Cultivating Ethical Attention in Psychology

This post is Part 2 of a series. In Part 1, I argued that virtue ethics, deontology, and utilitarianism remain important in the field of professional psychology. Yet they risk becoming strategic tools for justifying a stance instead of perceiving what a situation requires. Alongside these frameworks, we need something more fundamental: an ethics of attention.

Attention enables us to perceive a situation’s ethical nuances before categorizing or judging it. It can be seen as a way of deepening our moral progress. The Irish philosopher, Iris Murdoch, writes: "Simone Weil said that morality was a matter of attention, not of will" (Existentialist and Mystics). How do we as psychologists rediscover a sense of the density of our lives and the lives of others?

Attention lets a psychologist notice a shift in a client’s breathing, hesitation in a group, or discomfort in their own body. These micro-events may be invisible to ethical codes, but the deepest ethical responsibilities often lie here.

Pedagogies of Attention

If ethics should be more than compliance, we need to train our attention. In psychology education, this means adding practices that cultivate perception, presence, and responsiveness alongside traditional ethics courses. Here are three approaches I’ve found especially helpful:

1. Describing the “wrong” without judging: I ask students to recall a moment when something felt ethically troubling, though no rule was broken. They do not need to explain or fix. They describe: What happened? What did you notice? What did you feel? This opens a space where ethical thinking starts, not in judgment, but in presence.
2. Moral improvisation: Students receive a case and respond as a utilitarian, a deontologist, and a virtue ethicist. Then they reflect: What values appeared? What felt missing? How did it feel to act from each? A week later, they revisit the case and imagine the best possible resolution, not by rules but by the depth of the relationship. This shows how theory is helpful, but attention can surpass theory.
3. Listening without response: In pairs, one student asks: “What are you going through?” The other listens silently. No nodding, no fixing—just a “thank you” when the speaker finishes. Here, the listener practices ethics by holding space, not controlling.

Ethics as attention can be thought of in three stages:

1. Paying attention: Receptivity to what is happening, inwardly and outwardly.
2. Problematizing: Ask: For whom is this a problem? What assumptions are at play? What am I missing?
3. Sustainable action: Acting in ways one would be willing to repeat, grounded in responsiveness rather than optimization.

This is not relativism. It is not abandoning rules. It is learning to sense what is required in the living fabric of a relationship.

Why It Matters for Psychology

In clinical psychology, ethical failures rarely begin with dramatic breaches. They begin with unnoticed small moments: a silence overlooked, a boundary crossed without reflection, a client’s unease rationalized away, a sexual tension or attraction unacknowledged. All the missed micro-phenomena. Attention is what lets us catch these small moments before they harden into harm.

For research psychologists, the same is true: Attention is needed to identify who is excluded, to recognize which assumptions underpin our methods, and to ask whose voices are missing from our data. And for educators, attention is the difference between teaching ethics as abstract rules and teaching it as a living practice of presence.

Becoming Worthy of What Happens

The French philosopher Gilles Deleuze wrote that ethics means to “become worthy of what happens” (The Logic of Sense). For psychologists, this means developing the presence, the capacity to pay attention and nonjudgmentally meet each client, colleague, or research subject as they are—not as we wish them to be.

Codes and frameworks will always be necessary. But without attention, they remain external. With attention, they come alive. Attention helps us invest in life, not rules. For the same reason, ethics is not just about rules or outcomes. It is about being present enough to respond openly, vulnerably, and responsibly. It asks not only what I should do but also who I am becoming through my attention. In the end, psychology does not only need technicians of the mind. It requires practitioners who can discern what matters and respond with care. That is what it means to become worthy of what happens.