Terry Meijer

This paper addresses the ethical challenge of indifference in contemporary society, examining whether individuals can remain morally responsive in a world saturated with distant suffering and fragmented digital information. While modern psychological accounts suggest that human empathy is a selective, finite resource, and radical deontological or phenomenological ethical frameworks demand impossible forms of universal emotional exposure, this thesis proposes a vital synthesis through Simone Weil’s concept of attention. By structurally analyzing the tension between Paul Bloom’s warnings on empathy burnout and Emmanuel Levinas’s primordial ethical demand, I argue that indifference is not merely a passive psychological limitation or absence of feeling, but a culpable structural failure of attention. Furthermore, by drawing on Hannah Arendt’s critique of thoughtlessness and Zygmunt Bauman’s concept of adiaphorization, the paper demonstrates how contemporary bureaucratic and global economic institutions systematically produce moral distance. Ultimately, this paper contributes to the ongoing debate by framing morality within Iris Marion Young’s social connection model, showing that an ethics of attention allows the recognition of existing structural responsibilities and acknowledges others as morally real within our finite spheres of action. Keywords: Indifference, Simone Weil, Attention, Emmanuel Levinas, Paul Bloom, Structural Responsibility, Compassion Fatigue