Abstract Recent philosophical work on attention has probed what attention is in general, what collective attention is, and the ethics specifically of the latter, e.g., when it is virtuous, and how one might accordingly apportion praise or blame. An unexplored topic in this realm, though, is the importance of empowering non-academics to be able to draw on ideas developed in the academic debate in their reflection on the ethics of collective attention. This gap is evidenced by calls to explore how harmful collective attentional patterns of wider societal groups can be addressed. As such, there are identified problems with the way that society, or groups therein, collectively attends. I argue that having non-academics being able to access the ethics of collective attention puts them in a better position to address these problems (i.e., to identify and evaluate harmful patterns of collective attention) as part of a collective. However, having non-academics engage in the ethics of attention, even individual attention, is difficult. The topic of collective attention is highly conceptual and philosophically contested. Moreover, as the academic philosophical literature on collective attention has developed, it only offers limited, if any, access for non-academics to engage with such ideas. I refer to this as the accessibility problem. I demonstrate that the accessibility problem can be overcome by engaging with film, specifically The Zone of Interest , allowing non-academics to reflect on the ethics of, and thus address the problems related to, collective attention.
Michael Quinn (Wed,) studied this question.