).Taken together, these chapters suggest a view of why attention matters that isinsufficiently appreciated in contemporary academic philosophy. Attention is deeply historicallysituated, and the consequences of present attention ramify well into the future of our mentallives. Attention in the moment thus matters not only because attending is how we connect withthings of value but also because it is how we express and form our characters. Once this idea isappreciated, we can see that future normative investigations into attention must include a strongdevelopmental focus.In the rest of this introductory chapter, I outline some of the developments in philosophyand psychology that set the stage for the exploration described above. I begin with a historicaloverview of the modern study of attention beginning with William James’s Principles ofPsychology, first published in 1890. James considered attention to be a familiar phenomenon, butmuch of the subsequent study of it in psychology departed from this conception. Only recentlyhave certain theorists returned to this commitment, holding that attention figures into mental life3at the so-called “personal level” alongside other mental factors such as perceptions, beliefs, anddesires. For present purposes, this matters because such a conception of attention subjects thephenomenon to normative requirements associated with the concept of a person but notapplicable to subpersonal cognitive mechanisms. The door is thus open to an investigation of themoral significance of attending in one way rather than another.Following a survey of attention scholarship, I move to a discussion of certain recentdevelopments in moral philosophy. By the mid-twentieth century, moral philosophy was stillengaged primarily in the sort of project that had occupied Enlightenment-era British intellectuals:the search for the “correct” moral principles. In her influential “Modern Moral Philosophy,” G.E. M. Anscombe (1958) argued that, despite the fact that post-Enlightenment moral philosophyhas been committed to rejecting religious doctrine as a basis for normative theorizing, a deeperconceptual framework, which she calls the “divine law conception of ethics,” neverthelessremains. Anscombe advocated a rejection of this framework and a return to a virtue-theoreticconception of ethics, which she attributed to Aristotle. She also advocated the prioritization ofmoral psychology, the study of how the mind operates in morally significant contexts.I conclude the literature review with an expository bifurcation that corresponds toAnscombe’s recommendations and brings us to our present inquiry. First, I survey some recentdevelopments in virtue ethics that give rise to the need for a psychologically plausible conceptionof a virtuous perspective. Then, I briefly describe two writers, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch,who have been uniquely influential for those who seek to find a role for attention as afundamental aspect of moral life, and I also presenting two more recent attempts to articulate thatrole. I conclude with a few remarks about the idea of metacognition. At this point, the stage will4have been set for the three papers that follow, which jointly suggest a view of why attentionmatters morally that previous scholarship has overlooked.A Recent History of Attention Scholarship1. Pre-Theoretic Accounts of AttentionA certain quotation from James’s Principles of Psychology is ubiquitous in contemporarydiscussions of attention and thus serves as a fitting starting point for this review of the modernunderstanding of it. In Chapter IX, James begins his exploration of attention with the following:Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear andvivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains ofthought. Focalization, concentration, of consciousness are of its essence. It implieswithdrawal from some things in order to deal effectively with others, and is a conditionwhich has a real opposite in the confused, dazed, scatterbrained state which in French iscalled distraction, and Zerstreutheit in German (1890, pp. 403-4).This passage presents us with a pre-theoretical conception of attention, that is, it offers not adetailed theory of the phenomenon but rather a sketch of some of its defining features. We canidentify in James’s words at least five important features of attention. First, James emphasizesthat attention is a familiar phenomenon. There is a folk-psychological concept of it that figuresinto our everyday explanations of our own and others’ behavior, as when you realize that youfailed to understand some portion of a lecture because you were not paying attention during it.Second, James fleshes out this common understanding. What it is that “everyone knows” aboutattention has to do with its selective nature. Attention essentially involves a process of selectingcertain things from a larger set of options. Third, James notes that this selection occurs inconsciousness, which it provides with focus. This point is similar to the first, though here theemphasis is on attention’s phenomenal character. Attention has an experiential signature that in5part involves a highlighting of some elements rather than others. Fourth, James suggests thatthese elements are highlighted so that the attender can “deal effectively with” them. In otherwords, attention has a function. Attending to something allows us to concentrate our cognitiveeffort on it, redirecting that effort away from other possibilities. Fourth, James indicates thatattention is not a ubiquitous feature of waking life, since he mentions its “real opposite” in thestate of distraction. In the terms of recent philosophical discussions, we would say that, forJames, attention is not necessary for consciousness.Not all of James’s contemporaries emphasized these features, at least not to the samedegree. Theodule Ribot (1911), for example, focused less on consciousness and offered insteadan account of attention that highlighted its embodied nature. Ribot argues that every mentalactivity has a physical expression and that each movement of attention correlates with somemotor component, which he describes as “muscular activity” (p. 12). His accounts are at timesquite detailed and specific, as when he suggests that attention “contracts the occipitio-frontalis,”a muscle “which occupies the whole region of the forehead” (p. 16). Importantly, Ribotmaintains that these physical accompaniments are not “simply effects” or “outward marks” ofattention but are rather its “necessary conditions” and “constituent elements” (p. 19).This difference of emphasis between James and Ribot prefigures a distinction in morerecent discussions of attention between accounts that explain attention in terms of modificationsof consciousness or mental content (see, e.g., Watzl, 2017) and those that locate it in theperformance of some other action (see, e.g., Mole, 2011).Another contemporary distinction is prefigured by one of their areas of commonality.Both James and Ribot describe, albeit in slightly different terms, what have come to be called theexogenous and endogenous varieties of attention. For James, there is a distinction between6“passive” and “active” attention, while Ribot speaks in terms of “spontaneous” and “voluntary”attention. In both cases, they consider endogenous attention a derivative of the more fundamentalexogenous variety. This has implications for their understanding of what we might call theguidance of attention, that is, the principle by which changes in attention occur over time and invarying circumstances. For James, attention is guided by interest, which can either be immediateor derived. Stimuli have immediate interest when they excite the senses and derived interestwhen they are connected as symbols to past experiences of sensory excitation. Passive attentioncan be either immediate, as in the case of a loud crash in the adjacent room, or derived, as in thecase of an alluring advertisement for a favorite food. Active attention, on the other hand, isalways derived. It involves willfully pairing as an instrument a present stimulus that lacksindependent, immediate interest with a distant end that does feature it. For Ribot, spontaneousattention is caused by emotional states, while voluntary attention is a learned skill involving thegeneration of emotional responses to less immediately stimulating factors. He offers the exampleof the child who studies attentively not because he finds it enjoyable but because his mother’sdesire for him to do so moves him.2. Twentieth Century Developments and Psychological ReductionismFor the first half of the twentieth century, behaviorism was the dominant explanatoryapproach in psychology. Psychological accounts of attention thus tended to resemble Ribot’sideas rather than James’s, since behaviorists were committed to describing only thosephenomena that are outwardly observable. Because shifts in attention can be private and covert,however, the behaviorist paradigm was ill-suited to theorize about it. The result was that thestudy of attention fell mostly dormant in this period.7Activity resumed as part of the cognitive revolution in the 1950s and 60s. Cognitivismposits internal, content-bearing mental representations the transformations of which can betheorized about independently of the substrate that realizes those representations. This paradigmallowed theorists to understand attention in terms of mechanisms related to informationprocessing. A major figure in this movement was Donald Broadbent (1958), who borrowedresources from information technology in order to develop an account of attention as a limitationon the brain’s information processing capacity. His “bottleneck” approach generated significantscholarly debate over whether or not the limitations were “early,” that is, sourced in thelimitations of the perceptual systems, or “late,” resulting from the limited capacity of centralprocessing. Though the idea of attention being related to a limitation in processing capacity isstill influential today, attempts to find a single attentional bottleneck at a specific point in a linearinformational processing chain have lost steam since the 1980s. In the years following, a numberof other psychological accounts of attention have gained prominence. Notably, attention has beenunderstood as a process of perceptual feature-binding (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), a mechanismfor selecting information to guide action (Allport, 1987), the mechanism by which informationprocessed by sensory systems competes for cognitive resources (Desimone & Duncan, 1995),and the broadcasting of information to working memory (Prinz, 2005).What each of the above accounts have in common is that they are reductionist, meaningthey attempt to identify attention with a specific neural mechanism or process. Recently,philosophers have challenged this strategy. Watzl (2011) points out that attention comes in avariety of forms and that it is unlikely that these varieties of attention are unified at the level ofneuronal or computational processing, while Mole (2011) argues that, for any proposed candidate8for an attention-constituting process or mechanism, we will be able to identify contexts in whichthat process or mechanism is instantiated but attention is absent.3. Anti-Reductionism and the Personal LevelIn the face of these critiques, some philosophers have recently attempted to give a unifiedtheory of attention. A common strategy has been to unify attention at what Dennett (1969) callsthe personal level of explanation and understand the empirical psychological findings asrevealing subpersonal mechanisms that jointly explain the various ways in which attentionoperates. The personal-subpersonal distinction is partially a matter of mereology, and sometimestheorists will use it just to argue that attention is a phenomenon attributable only to a wholeperson and not to one of their proper parts. Yet as Hornsby (2000) points out, there are alsodistinct conceptual and normative requirements surrounding our personal-level discourse. Forexample, while we can attribute rational behavior to a person, there is no way to reduce theconcept of rationality to the non-rational concepts we use to describe, say, certain patterns ofneuronal processing. In developing anti-reductionist theories of attention, then, philosophershave sought to find some essential characteristic that grounds a unified concept of attention, evenif this concept cannot be analyzed in terms of the mechanisms and processes uncovered bypsychologists.This section presents some of the more prominent anti-reductionist theories of attentionrecently developed by philosophers. With the exception of Ganeri’s (2017), each of thesetheories seeks to unify attention at the personal level.3.a. Cognitive UnisonMole (2011) presents the view that attention is cognitive unison. This is an adverbialisttheory, meaning that attention is equated not with any particular process or processes but rather9with a way in which processes unfold. According to this view, you attend when the variouscognitive processes you can bring to bear in executing a task occur in unison, that is, no one ofthem is employed in the service of a separate task.The cognitive unison theory contains a number of elements that require explanation. Thefirst is that attention is always in the service of a task. For Mole, one does not simply “payattention” but rather engages in some task attentively or not. For any given task, one’sunderstanding of that task defines a background set of cognitive processes that can be brought tobear in its execution. Cognitive processes are those that operate over representations whosecontent is accessible to the agent, situating the cognitive unison view at the personal level.Finally, the cognitive unison theory is privative in nature. Rather than requiring all of theprocesses in a background set be employed in the service of the task-at-hand, the theory says thatattention occurs so long as no such process is engaged in some other task.3.b. Selection for ActionWu (2014) develops a philosophical version of the psychological account of attention asselection for action (Allport, 1987). He begins by locating in the psychological andneuroscientific literature on attention what he refers to as the Empirical Sufficient Condition:“Subject S perceptually attends to X if S perceptually selects X to guide performance of someexperimental task T, i.e., selects X for that task” (2014, p. 39). Understanding attention as theselection of an item for use in guiding the performance of a task, he thinks, can unify the study ofattention in these fields, which have understood the phenomenon in various, often conflictingways.Wu develops his account from Allport’s articulation of the Many-Many problem that anorganism faces when presented with a set of behavioral options. In such cases, the organism must10be able to select certain couplings of perceptual and motor processes in order to initiate andguide action in its environment. An example is when a person reaches for an apple hanging froma tree. Not only must the person choose which hand to use in grasping the fruit; they also have tobe able to guide the grasping action by isolating information from the one apple that is to begrasped from other information from apples that, as a consequence of this selection, have nowbecome obstacles.Allport’s problem is presented in terms of perceptual and cognitive mechanisms at thesubpersonal level. Wu’s account is a philosophical one pitched at the personal level. He pointsout that, in going about our lives, we move through psychological behavior spaces consisting ofmany behavioral options. These options he understands as couplings of inputs to outputs. Hisexample is that of encountering a basketball and a soccer ball and being able to kick one of themwith either of your two feet. This idealized behavioral space consists of four options generatedby the presence of two possible inputs (the balls) and two possible outputs (kicking with eitherfoot). Attention is to be understood as the selection of one from among these four couplings. Forexample, you might select the soccer ball in order to kick it with your right foot. Attention iswhat allows us to solve this version of the Many-Many Problem. It is a personal levelphenomenon because the inputs are personal level states (paradigmatically, perceptual ones) andthe outputs are the actions of an agent, rather than the behavior of some part of the agent.3.c. Mental StructuringWatzl (2017) argues for the view that attention is the activity of regulating prioritystructures. It is a sort of basic mental activity not reducible to perception, cognition, or the like.The activity is one of structuring the other elements of the mind, that is, personal-level, occurrentmental states, in terms of priority. Watzl takes priority to be an unanalyzable notion; it is one of11the primitive elements in his theory. But the idea that some mental state can be prioritized overanother in a given moment is supposed to have intuitive appeal. Consider, for example, that yourperception of these words is more prevalent or central in your mind than the feeling of your backagainst your chair. Watzl believes that an appeal to priority can unify the different ways in whichwe understand attention. The previous example involved simple perceptual and proprioceptivestates, but other times we talk about paying more attention to one project than to another,invoking a broader time frame. Here, too, we can offer an explanation in terms of priority: to begiving more attention to, say, writing a novel than to training a pet in a given period of time is tobe prioritizing the former over the latter. The prioritization of projects such as theseconstitutively involves prioritization at “smaller” scales. The structuring view thus seeks to givea unifying account of mental life.Watzl argues that an activity is a distinct sort of process, one which involvespersonal-level guidance. Accordingly, he provides an account of how this process unfolds overtime and in various conditions. This emphasis on the dynamics of attention is a distinctiveelement of his theory. Watzl relies on the distinction between exogenous and endogenousattention, especially as it is demonstrated through the Posner cuing paradigm, in order to arguethat there are passive and active forms of attentional guidance. Passive attentional guidance isguidance by psychological salience. Watzl argues that mental states have imperatival in additionto descriptive content, where the former involves a command to prioritize that state. Yet asubject’s executive control system can also guide attention, such as when you intentionallyredirect your attention from these words to your back against the chair or when your goal offinishing this reading prevents you from following that suggestion. Watzl parlays his account ofactive attentional guidance into an argument that regulating priority structures (that is, attending)12can be a paradigmatic intentional action. In doing so, he argues for a more expansive picture ofmental action than is often assumed.3.d. DisunityGaneri (2017) provides an expansive account of attention as a disunified phenomenonwith an explanatory role to play in a wide variety of issues in and around the philosophy of mind.A distinguishing feature of his theory is that it draws inspiration from the work of the fifthcentury Theravadin Buddhist thinker Buddhaghosa. Ganeri’s aim is to make use of “theinformation which emerged as a result of meticulous Buddhist introspective observation of thehuman mind’s structure and functioning” and bring it into conversation with conclusions drawnfrom “the rich experimental studies of contemporary cognitive psychology” (p. 5).One prominent example of this convergence is in his idea that attention plays twoconstitutive roles in perceptual experience, placing and focusing, which he aligns with theBuddhist concepts of ekaggata and manasikara, respectively. Attentional placing is a process ofdistractor elimination that structures the perceptual field into center and surround. This processdefines via exclusion an attentional window around an object. The focal role of manasikara isthen to access the properties of that object. Ganeri elucidates the subtle distinction betweenplacing and focusing with the example of the wind, which can part clouds from in front of themoon but does not see the moon itself. These two processes thus form, in the words of AnagarikaGovinda, “the negative and positive side[s] of the same function” (1961, p. 116). Ganeri thenconnects these ideas to those of Anne Treisman, specifically her later adoption of the attentionalwindow as the preferred metaphor over the spotlight. Treisman prefers the window metaphorbecause it better captures the more updated understanding of feature integration as involving the13active inhibition of distractors. Ganeri thus aligns placing and focusing with the cognitivescience concepts of distractor inhibition and attractor attenuation.Ganeri’s account of attention is a disunified one, which puts him at odds with otheranti-reductionists, whom he calls “attention essentialists.” He is partly motivated by“considerable empirical support for a distinction at least between selective, sustained, executive,and divided attention” (p. 222) and also by “the same disunity … reflected in a rich Sanskritlexicon [of Buddhist mental terms]” (p. 224). Ganeri thus characterizes attention “at a very highlevel of generality” when he describes it as “the organizing of experience and action” (p. 224).This high level of generality may strike some as coming at the expense of theoreticalsignificance. If there are numerous types of attention and all they have in common is that theyplay some role in the organization of experience and action, ranging from distractor eliminationin perceptual experience to the construction of a narrative self and the facilitation of empathy,one might be concerned that the concept of attention has been stretched here past the point ofcapturing a single phenomenon.4. Signs of a Paradigm ShiftAs explained earlier, a distinction between endogenous and exogenous forms of attentiongoes back at least as far as the turn of the twentieth century, where James referred to the two as“active” and “passive” and Ribot as “voluntary” and “spontaneous.” Scholars have also referredto distinctions between “top-down” and “bottom-up,” “goal-directed” and “stimulus-driven,” and“controlled” and “automatic” attention. What these distinctions are really about is the guidanceof attention. It is one thing to recognize that a person is in an attentive state and to describe theobject of their attention; it is another to explain how it is that the person came to be in that state.The distinction between endogenous and exogenous forms of attention aims to capture two14different ways in which a person can come to be paying attention. When attention is guidedendogenously, it is directed somehow by features of the person or subject. So it is sometimes saidthat a person’s will directs the attention or that one’s goals do. Or it is said that attention isdirected voluntarily or as the result of the person’s intentions. Exogenous attention, by contrast,is typically understood to have more to do with a person’s environment. It is exogenous attentionthat is implicated in cases of “attentional capture.” To explain exogenous shifts of attention, onetends to refer to salient features of external stimuli. These features can themselves beattention-grabbing, as when a fire alarm goes off in one’s vicinity, or their salience can be theresult of their context, as in the “pop-out” effect.Much empirical work has been done on endogenous and exogenous attention using thePosner cuing experimental paradigm. In these experiments, subjects are instructed to keep theirgaze fixated on a central point while performing some task that implicates peripheral areas of thevisual field. Experimenters measure the effects on performance when attention is antecedentlydirected toward or away from those areas. To measure the effects of endogenous attention,experimenters instruct subjects to direct their covert visual attention to one or another area of thevisual field’s periphery. To study exogenous attention, experimenters instead flashattention-grabbing stimuli in an area.Though the psychological study of endogenous and exogenous attention has been fruitfuland the intuitive appeal of the distinction is strong, recent studies challenge this long-standingframework. Awh, Belopolsky, and Theeuwes (2012) have gone as far as to declare that thinkingin these terms relies on a “failed theoretical dichotomy.” To support this idea, they reviewevidence that suggests the effects of selection and reward history on the guidance of selectivevisual attention. For example, Wolfe (2003) demonstrates that repeated exposure to a target15feature in a search task enhances reaction time to it. Traditionally, this effect would be attributedto the ability of the subject to focus top-down resources on one feature instead of multiple ones.But Awh and colleagues point out that the result is consistent with priming effects of selectionhistory, which have independent empirical support (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994) and seem tobe efficacious even when they contradict the subject’s voluntary goals (Theeuwes & Van derBurg, 2011). The authors also point to considerable evidence for the effects of past reward onattentional biasing. Again, there is a traditional interpretation that they reject. It is common tothink of the effect of rewards on attentional biasing as mediated by subjects’ motivational states,which inform their voluntary goals. However, Hickey et al (2010) and Anderson et al (2011a,2011b) provide evidence that the effects can run counter to this sort of intentional control, againsupporting the idea that a third category of attentional guidance is needed.This evidence, Awh and colleagues claim, strains explanation in terms of endogenous andexogenous factors and supports an expanded framework of attentional guidance. They advocatethe use of the construct of a priority map, well-known to psychologists, to integrate a subject’sgoals, selection history, and environmental salience. A priority map is a neuronal representationof salience that is the product of a mechanism that integrates salience information from a numberof sources and ultimately guides attention. Thinking in terms of priority maps allows one toaccommodate findings from past studies of endogenous and exogenous attention withoutunderstanding the dichotomy between the two as constituting an exhaustive list of sources ofattentional guidance.Todd and Manaligod (2018) expand both upon the set of cases that challenge thetraditional dichotomy and upon the integrative framework outlined in Awh et al. (2012). Themotivation for this expansion comes from their increased emphasis on attention’s broader16temporal context. They note that the categories of selection and reward history reflect short-termchanges in attentional guidance but fail to capture longer-term changes in attentional dispositionsthat also cannot be sourced to the subject’s goals or environmental salience (see, for example,Todd, Macdonald, et al. [2015] for a study of attention-related effects of combat experience onveterans). They also prefer the notion of a priority state space to that of a priority map, since theformer better represents the various possibilities for attentional guidance in a given context.Their expanded picture integrates, in addition to traditional, paradigmatically endogenous andexogenous sources of guidance, statistical learning, semantic associations, reward history, andaffective history.Philosophers have relied upon the endogenous-exogenous distinction to varying degreesin their theorizing. As psychology evolves in the direction of integrative representations ofsalience, these changes should be reflected in how philosophers think about attention and itsguidance. Watzl’s (2017) structuring account stands out among recent theories in its attempt toaccommodate these developments; still, the role they play in his overall picture is marginal. Anaccount of attentional guidance that more centrally addresses these recent developments is to bepreferred.5. The Ethics of Attention?The works outlined above concern attention’s psychological mechanisms, metaphysicalstatus, and phenomenological profile. None of them discusses the normative pressures that mightbe applicable to it. Section 3 of this review outlines the relatively sparse literature on that topic.This dissertation connects attention with virtue, though, so we first turn to a brief overview ofvirtue ethics.17The Rise of Virtue EthicsVirtue theoretic approaches to ethics are not new. They have an ancient provenance, boththrough Aristotle in Greece and Confucius in China. Nevertheless, we can trace thecontemporary discussions of virtue ethics meaningfully back to G. E. M. Anscombe’s (1958)“Modern Moral Philosophy,” in which she argues against the two approaches to moral theorizingdominant at the time: utilitarianism and deontology. In brief, Anscombe’s indictment was thatthese theories fundamentally employ legislative language that lacks content absent the existenceof a legislator. Terms like “rightness,” “duty,” and “obligation” call out for an explanation oftheir normative source. Traditionally, this role could be filled by an almighty God, but for thosewho are not committed to the existence of such an entity, Anscombe thinks that such “thin”moral concepts lose their normative force and even their meaning. Many have read her asadvocating another approach, one that prioritizes moral psychology, specifically anunderstanding of such concepts as intention, desire, and action. Fuller accounts of such conceptscan figure into descriptions of human virtues, which are described using “thick” terms like“courageous,” “patient,” and “generous.” It is terms like these that Anscombe thinks we shoulduse to describe moral life.The majority of virtue theoretic work in anglophone academic philosophy sinceAnscombe has drawn from Aristotle, who held that the possession of virtue requires bothparticular actions and particular emotional responses. As Stohr (2006) explains, contemporaryvirtue ethicists have largely adopted these two requirements. More controversial, she explains,have been Aristotle’s doctrine of the mean, the reciprocity of practical wisdom and virtue, andthe claim that virtues benefit their possessor.18Because this dissertation centrally involves the developmental aspect of virtue, it will behelpful to bear in mind the ways in which virtuous action resembles skilled action. Annas (2011)argues at length for this connection. Her defense of the “skill analogy” revolves around the ideathat a virtuous person’s exercise of practical reason is importantly analogous to an expert’spractical reasoning when exercising a skill. She uses this idea to further argue that virtue isconstitutive of human flourishing.Though their approach need not be aligned with any particular meta-ethical theory, virtueethicists tend to be friendly toward moral particularism and a perceptual model of virtue. In hisinfluential “Virtue and Reason,” McDowell (1979) draws on Platonic and Aristotelian ideas toargue that possessing a virtue can be understood as exhibiting a sensitivity to the morally salientfacts in a given situation. Moral particularism enters the picture in the uncodifiability thesis:neither moral facts nor conceptions of the right way to live can be adequately expressed inpropositional form. As Stohr (2006) observes, McDowell’s perceptual model with itsuncodifiability constraint is the dominant approach in contemporary Aristotelian virtue ethics.(The moral realism his picture involves is related to the work of Iris Murdoch, who influencedMcDowell and is discussed in Section 3.1 below.)The concept of a virtue in general (and perhaps especially when it is understood as a wayof perceiving moral salience in complex situations) seems to entail that virtuous character traitswill exhibit at least some degree of stability or context-invariance. For example, we expect anhonest person to be honest in all or most situations, not just in a specially circumscribed contexts.However, some evidence from empirical moral psychology has been thought to challenge theexistence of durable character traits. This challenge has come to be known as the “situationistcritique,” which holds that it is morally irrelevant features of situations rather than durable19character traits that predict people’s behavior in morally significant contexts (Doris, 1998;Harman, 1999). For example, a widely cited study showed that people were more likely to help astranger who had dropped some papers if they had recently discovered a dime in the coin returnof a phone booth (Isen & Levin, 1972).Slingerland (2011) has argued that the situationist critique is both empirically andconceptually unfounded. He claims that modern psychological research done in response to thestudies that support the critique confirm the existence of stable personality traits, even if theseare mutable and to a degree context-sensitive. Furthermore, he argues that the distinctionbetween “local” and “global” traits that figures into the situationist debate is not an analyticdichotomy; rather, the terms mark off two ends of a spectrum of abstraction from individualinstances of behavioral responses. Accordingly, the degree to which one will be concerned withhow context-invariant a trait is will depend upon one’s pragmatic end. Slingerland also arguesthat ancient Confucian virtue ethics is well suited to meet the situationist critique both because itemphasizes the development of virtues (not considered in the relevant psychological work) andbecause it recognizes the importance of modifying environments (situations) for facilitatingvirtuous behavior.Ethics and AttentionWatzl (2022) argues that the ethics of attention has the potential to be a rich field of study,analogous to the ethics of belief literature that originates with the Clifford-James debate. Watzlconsiders two reasons why the ethics of attention has been neglected by scholars. The first is thatit is commonly believed that attention is not the sort of thing to which normative pressures apply.This belief often relies on the idea that attention is identical with one or another subpersonal20psychological or neuronal process. It is natural to think that these sorts of processes are notnormatively evaluable because normative considerations apply to the whole person; they regardwhat that person should do, not how one of their constituent parts should operate. Yet as we havealready seen, a number of contemporary thinkers have constructed theories of attentionunderstood as a personal-level phenomenon. Watzl’s priority structuring account is one of these,so naturally he thinks that the belief that attention is not normatively evaluable is a misguidedone.The second reason the ethics of attention has been neglected, according to Watzl, is theconcern that a systematic normative account of attention is not possible. He addresses thisconcern by articulating three dimensions along which we can evaluate a norm of attention:whether it is object- or manner-based, whether it is an instrumental or non-instrumental norm,and whether its source is moral, prudential, or epistemic.The rest of this section outlines some work that has been done on the normativity ofattention. It is separated into two sub-sections, one that focuses on earlier work by Simone Weiland Iris Murdoch on the connection between virtue and attention and a second on more recentaccounts.1. Weil and MurdochFor Simone Weil, the connection between attention and ethics was of ultimateimportance. Her perspective on the matter is a religious one. Prayer for Weil is to be understoodas an open but steady state of attention directed at God. She characterizes this state as a sort of“waiting.” A chief obstacle to achieving this normatively supreme state is the active personality.Weil notices that much of our mental effort is directed at achieving goals we set for ourselves,guarding our self-esteem, and otherwise maintaining an illusory world of self-regard. The21preferred alternative is to set our minds on the pursuit of truth, which requires humility and, inthe extreme, what Weil calls "decreation.”Cameron (2003) argues that Weil advocates a “practice of impersonality” that aims todevelop both focused and open attention by reducing self-regarding thought. The aim is to makeof oneself a void into which divine presence can enter, so this practice is a spiritually directedone. Nevertheless, Cameron insists that Weil sees developing attention as a naturalistic process.This idea receives support from Weil’s comments in “Reflections on the Right Use of SchoolStudies with a View to the Love of God,” published as a part of her (1951) Waiting for God. HereWeil discusses the mundane practice of school study, the study of mathematics, languages, andthe like. Surprisingly, she views the learning of content in school studies to be of only secondaryimportance. For Weil, study should be first and foremost a practice for developing attention,which should ultimately be directed at God. Whether one grasps the material or not, Weil thinksthat diligent study improves one’s attentional capacities. In fact, failures are in their own wayespecially valuable, because they provide opportunities to develop humility, the capacity toattend to one’s shortcomings without deflecting them or otherwise making excuses for oneself.Iris Murdoch’s work was heavily influenced by Weil, and the direction of her thought islargely in line with Weil’s ideas, even though her framing is Platonic where Weil’s was Christian.In The Sovereignty of Good, Murdoch (1970) argues against what she identifies as the dominantconception of agency in contemporary moral philosophy. This conception she describes asbehaviorist, existentialist, and utilitarian, primarily characterized by the will’s simplicity andfreedom. Murdoch charges her contemporaries with conceiving of moral life as limited tomoments of free choice in which the will, unconstrained by past experiences and able to access arealm of objective facts, exerts itself. She finds this picture unconvincing and immoral, and in its22place she describes an alternative in which moments of choice are relatively unimportant, theinevitable fruition of work completed prior to them. What is morally evaluable for Murdoch isless the moment of choice and more the “innumerable lookings” that create the chooser,moments of attention that construct a person’s world, that is, what they notice and theopportunities for action of which they conceive.Freeman (2015) describes Murdoch’s view as an ethics of attention that emphasizes theneed for de-selfing and a recognition of the distinctness of the Other. Like Weil, Murdoch viewsthe ego as a barrier to right living. Also like Weil, she thinks that this is because it exerts adistorting force on one’s perception. Thus Murdoch advocates attention to the Beautiful and,ultimately, to the Good as a way of eradicating self-regard and maintaining attention on thereality of the world in which one is immersed. Aesthetic experiences, for example, encourage areverent state of mind, which is incompatible with self-guarding defensiveness. Yet that which isBeautiful is subordinate to the Good, which Murdoch expresses in Platonic language as atranscendent, unifying, and compulsive force. To access the Good, we must pay attention toreality as it really is as opposed to how we distort it through a veil of self-concern. By directingattention, a “just and loving gaze upon an individual reality,” we encounter a reality that featuresa hierarchy of value and deepen our understanding of that hierarchy. This is what it means toaccess the Good, and it can alternatively be described as developing the ultimately unifiedvirtues. Accordingly, Murdoch prefers the virtue theoretic approach to ethics. One of herdistinctive contributions to it is the centrality of attention.There has been some controversy surrounding how to read Murdoch’s idiosyncratic work.Setiya (2013) advocates reconstructing her ideas in terms of modern debates. He finds in herwork a view that avoids the distinctive “Why be moral?” problem faced by what he calls ethical23rationalism, the view that standards of practical reason can be derived from the nature of agency.Bakhurst (2020) criticizes this approach, not for being wrong per se but for being incomplete andanachronistic. He insists that Murdoch must be understood in the context in which she waswriting in order to fully appreciate her views and to access those insights that are morewide-reaching than their application to existing views. Approaching her work in this way putsher at odds with not just those contemporaries she criticized but even some of her followers likeMcDowell, Bakhurst claims. This is because he thinks Murdoch would have disapproved of agreat deal of modern moral philosophy for its “pointillistic preoccupation” with thecircumstances surrounding moral judgements and its relative neglect of the broader question ofhow one should live one’s life.Another issue arising from Murdoch’s work is worth mentioning here due to itsrelationship to some of the fundamental motivations of this dissertation. Scholars have noted atension in Murdoch’s account between her emphasis on the moral importance of “the inner life”and her insistence on the imperative to de-self. If we are to attend to what is good or morallyimportant, it seems that the first of these two factors requires us to attend to the self while thesecond requires us to attend away from it. Vice (2006) argues that we should limit Murdoch’sprohibition on self-regarding attention to egoistic aspects of the self while permitting attention toa wider self-consciousness. Mole (2006) takes an alternative approach by arguing that thosestates of mind and character that Murdoch finds morally important are not private inner states butare rather world-involving.242. Other AccountsThere have been some recent attempts to connect attention explicitly with ethics. Thissection briefly considers Bommarito’s (2018) account of attention as manifesting morallyrelevant concern and Chappell and Yetter-Chappell’s (2016) account of virtues of salience.Bommarito (2018) distinguishes his view from those of Weil and Murdoch, which heclaims attribute intrinsic moral worth to attention. He points to examples such as a psychopathicfascination with someone’s suffering in order to argue that attention itself is morally neutral.However, he notes that attention can often manifest an underlying concern for something orsomeone. He cites the examples of a caring parent who is attentive to their child and of thedifference between attending to a nearby stranger’s sneeze out of self-concern (not wanting toget sick oneself) and doing so out of other-directed concern (hoping the stranger feels bettersoon). Inattention can be similarly morally significant when it manifests a lack of concern forsomething that does not have moral value. Bommarito (2013) applies this account in an analysisof modesty as a “virtue of attention.” According to this picture, the modest person need not beignorant of their positive traits nor dishonest about them but instead manifest their modestythrough either their lack of attention to these traits or their value or, alternatively, throughattention to the broader conditions which made developing their virtues possible.Chappell and Yetter-Chappell (2016) connect attention with virtue through the concept ofsalience. They argue that a number of what have come to be called “virtues of ignorance” (e.g.,modesty, being a good friend) are better thought of as virtues of salience. They understandsalience as involving dispositions to attend rather than actual attention and thereby claim todistinguish their account of modesty from Bommarito’s. In the case of good friendship, theyargue against views that a good friend is ignorant about their friend’s faults and instead hold that25the good friend finds a friend’s positive traits much more salient than their negative ones and sois much more disposed to attend to the good they see in them. Chappell and Yetter-Chappell alsoargue that salience affects blameworthiness. In explaining the difference in blameworthinessbetween someone who ignores a nearby drowning child and someone who ignores an appealfrom a life-saving charity, they argue that the former person has responded poorly to a highlysalient moral need and thereby reveals worse character than someone who responds poorly to aless salient need.Metacognition and Meta-AwarenessThe development of the ethically significant attentional skills implicated in thisdissertation plausibly involve a type of metacognition that has become known as metacognitiveawareness or meta-awareness. Child psychologist John H. Flavell (1979) coined the term“metacognition” to refer to knowledge or cognition of mental phenomena. It is sometimesglossed as “thinking about thinking.” Since then other scholars have distinguished betweenexplicit knowledge of one’s cognitive processes, monitoring of those processes, and controllingthose processes using the results of such monitoring.There is controversy as to whether or not all metacognition is “analytic” in the sense thatit involves conceptual knowledge of one’s mental states. Proust (2014) distinguishes“attributivist” accounts of metacognition, those that require a metacognizing system topropositionally represent a subsystem, from “evaluativist” accounts that locate metacognitionadditionally in cases where a system uses non-propositional monitoring to control a subsystem.Her own view is that epistemic emotions, such as feelings of certainty, tip-of-the-tonguephenomena, and surprise, should be considered “procedurally” metacognitive because they serve26as non-propositional cues in a process of monitoring and controlling other cognition. Carruthers(2017) disagrees and argues that such emotions are not metacognitive in any robust sense butinstead can be adequately characterized as first-order mental states.Smallwood and Schooler (2015) describe evidence that metacognitive monitoring andcontrol can occur without explicit awareness of the metacognized states or metacognitiveprocess. This dissociation leads them to distinguish between implicit monitoring andmeta-awareness. This latter mental state is explicit, conscious, propositional, and intermittent.Recently, Dunne et al. (2019) have drawn upon Tibetan Buddhist resources to propose the newconstruct of mindful meta-awareness, which contrasts with the earlier construct by beingsustained and non-propositional. They advocate further empirical investigation of thisphenomenon.ConclusionAs we can see, both attention and virtue are vigorous objects of study in contemporaryphilosophy, but the insights from research into these areas have yet to be adequately integrated.Attention is increasingly being understood as a fundamental mental capacity responsible fordetermining a whole host of psychological qualities as well as the character of conscious mentallife. This matters for virtue ethics, since its distinctive approach to morality is theoreticallydependent on an accurate characterization of virtuous people, including (and perhaps especially)with respect to their mental lives. Virtuous people have characteristically virtuous emotional andmotivational dispositions; they may even have specialized perceptual abilities (Werner, 2020).Attention plays a role in determining all of these things. Furthermore, it is a capacity that ispartially under volitional control, making it especially well suited to normative theories that27aspire to practicality. A proper understanding of attention reveals possibilities for moral growthin those who have the desire to achieve it.282 Hume on Self-Government and Strength of MindIn a letter written to his friend Michael Ramsay in 1727, a sixteen-year-old Humeexpressed his desire to live a life in pursuit of tranquility. He described “the Subject of myAmbition” as “a pastoral & Saturnian happiness” free from “perturbation” and yearned for a“Peace of Mind” and “Greatness & Elevation of Soul” from which he could “look down uponhumane Accidents” (Hume, 2011b, p. 10). Almost fifty years later and mere months before hisdeath, Hume reported in a short autobiographical essay that his ambition had been fulfilled. Of“my own Character,” he wrote, “I was, I say, a man of mild Dispositions, of Command of Temper… and of great Moderation in all my Passions” (Hume, 2011a, p. 7). Even as he wasexperiencing a “speedy Dissolution” from “a Disorder in my Bowels” (now thought to be a formof abdominal cancer), he was able to report, “notwithstanding the great Decline of my Person,”that “I … never suffered a Moments Abatement of my Spirits” (Hume, 2011a, p. 7). “It isdifficult to be more detached from Life,” he wrote, “than I am at present” (Hume, 2011a, p. 7).Throughout his writings, Hume connects the lofty state of mental tranquility with anattribute he calls “Strength of Mind,” which he defines as the “prevalence of the calm passionsover the violent” (T 2.3.3.10) and associates with the ability to “resist the temptation of presentease or pleasure, and carry them forward in the search of more distant profit and enjoyment”(EPM 6.15).1 Though this concept has received some attention in the literature, both on its ownand in the context of discussions about Hume’s views on character change, scholars have not yet1 In keeping with the practices of contemporary Hume scholarship, references to Hume’s major works are formatted inthe following manner. References to the Treatise are to David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. David FateNorton and Mary J. Norton (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2000), hereafter cited in the text as "T" followed by Book,part, section, and paragraph numbers. References to the second Enquiry are to David Hume, An Enquiry Concerningthe Principles of Morals, ed. T. L. Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1999), hereafter cited in the text as "EPM"followed by section and paragraph number. All emphasis in quotations is original, unless otherwise specified.29fully appreciated the nuance involved in Hume’s approach to attaining this important trait.In contrast with some of his intellectual predecessors, thinkers such as Shaftesbury andHutcheson, Hume did not believe that strength of mind could be the product of suddenphilosophical insight. This view is in keeping with his general pessimism about the prospects forgoverning the passions through the use of reason, which he famously expresses in the Treatisewhen he concludes that “reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can neverpretend to any other office than to serve and obey them” (T 2.3.3.4). Because it is clear thatHume rejects such a direct method of character reformation, contemporary scholars havecommitted Hume to advocating exclusively indirect methods, such as state punishment orsympathetic pressure, for governing the passions and achieving strength of mind (Kopajtic, 2015;Waldow, 2012; McIntyre, 2006). This perspective is an insightful one, since there is good reasonto believe that Hume did think that such methods were capable of cultivating strength of mind,especially at a broad societal level, and he was skeptical about how successful individual effortsaimed at such cultivation could be for most people. Nevertheless, we can glean from Hume’scorpus his advocacy for a more direct approach to cultivating strength of mind at the individuallevel. Though rarely achieved and difficult to execute, self-government of the passions isnevertheless possible according to Hume. The key to success lies in harnessing the power ofhabit, which he describes as “the great guide of human life” (EHU 5.6) and a “powerful means ofreforming the mind” (E-Sc: 105).2 By exerting control over one’s own habit formation, an2References to the first Enquiry are to David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, ed. T. L.Beauchamp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 2001), hereafter cited in the text as “EHU” followed by section andparagraph number. References to “The Sceptic” are to David Hume, “The Sceptic,” in Selected Essays, eds. StephenCopley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 95-112, hereafter cited in the text as "E-Sc”followed by page number. There is some controversy as to how to read “The Sceptic,” which Hume wrote as adialogue, along with “The Epicurean,” “The Stoic,” and “The Platonist.” Following Fogelin (1985) and others, I willassume that Hume is to be identified with the titular skeptic or, at the very least, that he finds the character’s viewshighly persuasive. But see Immerwahr (1989) for the alternative view that these essays should be read as a set.30individual can, according to Hume, increase the motivational dominance of calm passions overviolent ones, cultivating strength of mind and the mental tranquility it affords.In its most sophisticated form, self-government in the service of developing strength ofmind centrally involves, on one reading of Hume, the cultivation of a certain transformativeconnoisseurship, the ability to appreciate regularities in one’s own mental activity and therebyalter it. To foster a transformative connoisseurship of one’s mind, one must develop theintrospective sensitivity needed to detect those patterns of ideas and impressions in the stream ofconsciousness that connect motivating passions to the pains and pleasures that result from theactions they motivate. By seeing over and over with increasing clarity how acting from calmpassions leads to distant but greater pleasures, a person strengthens the associations in their mindbetween the corresponding impressions and ideas, augmenting the vividness of the calm passionsand thereby their strength and prevalence in the mind. It becomes clearer to a person preciselyhow acting from calm passions is in their best interest, and this clarity naturally leads to changesin behavioral tendencies. Similarly, becoming more intimately acquainted with the correlationbetween actions motivated by violent passions and the deleterious or (at best) suboptimal effectsthat stem from them strengthens the associations between the relevant mental correlates andthereby makes acting from violent passions seem increasingly unattractive. Understood this way,Hume’s method of developing strength of mind constitutes a relatively direct reclamation ofthose indirect character reformation processes upon which recent scholarship has focused.According to the transformative connoisseurship model, it turns out that governing the passionsthrough the use of reason is not the only conceivable way that a person seeking mental tranquilitymight take an active role in developing strength of mind, the chief means of ensuring it.31Strength of Mind and the PassionsStrength of mind, as Hume conceived of it, must be understood in the context of hisviews on the passions, which are systematically expressed in Book 2 of the Treatise. Here Humeexpresses a well-known feature of his empiricism, that the mind, as known from experience,consists entirely of impressions and ideas. The passions are impressions of a form Humevariously describes as secondary or reflective. “Secondary, or reflective impressions,” heexplains, “are such as proceed from some of [the] original ones, either immediately or by theinterposition of its idea” (T 2.1.1.1). Though they do not take original impressions as theirobjects, since “a passion … contains not any representative quality, which renders it a copy ofany other existence or modification” (T 2.3.3.5), secondary impressions “arise” from originalones, and the latter can be the “source” of the former (T 2.1.1.2). Thus we can understand thepassions, as Hume describes them, as regularly proceeding from other impressions or ideas as ifreactions to them. Hume gives an illustrative example when he describes “bodily pains andpleasures” as the “source of many passions”: “a fit of the gout produces a long train of passions,as grief, hope, fear” (T 2.1.1.2).Hume distinguishes calm passions from violent ones in terms of their phenomenalcharacter. Though “this division is far from being exact” and is a “vulgar and specious” one (T2.1.1.3), it nevertheless tracks a certain spectrum of felt emotional intensity and mental order.Calm passions “produce little emotion in the mind” and “cause no disorder in the soul” (T2.3.3.8). In fact, their felt intensity is so slight that they “are more known by their effects than bythe immediate feeling or sensation” and “are very readily taken for the determinations of reason”(T 2.3.3.8). Violent passions, in contrast, “produce a sensible emotion” (T 2.3.3.9). Comprisingsuch states as “love and hatred, grief and joy, [and] pride and humility” (T 2.1.1.3), they are32associated with feeling “disturbed” (T 2.2.2.22) and “agitated” (T 2.2.5.15).Phenomenal character must not be confused here for motivational force, however. In T2.3.4.1, Hume insists that we “distinguish betwixt a calm and a weak passion; betwixt a violentand a strong one.” Both calm and violent passions are capable of motivating action anddetermining the course of thought. It is not the agitation or disorder but the strength of thepassion that matters here. Since Hume famously holds that passions are the sole determinants ofthe will with reason as their servant, the distinction is especially important for understanding hismotivational psychology.In light of these two parameters, phenomenal character and motivational force, we canbegin to elaborate a picture of “strength of mind,” a “virtue” that Hume says “implies theprevalence of the calm passions above the violent” (T 2.3.3.10).3 In “the great difficulty ofdeciding concerning the actions and resolutions of men, where there is any contrariety of motivesand passions,” it is the calm passions that prevail in someone possessing this attribute (T2.3.3.10). In Book 2 of the Treatise, in the section “Of the causes of the violent passions,” whichimmediately follows his explicit mention of strength of mind, Hume is concerned with times“when two passions are already produc'd by their separate causes, and are both present in themind [where] they readily mingle and unite” until “the predominant passion swallows up theinferior, and converts it into itself” (T 2.3.4.2). What causes the violent or the calm passions toprevail in any given struggle will depend upon their relative strength, which will be a function ofone’s character. Hume describes how a passion can “become a settled principle of action” and “apredominant inclination of the soul” such that “it directs the actions and conduct without that3See Radcliffe (2015) for a discussion of precisely how strength of mind fits into Hume’s broader virtue theory.Radcliffe argues that, rather than comprising a single trait, strength of mind entails “a constellation of traitscomprising certain calm passions” (p. 564).33opposition and emotion, which so naturally attend every momentary gust of passion” (T 2.3.4.1).It is the calm passions that achieve this status for someone with strength of mind. Contraryinclinations and their attendant passions may occur while such a person moves through thevarious circumstances of life, but in general it will be the calm passions that have the strength toovercome them and determine the person’s will.In his Enquiry Concerning the Principle of Morals, Hume connects strength of mind withthe capacity to “persevere in a steady adherence to a general and a distant interest, in oppositionto the allurements of present pleasure and advantage” (EPM 4.1). Already in the Treatise Humehad warned of the asymmetrical influence of present and distant objects. “The same good, whennear,” he writes, “will cause a violent passion, which, when remote, produces only a calm one”(T 2.3.4.1). Keeping in mind the distinction between phenomenal feel and motivational force, itis most accurate to read Hume here as describing the effects of proximity on felt intensity, butanother passage ensures us that a passion’s strength is likewise susceptible:Now as every thing, that is contiguous to us, either in space or time, strikes upon us withsuch an idea, it has a proportional effect on the will and passions, and commonly operateswith more force than any object that lies in a more distant and obscure light. Tho’ we maybe fully convinc’d, that the latter object excels the former, we are not able to regulate ouractions by this judgment; but yield to the sollicitations of our passions, which alwaysplead in favour of whatever is near and contiguous. (T 3.2.7.2; emphasis added).Our tendency to be preferentially motivated by proximate goods and ends is a serious problem,according to Hume.4 In his essay “Of the Origin of Government,” he calls it a “great weakness”(E-OG: 29) and in EPM 6.15, he has the following to say about it:4For an interesting discussion of certain political implications of Hume's concern, especially as they regard publicdebt, see Chapter 6 of Schabas and Wennerlind (2020).34All men, it is allowed, are equally desirous of happiness; but few are successful in thepursuit: One considerable cause is the want of STRENGTH of MIND, which mightenable them to resist the temptation of present ease or pleasure, and carry them forwardin the search of more distant profit and enjoyment.5In these various passages, Hume directs our attention to the fact that, in various circumstances, aproximate good can present itself in a distortedly desirable light, drawing upon our innatetendency to prefer it over distant advantage. These are the moments when a violent passion forwhat is near but inferior will “mingle and unite” with a calm passion for what is remote butsuperior. To the extent that one possesses strength of mind, the calm passion can prevail, enablingone to secure greater benefit and happiness.The ability to resist temptation and pursue long-term goals, though extremely importantfor Hume, is not the only benefit he sees in possessing strength of mind. Consider the followingremarks from “The Sceptic”:Some men are possessed of great strength of mind; and even when they pursue externalobjects, are not much affected by a disappointment, but renew their application andindustry with the greatest cheerfulness. Nothing contributes more to happiness than sucha turn of mind (E-Sc: 102).Here Hume suggests that strength of mind defends its possessor against disappointment.Irrespective of the success or failure of one’s pursuits, this trait ensures for a person a defaultlevel of contentment and tranquility maintained by the very constitution of the person’s mind. In5References to "Of the Origin Government” are to David Hume, "Of the Origin of Government,” in Selected Essays,eds. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 28-32, hereafter cited in the textas “E-OG” followed by page number. In addition to labeling it a weakness, Hume also says in this essay that ourpreference for the proximate is “incurable in human nature” (29). This coheres with Hume’s statement, regardingstrength of mind, that “we may easily observe, there is no man so constantly possess'd of this virtue, as never on anyoccasion to yield to the sollicitations of passion and desire” (T 2.3.3.10). As will be clear in the following sections, Ido not think that we should take these remarks as indicating that strength of mind cannot be increased on Hume’sview; rather, we should view them as cautionary notes about a maximum limit of improvement fixed by humannature.35“Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” Hume discusses people who “are subject to a certaindelicacy of passion, which makes them extremely sensible to all the accidents of life” (E-DT:10).6 Such people “have, no doubt, more lively enjoyments, as well as more pungent sorrows,than men of cool and sedate tempers” (E-DT: 10). Nevertheless, “there is no one, who would notrather be of the latter character, were he entirely master of his own disposition” (E-DT: 10).7Again the reason is because someone in whom the calm passions prevail endures setbacks muchmore easily than someone with a “sensibility of temper” whose “sorrow or resentment takesentire possession of him, and deprives him of all relish in the common occurrences of life; theright enjoyment of which forms the chief part of our happiness” (E-DT: 10).Cultivating Strength of Mind: Direct and Indirect MethodsHume’s ideas about strength of mind and the prevalence of certain passions over otherscan be seen as part of his rejection of the normative model upon which he claims “the greatestpart of moral philosophy, antient and modern, seems to be founded” (T 2.3.3.1), that is, the idealof the individual who has achieved the triumph of reason over the passions. In the Westerntradition, this model dates back at least to Plato, who believed that the logical part of the soul(nous) should dominate and regulate its emotional and appetitive aspects (thumos and epithumia,respectively). In the Stoics this hierarchical relationship rose to an exacting normative ideal. Thepassions, according to Stoicism, were those impulses that were excessive and irrational, and thus7These quotations should remind us of what Hume had to say about rising above “humane Accidents” in the letter toMichael Ramsay cited in the introduction. “Of Delicacy of Taste and Passion” was published in 1742. Fifteen yearsafter his letter, then, Hume was still concerned with guarding against the vicissitudes of fortune by cultivating aninner peace.6References to "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion” are to David Hume, "Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,”in Selected Essays, eds. Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 10-12,hereafter cited in the text as “E-DT” followed by page number.36they were incompatible with the Stoic conception of virtue, the rational selection of ends inaccordance with an accurate understanding of the way the world works. These ideas resonatedwell beyond the Hellenistic period, animating strands of Roman and Christian thought forcenturies.Indeed, the question of the proper relation between reason and emotion was still beingdebated in Hume’s time. James Harris (2013) goes as far as to remark that “it is no exaggerationto say that writers in eighteenth-century Britain were obsessed with the passions and theirgovernment” (p. 270). In a detailed exploration of this intellectual climate, Harris explains howChristian thinkers at the time were critical of the Stoics for their obsession with reason as theexclusive director of the soul and argued instead that reason needed to be supplemented by divinegrace in order to effectively steer the passions toward worthy ends. Anthony Ashley Cooper, thethird Earl of Shaftesbury and one of Hume’s major influences, rejected this criticism, which heviewed as a mischaracterization of the Stoics. According to Harris, Shaftesbury found in what heconsidered the best of these ancients a compelling picture of virtue, agreeing that human beingsneeded to use their rational judgment to determine which ends were worth pursuing. AsShaftesbury saw it, the distinctively rational nature of human beings opens for them a door tomistaken judgment that is closed for other animals, who just follow their natural instincts andappetites. Correct opinions are thus required in order for humans to govern their livesappropriately. As Harris explains, both Shaftesbury and Francis Hutcheson, another majorinfluence on Hume’s thought, believed that a great deal of contemporary British philosophy wasmisguided, with prominent thinkers advocating for the wrong ends through poor argumentation.They thus sought to rectify these errors and reveal the correct way to direct the passions such thatthey would be balanced, motivating a person to varying degrees in accordance with a proper37hierarchy of ends.The Stoics and those eighteen-century writers who were influenced by them believed thatindividuals could exercise direct control over their passions. On this model of characterreformation, much of the work is done in the privacy of the individual mind. A person governstheir passions here through the use of reason by settling, through the consideration of variousarguments, upon a proper relationship among various ends. One comes to see, for example, thatthere are limits to the degree to which one should pursue private interest, that this end must bebalanced against, say, regard for the common good. This new understanding is then supposed tochange one’s motivations accordingly. One realizes that one’s behavior does not cohere withone’s own conception of how best to live and adjusts that behavior accordingly.Hume rejected this direct methodology on both conceptual and empirical grounds. InBook 2 of the Treatise, in the section entitled “Of the influencing motives of the will,” hearticulates a conception of reason that leaves no room for it to motivate action. On this account,reason is understood as that faculty of understanding responsible only for producing “abstract ordemonstrative” (T 2.3.3.2) judgments and “comprehend[ing] whatever objects are connected …by the relation of cause and effect” (T 2.3.3.3). With regard to the first, he thinks it obvious that“demonstration and volition … [are] totally remov’d, from each other” because the former’s“proper province is the world of ideas” rather than the world of concrete objects upon which wemight act (T 2.3.3.2). With regard to the second, he says that “'tis evident … that the impulsearises not from reason, but is only directed by it” (T 2.3.3.3). Instead, the impulse to act arisesfrom the passions generated by the “prospect of pain or pleasure” (T 2.3.3.3).As an empirical matter, Hume concludes that reason is able to affect one’s motivations inonly two ways: by correcting a false supposition upon which the motivation is based or by38demonstrating that one’s chosen means will not produce the desired end (T 2.3.3.6). Neither ofthese ways corresponds with what Hume’s opponents assert, that reason itself can settle upon anend and motivate a person to pursue it. It is easy to overlook this, however, if one understands thecorrection of a false supposition as referring to normative claims. Understood this way, it wouldseem possible for reason to reveal that a certain end is not actually worth pursuing and therebyaffect a person’s motivation, but this is not what Hume has in mind. He explicitly states that thesuppositions that reason is able to correct are those that posit “the existence of objects, whichreally do not exist” (T 2.3.3.6). This is the sort of supposition that comes into play, for example,when you conclude that the treasure map you have been following is really a forgery. Uponrealizing that there is no treasure to be found, you immediately stop looking for it. Your behaviorchanges instantly, but this is not an example of reason settling upon an end.Now, Hume did not deny that reason is capable of making some abstract or demonstrativejudgment to the effect that one or another end is worth pursuing; he simply did not believe thatsuch a judgment would have an appreciable effect on a person’s behavior or character. He evenmade explicit references in his work to philosophical insight and its inability, as a matter of fact,to effect change in the constitution of one’s mind. In the same discussion of our natural tendencyto prefer proximate to distant ends that we cited earlier, for example, he says the following:This natural infirmity I may very much regret, and I may endeavour, by all possiblemeans, to free my self from it. I may have recourse to study and reflection within myself;to the advice of friends; to frequent meditation, and repeated resolution: And havingexperienc'd how ineffectual all these are, I may embrace with pleasure any otherexpedient, by which I may impose a restraint upon myself, and guard against thisweakness (T 3.2.7.5; emphasis added).In “The Sceptic,” Hume’s speaker notes that “we come to a philosopher to be instructed, how we39shall choose our ends” (E-Sc: 97) but issues a pessimistic conclusion about the practical upshotsof such a project:The fabric and constitution of our mind no more depends on our choice, than that of ourbody ... nor is it always in a man's power, by the utmost art and industry, to correct histemper, and attain that virtuous character to which he aspires. The empire of philosophyextends over a few; and with regard to these, too, her authority is very weak and limited(E-Sc: 103).We can see from these passages that Hume rejects the idea that a moment of philosophicalinsight is able to counteract the mind’s stubborn natural tendencies and transform behavior in adurable way.In light of his multi-pronged rejection of this direct method, contemporary scholars haveargued that Hume exclusively advocates indirect methods for strengthening the calm passions:unable to govern their passions through the individual use of reason, human beings must rely onexternally applied pressures in order to develop strength of mind. Government and sympathy arethe two forces primarily discussed in the literature. For example, Lauren Kopajtic (2015) pointsout that the “other expedient” Hume settles on in order to remedy the natural preference forproximate goods, to “guard against this weakness,” is the institution of civil government. Indeed,Hume’s comments in Book 3 of the Treatise are suggestive. There Hume explains howgovernment and the administration of laws by civil magistrates serve to “render the observanceof the laws of justice our nearest interest, and their violation our most remote” (T 3.2.7.6). Peopleliving under a government are threatened with punishment for acts of injustice, which areotherwise appealing as opportunities to secure proximate goods. Because punishment appears asa proximate harm, it works upon people’s natural propensity to overvalue the present, and they40choose to refrain from injustice. Kopajtic argues that such acts of forbearance, when repeated,eventually become habitual. People become accustomed to restraint and learn to apply thispattern of behavior throughout other domains of life. In this way, she suggests, governmentinculcates strength of mind at a broad, societal level.8Other scholars have focused on the role that sympathy plays in strengthening the calmpassions. Sympathy features centrally in much of Hume’s thought, explaining phenomena inaesthetics, ethics, and the dynamics of the passions. For Hume, it is a psychological mechanismthat operates between people in virtue of their similarity to one another. As he explains in T2.2.7.2:We have a lively idea of everything related to us. All human creatures are related to us byresemblance. Their persons, therefore, their interests, their passions, their pains andpleasures must strike upon us in a lively manner, and produce an emotion similar to theoriginal one.Anik Waldow (2012) suggests that, on Hume’s account, approval or disapproval by those aroundus can serve as a motivator of character change.9 For Hume, sympathy operates in a spontaneous,unmediated, and mandatory fashion. “So close and intimate is the correspondence of humansouls,” he says, “that no sooner any person approaches me, than he diffuses on me all hisopinions, and draws along my judgment in a greater or lesser degree” (T 3.3.2.2). For Hume,sympathy functions by generating a like idea in the mind of one person as that of another, so ifanother person, say, disapproves of something I do, I then feel that disapproving emotion withinmyself. What is more, I associate this idea with my self-conception, an especially lively idea that9See also Mcintyre (2006) for the argument that “strength of mind is … dependent on the operation of the socialforce of sympathy” (p. 400).8This view aligns Hume with Mandeville, a somewhat earlier thinker who believed that human beings areessentially and incurably selfish and that they need to be constrained and manipulated by government in order to livetogether peacefully in large societies.41imbues the associated emotion with greater vividness. Waldow argues that repeated negative orpositive judgments by others, adopted for oneself through sympathy, can cause significant pain orpleasure, and, recognizing that for Hume pain and pleasure form “the chief spring and movingprinciple” of the mind’s actions (T 1.3.10.2), she concludes that sympathy will motivate a personto change their behavior so as to garner more approval and less disapproval. Though her accountconcerns character change generally, we can easily adapt it to the case of strength of mind. Thosearound us can approve of our calmer moments and disapprove of our more violent ones. In likefashion, they can approve of times when we refrain from pursuing a proximate good in favor ofsecuring a distant and better one, and they can disapprove of times when we do the opposite. Inthese ways, sympathy can cultivate strength of mind.10In both the case of government and that of sympathy, we see forces external to theindividual shaping that individual’s mind. The way that they do so is through a process of habitformation, a process which centrally involves placing thoughts of a proximate harm in closesuccession to those of a proximate good. The legal system threatens us with punishment, thethought of which enters our minds vividly alongside thoughts of whatever benefit we hope toattain through injustice. Sympathy, when it involves disapproval, furnishes the mind with painalongside ideas associated with the behavior being disapproved of.The scholars we have focused on do not go into much detail on this point, but it isplausible to suggest that, for Hume, thoughts about these proximate harms generate violent10One might wonder here why other people, subject as much themselves as I am to the natural propensity to preferproximate goods over distant advantage, would disapprove of my short-sightedness. The key to understanding this isto recognize that the ideas I have of proximate goods that I may attain are closely associated with my idea of myselfas the one who will attain them. Because the idea of the self is, for Hume, such a lively one, its vividness andmotivational strength transfer to the ideas about the proximate goods. This explains the difference between our ownbehavioral tendencies and how we tend to judge others. Because people in general recognize the value offorbearance, they disapprove of others who fail to engage in it, but this recognition is overridden in their own caseby the distorting effect of the idea of self.42passions. This certainly seems to be the case with the threat of punishment, as we can see in T2.3.3.9, where Hume says the following during a discussion of how violent passions motivate thewill: “When I am immediately threaten'd with any grievous ill, my fears, apprehensions, andaversions rise to a great height, and produce a sensible emotion.” With respect to strength ofmind, then, we can now see how inserting ideas of proximate harm into the stream ofconsciousness might increase the prevalence of the calm passions over the violent ones.Recognizing that, according to Hume, “[n]othing can oppose or retard the impulse of passion,but a contrary impulse” (T 2.3.3.4), John Immerwahr (1992) argues that the key to increasing theprevalence of calm passions in one’s mind is to set one violent passion against another such thatthey diffuse each other. To support this view, he points to Hume’s remarks in Book 2 of theTreatise, in a section entitled “Of the direct passions.” Here Hume discusses the effects ofdifferent sorts of passions when they arise in conjunction with one another. The relevant case iswhen “contrary” passions “exactly rencounter” and are “opposite in their direction” (T 2.3.9.16).In this special circumstance, these passions “become mutually destructive, and leave the mind inperfect tranquility” (T 2.3.9.16). When we are about to act but face the threat of punishment oran expression of disapproval, a new violent passion runs contrary to the original one motivatingthe action, and they significantly weaken each other’s motivational force.Now, recall that all the while there will be a calm passion associated with one’s long-terminterests “readily mingl[ing] and unit[ing]” with these other, violent motivations. Once they havecanceled each other out, the calm passion has a much higher chance of becoming “thepredominant passion” that “swallows up the inferior, and converts [them] into itself” (T 2.3.4.2).In other words, the calm passions can prevail once the violent ones have neutralized each other. Ifthis happens often enough, acting from calm passions will “become a settled principle of action,”43and once this becomes the “predominant inclination of the soul” that “directs the actions andconduct without that opposition and emotion, which so naturally attend every momentary gust ofpassion,” this is just another way of saying that strength of mind has been achieved (T 2.3.4.1).This chemistry of the passions may be effective in certain circumstances, but it is notwithout its risks. As Elizabeth Radcliffe (2017) explains, there are various ways in whichpassions can affect each other (or fail to). Besides the tranquilizing effect just discussed, anotherrelevant possibility is that two violent passions excited by the same object can lead to internalupheaval and an increase in the violence of the prevailing passion. As Radcliffe suggests, thistendency may explain why we sometimes have an intense desire to do something forbidden,since in such cases the violence of the desire to do the action can be increased by the violence ofpassions arising from its forbidden status. The upshots for those indirect methods that proceed bypitting one violent passion against another are, first, that they may carry risks of exacerbating theprevalence of violent passions, and second, that it will be important to ensure that the contrarietyof the warring passions arises from an object with “a mixed character,” as Radcliffe describes it,as in the case of a play that has tragic and comedic elements (2017, p. 161). The dangerassociated with the first upshot is an additional reason for taking seriously the alternativeapproach presented in the next section of this paper.Self-GovernmentWe saw in the previous section that underlying indirect methods of cultivating strength ofmind is a more fundamental force, habit formation, that is the actual mechanism of change. Thisshould not be surprising, as Hume relies on habit to explain a significant portion of mental and44social behavior.11 “The far greatest part of our reasonings with all our actions and passions,” hesays in Book 1 of the Treatise, “can be deriv'd from nothing but custom and habit” (T 1.3.10.1).12He also suggests there that, in many cases, habit can have “the same influence on the mind asnature” (T 1.3.10.1).Given Hume’s distinctive views of the mind and of the self, it is fitting that he would viewhabit as the “great guide of life” (EHU 5.6). In the first place, his avowed empiricism requires acommitment to not “go beyond experience” in constructing a “science of man” (T 0.8). Thismeans that the very “life” he is attempting to explain is a mental one, human nature as it isexperienced. Habit, on this view, explains certain regularities we see in the stream ofconsciousness. It accounts for the “associating quality, by which one idea naturally introducesanother” (T 1.1.4.1), and in this respect it offers an explanation that competes with the nativistposition that the mind’s various faculties, owing to their original design or structure, determinethe connections between ideas.13 For Hume, past experience of connection plays this determiningrole, and habit is the internalization of this experiential history.In the second place, Hume’s view of the self both reduces and naturalizes it, embeddingthe individual’s very constitution within a network of causally efficacious forces. Hisreductionism about the self is well-known, with the most frequently cited passage coming fromthe section “Of personal identity” in Book 1 of the Treatise:13See Owen (2009) for a discussion of the mechanics of mind according to Hume. Among other points, Owen arguesthat Hume’s reductionist empiricism “has the effect of lessening the importance of faculties in Hume’s account ofthe understanding and the will” (p. 103).12 “Custom” and “habit” are for the most part interchangeable, as Hume uses the concepts; the difference lies mainlyin emphasis, where habit applies primarily to individual behavior while custom applies both to individual and socialregularities. Habit is also primarily used by Hume in the context of explaining mental transitions betweenimpressions or ideas, while he uses custom to explain these as well as overt bodily and social behaviors. In whatfollows, I will use the term “habit” to refer to both of these forces in a general way, unless a specifically social orcultural meaning is called for.11See Laursen (2011) for a detailed discussion of Hume on custom and habit, including a connection between theseand Hume’s skepticism.45For my part, when I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble onsome particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain orpleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observeany thing but the perception (T 1.4.6.3).In this section, Hume very clearly states that, strictly speaking, there is in the mind no idea of theself because there is no “constant and invariable” impression that it could be based on (T1.4.6.2). Instead, he “affirm[s] of the rest of mankind, that they are nothing but a bundle orcollection of different perceptions, which succeed each other with an inconceivable rapidity, andare in a perpetual flux and movement” (T 1.4.6.4).14 This reductionism matters in the context ofour current discussion for the following reason: if what we are, the self, is nothing but a bundle ofideas and impressions, and if habit is what determines which ideas and impressions prevail in themind, then habit is what determines the particular nature of each person’s self. This means thatour constitution is more complex and malleable than it would be on a more fixed conception ofself. On the Humean picture, we can change in ways that are harder to imagine in the case of,say, a Cartesian ego, which is simple and fully present in every given moment. Furthermore,because we are bundles of perceptions, our nature as a self is bound up with our environmentsand the various forces that influence our moment-to-moment mental life. These can be as simpleas bits of bodily movement (“our eyes cannot turn in their sockets without varying ourperceptions”; T 1.4.6.4), but they can also be significantly more complex. In his essay “OfNational Characters,” Hume discusses at length the various influences on personal make-up. Inparticular, he focuses on sympathy as well as so-called “moral causes,” which include “the nature14There is some scholarly debate over the question of whether Hume’s comments in this section contradict his use ofthe self concept in Book 2 of the Treatise. See Giles (1993) and Lecaldano (2002) for detailed explorations ofHume’s views of self, including arguments about how to reconcile Hume’s reductionism with his thoughts on, forexample, pride.46of the government, the revolutions of public affairs, the plenty or penury in which the people live,the situation of the nation with regard to its neighbours, and such like circumstances” (E-NC:113).15 As bundles of perceptions within networks of forces, we are thus able to change ourconstitution by altering those forces we are able to channel. If we can affect how they operate onus, we can use them to reinforce habits that will underpin our characters, understood asconstituted by durable patterns in the stream of consciousness.Once we recognize that habit is the true means by which the passions are governed, wecan see that the external application of the efficacious, indirect methods of character reformfeatured in the secondary literature is a contingent feature of theirs. Sympathy and the threat ofstate punishment are forces external to the individual, but they operate via a mechanism that canin principle be harnessed with personal effort. Indeed, a closer look at some of Hume’scomments suggests that the individual can and should play a role in determining the course oftheir character development. Recall the previously cited T 3.2.7.5, where Hume discusses the“ineffectual” methods for curing “the natural infirmity” of preferring proximate to remoteenjoyment. Hume’s language here is strikingly first-personal: “I may endeavour, by all possiblemeans, to free my self from [the infirmity],” he says, and, “I may embrace with pleasure any otherexpedient, by which I may impose a restraint upon myself” (T 3.2.7.5; emphasis added). In “TheSceptic,” the exhortation to exert individual effort is even more forceful:Let a man propose to himself the model of a character which he approves: let him be wellacquainted with those particulars in which his own character deviates from this model: lethim keep a constant watch over himself, and bend his mind, by a continual effort, fromthe vices, towards the virtues; and I doubt not but, in time, he will find, in his temper, an15References to "Of National Characters” are to David Hume, "Of National Characters,” in Selected Essays, eds.Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 113-126, hereafter cited in the text as“E-NC” followed by page number.47alteration for the better (E-Sc: 105).We might also consider again Hume’s early letter to Michael Ramsay. At the age of sixteen,Hume had the “Ambition” to develop strength of mind. Plausibly, he felt that there wassomething he could do as an individual to bring about this result, and indeed, we see throughoutHume’s various autobiographical reflections and writings on other subjects the conviction thatone should choose carefully one’s path in life so as to facilitate salutary development. Forexample, Margaret Schabas and Carl Wennerlind (2020) describe Hume’s belief that mercantilelife inculcates a host of admirable qualities in a person. They also point out that, at the age oftwenty-three, Hume actively sought out this influence by working as a clerk for a sugarmerchant, interested in adopting this profession himself someday. We thus see in Hume’s life andwritings a certain faith in self-government, the individual’s harnessing of the underlying habitformation mechanism for reforming their character. The project may be difficult andimpracticable for most people, but it is nevertheless possible.16With respect to strength of mind in particular, one straightforward way in which a personcan harness the power of habit in order to govern their own passions is to adapt the model wediscerned earlier in the cases of state punishment and sympathy. In those cases, the governmentand our peers furnish the mind with violent passions that counteract those violent passions that16 It is an unfortunate consequence of Hume’s view here that the ability to develop strength of mind is a privilegeenjoyed by relatively few people in society. In T 3.2.7.6, Hume discusses how, in the particular case of “render[ing]the observance of the laws of justice our nearest interest, and their violation our most remote,” this is “impracticablewith respect to all mankind” and “can only take place with respect to a few.” Though he is not discussing strength ofmind in particular here, one can easily be left with the impression from this and other passages that Hume’s positionon character change is an elitist one (see, e.g., his remarks below about selective friendships). As we will see,developing strength of mind is a pursuit that requires a great deal of effort and attention and, plausibly, a certaindegree of freedom from want. I do not think that Hume is committed to the idea that all but a few people areintrinsically capable of engaging in this pursuit, though. Rather, as we saw above in his discussion of “nationalcharacters”, there are circumstantial factors beyond the scope of individual control (e.g. “the plenty or penury inwhich the people live”) that determine whether or not somebody will be well-positioned to engage in this project ofpersonal reformation.48arise when a person perceives an opportunity to secure some proximate good. These areinstances in which “moral qualities … or at least the actions, that proceed from them, may bechang’d by the motives of reward and punishment, praise and blame” (T 3.3.4.4). But thereseems to be nothing about these motives that necessitates that they are externally imposed. Manypeople construct personal systems of reward and punishment in order to build habits byincentivizing behaviors they wish to enact but sometimes fail to as the result of weakness of will.Praise and blame, in turn, have their self-applied analogues in the violent passions of pride andhumility, which Hume discusses at length and, in T 2.1.2.2, links to feelings of encouragement:“According as our idea of ourself is more or less advantageous, we feel either of those oppositeaffections, and are elated by pride, or dejected with humility.” By adapting the warring passionsmodel typically employed in the indirect methods of character reform, one can “impose aviolence on [one]self … reforming the mind, and implanting in it good dispositions andinclinations” (E-Sc: 105), where this violence can be taken quite literally to refer to a consciouseffort to generate in one’s own mind those violent passions that can cancel out the others.Another way to self-govern is simply to manage one’s surroundings and put oneself inpositions where the right associative connections are likely to be made. One of the most powerfulways to do this in the service of cultivating strength of mind is by intentionally joiningcommunities consisting of or forging relationships with people “of cool and sedate tempers”(E-DT: 10). In “Of the Delicacy of Taste and Passion,” Hume writes of a discernment that is“favourable to love and friendship, by confining our choice to few people, and making usindifferent to the company and conversation of the greater part of men” (E-DT: 12). Beingselective about one’s friends and community can foster strength of mind because of theaforementioned effects of sympathy. If we surround ourselves with people of calm disposition49who value prudence and scorn rashness, their reactions toward our behavior will mitigate ourimpulses and strengthen our tendency to act in ways motivated by calm passions. If we return toHume’s remarks in “Of National Characters,” we can clearly see that he believes this: “[t]hehuman mind is of a very imitative nature; nor is it possible for any set of men to converse oftentogether, without acquiring a similitude of manner, and communicating to each other their vicesas well as virtues” (E-NC: 115). By choosing our friends, mentors, and peers, we can play a moredirect role in what previously looked like an exclusively passive, indirect process. One’s choiceof profession can apparently have similar effects, again as evidenced by Hume’s mercantileambitions.These various ways of governing oneself through habit formation are likely to produceresults, on Hume’s view, but they do not represent the most sophisticated and directly efficaciousmethod. In the rest of this section, I argue that the most powerful way to govern oneself bygoverning one’s passions is by developing a certain transformative connoisseurship with respectto patterning in the stream of consciousness. To employ this method, one must “keep a constantwatch over” oneself, where this refers to an introspective sensitivity to the patterns of ideas andimpressions that link calm passions to distant but greater advantage. A person can track thesepatterns in memory, in imagination, and in the ongoing rush of living. In doing so, they becomebetter able to discern the connections, in their own mental life, between motivating passions andthe pleasurable and painful effects of the actions that these passions motivate. The deepertransformation occurs when the approach and avoid tendencies associated with pleasure and painare strengthened, becoming better able to counteract our “natural infirmity” to prefer inferiorcontiguous goods over superior distant ones. The result of this process is the cultivation ofstrength of mind. We come to see more clearly how acting from calm passions leads to greater50advantage, and this clarity increases the prevalence of the calm passions. As they become the“predominant inclination of the soul,” our lives are improved. We act more prudently, all thewhile experiencing the mental tranquility Hume valued so highly.The connoisseurship aspect of this method can be modeled on Hume’s pictures of thewise man and the art critic. Tina Baceski (2013) argues that Hume’s epistemic and aestheticideals feature a number of commonalities. Both the wise man, which Hume describes in hisessay “Of Miracles,” and the art critic, which he describes in “Of the Standard of Taste,” exhibitwhat she calls the virtues of taste: “Strong sense, united to delicate sentiment, improved bypractice, perfected by comparison, and cleared of all prejudice” (E-ST: 147).17 Whereas thesevirtues allow the art critic to discern beauty, they allow the wise man to discern epistemicallyrelevant features of evidence. In both the aesthetic and epistemic cases, development of thisconnoisseurship involves careful examination of particulars. A work of art, for example, must be“surveyed in different lights with attention and deliberation” (E-ST: 144). For the wise man,accurate judgments about causal relationships come from “learn[ing] to distinguish theaccidental circumstances from the efficacious causes” (T 1.3.13.11).The ability to distinguish meaningful property patterns from accidental circumstances isemployable in the phenomenological realm no less than it is in the aesthetic and epistemiccontexts. As Hume conceives of it, the stream of consciousness includes myriad perceptions.Pains and pleasures are among these, but so are the calm and violent passions that motivateaction, and there is patterning to be discerned between these two classes. In general, patterning inthe progression of ideas and impressions is something with which Hume is centrally concerned.17References to "Of the Standard of Taste" are to David Hume, "Of the Standard of Taste," in Selected Essays, eds.Stephen Copley and Andrew Edgar (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998), 133-153, hereafter cited in the text as"E-ST" followed by page number.51His three associative principles, resemblance, contiguity, and cause and effect, just are thesystematization of the patterns that “render [the mind], in some measure, uniform with itself inall times and places” rather than “entirely loose and unconnected” (T 1.1.4.1).18 With respect tothe passions specifically, we know already from Hume’s other remarks that there is a patterning,first, between certain violent passions and contiguous goods and, second, between certain calmpassions and distant but better goods. We can understand this as a patterning between certainpassions and the pains or pleasures that result from acting upon their motivation.Given that these patterns exist, our stubborn tendency to prefer proximate goods overthose distant ones that we would ourselves judge to be better calls out for explanation: why arewe less sensitive to the connection between calm passions and distant advantage than we are tothe connection between violent passions and proximate goods? Why is it that “[c]ontiguousobjects must have an influence much superior to the distant and remote” (T 2.3.7.3)? In Book 2of the Treatise, Hume provides the answer:Here then we are to consider two kinds of objects, the contiguous and remote; of whichthe former, by means of their relation to ourselves, approach an impression in force andvivacity; the latter by reason of the interruption in our manner of conceiving them, appearin a weaker and more imperfect light (T 2.3.7.3).The challenge for someone trying to cultivate strength of mind is that mental patterns are mucheasier to detect when they consist of fewer ideas in a relatively uninterrupted progression thanthey are when more complex and involving the interspersion of accidents. This is because, as18 If we examine Hume’s remarks in the conclusion of Book 1 of the Treatise, we can see that this concern was, inaddition to being philosophically motivated, also deeply, personally felt: “At the time, therefore, that I am tir'd withamusement and company, and have indulg'd a reverie in my chamber, or in a solitary walk by a river-side, I feel mymind all collected within itself, and am naturally inclin'd to carry my view into all those subjects, about which I havemet with so many disputes in the course of my reading and conversation. I cannot forbear having a curiosity to beacquainted with … the cause of those several passions and inclinations, which actuate and govern me” (T 1.4.7.12).52Hume explains, in order to ascertain (whether in memory, imagination, or reflection) theconnection between ideas and impressions involved in complex mental patterns, we must “[run]over, at least in a cursory manner, all those objects, which are interpos'd betwixt” the patternedelements (T 2.3.7.2).19 This interruption requires us “to renew our progress every moment” (T2.3.7.2), and this energetic cost makes it harder for us to vividly entertain ideas of objects that arespatially, temporally, or causally distant from us. Here then is the deeper explanation for ourirrational preference: the vividness of an idea has a “proportionable effect” on our motivations (T2.3.7.3). In other words, the strength of a passion is a function of its vivacity, and calm passionsfor distant goods are typically weaker as the result of the mind’s being interrupted when trying toimagine the promised pleasures. As Hume explains, “Talk to a man of his condition thirty yearshence, and he will not regard you. Speak of what is to happen to-morrow, and he will lend youattention” (T 2.3.7.3).The most fundamental way to cure ourselves of our “natural infirmity,” then, is to makemore vivid the ideas we have of the distant pleasures toward which our calm passions impel us.Just as a belief for Hume is essentially the enlivening of one idea in the context of another,strength of mind is, at its core, the enlivening of ideas or impressions associated with deferred19These are the “accidental circumstances,” which must be separated from “efficacious causes,” as they appear in thephenomenological domain. Here they refer specifically to the ideas that one’s mind “take[s] … in their proper orderand situation” when one is considering the relationship between two objects or events (T 2.3.7.2). As Humedescribes the process, the interspersions these ideas refer to will be spatial, temporal, or causal steps between oneobject or event and another. Though Hume does not give an example here, we can conjure one easily enough. Beforeembarking on a raucous night out, a person might try to imagine how the evening’s events may play out. In doingthis, there will be fewer steps to imagine between accepting a friend’s invitation and experiencing certain proximategoods than there will be between the acceptance and potential distant harms. For example, one need only imaginetraveling the route to the pub to arrive at the idea of a cheerful reunion with friends and the first sip of a favoritebeverage, while one must imagine all of the rest of the night’s happenings before arriving at the upset stomach, thedizzy collapse into bed, and the eventual hangover. Not only are we less likely to take each additional imaginativestep, considering further and further consequences of our actions, but we are less able to do so, as the ideascorresponding to additional steps grow fainter and fainter.53but ultimately superior gratification.20 The key to improvement in both cases is, again,connoisseurship: “learn[ing] to distinguish the accidental circumstances from the efficaciouscauses” (T 1.3.13.11). In order to develop strength of mind, one must see over and over withincreased clarity how violent passions pattern with pains and inferior pleasures while calmpassions pattern with greater advantage.The first step to developing this discernment is to develop introspective acuity and the“constant habit of surveying ourselves” (EPM 9.10). As Hume’s skeptic tells us, “the mind is notaltogether stubborn and inflexible, but will admit of many alterations from its original make andstructure,” but effecting this change requires a person to “keep a constant watch over himself”(E-Sc: 105). It is only by becoming increasingly acquainted with the mental elements that formpatterns that one will be able to discern these regularities. A greater attentiveness to theprogression of ideas and impressions will enable one to better separate irrelevancies, “conjoinedby accident” to truly patterned elements, when reconsidering one’s settled causal associations (T1.3.13.9). When a person succeeds in identifying durable patterns from the past, the mind willmore easily associate patterned elements, by enlivening ideas and impressions in the context oftheir pattern-predecessors, as a person proceeds into the future.21 This process is a recursive one,21We can continue with the example from footnote 29 to clarify this point. If our partygoer becomes morediscerning, they will become more able to connect their decision to drink with their eventual misery. They will seethat it does not much matter which route they take to the pub or which conversation topics they raise; what matters ishow much they drink. Though this connection may be obvious to us upon considering it, the key point is that animaginative chain moving more directly from the “efficacious cause” to the deleterious effect allows ideas of thelatter to better preserve their vivacity and thus have a greater influence on the will.20 Indeed, it would not be inappropriate to describe this process in epistemic terms and therefore as a specialized,phenomenological version of the epistemic connoisseurship articulated by Baceski. In light of Hume’s definition ofbelief, we could say that a person cultivating strength of mind via the transformative connoisseurship method isforming better causal beliefs about the effects of calm and violent passions. I have chosen not to frame things thisway, however, for the following reason. Strength of mind is an attribute that involves the effects of certain passionson the will. In discussing it, we are thus focused on an event subsequent to the transfer of vivacity that occurs whena Humean epistemic agent forms the belief that one thing is caused by another. The vivacity transfer matters in ourcontext because of its link to the motivational force of the enlivened idea, and this link, strictly speaking, is outsidethe scope of the epistemic.54where settled associations tend to strengthen themselves. This feature can thus be equally a helpor a hindrance, depending on the quality of the settled associations. It is plausibly for this reasonthat Hume exhorts us to introspect constantly, to be ever engaged in refining our discernment.Education is another aid to cultivating this phenomenological connoisseurship, accordingto Hume, because it furnishes the mind with a greater range of experiences than one wouldotherwise have within the confines of a single life. As a result, a person can come to betterunderstand psychological patterning more generally and then apply what is learned in their owncase. As Hume explains in the Enquiry Concerning Human Understanding, “books andconversation enlarge much more the sphere of one man's experience and thought than those ofanother” (EHU 9.5n20.11). The benefit, for the purposes of developing strength of mind, isaccess to more source material from which to identify patterns among passions andconsequences. One who engages regularly with history, fiction, and the other arts learns aboutways of living other than one’s own as well as about the consequences that tend to follow fromvarious sorts of behavior. As Hume explains, people differ in their level of connoisseurship, thatis, their ability to track complex patterns: “Where there is a complication of causes to produceany effect, one mind may be much larger than another, and better able to comprehend the wholesystem of objects, and to infer justly their consequences” (EHU 9.5n20.4). This ability extendsboth into the past, when reviewing one’s conduct, but also into the future, when consideringpotential courses of action: “[o]ne man is able to carry on a chain of consequences to a greaterlength than another” (EHU 9.5n20.5). Broadening one’s experience, especially througheducation, is therefore a way of guarding oneself against the mind’s natural tendency to getinterrupted when considering complex and lengthy causal chains.The reason why this connoisseurship is transformative, that is, why it actually results in55character reformation, is because the patterned elements involved here are perceptions of painsand pleasures that a person either actually experiences or believes they will. In either of these“two ways of making their appearance in the mind,” impressions and ideas of pain and pleasureserve as the “chief spring and moving principle of all [the mind’s] actions” (T 1.3.10.2). WhatHume means by this he explains later in the Treatise: “[W]hen we have the prospect of pain orpleasure from any object, we feel a consequent emotion of aversion or propensity, and are carry'dto avoid or embrace what will give us this uneasiness or satisfaction” (T 2.3.3.3). Passions arisingfrom pain or pleasure motivate a person to avoid or approach the corresponding objects. On thetransformative connoisseurship model, a person cultivating strength of mind becomes able tomore effectively trace the links between calm passions and the distant goods they drive toward.Considering these latter goods generates ideas of pleasure, and the fact that these are reachedwith fewer interspersions means that they are perceived with greater vividness. The more vividideas of pleasure then not only increase the vividness of the antecedent calm passions but alsoincreases their propensity to motivate an approach reaction.It is also possible that this transformative effect might be accelerated as the result of acertain virtuous cycle centered around the passion of pride. In light of all of the positive aspectsHume associates with strength of mind, it is plausible to suggest that he considers any accretionof it as an achievement that one can be proud of, and pride, for Hume, is a powerful motivator initself.22 “The love of fame,” he suggests, “rules, with such uncontrolled authority, in all generousminds, and is often the grand object of all their designs and undertakings” (EPM 9.10). This islargely because ideas are severally enlivened by the associative principles of resemblance and22See Reed (2017) for a detailed discussion of how pride and fame figure into the process of Humean characterchange.56contiguity, which combine their force in the case of our self-conceptions. A person successfullydeveloping strength of mind will thus begin to associate the prevalence of calm passions withtheir idea of self, and the pleasure that comes from identifying with this positive quality willfurther reinforce the tendencies that sustain it.ConclusionCultivating strength of mind on the Humean picture sketched above allows a person togovern oneself in two distinct and valuable ways. In the first place, we can exert control oversome of the external forces that affect our character development, and we can redirect them, notby coming to discover some philosophical truth but rather by adopting an objective stance towardour development. We recognize that we are part of the causal order, and we direct as best we canthe causal forces that shape us through their repeated influence. We harness the transformativepotential of habit and thereby play a more direct (albeit still ultimately indirect) role indetermining which habits form in us. In the second place, we can enliven ideas and impressionsassociated with our most prudent behavior and thereby strengthen those passions that drive ustoward our more considered ends. The greater part of humankind, according to Hume, is caughtin a cycle of pursuing proximate but lesser advantage at the expense of their better interest. Theyfail to defer their gratification even when they are well aware that doing so would bring themgreater benefit. Cultivating strength of mind puts a person in the position to achieve those moredeeply held ambitions that others so often neglect.“[W]hen we wou'd govern a man, and push him to any action,” Hume remarks in Book 2of the Treatise, “’twill commonly be better policy to work upon the violent than the calmpassions, and rather take him by his inclination, than what is vulgarly call'd his reason” (T572.3.4.1). This is the very sort of manipulation, government from without, to which those withstrength of mind are especially resistant. What works commonly will not work on theseuncommon people. Instead, those with strength of mind enjoy all of the rare benefits of theprevalence of the calm passions over the violent. If they can do the difficult work ofself-government, a “Peace of Mind” and “Saturnian happiness” is their noble reward.583 Hedonic Pull and the Guidance of AttentionFor the better part of the twentieth century, philosophers had little to say about attention.The questions of what attention is and how it functions were ones they left to psychologists, firstof a behaviorist stripe and later of a cognitivist one. More recently, the study of attention hasbecome a collaborative effort, with psychologists and philosophers working together withmembers of other disciplines to define and pursue lines of research. It is in this context that somephilosophers have sought to give unified accounts of attention understood as a personal- oragential-level phenomenon (see Mole, 2011; Wu, 2014, 2024; Watzl, 2017). Such thinkers rejectreductionist accounts that seek to identify attention with a particular cognitive process or neuralmechanism.23 Nonetheless, they rightly recognize the indispensability of empirical findings tosuccessful theorizing about attention and draw freely from the rich corpus of psychologicalstudies that have been performed over the years, the majority of which target selective visualattention. In this paper I highlight some recent findings that should prompt us to fundamentallyrethink the way we understand attention and, with it, agency in the domain of the mental.It is common for psychologists to make reference to the distinction between top-downand bottom-up attentional control, where the former typically refers to a subject’s goals and thelatter to features of stimuli. This pairs neatly with what we might call an intellectualistconception of attention. The picture is one of an agent navigating their environment via acombination of attentional capture by salient stimuli and purposeful direction of attention inaccordance with their aims and desires. Recent studies on implicit sources of attentional biasing,however, have shown that the story is more complicated (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012;23 Such attempts are myriad and include perception-cognition bottlenecking (Broadbent, 1958), perceptualfeature-binding (Treisman & Gelade, 1980), selection of information for the guidance of action (Allport, 1987), thecompetition between sensory systems for cognitive resources (Desimone & Duncan, 1995), and the broadcasting ofinformation to working memory (Prinz, 2005). These can be understood by anti-reductionists as all illuminating notwhat attention is but rather how it functions at a narrower level of generality.59Todd & Manaligod, 2017). They reveal that shifts in attention occur due to factors that cannot beneatly sorted as either top-down or bottom-up. Such factors are to be located in a subject’shistory of interactions, especially those that involved a significant affective component.If attention is guided in large part by historical factors, this tells us something strikingabout mental agency: it reveals agents as creatures of attentional habit, beings whose presentdispositions to attend to objects in their environments are largely structured by past interactions.This matters for how we understand agency because attention precedes intention, both logicallyand causally.24 If agency is understood as intentional action situated in an environment, we mustrecognize that forming an intention requires an agent to first take stock of their surroundings andthe opportunities for action which they afford. But this taking stock is a matter of attention.Attentional dispositions thus place a constraint on the intentions we can form.In this paper I attempt to render the insights from studies on historical sources ofattentional bias in a form that can be assimilated by those theorists who construe attention as apersonal-level phenomenon. I do this by introducing the construct of hedonic pull, aphenomenologically accessible property of occurrent mental states that is the presentmanifestation of affective history and a guiding force for large swaths of attentional activity.Hedonic pull is an attractive force exerted on an agent by those (mental and physical) objects towhich they attribute it. It draws a person’s attention, and when unchallenged by deliberateexecutive control or powerful stimulus salience, determines much of the content of one’s mentallife.Before proceeding, I should briefly explain how I will be using the term “attention” inwhat follows. To say that attention is a personal- or agential-level phenomenon is to say that it isa person or agent who attends rather than some constituent part of that person. I will thus be24 I have in mind here the orthodox view in the philosophy of action that intentions are mental states.60treating attention as a certain sort of mental activity undertaken by a person or agent. The natureof this activity has been the object of some dispute among philosophers. It is not necessary formy purposes here to take a firm stand on that question, but my mode of description will bearclosest resemblance to Watzl’s (2017) account of attention as the structuring of the mind. Thisaccount recognizes that, at any given moment, a person instantiates a number of mental states,some of which occupy higher positions of mental priority than others. According to Watzl,attention is the process of regulating the priority relations among occurrent mental states. Oneway to articulate a theory of hedonic pull, then, is to suggest that the present manifestation of aperson’s affective history is a major determinant of the priority relationships between occurrentmental states. Because my ultimate goal in this paper is to connect findings in cognitivepsychology to personal-level accounts of attention more generally, though, I will return towardthe end of the paper to two other widely discussed theories of attention, the cognitive unisonaccount (Mole, 2011) and the selection for action account (Wu, 2014, 2024), and explain howthose theories can interpret and incorporate the idea of hedonic pull.In the main discussion, which will progress in terms of priority relationships betweenoccurrent mental states, my focus will be primarily on perceptual and imagistic states (includinginner speech) whose intentional objects are relatively easy to specify. The reason for this is thathedonic pull explains the movement of attention at a very small timescale, where shifts ofattention are (arguably) between intentional objects of perceptual and imagistic states. Though itis beyond the scope of this paper to elaborate and argue for the point, I will assume for presentpurposes that many types of occurrent mental state, including occurrent beliefs and desires,consist of sequences of perceptual and imagistic states.2525 See Carruthers, 2015, for an extended argument for the claim that the stream of conscious consists not of amodalpropositional attitudes but rather exclusively of sensory (perceptual and imagistic) states.61Implicit Sources of Attentional SalienceIn this section, I will briefly explain the recent psychological findings on implicit sourcesof attentional salience to which I seek to do justice at the personal-level with the concept ofhedonic pull. The studies I focus on here reveal sources of attentional bias that relate to aperson’s idiosyncratic history of interactions with objects in their environment. These guidingfactors resist simple categorization as top-down or bottom-up, with one reviewer going as far asto declare the distinction a “failed theoretical dichotomy” (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes,2012). Accordingly, these historical factors put pressure on intellectual conceptions of attentionand the deliberative accounts of agency that go hand-in-hand with them. Far from the idea of adetached surveyor of objective properties, receiving information from the environment and usingit to calculate the best way of achieving independently held goals, the picture of agency thefindings reviewed here support is one of embeddedness in an affectively laden historical andenvironmental context. Agents bring more than their goals to new encounters. They also bringpersonal histories that create idiosyncratic attentional habits. These habits largely determine howan agent will take stock of their surroundings and the opportunities for action these surroundingsafford. Implicit sources of attentional guidance thus place constraints on the sorts of intentionalactions a person can perform to manifest their agency.Recent reviews of work uncovering implicit sources of attentional salience outline fourcategories of historical factors (Awh, Belopolsky, & Theeuwes, 2012; Todd & Manaligod, 2017).The first is statistical learning. Studies show that that repeated exposure to a target feature in asearch task enhances reaction time to it or biases attention toward its location (Wolfe, 2003;Jiang, Swallow, & Rosenbaum, 2013). Traditionally, this effect would be attributed to the abilityof the subject to focus top-down resources on one feature or location instead of multiple ones.62But Awh et al. (2012) point out that such effects are consistent with priming effects of selectionhistory, which have independent empirical support (Maljkovic & Nakayama, 1994) and seem tobe efficacious even when they contradict the subject’s voluntary goals (Theeuwes & Van derBurg, 2011). A second category is semantic associations. Moores et al. (2003) havedemonstrated that subjects are more likely to recall rapidly presented objects that are associatedwith a pre-specified target stimulus than they are to recall objects unrelated to that target. Forexample, if the target is “monkey,” subjects are more likely to recall the presence of bananas thanthat of other, non-associated objects. The authors hypothesize that this effect is due to semanticassociations that bias attention toward associated objects and thus make them more available forfurther processing and maintenance in working memory. Such associations are built uphistorically and resist grouping as a top-down or bottom-up factor. A third category is expectedreward. A number of studies have shown that subjects can form associations between financialreward and low-level features such as color. Attention then becomes biased toward features orlocations that have previously been paired with reward, where the bias increases with themagnitude of the reward (Chelazzi et al., 2013). Again, there is a traditional interpretation to berejected. It is common to think of the effect of rewards on attentional biasing as mediated bysubjects’ motivational states, which inform their voluntary goals. However, Hickey et al. (2010)and Anderson et al. (2011a, 2011b) provide evidence that the effects can run counter to this sortof intentional control. Finally, there are studies that demonstrate a biasing effect by affectivehistory. Here associations biasing attention are related to psychological or physiological arousaland are operative at varying timescales. Affective associations can be built quickly in alaboratory setting, for instance by pairing a certain image with an unpleasant shock (Lim,63Padmala, & Pessoa, 2009), but they can also result from longer term experiences on the order ofmonths or years (Todd et al., 2015).Integrative priority approaches to attentional guidance propose that these sources, inaddition to canonically top-down and bottom-up ones, are integrated into priority maps, neuronalrepresentations that are ultimately responsible for directing subpersonal attentional processes.26Todd and Manaligod (2017) define priority maps as “neural representations of the relativesalience of locations in the visual field that determine spatial allocation of attentional resources”(p. 122). By integrating the various sources of salience, priority maps provide an individual witha sort of holistic attentional control. Based on past experience in similar contexts, locations in thevisual field will have differing net levels of salience once competing and reinforcing sourceshave been reconciled. Executive attention, featural salience, and historical factors are all takeninto account and integrated, and the resultant priority map determines where and how oneattends.Priority maps (or “salience maps,” as they have often been called) have a history in thepsychology of attention. First proposed by Koch and Ullman (1985), they were originallyunderstood as mechanisms of attentional control based on low-level visual features. Treisman(1988) proposed the idea of a master map that integrated early visual processing of individualfeatures such as orientation and color and bound those features together so that later processingcould identify and perceive objects in the environment rather than a jumble of disconnectedfeatures. Traditional conceptions of salience maps sought to explain bottom-up attention, since itwas objective features of the environment that needed to be integrated. The priority mapsproposed by integrated priority approaches to attentional control differ from these because they26 Examples of integrative priority approaches include the Integrative Priority Map framework of Awh, Belopolsky,and Theeuwes (2012), the MAGiC model of Pourtois, Schettino, and Vuilleumier (2013), and the Priority StateSpace framework of Todd and Manaligod (2017).64integrate not just featural salience but individualized, historical factors as well. Additionally, inthe case of Todd and Manaligod’s (2017) Priority State Space framework, priority maps aretheoretically embedded within state spaces, which are conceptual representations of possiblesalience arrangements. According to this framework, when a person shifts from one context toanother (say, from writing a paper to taking a walk), the state space is bifurcated and newpossibilities for salience arrangements become possible. Whereas a laptop screen is a potentiallysalient attractor while sitting at a desk, it is not even a possible object of visual attention onceone steps outside for a breath of fresh air. The operative priority map is thus constantly beingupdated as an individual proceeds through one environmental or cognitive context after another.In each context, the various sources of salience are reconciled and the resultant map guidesattention.Though psychologists have studied them as separate constructs, I think there is reason tobelieve that the four historical sources of attentional salience may be less distinct than one mightinitially take them to be. It should be expected, for instance, that guidance by reward reduces toguidance by (positive) affective history. A reward can only be thought of as such, after all, if thesubject has a positive experience as a result of acquiring it. But it may also be the case that theother historical factors, statistical learning and semantic associations, draw their guiding forcefrom affective history as well. In the case of statistical learning, a stimulus biases attention onceit has been repeated. It is reasonable to assume that pattern recognition produces a very subtleform of pleasure. A mere glance at nearly any human artifact will confirm that some level ofsymmetry and order is fundamental to our aesthetic preferences, and studies of aestheticjudgements of patterns (Eisenman & Gellens, 1968; Jacobsen & Höfel, 2001; Tinio & Leder,2009) and attractiveness judgements of symmetrical faces suggest this as well (Perett et al.,651999; Little, 2014). Something similar can be said of semantic associations, which likely reduceto this same category. Indeed, Todd and Manaligod suggest that biasing by semantic associations“may result from long-term statistical learning of the frequent co-occurrence of semanticallyassociated objects in real environments” (2017, p. 123). In the next section, I will introduce theconstruct of hedonic pull as the present manifestation of affective history. To the extent that othersources of attentional salience reduce to such a history, they too will find expression in thisconstruct.Along these lines, might canonical bottom-up factors of attentional salience draw theirguiding force from associations with affective history as well? These factors are traditionallythought to be related to intrinsic qualities of external stimuli. In the case of vision, these aretypically low-level properties such as color, orientation, and motion, and in each such case “whatappears to matter in guiding bottom-up attention is feature contrast” (Itti, 2005, p. 577). Thus agreen square will “pop-out” amidst an array of red circles, as will a uniquely oriented gaborpatch among identical neighbors and a moving shape among stationary ones. Though it isestablished that these salience differences are discerned early in the visual system, the fact thatthey are attention-garnering may still be explained by reference to affective experiences. Herethese would have to come in at a deeper level of analysis, where the guiding force of perceivedcontrast is generated as the result of certain fitness advantages in the context of natural selection.Contrasting features in an environment tend to indicate hedonic significance for an organism.Consider the pleasure that might be soon achieved as a result of noticing a ripe, red fruit amonggreen leaves or the pain that might be avoided by recognizing an uneven patch of ground aheadof where one is walking. Attending to motion is also obviously advantageous, for examplewhether one is hunting prey or, conversely, looking out for predators. The pairing between66contrast and affect is phylogenetically ancient. Eschericia coli (E. coli), a prokaryotic bacteriacell, tracks the presence of sucrose in its environment and uses its flagella to swim in thedirection of higher concentration. This behavior requires a rudimentary form of contrastperception to distinguish between sucrose concentrations in various directions. According to oneaccount, such perception should be thought of as guided by a rudimentary form of affect, wherethis is understood as an approach reaction to encountering nutritive molecules (Thompson,2007).Attentional Guidance by Hedonic PullIn this section, I will introduce the construct of hedonic pull and provide a provisionaloperational model for understanding its generation and maintenance. The empirical workreviewed in the last section reveals that subpersonal mechanisms of attention are guided byhistorical factors, especially affective history. But a history cannot guide activity in the presentunless it is somehow operative in the present. Attentional guidance happens in real-time as aperson navigates their mental and physical environment. We must therefore specify a factor thatis operative in the present and responsible for this guidance. I intend the construct of hedonicpull to refer to that factor.Before explaining the construct in detail, though, some ordinary, intuitive motivation forthe phenomenon may be helpful. It is often the case that different people in the sameenvironment have their attention drawn to different things. With the perceptible features heldconstant, sometimes what explains the attentional difference is the fact that the people havedifferent goals guiding their attention through executive control. For example, upon entering aroom where a cocktail party is underway, what is salient to a guest may differ greatly from what67is salient to a server. The guest, looking to join a conversation, may be more attentionally drawnto familiar faces. The server, on the other hand, may be more likely to notice glasses in need of arefill. But often we find ourselves in situations where we do not have any strongly held goals;still, attentional dispositions differ greatly. It is at times like these where what is noticed tends torelate to what seem like “deeper” motivational factors, ones that are better understood as aspectsof one’s personality than of any occurrent task or goal. Consider the following imagined butillustrative example. A fashion enthusiast and a foodie are at a dinner party. Neither is attemptingto do anything more than socialize and have a good time. Nevertheless, the first person’sattention is repeatedly drawn to what the other guests are wearing: their outfits, accessories, andthe degree of coordination and creativity these manifest. The second’s is drawn to what is served:the subtleties of the flavors and the ways in which each course complements the next. These aredifferences in attentional dispositions, manifest in the distinct way in which each personexperiences the same environment. What seems to explain these differences is the two people’sinterests and abilities, both of which are sourced in their personal histories. In developing theconstruct of hedonic pull, it is this sort of effect that I am seeking to explain.Hedonic pull, as hypothesized in this paper, is most naturally thought of as a property ofoccurrent mental states. I call this property “hedonic” because a mental state token’s specificmanifestation of it is a function of the person’s affective history while in mental statesintentionally directed at the same object-type or gestalt-type. “Pull” refers to the attractive forcethat directs the state upward in mental priority. According to the view I am advancing here, as wenavigate the world our sensory, memory, and affective systems interact in order to track and storeeach object-type’s propensity to produce in us positive and negatively valenced experiences in68various contexts.27 As a result, mental states intentionally directed toward objects of the type areimbued with a level of hedonic pull, where the strength of pull is determined both by themagnitude of the affect historically generated in response to attending to the object-type and theexpectation of how likely it is that so attending will produce this affect again.Hedonic pull should not be confused with the positive or negative feeling concomitantwith a given occurrent mental state. It is not itself an affective property but is rather a function ofaffective history; it is the present manifestation of past interactions. It is thus distinct from whatis sometimes referred to as affect valence.28 Mental states do not feature positive or negativehedonic pull. Rather, one’s history of valenced experiences results in a mental state having anattractive force that varies along just one dimension. This means that intensely pleasurable andintensely painful experiences can both encode object-types with high levels of hedonic pull.29Attentional guidance by hedonic pull can be modeled using a decision theoreticframework. Daniel Kahneman and colleagues (1997) distinguish between experienced,remembered, and predicted utility, concepts that have analogues in the case of attentionalguidance. Experienced utility is the actual utility an agent attains from a particular decisionoutcome, while remembered utility is the retrospective attribution of experienced utility that anagent makes with regard to a past outcome. Predicted utility then refers to an agent’s prospectivebelief about the experienced utility of a potential outcome. In the context of attentional guidance,29 This characterization of hedonic pull also differentiates it from what are sometimes called “micro-valences”(Lebrecht et al., 2012). The concept of a micro-valence is that of a subtle affective response to a stimulus nottypically thought to evoke strong emotional reactions. The tendency to have these responses is thought to explain theguidance of attention in certain cases. Unlike with micro-valences, the guiding force of hedonic pull is notnecessarily mediated by an affective response, even though it is the result of affective history.28 See Colombetti (2005) for a comprehensive history and discussion of the concept of valence.27 I have in mind here not just gross affective experiences, such as the pain of bodily injury or the pleasure oflaughter, but exceedingly subtle ones as well, such as the positive feeling that occurs when one knows the answer toa question or the negative feeling that occurs when one notices a painting hung askew on the wall.69hedonic pull can be understood as the predicted utility an agent (typically implicitly) attributes tothe decision outcome of attending to a particular object.30Kahneman and colleagues provide an analysis of subjects’ retrospective evaluation ofoutcomes, elements of which can be profitably imported into an explanation of the normativeprinciples operative in the generation of hedonic pull. In this analysis, instant utility is aprimitive, an expression of momentary experienced utility that is integrated over time into ameasure of total utility. Instant utility is to be measured ordinally, meaning that moments ofexperience can be compared in terms of their hedonic value. Episodes refer to discrete periods oftime, each of which will feature a utility profile that assigns a level of instant utility to eachmoment within it. Episodes can be grouped into a temporally extended outcome, the utilityprofile of which is constructed from the concatenation of those profiles associated with theconstituent episodes. We can derive from this framework the concept of an attentional episode torefer to a period of uninterrupted time during which a person attends to a particular object. Thetemporally extended outcome associated with an object-type is constructed from all of theprevious attentional episodes featuring objects of that type. We should also note that total utilityin the attentional context is an aggregation of the absolute values of negative and positiveexperienced instant utilities.A given object’s hedonic pull can then be understood as a function of total utility overtime. Although the precise principles describing the generation of hedonic pull would need to beleft to empirical investigation, one reasonable starting hypothesis is that hedonic pull is arepresentation of the average utility of past experiences attending to the objects of a specific30 When I say that a shift of attention is a decision outcome, I do not mean that it is the product of deliberation. Imean only that attentional shifts are mental events whose occurrence can be analyzed in decision theoretic terms.Also, I am using “utility” here in a fine-grained psychological sense to refer to a moment of positive affect (or theavoidance of negative affect).70type. Its value serves as the predicted utility of attending to such an object, where this isunderstood as the predicted likelihood that attending to that object will result in mental statespositively or negatively valenced to a certain degree.To say that attention is guided by hedonic pull is to say that a mental state’s position ofmental priority is a function of its level of hedonic pull relative to that of other occurrent mentalstates. It is customary to think that people instantiate many different occurrent mental states inany given context. For example, as I write this paper, instantiated in me are numerous sensorystates (including seeing the laptop, feeling the floor underfoot, and hearing the whir of anairplane passing by), imagistic states (such as imagining the next example to list), andproprioceptive states (like recognizing my slouching posture). Each state has an intentionalobject, which it is directed at. The corresponding objects for the examples just listed are thelaptop, the floor, an airplane, a string of words, and my torso. According to the view expressed inthis paper, each of these objects will be associated with a certain level of hedonic pullcorresponding to my (undoubtedly long and complicated) affective history when I haveencountered objects of the same type. My suggestion here is that the object associated with thehighest level of pull is the one to which I will attend, that is, the mental state directed at it willreach top priority.If the matter were this simple, however, the theory of guidance by hedonic pull would beobviously false, for as it stands, it describes hedonic pull in fixed, static terms. As a result, itpredicts that whichever occurrent mental state has the highest level of hedonic pull will rise tothe position of top priority and then stay there until that mental state is no longer instantiated, atwhich point the mental state with the next highest level will take this position until it is no longerinstantiated. But this is not what it is like for us to attend in a complex mental environment. I71may at first attend to the laptop, but it certainly seems like I continue to see it when I attend tothe feeling of the floor. At very least, the laptop continues to be there to be seen, that is, itremains a potential object of my attention even after I stop attending to it. Assuming the laptop isthe object associated with the highest level of hedonic pull in such a moment, I am neverthelesscapable of attending elsewhere while in its presence, though, as it stands, guidance by hedonicpull predicts that this should not be possible.We must therefore add complexity to what has thus far been too simple a theoreticalpicture. As a first step, we should address object-individuation and context-sensitivity. We shouldrecognize that the object-types at issue will track objects in a more finely-grained manner thanwe tend to with our generic object categories and that hedonic pull must be somehow indexed tocontext. For example, it is highly implausible that all of the cups I encounter are associated withthe same level of hedonic pull, and the same cup or type of cup may have different levels of pullin different contexts. For my affective history when encountering an empty glass on the shelf of akitchenware store is very different than my history when encountering an empty glass in my ownkitchen cabinet. And my history with that same, latter glass is different in instances in which Iwas thirsty from how it is in instances in which I was not. In line with this, everyday experiencesuggests that my attentional dispositions differ accordingly in these various contexts. I am morelikely to overlook the glass in the store (assuming I am not there to purchase one) than I am tooverlook the glass in my cabinet, and the glass in my cabinet is more likely to draw my attentionif I am thirsty than if I am not.As a second step, we should identify a dynamic aspect of hedonic pull operative at shorttimescales, some way of allowing for attentional shifts between mental states whose objectsfeature levels of hedonic pull that are more fixed in the longer term. There are at least two (not72mutually exclusive) ways in which the theory of guidance by hedonic pull might accommodatedynamic attention in relatively stable circumstances. The first is to suggest that motivationalsystems typically associated with a person’s executive control network, those that are involved inmanaging a person’s goals and planning, might be able to selectively suppress or enhance theattractive potency of certain categories of mental states in accordance with one’s current tasks orpriorities. This management of the attentional landscape could result in a bounded domain ofmental states competing on the basis of hedonic pull free from interference by states outside ofthat domain.31 For instance, if a person is asked to carefully listen to the sounds in theirenvironment, they may temporarily be able to suppress visual, proprioceptive, and other stimulithat might otherwise capture unrestricted attention. A second way to accommodate dynamicattending is to posit a temporary “working draft” of the attentional landscape that is generatedand updated as one navigates one’s environment. The suggestion is that, in each new scenario,mental states arise initially with their intentional object’s historically imbued hedonic pull butthat the associated values are rapidly and temporarily updated in one’s present circumstances.Here we might simply distinguish between an object’s total hedonic pull and its hedonic pull inthe current episode. It is this episodic hedonic pull that then competes with the historical hedonicpull of other occurrent mental states in the first instance. The hedonic pull of the currentattentional episode will, of course, be constantly updated as that episode progresses. If (perhapsafter some minimum threshold of evaluative time) one experiences a lower level of affect thanthat predicted, then eventually a different object, the one with the next highest level of pull, willgarner attention and be “sampled” in the same way.As a further point in this initial explanation of the way in which hedonic pull guidesattention, we should make more precise my reference to “competition” between mental states for31 I discuss this process in greater detail in the next section.73attention. It would be a mistake here to think that mental states somehow had access to eachother’s level of hedonic pull such that they could compete with each other in an interactive way.Consequently we should say something about the mechanism by which the different hedonic pulllevels of the various mental states instantiated at any given time are combined and reconciled. Ipropose that this reconciliation occurs at the subpersonal level via the priority maps described inthe previous section but is then manifested in what I call a hedonic overlay in experience.Priority maps have been hypothesized to exist in primary visual cortex (Koch & Ullman, 1985),but there is also evidence of auditory maps (Kayser et al., 2005) as well as supra-modal ones(Behrmann et al., 2004).32 For a priority map to resolve competition between differing levels ofhedonic pull is for it to compare the neuronal representations of these values and integrate themto produce a representation of the environment that maps the values onto locations in space.33This sort of priority map would underpin hedonic overlay, a hypothesized phenomenological(and thus personal-level) layer that presents the hedonic pull corresponding to the various objectsin the person’s physical and mental environment. The hedonic overlay in experience can bethought of as a phenomenological topography of hedonic pull. As we move through physical andmental landscapes, our attention is guided along this topography to those objects that have led inthe past to experiences with a significant affective component.33 As the construct has been understood in cognitive psychology, priority maps are spatial, that is, they integrate sourcesof salience to produce a representation of the environment that guides attention to locations rather than to specificobjects or features. One challenge for a developed theory of hedonic pull, then, is to explain how priority maps canguide attention during what would appear to be non-spatial, abstract mental activity. For example, the theory should beable to explain how a person’s attention can be directed away from the present environment toward, say, plans for thefuture. One possibility for solving this problem is to better understand the developmental origin of such mental activity.As suggested by certain human practices, such as mind-mapping, and as expressed in idioms such as “beingscatterbrained” or having one’s “thoughts in order,” at least some of what might appear as non-spatial thought may haveits genetic basis in bodily experiences in space and time. To the extent that this is a case, it seems reasonable tohypothesize the existence of priority maps that direct mental attention to locations in this abstract environment. In theend, of course, the extent to which priority maps can underlie so-called “stimulus-independent thought” will be anempirical matter.32 Watzl (2017) makes a similar point in more detail. See Chapter 6.74The idea that the hedonic overlay is phenomenologically accessible can be motivated byordinary examples. Let us consider two. First, consider the experience of finding somebody inthe room very attractive. In such cases, there is often a felt desire to look at the person. When notlooking at them, one can feel one’s attention pulled back, and it is often the case that one findsoneself resisting this pull. The fact that resistance is called for suggests that the more naturalcourse of attention would be to look. This is in line with the topographical metaphor if we thinkof attention analogously to, say, water that moves naturally downward in a hilly landscape. As asecond example, consider certain aspects of owning a smartphone. People (especially youngadults) are often acutely aware of where their smartphones are and become focused on findingthem if not (Notara et al., 2021). They also routinely pull them out in situations where there is noobvious reason to do so. Although an adequate understanding of people’s behavior aroundsmartphones would require input from a variety of perspectives, it seems that what explains a fairbit of it is a disposition to attend to the device in myriad circumstances. Indeed, researchersincreasingly describe the problematic aspects of smartphones and the social media platforms thatare primarily accessed through them in attentional terms (Williams, 2018; Castro & Pham,2020). Important to this line of investigation is a recognition of the now well-understood efforton behalf of technology companies to design products and services that generate affectiveresponses in a manner most conducive to habit-formation. What we see in the smartphone, then,is an especially poignant example of an object with extremely high hedonic pull. When taken incontext, that is, when one reflects on one’s smartphone usage in real-world circumstances, thedevice appears as an extraordinarily high peak in the attentional topography that I have called thehedonic overlay to experience. Instead of attending to other aspects of the environment or75entertaining other thoughts, people are increasingly drawn to their smartphones, a phenomenontoo obvious to overlook in contemporary society.In his phenomenological account of attention, Arvidson (2006) adapts and expands ideasfrom Gurwitsch’s (1964) The Field of Consciousness in order to describe what he calls “thesphere of attention.” This phenomenological picture distinguishes three dimensions of attention,each with its own principles of organization and development. At the center of the sphere is atheme, which presents in a unified manner as having gestalt-coherence, meaning that each part ofthe thematic object presents with functional significance for that object. Around the theme is thecontext, which consists of content that is relevant to the theme. It is the background from whichthe theme emerges as foreground. Separated by a vague boundary from this context is themargin, which includes all of the items one is conscious of that are irrelevant to the theme. Wecan helpfully imagine the hedonic overlay in experience as superimposed upon this structure.The theme will be whichever object has garnered attention in virtue of its hedonic pull. Thecontext will include content related to the theme specifically insofar as it is relevant to anassessment of episodic hedonic pull. It is the content in the context that can be compared toprevious instances of attending to the same object-type as a way of determining circumstantialsimilarity and aiding predictive validity. Also, it is in the context that we should expect to findthe affective valence of an attended-to object, the positive or negative experienced utility thatdetermines current episodic pull. The margin is where we can find all other, unattended-toobjects, each “waiting in the wings” and exhibiting its own hedonic pull. Because these objectsare still experienced, albeit dimly, we feel their pull, and when the temporally local, episodic pullof an attended-to object weakens, it is from this peripheral awareness that the next themeemerges.76This interpretation of the phenomenology of attention is further supported by certainideas articulated by Edmund Husserl. In his work on what he called “passive synthesis,” Husserl(whom Gurwitsch would later draw from in developing his field of consciousness model) gaveattention a role in the earliest generative stages of mental content. For Husserl, mental contentcomes to be as the result of a synthetic process. Experiential entities need to be “constituted”;they do not appear in consciousness with definite form but rather come to be this way in a seriesof phenomenologically discernible stages. The final stage, a full-blown intentional object, occurswhen some piece of mental content becomes clearly defined at the center of one’s experientialfield. Husserl describes this in egoic terms as the ego’s “turning-toward” something, aparadigmatic direction of attention, but the prior synthetic activity deserves to be consideredattentional as well, since it is continuous with this final stage. To explain why some objectsrather than others garner attention and become full-blown intentional objects, Husserl employedthe concept of “affection”:By affection we understand the allure given to consciousness, the peculiar pull that anobject given to consciousness exercises on the ego; it is a pull that is relaxed when theego turns toward it attentively, and progresses from here, striving toward self-givingintuition, disclosing more and more of the self of the object, thus, striving toward anacquisition of knowledge, toward a more precise view of the object (2001, p. 196).Affection is exerted by elements of non-thematic content, what Husserl scholar AnthonySteinbock refers to as “object-like formations” as opposed to full-blown intentional objects(2004, p. 23). All such elements have some degree of affection, thought Husserl, and every fullyformed intentional object is the result of an egoic submission to an affective solicitation. This is apicture overall that coheres well with the ideas of hedonic pull and hedonic overlay as previouslyarticulated. On the present account, hedonic pull would be understood as the factor that77determines which “object-like formations” are further synthesized or, in other words, whichmental states rise to higher levels of mental priority. Hedonic overlay, then, would refer to thedistribution of Husserlian affection over a total cognitive and sensory field.Before moving on to other matters, it is important to clarify one additional issue at theheart of the idea of hedonic pull. We ought to make explicit why it is that hedonic pull should bethought to possess the requisite motivational force to guide attention. The motivational force ofhedonic pull is derived from the motivational force of the positive and negative experiencedutility that grounds it historically. This latter force I take to be intrinsic. Positive and negativeexperienced utility are equivalent, according to the view developed in this paper, to degrees ofpositive and negative affective valence. The concept of valence, first introduced into psychologyin 1932 by Edward C. Tolman in a translation of the works of Kurt Lewin, referred originally tothat power by which objects exert “attractive and repulsive forces” (Tolman, cited in Colombetti,2005, p. 105). Affective valence is thus best understood functionally in terms of its rolefacilitating approach and avoidance. Recall then that hedonic pull is the predicted utility ofattending in a certain manner, grounded primarily in the remembered utility of so attending, andthe motivational force of hedonic pull is thereby uncovered. Hedonic pull is motivationalbecause it orients a person toward objects that the person remembers avoiding or approachingand thus predicts the advantage of doing so again.Voluntary Attention and Attentional BoundingThe picture of attentional guidance by hedonic pull that I have outlined so far seems toapply primarily to the more receptive moments in one’s mental life, when one is surveyingobjects in one’s physical environment or when one’s mind wanders in the absence of a clear and78present task. At times like these, it seems plausible to suggest that attention generally gravitatesto mental or physical object-types that in the past have led to strong affective experiences. Butthere are also times when we direct our attention voluntarily, sometimes explicitly so. Forexample, if given the instruction, you can easily direct your visual attention to the nearest wall,hold it there for five seconds, and then cease doing so. You can also maintain attention whilereading or listening to somebody speak. Is hedonic pull operative in such circumstances? In thissection, I will suggest that paradigmatically voluntary attention often includes a spontaneousaspect that makes space for attentional guidance by hedonic pull. I will consider three types ofvoluntary attention - sustained perceptual attention, directed thought, and deliberation - andargue that what unites them is the execution of a hitherto unappreciated form of mental actionthat I will call attentional bounding. When engaged in these sorts of mental activity, our mentalagency involves bounding a domain of content, but within that domain, attention roamsaccording to its own guiding principles. It is in this roaming that it can be guided by hedonicpull.Let us begin with sustained perceptual attention. Consider, for example, what it is like toattentively look at the back of your hand. If your experience is anything like my own, it involvesa seemingly aimless visual scan of the area. My visual attention jumps between fingers,fingernails, wrinkles, protruding veins, and other features of my hand. I can, however, focus. Ican choose to attend only to, say, my index finger. But this experience retains the structure of itspredecessor, with my visual attention scanning up and down the finger, from the nail to thewrinkly joint in the middle and down to the knuckle. I can focus more, now only attending to thefingernail, but again visual attention bounces about, from the white edge to the subtle ridges, tothe cuticle, to the little half-moon near the nailbed. When we direct our perceptual attention, it79seems that what we do is perform a mental action that can be understood as setting boundariesfor the implicated sense organ to explore. (For a non-visual example, consider what it is like toauditorily attend to the sound of birds in a natural landscape.) We can broaden these boundariesand we can narrow them, and we can set them around various objects, properties, or regions. Butonce we do that, precisely which features we notice seems out of our control. Attention movesabout seemingly spontaneously, and we can neither predict nor explain where it roams.Something similar happens when we direct our thoughts. Galen Strawson (2003) arguesthat:The role of genuine action in thought is at best indirect. It is entirely prefatory, it isessentially - merely - catalytic … No doubt there are ... preparatory, ground-setting,tuning, retuning, shepherding, active moves or intentional initiations. But action, inthinking, really goes no further than this. The rest is waiting, seeing if anything happens,waiting for content to come to mind, for the 'natural causality of reason' to operate in one.This operation is indeed spontaneous, but in the sense of 'involuntary, not due toconscious volition’ (p. 231-2).Strawson goes to some length in describing a taxonomy of mental actions, the details of whichare not important for our purposes here. Rather, the important point is that certain inwarddirections of attention bear a strong resemblance to the cases of perceptual attention I have justdescribed. For instance, you can voluntarily direct your attention to childhood memories. If youdo so without further specificity, memories will arise spontaneously. But you can focus further,perhaps by attending to childhood memories from when you were at school, and you can boundfurther by trying to recall memories from when you were at school with a certain friend. Somemental boundaries are so restrictive that they admit of only one piece of content, such as whenone mentally asks oneself the question, what is two plus two? Others are expansive, such aswhen you brainstorm ideas for a paper topic. Nevertheless there is in a great deal of thought a80similar structural pattern that can be described in terms of attention. You direct your attention atsome bounded domain, and precisely what comes to the foreground of your mind does sospontaneously.Finally, consider deliberation, which is a species of directed thought. In this form ofmental activity, it is natural to say that you attend to the process of making a decision, but in thefine-grained way we have been using the term “attention” in this paper, it is also natural to saythat deliberation includes serially attending to imagistic states associated with decision options.Carruthers (2011) reproduces with slight modification a model of practical reason developed andsupported in more detail by Damasio (1994). According to this model, a person decides upon acourse of action by serially considering a number of possibilities and monitoring one’s responseto them. For Damasio, this involves monitoring somatic responses, but for Carruthers, thisinvolves an affective response generated as a result of the global broadcast of some imagisticcontent. For example, in deciding whether to order a beer or a soda, one imagines the taste of onefollowed by the taste of the other and compares the resultant affective responses. Dependingupon a number of factors, including one’s history of experiences with the two drinks and one’scurrent environment and motivational state, these response will be either positively or negativelyvalenced to varying degrees. Here affect valence serves as a “common currency” between theoptions, and the more positively valenced choice will be the one the person decides to actualize.Again we see attentional bounding at work: your understanding of the decision and possibleoptions for outcomes create a domain in which content and reactions arise spontaneously.Attentional bounding thus seems like a common form of mental action, operating in atleast some of the instances that we would want to describe as exhibiting voluntary attention.When engaged in attentional bounding, an agent creates conditions in which subsequent81attentional guidance must be explained by principles other than those expressed in the action ofsetting the boundaries.34 One’s intention to visually attend to the back of their hand does notspecify where on that hand to look. Intending to recall childhood memories does not dictateprecisely which memories will be conjured up, in which order they will arise, or for how longthey will linger. And one does not always know when one initiates deliberation how manyoptions one will consider, the order in which they will be considered, and how one will react tothem. There is thus a place in at least some forms of voluntary attention for guidance by hedonicpull. Within the conceptual or regional limits set by attentional bounding, mental states canachieve priority in accordance with the hedonic pull of their intentional objects.Attentional bounding can be understood as a process by which certain mental states aregenerated, and the theory of hedonic pull can explain which generated states achieve mentalpriority. The process is similar in form to other actions that cause a change in the occurrentmental states one instantiates. For example, when you turn your head, this action results in a newset of visual states, and hedonic pull plays a role in determining which of these new states, if any,will achieve mental priority. Similarly, bounding is a cognitive action that, according to variousprinciples, causes certain mental states to become instantiated. Since these have intentionalobjects, they will have some level of hedonic pull, and they can compete for priority on thisbasis. When a mental state achieves priority, its episodic hedonic pull determines how long itholds that position. Just as in cases of involuntary attention, this will depend on the affectiveresponse one has to attending in that way.34 Traditionally, this process might be thought of as involving top-down constraints on automatic shifts in attention.Here, hedonic pull is hypothesized as the factor governing those shifts. This provides a fuller explanation of whyattention moves around the way it does within intentional constraints, and it also links what would otherwise appear tobe two distinct forms of mental activity (passive and active attention) by revealing a common element.82Personal-Level Attention RevisitedThroughout the discussion so far, I have articulated certain ideas in terms drawn fromSebastian Watzl’s account of attention as mental prioritization and structuring. In doing so, myintention was not to take a stand on the correct theory of what attention is. Rather, I sought toelaborate the theory of hedonic pull in greater detail, and the structuring account provided atheoretical framework within which I was able to do that. In this brief final section, I willconnect the idea of hedonic pull to two other important contemporary philosophical theories ofattention: the cognitive unison account, first proposed by Christopher Mole (2011), and theselection for action account, first proposed by Wayne Wu (2014, 2024) as an adaptation of apsychological theory developed by Alan Allport (1987).According to Mole (2011), attention is cognitive unison. One of the most distinctiveaspects of this view is that it is an adverbial account of attention, meaning that it takes attentionnot to be something an agent does but rather a way of doing something else. Attentive action,from this perspective, is action performed with cognitive unison. An agent performs some taskattentively when no cognitive process that the agent could bring to bear in the service of that taskis otherwise directed. For example, consider an interior decorator who is examining a room withan eye toward possibilities for redecorating. Some cognitive processes involved in performingthis task would include carefully assessing the dimensions and orientation of the room, recallingother design elements in the building, and imagining possible arrangements of furniture anddecor. This last process in particular plausibly relies on a sort of visualization ability that couldserve other tasks, such as considering what to cook for dinner after work. If the decoratoremploys their visualization ability for this latter task, momentarily thinking through a few meal83options instead of redecoration possibilities, cognitive unison is lacking; they are not examiningthe room attentively.The idea of hedonic pull can make at least two contributions to the cognitive unisontheory of attention. First, it can help to explain why an agent engages in one task rather thananother. Intentions to act in one way or another often arise in light of environmentalcircumstances. The theory of hedonic pull explains why agents notice some features of theenvironment rather than others, and this noticing sets constraints on what sorts of behavioralpossibilities will occur to the agent. From this constrained set, the agent can then choose toinitiate a task, which brings us to the second contribution. Hedonic pull can help to explain notjust which task an agent engages in but also whether or not cognitive unison is achieved in theperformance of that task. Hedonic pull encodes motivational force via the integration ofimplicitly recalled affective experiences. The strength of this force plausibly influences howlikely it is that the agent will employ the full complement of relevant cognitive processes inservice of the task at hand. So, too, does the hedonic pull exerted on the agent by competingobjects. In this way, hedonic pull can help to explain the cognitive conditions that conduce to orinhibit attentive action.In the other direction, the cognitive unison view raises an interesting question for thefurther empirical investigation of hedonic pull. It seems reasonable to assume that the presenceor absence of cognitive unison will influence the affective quality of the experience of a givenbehavior. In other words, engaging in a task with cognitive unison likely generates a different setof affective responses from what is generated by engaging in the same task without cognitiveunison. This is suggested, for example, by psychological research into the nature of so-called“flow” experiences, where positive affect is linked to fully focused engagement in a task84(Csikszentmihalyi, 1990). To the extent that cognitive unison influences the affective quality ofexperiences, it will influence the generation of hedonic pull for attentional objects implicated invarious forms of behavior. Understanding this process better can help elucidate the recursivenature of attentional guidance, where attending in a particular manner can determine how likelyone is to attend similarly in the future.According to Wu (2014; 2024), attention is selection for action. This view is aphilosophical adaptation of Alan Allport’s psychological theory of attention as the selection ofinformation for the guidance of action. The selection of information is a computational notionthat refers to subpersonal cognitive mechanisms. At the personal level, Wu argues, what isselected are couplings of observation and response. He gives the simple example of an agentpresented with a basketball and a soccer ball and able to kick either one of these with either foot.Here the agent occupies a psychological behavior space consisting of four possibilities: each ofthe two balls can be kicked with either of the two feet. Attention is constituted by the selection ofone of these four possibilities, a perceptual attunement to one of the balls coupled with the intentto kick it with a one of the feet. In ordinary life, agents occupy psychological behavior spacesconsisting of innumerably more possibilities. They thus face what Wu calls the Many-ManyProblem, since there are many possible objects of perception and many possible responses toeach of them. Attention, he argues, arises as agents solve this problem.As with the cognitive unison view, the theory of hedonic pull can help to explain actionselection. According the selection for action view, agents solve the Many-Many Problem byattending. The idea of hedonic pull helps to explain why some perceptible objects are selectedrather than others.35 Suppose, for example, that the agent in the ball-kicking example has35 In other words, it seeks to illuminate the principles by which the various cognitive biases that lead to attentionfunction.85previously had many positive experiences playing soccer and none playing basketball. Thisaffective history will imbue soccer balls, as an object-category, with a high level of hedonic pull.As a result, the soccer ball will be more salient than the basketball, meaning that it will be morelikely to be selected for action.This example highlights an underexplored aspect of hedonic pull as previously described.In the main explication of the construct, I described the generation of hedonic pull in somewhatpassive terms, as being determined by past utility experienced as the result of deciding to attendto something. This was, in part, an artifact of my choice of attentional theory. On Watzl’sstructuring view, attention is the process by which an agent organizes their occurrent mentalstates into priority structures. We can thus assimilate all instances of prioritizing mental stateswith intentional objects of the same type and thereby assign hedonic pull to that object-type.What the selection for action view helps bring out is that perceptual attunement to some object isalways, or at least often, paired with some behavioral response. This raises an interestingquestion for further empirical investigation: is hedonic pull determined merely by attention to anobject, where this is understood as perceptual focus on or mental prioritization of that object, oris hedonic pull indexed to couplings of perception and response? Is it the agent’s history of affectgenerated in the mere perceptual presence of soccer balls that guides attention, or is it theirhistory of, say, kicking a soccer ball with their right foot that matters? The latter possibility isinteresting, since, if correct, it suggests that it is not just our way of encountering the world thatis habitual but also our way of responding to it.86ConclusionRecent findings in the cognitive psychology of attention reveal that attention is biased byfactors that cannot be categorized simply as top-down or bottom-up. Because a great deal ofphilosophical theorizing about attention has drawn upon this distinction, an important aspect ofthe phenomenon has been downplayed or ignored: the fact that attentional dispositions feature anintegral connection to one’s affective history. In this paper, I have introduced the construct ofhedonic pull in order to provide personal-level accounts of attention with a way of incorporatingthese new empirical results. Hedonic pull is the present manifestation of affective history. It isphenomenologically available in the form of a hedonic overlay in one’s perceptual andintrospective experience. Objects in one’s mental and physical environment exert an attractiveforce that guides an agent’s attention in accordance with that agent’s idiosyncratic affectivehistory of interactions with objects of the same type. This guiding force is operative in largeswaths of involuntary attention, but it can also explain movements of attention in its voluntaryform when this involves attentional bounding, the hitherto underappreciated mental action ofcreating boundaries within which mental content arises spontaneously.874 Attention, Affordance, and VirtueVirtue ethics is often understood as having a strong theoretical affinity with moralparticularism (Hursthouse, 1999; McDowell, 1979; Swanton, 2001). According to moralparticularism, it is particular features of a situation that make one or another course of actionmorally right. This view is in direct opposition to moral generalism, which states that an action’sadherence with general moral principles is what makes it morally right. Though primarily adebate in meta-ethics, these two positions correspond to two different pictures of moralpsychology. If we take the object of moral psychology to be the manner in which human beingsfunction when performing behaviors or making judgments that are morally correct (rather thansimply how they behave in contexts thought to involve moral considerations), each of thesemeta-ethical positions will have implications in this domain. The moral generalist will becommitted to a picture on which moral behavior and judgment issue from an application ofgeneral moral principles to specific situations. In contrast, the moral particularist must explainhow a moral actor fastens on to the right particulars.On one popular model, virtue consists, at least in part, in the ability to ascertain theparticular moral demands of a given situation. This idea, in its modern formulation, comes mostdirectly out of John McDowell’s work, which has given rise to what is sometimes called theperceptual conception of virtue. According to McDowell, the virtuous person “has a reliablesensitivity to a certain sort of requirement which situations impose on behavior,” and “thesensitivity is, we might say, a sort of perceptual capacity” (1979, pp. 331-32). From a moralpsychological perspective, there is a question of how literally to take this perceptual locution.One option is to take it quite literally. For theorists who believe that higher-order properties canfigure into the content of perceptual states, the door is open for moral requirements to be88represented in vision, audition, and so on (Cowan, 2014). Another option is to incorporate theaffective quality of emotional states. While perceptual states proper may not be capable ofrepresenting requirements, perhaps the appropriate affective coloring can result in an overallapprehension of situational features as issuing a demand (Doring, 2007). A third option is todownplay the perceptual idiom by treating it simply as a metaphor meant merely to emphasizecertain perception-like features of the virtuous person’s reliable sensitivity, its immediacy orresistance to explanation in terms of principles, for instance (Jacobson, 2005). There is reason tothink that this last one is the path McDowell himself chooses. He has said that “the perceptualmodel is no more than a model” and been critical of the view known as ethical intuitionism forillegitimately “borrow[ing] the epistemological credentials” of traditional sensory perception(1998, p. 162).It appears that McDowell’s disapproval of intuitionism is in part motivated by concernsabout the mysterious nature of quasi-perceptual moral faculties, as evidenced by his claim thatthe view offers “nothing helpful to say about how such a faculty might work” (1996, p. 133). Anaccount of virtuous sensitivity that could say something helpful about how such a faculty worksmight therefore be an advancement on a purely metaphorical reading. In this paper, I argue thatattention is a strong candidate for the mental faculty playing the role of a virtuous person’sreliable sensitivity to moral demands. Not only is attention primarily a process of selection,something required for particularist moral psychology, but it also has fundamental connections tomotivation and action. These features make it especially well suited to explain how a virtuousperson picks out certain aspects of a situation and is motivated to act appropriately given them.The account developed here will go further than a recently articulated view known as“attentional moral perception” (Vance & Werner, 2022; Werner, 2020). On that view, attention is89understood as being sensitive to the moral difference-makers in a given situation. While this maybe accurate, to account for virtuous sensitivity we need not just an ability to apprehend morallyrelevant features but also a reliable tendency to apprehend them as demanding. We also need theapprehension of certain features to give rise to specific actions. To meet these requirements, Iwill analyze the virtuous person’s sensitivity to moral demands in terms of attention toaffordances, that is, perceptible opportunities for action, specifically when these affordances areencountered as decisive solicitations. Let us begin by stating the view plainly:Attention-Affordance Hypothesis. A virtuous person’s sensitivity to moral demandsconsists in that person’s attention being reliably drawn to environmental affordances thattake the form of decisive solicitations for specific actions.It is commonly held among virtue ethicists that the virtuous person does the right thing for theright reasons. The Attention-Affordance Hypothesis explains the related but logically prior ideathat the virtuous person attends to the right things for the right reasons. For attention here will beunderstood as a matter of perceptually carving up one’s environment such that some featuresoccupy the cognitive and phenomenal foreground while others recede into the background.Attention is what allows a person to “set the stage” for action, and how this stage-setting playsout is a function of a person’s motivational states. Since the virtuous person’s attention is guidedby virtuous motives, the result of such guidance is the ability and tendency to ascertain the moraldemands in any given situation.I will begin, in the first section, by explaining the conception of attention at the heart ofthe view. By emphasizing its selective nature, I will show how it is a faculty well suited to pickout the morally relevant aspects of a situation. In the next section, I discuss the idea ofaffordances in order to show how the object of attention can be an opportunity for specificaction. I then move on, in the next section, to the related idea of solicitations, which incorporate90motivational factors that can turn the ascertainment of opportunities for moral action into theascertainment of demands. I conclude, in the final section, by comparing theAttention-Affordance Hypothesis to competing views centered on perceptual or affective states.Attention: Cognitive Priority and Phenomenological CentralityAttention is one of the most widely studied and theorized-about mental faculties.Conceptions of it vary significantly across disciplines, but one thing about attention thatresearchers and theorists tend to agree on is that selectivity is one of its fundamental aspects. Inmodern psychology, this idea is usually traced back to William James and an oft-quoted passagefrom The Principles of Psychology:Everyone knows what attention is. It is the taking possession by the mind, in clear andvivid form, of one out of what seem several simultaneously possible objects or trains ofthought (1890, pp. 403-404).According to James, attention is a process of mental selection. Cognitive scientists often put thisin information processing terms, noting that the brain receives more information than it canmeaningfully deal with and so needs to select some subset of it, but the idea of attention asselection has ordinary, intuitive plausibility as well. At any given moment, there are seeminglyinnumerable thoughts you could think, things you could perceive in your environment, andsensations to focus on in your body, yet our mental lives are comparatively sparse. Rather thantaking in everything at once, the mind serially “takes possession” of one or a few things at atime.Claiming that attention is mental selection is not the same thing as claiming thatattended-to objects exclusively occupy one’s mind or experience, but it is to grant them a special91status.36 According to Sebastian Watzl’s (2017) influential theory of attention as mentalstructuring, this special status is cognitive priority. In Watzl’s account, priority is a theoreticalprimitive, but we can nevertheless provide some description of it. When something isattended-to, it enjoys a certain cognitive pride of place. By bringing something to the forefront ofthe mind via attention, we allow the “other parts” of the mind to work on it.37 Suppose, forexample, that you see a man wearing a tall, black top-hat on the bus and cannot help but noticethis. Instantly your mental wheels begin to turn. Who wears a top-hat these days? Is he beingironic? It’s actually in pretty good condition. I couldn’t pull that off if I wanted to. He looks likeAbraham Lincoln. This example brings out at least three distinct mental processes that typicallyaccompany attention. First, we often discern significantly more of an object’s perceptible detailwhen we attend to it than we would otherwise. You see not just that there is a top-hat but that it isin good condition, relatively free from scuffs or tears. Second, we often think more about anattended-to object and make inferences by relating it to our previously held beliefs. Aware thattop-hats are not commonly worn in contemporary society, you wonder if the wearer is makingsome sort of statement or joke. Aware that Abraham Lincoln famously donned such a cap, younote the resemblance. Third, while attending to something, we typically consider it in the contextof our motivational states. Generally desiring to be fashionable, you wonder if you would lookgood in such a hat. These three sorts of mental considerations can occur in concert and influenceeach other. Noting the good condition of the top-hat may incline you toward trying out the37 Many cognitive scientists believe that this talk of mental parts operating on a central object can be takensomewhat literally. The theory of mental modularity holds that the architecture of the mind consists, at leastpartially, of functionally isolable units or “modules” that process information independently but are linked up withone another in complicated ways (Carruthers, 2011). A theory that is often paired with this view posits a “globalneuronal workspace” (Dehaene & Naccache, 2001). When a mental representation of an object occupies theworkspace, it is made conscious, and various consumer modules in the brain get access to it. Attention here plays therole of gatekeeper to the workspace.36 I specifically want to refrain here from taking a stance on the infamous debate over the necessity and sufficiencyconditions that may hold between attention and consciousness.92fashion, while inferring that the wearer is being ironic may incline you away from doing so.Inversely, if your interest is piqued and you are wondering whether your should wear a top-hat,this may incline you to more carefully perceptually examine the one before you in order to helpyou make the decision.We can say that whatever it is that is selected by attention and raised to the position ofcognitive priority is the object of attention. Here the concept of intentionality is helpful.Intentionality is a philosophical term of art used to reference “aboutness.” An intentional state isa state that is about something. Beliefs and desires are good examples. When you believe thatyour friend is at the library, your doxastic state is an intentional one; it is about your friend.When you desire a new hat, your conative state is about the hat. From the concept ofintentionality we can derive the concept of an intentional object: whatever a state is about is thatstate’s intentional object. In the examples above, the objects are your friend and a hat. Whenattention selects one thing rather than another, that attentional state is about the thing selected.This becomes the object of attention in that moment, or, in other words, attention’s intentionalobject.38The idea of an attentional intentional object may appear somewhat strange given thefollowing. When we attend to something, it seems that we have to apprehend it in some othermode in addition to that of mere attention. If I am paying attention to an actor as she walks outonto the stage, am I not also seeing that actor? It seems as if I am in two states at once here.There is an attentional state and a visual one, and they are both about the same thing, the actor.38 Philosophers disagree about whether or not we should think of attention as intentional. Broadly speaking, there isa divide between perception-based and action-based theories of attention, where the latter are less friendly to theintentionality thesis. See Mole (2011) for a more in-depth discussion of this issue and for an example of anaction-based theory. Now, object-oriented theorists of course grant that attending to certain objects plays animportant role in guiding action, and action-oriented theorists grant that attentive action is partially constituted byintentional states. The account eventually developed in this paper will try to respect the insights from both parties,which I see as primarily divided by choice of emphasis.93Here Watzl’s structuring account again provides helpful theoretical resources for betterunderstanding these relationships. In his view, attention is a process of regulating other occurrentmental states in terms of priority. He recognizes that attention does not enter into an ongoingmental life in the same way that states such as vision do. Rather, it coordinates these, and itappears and is operative through this coordination. He provides the helpful analogy of newsstories arranged on the front page of a newspaper. Here the stories stand for occurrent mentalstates, and their arrangement stands for attention. The news stories are arranged such that someare more prominent than others, usually with one headline dominating the page. Thisarrangement does not exist in the same way as the stories do, but it is nevertheless present andappreciable through consideration of the relations between the arranged components. So too is itwith attention. Of the many mental states we occupy at a given moment (various perceptual,doxastic, and conative, for examples), attention selects some and prioritizes them at the expenseof others. Each occurrent mental state will have its own intentional object, and when attentionprioritizes that state, its object becomes attention’s intentional object. But the intentionality ofattention is not just derivative in this manner. There is a sense in which attention has its ownintentional object, and this is found in the way attention serially prioritizes a number of mentalstates that, while varying in modality, are nevertheless all about the same object. To attend to theactor over time is not merely to stare at her. If I see her walk out from the wing, hear her begin anaria, close my eyes and appreciate the clarity of her tone, and then feel admiration for her talent,I am all the while attending to her. This coordination of various mental states around a commonobject is the sense in which attention can be properly said to have its own intentionality.3939 Attention can also coordinate mental states in accordance with one’s understanding of a task (Mole, 2011). Forexample, one can pay attention to one’s dancing. This may involve prioritizing hearing the music, feeling theposition of one’s body, and seeing one’s dance partner, where the relative priority positioning of each state willchange as the activity continues.94Typically, the cognitive priority of attention’s intentional object is accompanied byphenomenological centrality.40 When we attend to something, it typically occupies a prominentrole in our experience. This is an intuitive point, but recent phenomenological accounts ofattention suggest that how attention organizes experience is considerably more complex than wemight initially think. Indeed, the picture of an attentional intentional object we have painted sofar is an austere one. We have focused on the centrality of a single object, like a hat or an actor,where it seems to occupy a solitary position at the forefront of the mind. In a classic examinationof the structure of attention, C. O. Evans (1970) argued for a more complicated model. Hepointed out that attention structures experience into a mental foreground and background andthat this structure is a ubiquitous component of conscious life. More recently, P. Sven Arvidson(2006) elaborated Aron Gurwitsch’s (1964) idea of the “field of consciousness” into what hecalls the “sphere of attention.” This complex phenomenological model has three maincomponents. At the center of the sphere is a theme, the focal experiential material. We have beencalling this material the intentional object, but what Arvidson’s idea of a central theme shows usis that the focus of attention can be a more complex entity so long as each component of itexhibits gestalt-coherence, or functional significance for the whole. For example, consider whatit is like to attentively watch a soccer game. To do this is to apprehend each of a number ofcomponents (the players, the ball, the goals, the lines, the referees, etc.) as having functionalsignificance for the game as a whole. We see not just a person but a “player” who is not justrunning up the field but is “initiating an attack.” We then see “opposing players” who “respond”by coordinating a “defensive” formation. The next part of the model, around the theme, is thecontext, which consists of content relevant to the theme. It is the background from which thetheme emerges as foreground. In terms of the previous example, if my theme is the soccer game,40 This is also an important aspect of the structuring view of attention. See Part II of Watzl, 2017.95the context may include, among other items, the cheering fans and the other parts of the stadium.It may also include thoughts about the game, such as the judgment that it is a riveting one.Consisting in this way of both perceptual and cognitive content, the context features a gradient ofrelevance, with more relevant entities “nearer” to the theme than less relevant ones. Finally,separated by a vague boundary from the context is the margin, which includes all that one isconscious of that is irrelevant to the theme. This includes irrelevant thoughts and noticings, but italso includes features of embodied being in the world that often go overlooked in the cognitivescience of attention, features such as the awareness of passing time, kinesthetic sensations, and asense of a larger environment in which the theme and context are situated.41It is important to remember that the “sphere” of attention is only a model, not meant to betaken literally as if mental components were spatially organized around each other. The fact thatmuch of the psychology and philosophy of attention is dominated by discussions of visualattention can lead one to make this sort of error. We must remember that “center” here relates toexperiential prominence, not a position in the visual field or the spatial location of one’s body.The theme is the most prominent thing in consciousness, while the context and periphery are“around it” in the sense that they are less prominent, that is, one’s awareness of them is dimmer,making one less likely to pick up on or remember details. They are also less prominent in thesense that they are less likely to take over as a new theme.The conception of attention developed in this section, with its fundamental emphasis onselectivity and its dual components of cognitive priority and phenomenological centrality, is wellsuited to account for the the virtuous person’s ability to choose from among the various features41 Though it is beyond the scope to defend this point at length, it is tempting to relate the tripartite phenomenological“sphere” structure to the global workspace theory. A central representation occupying the workspace could serve asthe neurological underpinning of the theme. The outputs of modules processing that representation can providematerial for the context, and modules that are not processing the representation but nevertheless are processing otherinformation could underpin the margin.96in a given situation those that are morally relevant. One reason for this is simply that it is part ofattention’s nature to make selections. Of course, for our purposes, we need it to be possible forthis selection to be made along moral lines. Fortunately, this is something established by JonnaVance and Preston Werner (2022), who supplement the account developed above by reviewingconsiderable empirical evidence that attention can be guided toward properties traditionallythought to be morally significant, such things as facial expression and the moral valence ofterms. Another reason attention is well suited to explain a virtuous person’s sensitivity to moralparticulars is that it is the natural coordinator of other occurrent mental states. It is frequently thecase that the morally relevant aspects of a situation must be apprehended holistically throughmultiple sense modalities. For example, consider what it like to empathetically listen to a friendwho is discussing some personal difficulty. To respond appropriately during this ongoinginteraction, you need to be sensitive both to the person’s visible expressions and to their words.These separate sensory deliverances become integrated into an overall impression of your friend.What is important here is not that you see the expressions and hear the words severally but thatyou pay attention to your friend as a whole. Attention is what coordinates your other modes ofperception around a common object and maintains your general mental directedness on yourfriend, who shows up to you as a whole, a multi-modal gestalt.Attention to AffordancesThe virtuous person’s sensitivity to moral demands consists in more than just thetendency and ability to mentally select the right particulars. It also consists in ascertaining on thebasis of these particulars a demand for a specific, virtuous response. As it is commonly put, thevirtuous person sees what to do and is motivated to do it. But how can a person see (or hear, etc.)97what to do when what to do is not an object or event exhibiting properties our perceptualapparatuses are fit to detect?To the extent that we are gripped by this question, we should be wary of the influence ofwhat G. E. M. Anscombe (1958) called “an incorrigibly contemplative conception” ofknowledge and perception (p. 57). Much of contemporary psychology and philosophy of mindoperates with a conception of perception that makes its connection to action awkward to explain.Susanna Siegel (2014) calls this the “spectator-first” approach to (visual) perception. Itsparadigmatic example is an instance in which a virtually detached observer is sensorily open tothe external events and objects in its environment, taking these in like some sort of recordingdevice. Here there is observation without interaction, so perception is taken to be a process ofabstraction. In the dominant approach to perception in philosophy, the abstraction is fromproperties of external objects to neuronally grounded representations, re-presentations of thatwhich the observer has sensorily recorded. Such representations can then figure intocomputational relations with desires and beliefs in virtue of sharing a common propositionalformat. The awkwardness comes when the end of a computational chain must issue in behavior.Typically this process is understood in terms of action plans which consist of instructions forspecific patterns of coordinated muscular activation, but the nature of these instructions is leftopaque, as it is unclear how to move from propositional content to motor signals. The problemhere is that the theoretical framework adopted to explain perception abstracted away from actionat the outset, making it cumbersome to add it back in later.Siegel contrasts the spectator-first approach with an “action-first” one, which she relatesnot to the computational theory of vision but to J. J. Gibson’s (1979) ecological theory ofperception. Gibson held that the content of our perceptual states consists of what he called98affordances. An affordance is a relational property of an object in a creature’s environment,which it has in virtue of a combination of environmental features and the creature’s abilities. Forexample, chairs afford sitting to humans, who can adopt such a posture, but not to snakes, whocannot. When perceived, an affordance appears as an opportunity for specific action by theperceiving creature capable of performing that action.According to Gibson, affordances, or opportunities for action, constitute the content ofperception proper, but his reasons for thinking this are tied to other theoretical commitments thatwe need not adopt. As Tom McClelland (2020) explains:Gibson’s understanding of affordances is bound up with a number of theses regardingaffordance perception including: that affordances are perceived directly rather than via amental representation; that affordances are perceived through ‘optic flow’ informationwithout any need for internal processing; and that in ordinary perception we are awareexclusively of affordances (p. 6).If, therefore, we are not committed to this broader system of views, we can explore alternativesto the idea that affordances must be explained as part of the content of perceptual states.Attention, as it turns out, is a strong candidate. This is in part because it is capable of playing theexplanatory roles that motivate the idea of affordance perception in the first place. According toMcClelland, there are two of these: first, the idea that we perceive affordances accords with ourphenomenology, and, second, it explains action selection. I will take this latter consideration upfirst.Let us begin by recalling that the idea of an affordance is far less controversial than theidea that we somehow perceive affordances. Affordances, after all, are just an opportunities foraction. They exist as functions of pairings between certain environmental factors and agents’abilities. For a complex agent in an complex environment, the number of affordances at any99given moment will be intractably large. Consider, for example, all of the various actions you areable to perform right now, even if you are in a relatively simple environment. As McClellandargues, if we are able to perceive some of these affordances, “this saves us from the burdensometask of having to infer explicitly what kinds of action are available to us, freeing up our cognitiveresources for the task of deciding which of the available courses of action is best” (2020, p. 8).Affordance perception, therefore, is considered here to be the best explanation for how we selectan action from among many possibilities. This explanation, it turns out, is strikingly similar toone of the most prominent accounts in the philosophy of attention, that of Wayne Wu’s (2014)selection for action theory. According to this view, attention just is selection for action, wherethis is understood as the process by which an agent pairs a perceptual input with a specificbehavioral response. It is a solution to what Wu describes, developing ideas from Alan Allport(1987), as the Many-Many Problem. As engaged beings embedded in complex environments, weencounter countless stimuli toward which we may enact countless responses. Attention is theprocess by which we select some stimulus-response pairing. In other words, it is the process bywhich we pick something out of our environment in order to act upon it in a certain way.Now, we need not accept Wu’s thesis that attention is to be identified with selection foraction in order to take on board his insights regarding its role in solving the Many-ManyProblem. For our purposes, it is enough to note the explanatory overlap: attention and theaffordance perception have independently been thought to be solutions to the same problem. Iwill argue now that this is no coincidence, since we have good reasons for believing thatperceiving affordances is facilitated via the use of attention.A plausible neuroscientific account of action selection centers on the potentiation ofactions through the automatic readying of certain motor signals in the presence of certain100perceptual stimuli. Research has demonstrated that motor signals associated with specific actions(such as grasping with one’s right hand) are activated when subjects encounter objects uponwhich these actions are typically performed (such as a teapot with its handle aligned to the right)(Tucker & Ellis, 1998). Subsequent theorizing has connected these findings to the problem ofaction selection. One prominent example is Paul Cisek and John Kalaska’s (2010) affordancecompetition hypothesis, according to which multiple neural populations corresponding tomutually exclusive actions are activated in the presence of affording objects. These neuralpopulations compete for further processing, and this competition is biased by a number offactors. In their words:If a competition between representations of potential actions exists in frontoparietalcircuits, then intelligent behavior requires a way to influence that competition by factorsrelated to rewards, costs, risks, or any variable pertinent to making good choices. Avariety of brain systems can contribute their votes into this selection process simply bybiasing activity within the ongoing frontoparietal competition (2010, p. 279).For our purposes, the important point is that Cisek and Kalaska give attention a prominent role inthe resolution of this competition, as the process that is largely responsible for the biasing ofinformation processing. Now, the conception of attention they employ here is a mechanistic one,fit for the sort of subpersonal, neuroscientific explanation they are engaged in, but our moreintuitive conception of attention as the process of cognitive prioritization also accords well withtheir account. As described earlier, cognitive priority entails access to multiple, distinct parts ofthe mind. When multiple actions become potentiated in the presence of affordances, therefore,attention is capable of playing two necessary and related roles in the process of selecting whichto execute. First, since attention itself is biased by motivational factors, it can make the initialselection of which nascent potentiations to amplify for further processing (Awh et al., 2012; Todd101& Manaligod, 2018). Second, attention can then direct distinct forms of mental activity towardthe evaluation of this subset of potential actions. In addition to being independently plausible,both of these points are suggested by the way that Cisek and Kalaska describe the role ofattention in their account: “attention and intention may be different aspects of a common processthat progressively narrows the set of potential actions that will be processed further downstream”(2010, p. 282).It seems appropriate to describe this progressive process not simply as the process ofperceiving an affordance but rather as the process of coming to perceive an affordance, a processthat corresponds to what Edmund Husserl (2001) described phenomenologically as the “passivesynthesis” of experiential objects. If this is correct, then we should understand the earliestpotentiations as constituting proto-affordance-perception, rising to the level of affordanceperception proper only through subsequent attentional activity.This brings us to the next explanatory role that motivates the idea of affordance perceptionand is also plausibly played by attention: accounting for our phenomenology. In describing thefindings of Tucker and Ellis (1998), McClelland notes that “some [subjects] report that theyperceptually experience the teapot not just as white and as smooth but as grippable” (2020, p. 7,emphasis in original). He also describes other experiences of affordance, such as that of hearing aringing phone as affording answering or seeing a cake as affording eating. Reflection onexperiences such as these plausibly reveals three related phenomenological data that attention isfit to explain. The first is that affordance perception seems to vary in vividness. For example, thehandle of a teapot likely appears, in normal circumstances, more grippable than does a lamppost,even when both technically afford gripping. This makes sense given the account ofattention-mediated action selection developed above. Each step of the action potentiation process102relies on past experiences of performing the action on the encountered object, and at least asearly as the attentional selection of some potentiations for further processing, the motivationalrelevance of the potential actions is implicated. For most people, there will have been many moreinstances of teapot-gripping in their personal history than of lamppost-gripping. Furthermore,teapot-gripping corresponds to the common goal of pouring and enjoying tea, where a reason forgripping a lamppost is more difficult to identify. (Perhaps when a person is slipping and about tofall, the lamppost may appear intensely grippable, but this is a rare occurrence.) The secondphenomenological datum is the way in which the vividness of a perceived affordance oftenincreases when the affording object is focused on. If you are busy working, with a teapot next toyou, you may idly grip the handle to pour a fresh cup, perceiving the affordance dimly in theperiphery of an attentional field otherwise directed. But if you focus directly on it, the handle’sgrippability can be more intensely experienced. This is plausibly because the potentiation of thegripping action intensifies as attention drives ever more cognitive resources toward considering itand away from alternatives. The third datum is the way in which motivation influencesaffordance perception, both at the initial selection phase and in the later stages of actionselection. Plausibly, a person is more likely to notice some cake on a nearby table when one ishungry, and the extent to which it looks eat-able will be greater in this context as well (and muchless so after consuming a slice or two). This effect is attributable to the aforementionedmotivational biasing of spontaneous attention in addition to the way in which cognitive priorityexposes an object to extended consideration in light of transient as well as durable conativestates.One way of driving home the point that attentional activity can account for our experienceof affordances is to find a place for these in the sphere of attention phenomenological framework103articulated in the previous section. The most natural candidate is in the context that surroundsattention’s thematic core. When we experience an object as affording some action, the objectitself has phenomenological primacy over its affording quality. We cannot experience thegrippability of a teapot without experiencing the teapot itself. It thus makes most sense tounderstand affordance perceptions as figuring into the experiential material surrounding the mainattentional object. And because the context can vary in its share of experiential real estate as wellas its constituting entities, it is especially well suited to explain the varying vividness ofaffordance perception. While the eatability of the last slice of cake may ordinarily competeexperientially with other contextual material (such as appreciation for its decoration) orperipheral material (such as a mild backache), if a person is, for instance, starving, these lattercan easily be pushed out of mind as the cake is experienced intensely as calling out to be eaten.In such a moment, the eatability may take over nearly all of a person’s attentional field as thecontext, which the affordance now exclusively occupies, expands to the point of minimizing boththe periphery and even the theme itself.To sum up the argument so far, there are two explanatory roles that motivate the idea ofaffordance perception in the first place. These are accounting for how we select an action out ofthe intractably many ones available to us at any given moment and accounting for ourexperiences of objects as calling out for specific actions. Since attention is the main componentin plausible accounts of both of these, we have good reason to believe that affordance perceptionis constituted primarily by attentional activity.How does this figure into our analysis of the virtuous person’s sensitivity to moraldemands, specifically of the way in which the apprehension of certain features prompts specificresponses? The application is fairly straightforward. For the virtuous person, noticing the morally104relevant particulars in a given situation causes the potentiation of actions that correspond tospecific moral responses. This feature of the Attention-Affordance view accords well with thewidely accepted view that virtuous behavior is often a matter of skill (Annas, 2011). Becauseaffordances arise as the product of a pairing between environmental circumstances and ability,additional ones come into being as the result of skill acquisition. Holding the environmentalfactors fixed, an alteration in a creature’s capacities will bring about an alteration in theaffordance landscape that creature can perceive. Take an overhead slam in tennis, for example.Before learning how to execute this technique, a lobbed ball affords the tennis player the actionof moving back, waiting for a bounce, and returning the ball when it reaches a suitable height.But once they learn the overhead move, the same sort of ball then affords executing thistechnique. The player thereafter perceives this affordance in conjunction with the affordance tomove back, as both of these are pairings of the player’s abilities with the positioning of the ball.Something similar occurs in many other domains, where we can understand education or skilldevelopment as the broadening of affordance landscapes, an increase in the number and varietyof actions possible for a person in a given circumstance.It would seem that whichever skills are involved in virtuous behavior must be various andoften quite complex, for the morally implicated situations a person encounters as they proceedthrough life are myriad and demand all sorts of responses. We should thus expect of the virtuousperson a wide range of abilities that produce a correspondingly wide range of affordance-types.Attempting to enumerate these here would be far too vast a project for a discussion of this scope,but worth noting is the fact that for us humans, as intensely social animals, many of theaffordances in our environments have to do with other people. Even the presence of one otherperson generates innumerable social affordances, opportunities to say any number of things, to105praise, to challenge, to question, to embrace, to attack, to ignore, and so on. These arise inaccordance with shared linguistic and cultural practices (or a lack thereof), our physicalmake-ups, our positioning relative to other objects in an environment, and a whole host of socialskills. It is thus important to bear in mind that, while we may speak accurately of objects in theenvironment affording specific actions, we should understand this environment as a largelysocial, conceptual, and meaning-laden one, where the called-for actions reflect these dimensions.For example, speech acts, facial expressions, and subtle alterations of posture are all actions thatcan all be potentiated.Because an affordance must actually exist (or at least once have existed) in order for it tobe perceived, it is a precondition of the virtuous person’s sensitivity to moral demands, asunderstood by the Attention-Affordance view, that the person possess (or at least once possessed)the requisite skill to perform the required actions. This ability is what grounds the possibility ofthe correct actions being potentiated. One could object here that a virtuous person does not needto be able to perform an action in order to recognize that a situation morally calls for it, so thefact that the Attention-Affordance Hypothesis requires this is actually a mark against it. After all,cannot a virtuous person see that a certain course of action would be best even when theyindividually are not able to follow that course? Ought we not analyze such a situation as apractical rather than moral shortcoming? While initially compelling, such a line of thought seemsinappropriate after more careful consideration. The main reason is that the objection loses trackof the original issue. The reason why the virtuous sensitivity was posited in the first place was togive an account of how a virtuous person comes to act rightly. As McDowell (1979) explains:Since the sensitivity fully accounts for its deliverances, the sensitivity fully accounts for theactions. But the concept of the virtue is the concept of a state whose possession accountsfor the actions which manifest it. Since that explanatory role is filled by the sensitivity, the106sensitivity turns out to be what the virtue is (p. 332).A state that does not manifest an action is therefore not a candidate for the sort of virtuoussensitivity we are after. That the virtuous person is capable of virtuous action is a conceptualmatter. Though our understanding of the virtuous person must be informed by reflection onactual people, such an individual is first and foremost a theoretical construct that allows us toexplain right action via reference to an idealized individual. When we ask for an explanation ofhow a virtuous person can act the way they do, their ability to act is taken for granted. We cannottherefore answer this question by positing a capacity unable to give rise to action.Perhaps one could then press the objection by suggesting that a sensitivity that does notmanifest in action is still an explanation of virtue because it explains what the virtuous personwould do if they were able. But if we maintain that such a person is and always has been actuallyincapable of potentiating the required actions (rather than being temporarily restricted, in whichcase potentiation could still occur), we quickly run into further problems. For now we have togive a characterization of what exactly it is that the sensitivity delivers, and if the person isunable to perform the required action, their understanding of it will be at a remove. It wouldseem that, in such a case, the virtuous person could only have either a sort of discursive grasp ofwhat the situation calls for (for example, an awareness that “somebody really should save the catfrom that tree”) or an imaginative one (for example, a quasi-visual impression of what saving thecat would be like). In both of these cases, however, we end up positing of the virtuous person toocognitive a grasp of the radically particular demands of the situation. In fully accounting for avirtuous action, we need the deliverances of the sensitivity to be so specific as to resist faithfultranslation into words or disengaged imagination. This is only possible if the sensitivity isfundamentally connected to the ability of the virtuous person to act in precisely the manner the107situation calls for, both initially and as it unfolds.Motivated Attention and SolicitationsSo far, we have seen how reference to attention can explain two important features of thevirtuous person’s sensitivity to moral demands: its selective nature and its capacity to give rise tospecific actions. These features correspond to the idea that a virtuous person is able to see whatto do in a given situation. But, as a definitional matter, the virtuous person is not just aware ofwhat must be done in a situation; they are also motivated to do it. In this section, we will see howthe concept of a solicitation, an affordance with motivational force, can account for this finalcomponent. We will also see that perceiving a solicitation is a function of attention.In her discussion of what she calls “experienced mandates,” Siegel (2014) explains thedifference between a simple affordance and a solicitation. While an affordance is an opportunityfor action by a creature, available to be perceived merely in virtue of a particular matching ofenvironmental conditions and the perceiving creature’s abilities, a solicitation is an affordancethat is experienced as “soliciting, inviting, or otherwise prompting” the creature to perform thataction (p. 4). One compelling example Siegel provides is that of being engaged in an importantconversation when a tuft of hair repeatedly droops down and obscures your interlocutor’s face,hindering communication. This distraction calls out to you as a solicitation, something that notonly can be moved out of the way but also should be.Plausibly, we should understand the difference-maker between affordances andsolicitations as being primarily furnished by the agent rather than their environment. It is invirtue of some motivational state occupied by the perceiver-actor that a given opportunity foraction appears as soliciting. This is a slight departure from Siegel, who holds that solicitations108can call out to someone without that person being at all motivated to respond to the call. She usesthe examples of music made to be danced to and enticing advertisements to argue thatsolicitation and motivation can be conceptually separated. In such cases she suggests that you aresolicited but may not be motivated at all to perform the solicited action. But if this is right, wewould then have to give some independent characterization of solicitation in terms of theobjective features of the soliciting object, something that seems initially implausible. In contrast,we could more parsimoniously suggest that in these cases a solicitation is intended (by themusicians or advertisers) but fails to materialize due to a lack of motivation on the part of itstarget. Of course, nothing here would entail that we respond to every solicitation that tugs at us,since motivational force varies. We may feel some motivation when encountering an affordancebut choose not to act on it due to overriding contrary motivations. In the example above withyour interlocutor’s drooping tuft of hair, for instance, it would probably be inappropriate andpainfully awkward for you to move the hair out of the way. As a result, you will likely not havean all-things-considered desire to move it. The example is thus useful in demonstrating that onecan perceive a solicitation, an affordance you are motivated to avail yourself of, without beingmotivated enough to actually answer it.If it is correct, then, to hold that it is a person’s background motivational states rather thanan object’s objective features that explains solicitation perception, then solicitations can figurecentrally in an explanation of how a virtuous person’s motivations are related to behavior. Inother words, solicitations can figure into an account of why, as it is traditionally and commonlyheld by virtue ethicists, the virtuous person does the right thing for the right reasons. Tounderstand why this is the case, we must examine more closely the two stages at whichmotivational factors influence attention as it in turn facilitates the process of action selection: the109initial selection phase, where attention amplifies some subset of nascent action potentiations, andthe post-amplification phase of cognitive prioritization, where affordances are more fullyconsidered in light of, among other things, conative states.In both of these cases, the connection between attention and motivation is a fundamentalone. It is a mistake to think that there is one thing, attention, that has access to some separatethings, motivational factors, which it uses to make its selections. Rather, as described in Watzl’s(2017) structuring view, attention is a process of mental coordination that is guided bymotivational factors. But whatever guides a process is itself an aspect of that process, aprecondition of its intelligibility as the kind of process it is. In this case, attention-directed actionselection unfolds in light of motivational factors. The initial selection is just the prevailing ofsome action potentiations in accordance with their relation to a person’s motivationalbackground. The later stages of affordance perception, then, are just a function of a narrowingdown of options again in accordance with how they relate to a person’s various values and goals.Motivation and attention are conceptually distinct, certainly. A person can be dispositionallymotivated to further some goal even when the circumstances provide absolutely no opportunitiesto do so. But attention, understood as the process of setting the stage for action by cognitivelyprioritizing and phenomenologically centralizing some things rather than others, is motivated atits very core.Seen this way, it turns out that every instance of affordance perception is also an instanceof solicitation, though the degree of motivational force will vary from case to case.42 If attentionis fundamentally motivated, then relative motivational backing will at least partially determinewhich action potentiations get amplified and also which actions are ultimately selected, but this42 It may also be true that every instance of proto-affordance-perception is an instance of solicitation. To argue forthis conclusion, we would need to explain how the earliest, pre-attentional action potentiations are also determinedby motivational factors.110is just another way of saying that affordances prevail in perception according to their degree ofsolicitation. Going forward, then, we should understand an individual’s landscape of perceptibleaffordances as consisting of solicitations that vary in strength and typically compete with oneanother.43For ordinary people, a wide range of varying and often conflicting motivations is whatgives rise to a competition first among nascent potentiations and then among perceivedaffordances. Suppose, for example, that you find yourself in a rapidly burning building in thecompany of a less physically able person. With (at least) two powerful motivations in place, aprudential one to save yourself and a moral one to assist your companion, there will becompetition in the process of action selection, and attention will have to reconcile it. Your bodyprepares to move toward the exit, located in one direction, but also to move toward the otherperson. Perhaps both potentiations then develop (are initially selected for amplification) in thistense moment, gaining cognitive prioritization as you become aware of the conflict inside you.Other considerations then come into play, causing one potential action to eventually prevail overthe other. You come to see, perhaps, that you must at least try to save your companion, and theexit’s affordance thereby disappears from your awareness as you run toward the other person andbecome totally immersed in the action of trying to rescue them.The moral psychology of the idealized virtuous person is not like this. For such a person,amoral or immoral considerations do not compete with moral ones at any level of description, aconceptual requirement of being truly virtuous. The implication empirically is that there will beno competition among action potentiations, beginning as early as motivational factors are able to43 This understanding accords with the idea of a salience map as hypothesized in the psychology of attention.Originally proposed by Koch and Ullman (1985), the concept refers to the cognitive process by which sources ofsalience are integrated into a map or state space that guides attention to various locations in the attender’senvironment. More recent versions acknowledge the influence not just of objective property contrast but alsopersonal motivational factors in determining salience (Awh et al., 2012; Todd and Manaligod, 2018).111influence the virtuous person’s apprehension of their surroundings. Perhaps some menu ofaffordances is pre-attentionally gleaned as a mere matter of the positioning of sense organs, butas soon as motivated attention can exert its coordinating effect, only the morally best responsewill be selected. The process of action selection proceeds smoothly for a virtuous person, sincetheir motivational background is unified around appropriately balanced moral ends. This meansthat the solicitations they perceive are always decisive ones, accepted without hesitation. Thevirtuous person immediately sees what morality calls for in a situation and is immediately anddecisively motivated to do it.We now have a full picture of the Attention-Affordance Hypothesis on the table. Its maincontention is that attention plays the role of a virtuous person’s sensitivity to moral demands.When combined with moral particularism, this sensitivity is understood as the disposition toattentionally select those particular features of a given situation that jointly afford the propermoral response. This response is a specific action, which immediately becomes potentiatedbefore being ultimately selected through the prioritizing function of attention. Accordingly, thecorresponding affordance takes the form of a decisive solicitation. The virtuous person’s unifiedmotivational background ensures that the process of action selection unfolds without anycompetition from amoral or immoral behavioral possibilities.Perceptual and Affective Alternatives to the Attention-Affordance HypothesisIn this final section, I will briefly review and argue against two alternatives to theattentional picture developed above. The first of these is the view that the virtuous person’ssensitivity is to be accounted for in properly perceptual terms. The second is the view that it is aform of affective perception. As we will see, these alternative views have independent problems112in addition to comparative disadvantages with respect to the Attention-Affordance Hypothesis.1. Perception ProperAs mentioned at the outset, one way of interpreting the perceptual idiom virtue ethicists usein describing a virtuous person’s responsiveness to particular moral demands is to take it literally.The best way to do this would seem to be to locate the deliverances of virtuous sensitivity in thecontent of perceptual states proper, an approach that would seem to be committed to what iscommonly referred to in cognitive science as rich perceptual content (Bergqvist & Cowan,2018). While it is uncontroversial among representationalists about perception that low-levelproperties such as shape, color, and texture are represented in the content of perceptual states,rich content theorists hold that at least some so-called “higher-order” properties, such as naturalkinds, causation, and evaluative properties, can feature in that content as well. Ethical perception,in particular, is the view that at least some moral properties can figure into the content of at leastsome perceptual states (Cowan, 2014). If one wants to account for a virtuous person’s sensitivityto moral demands in properly perceptual terms, this seems like the most promising place to start.Robert Cowan (2014) defends a view of ethical perceptions that, like many attempts toexplain rich perceptual content, relies on the idea of cognitive penetrability. This supposedphenomenon is one in which non-perceptual mental states “penetrate” perceptual ones anddetermine their content. Because these other states represent higher-order properties, it isbelieved that they are the source of rich content in perceptual states proper. According to Cowan,three candidates for the penetrating states are standing ethical beliefs, emotions, and intuition. Asthe story goes, certain low-level features in a situation trigger a stored ethical commitment, anemotional response, or an intuitive seeming, which then penetrates the perceptual state and altersits content.113Before critically evaluating these three possibilities, it is worth pausing to mention that thephenomenon of cognitive penetrability is highly controversial. Chaz Firestone and Brian Scholl(2016), in an influential review of studies purporting to demonstrate this effect, have pointed outa collection of methodological “pitfalls,” one or more of which they believe all cognitivepenetrability studies fall into. Indeed, they have gone as far as to claim that, with these issues leftunaddressed, there is actually no evidence at present for the phenomenon. While we can proceedwith the assumption that cognitive penetration is possible so as to evaluate the properlyperceptual explanations of virtuous sensitivity, it will be a weakness of any such view that it isdependent on this unstable empirical foundation.Let us begin with the idea that it is penetration by standing ethical beliefs that explainethical perception. This is clearly not a position that virtue ethicists can maintain, since it givesup on the aforementioned commitment that the virtuous sensitivity must fully explain thebehavior of the virtuous actor. Perceptual theorists like McDowell (1979) are typicallycommitted to the anti-codifiability of ethics. If it turns out that the virtuous person behaves wellas the result of having the right ethical beliefs penetrate their perception, the explanation for therightness of the behavior will be its adherence with those substantive moral beliefs whichthemselves would be codifiable and thus expressible as an alternative to the moral theoreticalexplanation that the right course of action in a given situation is what the virtuous person woulddo. Such a concession would strike at the very core of virtue ethics and nullify its coherence as adistinctive approach in moral philosophy.The other two candidates, emotion and intuition, are likewise problematic. Intuition, if notgiven a fuller analysis, falls prey immediately to McDowell’s complaint about mysteriousquasi-perceptual faculties. Analyzing virtuous sensitivity in terms of virtuous intuition has no114explanatory value unless the latter is given substance, after all. Emotion thus appears the morepromising candidate at the outset.44 The problem, however, is that emotional responses areunspecific and lingering. This contention, which will be discussed more fully in the followingsubsection on affective perception, disqualifies the cognitive penetration of perception byemotion as the basis of virtuous sensitivity on empirical grounds. In short, the virtuous person’sreliable sensitivity to moral demands cannot rely on something that is as typically unreliable asemotional responses turn out to be.Ethical perception, the seemingly best approach for giving a properly perceptualexplanation of virtuous sensitivity, therefore has numerous problems right from the beginning.First, it relies on the controversial idea of cognitive penetrability. Then, even if we grant theexistence of this phenomenon, the most plausible candidates for the penetrating states produceaccounts that fail to satisfy the theoretical needs of perceptual virtue ethics. Nevertheless, if wego even further and grant that there could be a satisfying account of how ethical properties canmake their way into perceptual content, two problems remain.The first is that, as mentioned earlier, moral particulars are not confined to one sensemodality. To properly ascertain the moral demands in a given situation, such as the one in whichyou are listening to your troubled friend, it is often necessary to perceive the scene holistically,and this involves not just using multiple senses but also integrating their deliverances.Demonstrating that moral properties can figure into individual sensory states cannot account forthis integration. To do so, the ethical perception view would need supplementation. One option isto appeal to some sort of moral knowledge that a virtuous person uses to connect particularsacross modalities, but here again we give up on the spirit of anti-codifiability characteristic of the44 Indeed, as Peter Railton (2014) argues in an influential analysis, intuition may just turn out to be identical with theaffective system when the latter is understood as a flexible learning system capable of guiding decision and action.115virtue ethical approach. Another is to posit some sort of supramodal perceptual apparatus thatcan coordinate the senses. But unless we are talking about attention, which brings us back to theview expressed in the present work, this seems ad-hoc and mysterious in the way McDowellcomplained of.The second problem is that properly perceptual views seem ill-suited to explain theessential connection to action that the virtuous sensitivity must feature. After all, how can themere representation of moral properties in a perceptual state fully explain an action, as thevirtuous sensitivity is meant to do? What we are missing here is a place for motivation, and it isnot clear how appealing solely to perceptual states can remedy this. The problem is related tothat faced by internalists about moral motivation, who hold that practical reasons have inherentmotivating force. Internalists argue that believing that you ought to perform some action willnecessarily motivate you to perform that action, while their externalist opponents deny this,arguing that the motivation must come from elsewhere. Without adjudicating that issue here, wecan just point out for now that the challenge a properly perceptual virtue theorist faces is evenmore difficult than that faced by the internalist in the reasons debate. Perceptions are typicallythought of as contributing to the formation of beliefs by providing “input” for the operation ofreason. Sometimes perception provides prima facie justification for beliefs, but these casestypically involve the ascription of fairly simple properties to or relations between objects in one’senvironment, e.g., that there is an orange cat on the sofa. The idea that perception alone couldprovide prima facie justification for a motivating belief is much more controversial. Now,internalists about moral motivation need not defend such a claim, equipped as they are to includeperception as well as reason in the formation of the beliefs they claim have the force to motivateaction. In contrast, properly perceptual virtue theory can make use only of perception. Therefore,116even if such a view could explain how high-level properties such as “being good” or “beingselfish” could make it into the content of a perceptual state, it would still face the problem ofexplaining that state’s motivational force. The virtuous person both recognizes moralopportunities in the environment and is motivated to take them. To capture this, something likethe property of “to-be-doneness” or “being required” would need to figure into the perceptualstate’s content, and, as already argued, this seems implausible when confined to a single sensemodality.In contrast with properly perceptual views, the Attention-Affordance Hypothesis does notrely on the controversial notion of cognitive penetration, maintains the spirit of anti-codifiabilitythrough its reliance on action potentiation, gives an account of how various sensory deliverancescan be integrated, and explains the close connection between virtuous sensitivity and action. Forthese reasons, it appears the much stronger view for perceptual virtue theorists.2. Affective PerceptionThere are reasons to think that an affect-based account of the virtuous person’s sensitivityto moral demands may form a more attractive theoretical picture for the virtue ethicist than doproperly perceptual ones. Rosalind Hursthouse and Glen Pettigrove (2018) note that the modernreemergence of virtue ethics as a serious approach to moral theorizing, spurred in large part byG. E. M. Anscombe’s (1958) “Modern Moral Philosophy,” resulted in part from utilitarianismand deontology’s neglect of “the role of the emotions in our moral life” (2018, p. 3). Indeed, theemotions figure prominently in the original Aristotelian conception of virtue. Aristotle disagreeswith Kant that a person who acts rightly despite a lack of emotional motivation is morallysuperior to someone who takes pleasure in doing good. On the Aristotelian picture, the virtuousperson is positively disposed to moral behavior and negatively disposed to immoral behavior,117and they exhibit certain emotional responses that are accordingly fitting. Precisely whichemotions are called for will depend on the particularities of the situation the virtuous agent findsthemself in, but some examples might include feeling joy for a child’s being reunited with herfamily or feeling satisfied with the enforcement of a just law. With these considerations in mind,it may seem that affect plays an important role in how a virtuous agent perceives theirenvironment and the opportunities for moral action it affords.One scholar who advances this view is Sabine Doring (2007), who argues that the emotionsare in significant ways analogous to sense perceptions, with the important exception that theformer are evaluative and thus fitting to explain a person’s motivation to act on them. Thisconnection to action, as well as the fact that emotional responses can result from complexsituations perceived through multiple sense modalities, gives us reason to believe that anaffect-based account of virtuous sensitivity could succeed where its properly perceptualcompetitor fell short.Doring’s picture of affective perception begins with the claim that emotions have bothphenomenological and intentional aspects. In other words, an emotion is a mental state that hasboth a subjective feeling and is also directed at an object. To combine these, Doring joins PeterGoldie (2000) in understanding the subjective character of an emotion as a “feeling towards”some intentional object. Pride, for example, has a certain distinctive feel (perhaps some sort ofelation and confident energy) directed at oneself or one’s achievements. It is a feeling towardoneself. For another example, consider occurrent fear, which has phenomenal components (hereperhaps it is a sinking in the stomach or the prickling of goosebumps) directed toward somedreaded object.On Doring’s view, the intentional content of emotions is best understood by analogy to118sensory perception. In both cases, the content is part of the state’s conscious, subjectivecharacter. There is something it is like to see a tiger, and one experiences this when in a visualperceptual state with the tiger as part of its intentional content. Doring thinks emotions aresimilar in this regard. There is something it is like to be afraid of a tiger, and one experiences thiswhen in a emotional state with the tiger as part of its intentional content. A second analogousfeature is that both perception proper and emotion play a non-inferential role in the justificationof other mental states. Just as a visual perception of a tiger can confer prima facie justification tothe belief that there is a tiger in one’s vicinity, an emotional response to a tiger can confer primafacie justification to the belief that the tiger is dangerous. A third analogous feature is thatperceptual and emotional states have intentional content that is representational, meaning that itis subject to correctness conditions: there may or may not be a tiger in one’s vicinity, and it mayor may not be dangerous. Unlike in the case of beliefs, however, perception and emotion aresimilar in that they do not commit the agent to the truth of the represented state.Sensory perception and emotion thus have a number of features in common, according toDoring. They both have phenomenological and intentional components, where the latter is a partof the former. They both non-inferentially justify other states like beliefs. And they both havecontent that is representational, though in a way that does not commit their possessors to thetruth of the representation. On the basis of these similarities, Doring concludes that it isappropriate to think of (at least some) emotions as affective perceptions. This makes themplausible candidates for an explanation of the virtuous sensitivity we are focused on in this paper.Properly perceptual accounts struggled to explain virtuous sensitivity’s connection toaction. How does Doring’s affective perception fare in this regard? She suggests that anemotion’s motivational force comes from its being an evaluative representation that contains a119normative component. Following Charles Dunbar Broad (1930), she argues that emotionsrepresent in light of a special kind of ought: the “ought-to-be” rather than the “ought-to-do.”When you fearfully represent a tiger, you represent that it ought to be safely distanced from you.When you pridefully represent yourself, you represent yourself as being the kind of person youought to be. This normative component of emotional representations motivates because ittransfers the natural motivational force of emotions into reasons for action via the their justifyingrelation with moral judgments. For example, when a virtuous person sees a child teetering on theedge of deep well, such a person, on the affective perception view, has an emotional reaction(perhaps alarm) that represents the child as being in a dangerous situation in which she ought notbe.45 The virtuous person then takes the content of their alarm at face value and comes to judgethat the child ought not be in that situation. Because, ex hypothesi, the virtuous person would nothave had this judgment without the emotional response, the latter explains as well as justifies theformer. If this person then also takes themself to be in a position to help the child, they may thenconclude that they ought to move the child, and they are motivated to act in accordance with thisconclusion because the motivational force of the original emotional response, springing from theperson’s concerns, is transferred via this justifying relation to the normative judgment. Thejudgment then serves as both a rationalization and explanation of the action.We are now in a position to sum up a version of virtuous sensitivity based on Doring’stheory of affective perception. On this view, the virtuous person’s sensitivity consists in thatperson’s having the right emotional reactions to events in their environment. These emotionalreactions represent objects and events in the environment in “ought-to-be” terms that get thingsright morally. They then motivate the person to act because they occur in light of that person’s45 This is a famous example from Mencius, the second most influential Confucian thinker, who centered emotions inhis conception of right action.120pre-existing concerns. One benefit of this view is that these concerns need not be explained interms of moral principles. The virtuous person, by definition, is concerned with the right things,and we need not give a further characterization of these concerns. For particularists, it will beparticular features of individual situations that determine how things ought to be morally, and thevirtuous person will be able to determine those by pairing their inscrutable set of concerns withsensory perception to generate affective perceptions of moral properties.This last point suggests another relative advantage of the affect-based virtuous sensitivityview over the the properly perceptual one. Where properly perceptual views struggled to accountfor the holistic apprehension of the moral aspects of a situation, the affective perception view canhold that emotional responses take place after and in response to sensory perception. Thevirtuous person can thus sensorily “take in” (through the various sense modalities) and integratemany low-level properties of a circumstance that they thereafter perceive, via emotion, to featuresome moral properties as well. This consequence, in addition to the stronger connection to actionthat affective perception enjoys, makes it seem the more preferable option for virtue ethicistswhen compared with the properly perceptual view.While this all sounds good so far, the problem with affective perception as a basis forvirtuous sensitivity is that emotions are not nearly as discerning in their representations asDoring makes them out to be. Specifically, though affect is often directed toward objects andmay even represent them in normative ways, it is subject to what we might call affectivespillover. There are intuitive and empirical reasons for thinking that emotions generated by oneobject or consideration have a significant impact on the affective perception of others. Forexample, consider what it is like to interact with someone who has just exited a tense argument.In my experience, it is not uncommon for such a person to exhibit a certain persistent agitation,121impatience, or combativeness. You would not want to ask such a person for a favor at a time likethis, and even attempts to console can be read as further attacks. Their anger, caused by theargument, nevertheless spills over. In terms of affective perception, we could say that theirperceptions are colored by a persistent emotional state. The person continues to have emotionalresponses that represent circumstances as ought to be one way or another, but this normativecomponent is heavily distorted in a patterned way explicable in terms of the prior emotionalresponses.There is significant empirical evidence demonstrating this effect. Peter Carruthers (2011)outlines some of the findings as part of an argument against the idea that we have transparentaccess to our affective propositional attitudes. In a classic study by Norbert Schwarz and GeraldClore (1983), subjects reported higher life-satisfaction on sunny days than they did on overcastones. Karen Jordens and Frank Van Overwalle (2005), replicating one of the findings of DarwynLinder and colleagues (1967), found that subjects who were forced to write an essay supportingsomething they were known to disagree with judged this counter-attitudinal position morefavorably if they received financial compensation after the exercise. In a variation of theexperiment, the researchers were also able to produce this effect if subjects were given positivefeedback about their performance on an intelligence test given before the exercise. Numerousother studies have produced similar results, leading Carruthers to offer the following upshot:What has been established so far is that affective feelings aren’t automatically tied to theobjects or events that give rise to them, and will tend to be targeted at whatever happens tobe the current focus of attention. […] Affect […] doesn’t get bound tightly together withperceptual representations to form a single value-laden conception of an object. Rather, itcolors the representation of whatever one attends to (2011, p. 138).We should consider the prevalence of affective spillover to be disqualifying for affective122perception as an account of virtuous sensitivity. If emotion is by its very nature unspecific andinadequately responsive to the objects and events in one’s environment, it cannot form the basisof the virtuous person’s ability to discern what to do in a given situation. Any claim by the virtueethicist that the virtuous person has the morally appropriate emotional responses is renderedempirically implausible by this phenomenon, casting into doubt the entire project of virtueethics, which would then seem to offer an ought without a can.The Attention-Affordance view, on the other hand, enjoys many of the same benefits of theaffective perception view without this critical flaw. Furthermore, it is interesting that, in rejectingthe reliable representation of emotions, Carruthers offers another upshot that further supports therole of attention in explaining virtuous sensitivity. He points out that the results of Schwarz andClore (1983) only held when subjects did not have their attention directed by the experimentersto the weather. This finding suggests that subjects are able to mitigate the effects of affectivespillover if its possibility is made salient to them. Karen Gasper and Gerald Clore (2000) foundsimilar results, with the additional finding that those subjects who habitually pay closer attentionto their feelings were better able to negate the effects of affective spillover. Indeed, the negationwas complete in some cases, with evaluations returning to normal. As Carruthers explains,“subjects are capable of factoring their affective feelings into different components, when thepossibility of multiple sources of affect are made salient to them” (2011, p. 138). An additionalbenefit of the Attention-Affordance view is thus that it can accommodate the intuition thatemotion plays an important role in the virtuous person’s life without having to claim that it fullyexplains virtuous behavior. Because attention coordinates other mental states, including affectiveones, emotions can contribute to bringing about an action on this view. One plausible suggestionfor how they do this is by factoring into the competition between action potentiations.1235 ConclusionThe preceding chapters motivate, in different ways, the idea that reflexive attention paidto one’s mental life, explicitly ascertained as such, is capable of reconfiguring attentionaldispositions and that this process is morally important. As we have seen, Hume believed that animportant precursor to developing virtue is introspection, but he did not understand this as amatter of reflecting on one’s beliefs. Rather, he advocated the ongoing monitoring of patterns inthe stream of consciousness. Specifically, he believed that there were patterns between certainkinds of motivations and the pains and pleasures that result from acting from them, and he alsobelieved that recognizing these patterns was part of the process of altering them. Contemporaryresearch in the cognitive psychology of attention then reveals that a person’s history of pain andpleasure plays an important role in determining the unfolding of their mental lives, includingwhat they notice, which spontaneous thoughts occur to them, and which motivations theyentertain. Taken together, these insights from the first two chapters of this dissertation motivatethe first part of the project’s central theme: the idea that reflexive attention can facilitate thealteration of attentional habits. The third chapter then motivates the other aspect: the idea thataltering attentional habits matters morally. The way it does this is by characterizing an importantrole that attention plays in a virtuous person’s life. As we have seen, there is good reason tobelieve that virtuous people have a distinctive way of encountering the world and that thisperspective is largely a matter of attentional dispositions. In particular, the virtuous person’sattention is reliably drawn to those opportunities for moral action afforded by the physical andsocial contexts in which they find themselves.What these chapters do not do is articulate in detail a comprehensive and psychologicallyrealistic account of how attentional dispositions can be altered. This important task must be124reserved for a subsequent research program. Developing such an account would involve, amongother things, an exploration of such issues as mental action, the transparency of consciousness,the relationship between attention and intention, and the degree to which attentional abilities canbe understood as skills. Ultimately, then, a great deal of the plausibility of the account woulddepend on empirical investigations, most notably into the relative influence of various factors onattentional guidance, the nature of affordances, and the effects of certain interventions onattentional tendencies. There is significant work to be done still, but it is work worth doing, sincea richer understanding of how attentional dispositions are formed and altered has the potential toprovide a more detailed roadmap to those who seek to bring about beneficial psychologicalchange. There are thus potentially implications for clinical psychology in addition to moreordinary moral development.Another limitation of the present work is its individualistic focus. In all three chapters,the conversation has been mainly about steps individuals can take to bring about change in theirmental lives. This was in part because contemporary moral philosophy provides few resourcesfor individuals who, with an awareness of their moral shortcomings, desire some method forbecoming a better person or living a good life. But humans are fundamentally social beings, andtheir mental and moral development always proceeds in the context of historically rootedsocio-cultural situations. The relevant factors are far too numerous to exhaustively adumbrate,but they importantly include linguistic systems, social norms, family dynamics, economicrelations, technological developments, and political structures. Because all of these things are, tovarying degrees, contingent factors, investigating their influence on the development of moralcharacter via the formation of attentional dispositions is an important part of understandingmorality. 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Thesis/Dissertation
eng
Philosophy
Vancouver : University of British Columbia Library
Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International
Graduate
Thompson, Evan
Attention and virtue
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