A Confucian Contribution to the Ethics of Attention

The Moynihan Institute’s, East Asia Program presents Daniel J. Stephens from University at Buffalo.

Partly to support criticisms of the attention economy, philosophers have recently begun to develop general frameworks for the ethics of attention. In this talk, Daniel Stephens makes the case that early Confucian ethics can make an important contribution to these frameworks.

Because the normative assessment of people’s attention allocations is informed by the attentional demands inherent to their ethical lives, and because the finite nature of human attention places limits on people’s ability to meet those demands, Stephens argues that an ethics of attention should explain how people ought to collectively meet those demands. This means both that an ethics of attention should provide realistic, collective expectations for how people allocate their attention in attempting to meet those demands, and that it should provide collective practices that synergize these attempts.

Stephens calls such a set of collective practices a “social-attentional scheme” and proposes that one goal of an ethics of attention should be to develop effective social-attentional schemes. He concludes by discussing a social-attentional scheme developed within early Confucian thought, proposing ways that this example can help develop a contemporary ethics of attention.

Daniel Stephens is assistant professor in the Philosophy Department at the University at Buffalo. Before joining the department at Buffalo, he was assistant professor of philosophy at Duke Kunshan University. His research focuses on ethical theory, political philosophy, epistemology, and issues in ethics, politics and the philosophy of language in pre-Han Chinese thought. His work has appeared in Philosophers’ Imprint, The British Journal for the History of Philosophy, Dao: A Journal of Comparative Philosophy, Philosophy East and West, The Journal of Chinese Philosophy, and Politics, Philosophy, and Economics.