Ryan Harte, “Ethics of Attention: Comparative Notes on Zhuangzi, Plato, and Others“
This paper sketches a Platonic-Daoist model of ethical psychology as a potential
resource for challenging some dominant positions in modern moral philosophy. I first
describe the “Humean model” of moral psychology. On this model, the moral agent
acts, and her primary responsibility is to affect the world in some way. The Humean
agent is disintegrative, experiencing conflict between her beliefs about the world and her
desires for the world. She thus struggles and works to reconcile the cognitive and noncognitive elements of the self. Freedom for the Humean agent is unobstructed self determination. My proposed alternative is a Platonic-Daoist model in which the moral
agent is less an agent than a patient who witnesses. Her primary responsibility is to see
and understand the world. She is integrative, attending to the world in order to harmonize with it. To the extent that she acts, her actions are responsive, and freedom for her consists in other-determination, in following along with the world clearly perceived. She does act, but the momentum for action is received from external sources, not willfully summoned through choice. The paper will briefly contrast these two models before turning to specific textual sources and examples from the Zhuangzi (an early Daoist text, ca. 300s BCE) and Platonic dialogues. I will also draw heavily on Simone Weil’s work on attention.
The goal of the paper is in the title: just to sketch a coherent picture of how thinkers as
various as Zhuangzi and Plato might challenge and offer alternatives to modern moral
theory. The underlying stakes (which are not the focus of the paper) are that postEnlightenment Western moral theory relies on a largely unquestioned set of
assumptions (the fact/value separation, the autonomous rational agent, etc.). Martha
Nussbaum calls this “the muscular choice-is-all school of moral philosophy.” It is so
pervasive that it has entirely coöpted virtue ethics, which originally arose as a reaction
against modern moral philosophy. I will touch on this situation and suggest how a
Platonic-Daoist ethics of attending brings to light important but neglected features of
moral life. A final upshot is to argue for the comparability of Plato and Zhuangzi,
usually seen as the most antithetical representatives of Western and Eastern philosophy.