Attention, Agency, Morality.

What is the role of attention in rational agency, and more broadly, in moral life? Iris Murdoch famously argued that attention (in her own specialized sense) is “the characteristic and proper mark of the active moral agent”, and built her ethical theory around attention rather than right action or intention. Proponents of other theories—including interpersonal theories like contractualism—cannot make attention the essence of morality, but they may have much to gain from giving it a relatively more central role. I argue that if attention is selection for action, then lapses of attention can be failures of due care. And Murdoch’s loving attention, though not necessarily owed to anyone, plays a constitutive role in maintaining the relationships in which we do owe things to each other.

First, what is attention? Wayne Wu proposes that attention is selection for action. In order to act, agents must solve what he calls the Many-Many Problem, deciding which of many ‘inputs’ to connect to which of many ‘outputs’—and attention just is the process of solving it. Some of this selection is intentional and some is not: an unexpected noise may grab my attention without involving my intentions. Sebastian Watzl argues that since attention is descriptively central in explaining behavior, it is normatively central too. But this mistakes a necessary condition for a sufficient one: not all descriptively central features should be normatively assessed, namely those which are not within the agent’s control. And attention that is not intentional may still be within our control. Controlling it falls within what Joseph Raz calls our domain of secure competence, and we hold ourselves responsible for failures within that domain, intentional or not.

In this regard, lapses of attention may resemble negligence as Seana Shiffrin understands it: one acts negligently when they fail to take due care without intending a bad outcome. Shiffrin rejects the view that negligence is less morally significant because it involves at most a ‘mental omission’. Neither, I argue, are lapses of attention merely ‘mental omissions’. To spell things out, imagine a baby-sitter who may take on some of his own tasks so long as a sufficient portion of his attention is devoted to the child. Instead, he is engrossed in his reading and pays no attention to the child whatsoever. Fortunately, no harm comes to her as she plays. Nonetheless, the baby-sitter is blameworthy, whether he accidentally becomes distracted by the book or intentionally tunes out the child because he finds her annoying. It is no defense that the slip was not intentional, since maintaining his attention at the extremely reasonable level required for baby-sitting is within his domain of secure competence. By contrast, one would not be blameworthy for failing to attend wholeheartedly to the drying of a freshly painted wall for hours on end.

If the baby-sitter could have foreseen and prevented the condition that disabled him (being insufficiently caffeinated, say), he is also blameworthy for his past failure to prevent it. And in some cases, our past failure will have been a failure to cultivate the right habits of attention. Murdoch’s notion of loving attention, “a just and loving gaze directed upon an individual reality”, can be understood as a development of this emphasis on moral cultivation. In her famous example, M dislikes her daughter-in-law D, finding her vulgar and juvenile, but remains outwardly gracious throughout. Over time, M comes to see D as youthful and spontaneous instead. There is no change in D’s behavior nor in M’s outward conduct, yet Murdoch contends that M has engaged in genuine moral activity. On my interpretation, this is still attention as selection for action: the deliberate selection of positive rather than negative thick concepts as inputs in the Many-Many Problem of evaluating another person.

Loving attention might then seem merely instrumental: what M owes D is to treat her with respect, and loving attention is a means of avoiding future lapses, such as flying into a contemptuous rage. But it should be uncontroversial that we are instrumentally required to attend in whatever way is necessary to fulfill our more fundamental obligations. More interesting is the possibility that attention is non-instrumentally connected to what we owe each other. Kantian respect is one tempting account of an attention we owe each other, since it too is an orientation we should (purportedly) adopt towards all others. But unlike Kantian respect, loving attention is deeply particular: M’s transformation does not consist in coming to regard D as a noumenally valuable agent who is unfortunately phenomenally annoying, but in maintaining focus on D’s peculiar features while viewing them in a new light. The Kantian view might appeal to David Velleman’s broadly Kantian conception of love, which takes the empirical person as its immediate object, but sees through her to the value of a deeper noumenal self. However, as Vida Yao argues, this alienates the object of love from her properties. D listens to the Beatles (to M, vulgar) and not Bach (to M, sophisticated) not because of some excusing condition intervening between her agency and her taste in music, but just because D values the Beatles. Loving attention instead acknowledges the empirical person as valuable in virtue of those particular features.

Returning to the big-picture Murdochian insight that attention is central to morality: Might it be that we have directed obligations to lovingly attend to others? I speculate that loving attention is deeply connected to directed obligations without being the content of them. In his draft “Resentment and Social Friction”, R. Jay Wallace argues that resentment helps operationalize moral obligations by making them legible and apparent. It is unplesant to be the object of resentment, so we are incentivized to comply with our obligations, or at least to become highly aware of them. As Wallace writes, our aversion to disesteem “is the flip side of the phenomenon of recognition, our dependence on positive attitudes of regard and consideration and esteem.” I propose that loving attention fulfills this basic need for recognition, drawing others closer, and so counterbalances the social repulsion of resentment. Without loving attention to oppose it, resentment would not reliably highlight moral requirements within relationships; it would simply threaten to dissolve them. Loving attention is not necessarily something we owe to each other, but it plays a constitutive role in maintaining the relationships in the context of which we do owe things to each other.

Finally, Christopher Mole’s “Emancipatory Attention” carries Wu’s account to collective agents. Suppose work-to-rule will win a labor union more pay but not more holidays, while an all-out strike has the opposite effect. For the union to act as a collective agent, it must competently select which inputs to connect to which outputs. Mole likens a group that cannot solve its Many-Many Problem to a pre-reflective child, who has not yet developed agency. The conception of attention as selection for action thus draws a constitutive connection between attention and agency that explains not only how we can be responsible for our attention, but also how agency is realized in groups.

Qualifying paper, written for R. Jay Wallace. An earlier version, on Murdoch’s loving attention, was given as “Loving Attention Is All We Need” at the Wollheim Society, UC Berkeley, October 2025.

Questions, objections, or a better example? Write to me: patrick.pan@patrickpan.com.