Beverley McGuire is an Associate Professor at the University of North Carolina Wilmington. As a historian of religion specializing in Chinese Religions, McGuire examines the impact of digital technology on moral attention—the capacity to discern and attend to the morally salient features of a given situation. Although most scholars associate moral attention with Western philosophers, Chinese religious traditions describe various means of facilitating moral attention, including Confucian techniques of moral cultivation, Daoist practices of “fasting the mind,” and Buddhist meditation.

This project considers ways in which digital technologies can distract us from other people and disrupt our moral attention, and ways in which digital technologies might enhance our interpersonal relationships and develop our moral attention.