The Ethics of Attention

This five-day intensive course investigates the ethical dimensions of attention. We live in the attention economy, where attention is commodified and manipulated. Attentional crises abound: big tech, social media, and the pandemic have eroded people’s attentional capacities. Attention, though, is paramount to personal and institutional flourishing. Attending to people, places, and projects is at the heart of love, community, justice, good relationships, creativity, art, education, and mental health. It is also a central, but overlooked, component of justice. We can wrong each other with attention patterns. Improper attention can also create unfair and dangerous social disparities; scientists might overlook medical differences between women and men, for example, and fail to notice this oversight. And yet theorists lack adequate frameworks for conceptualising and assessing this. There is a dearth of research on attention, and the ethics of attention is seldom featured in university courses.