Morality has become dominated by talk of ‘concepts’, principles, well-being and virtue. But these notions leave out key detail. If we are to have any deep understanding of morality, we must re-centre our focus on ‘attention’. By looking back to the works of William James, Simone Weil and Iris Murdoch, argues Elisa Magrì, we can chart an ethical framework that reshapes our mental landscape and provides us with meaning.  

In Principles of Psychology (1890), William James, one of the most influential philosophers and pragmatists of the 19^th century, wrote that “an education which should improve this faculty [of attention] would be the education par excellence.”

Working in the aftermath of Wilhelm Wundt, a father of modern psychology, and his studies on attention, James explored the different ways that we deploy attention to direct our will to objects and actions. To this end, James distinguished between sensorial and intellectual attention. The former refers to how we attend to our sense-impressions (for example, how intense or strong our sensations of heat or cold are), whereas the latter is the effort we put into thinking (for example, when we solve a problem, or make a choice).