Vivian weighs in on my paying attention post:
I'm not quite sure how to digest all that, but it's well said and food for thought. Of some sort.
What you're talking about is what Martha Nussbaum calls a "flexible movement back and forth between particular and general." I've been rotating the idea of "moral attention" lately. Nussbaum says, "Obtuseness is a moral failing; its opposite can be cultivated." Success in morality is contingent on a balance of attention; in Love's Knowledge, she uses Aristotelian practical reasoning to suggest that the particular should have priority, especially in the context of developing a "finely tuned concreteness in ethical attention and judgement." We sharpen our perceptions through what she calls "loving perception," and similarly, in The Sovereignty of the Good, Iris Murdoch says we become good through paying "loving attention" to the particular.
I'm not quite sure how to digest all that, but it's well said and food for thought. Of some sort.