Ying Yao

• Watzl, Sebastian; Browne, Katharine Naomi Whitfield; Clover, Louise Margaret; Eileen Eldjarn; Lie Hølmebakk, Lara & Kapelner, Zsolt Kristof [Show all 11 contributors for this article] (2026). Aldersgrenser i sosiale medier er et bomskudd. doi: https:/www.morgenbladet.no/ideer/aldersgrenser-i-sosiale-medier-er-et-bomskudd/10270143. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Et samfunn som ønsker selvstendige borgere, kan ikke møte digitale utfordringer først og fremst med forbud.

• Watzl, Sebastian; Browne, Katharine Naomi Whitfield; Kapelner, Zsolt Kristof; Eldjarn, Eileen; Hølmebakk, Lara Lie & Lange, Victor [Show all 10 contributors for this article] (2026). Social Media Bans and the Ethics of Attention. doi: https:/www.hf.uio.no/ifikk/english/research/projects/goodattention/news/goodattention_final-social-media-bans.pdf. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  The current worldwide debate on age restrictions on social media is mis-framed, and if this framing persists, the net societal harm will increase regardless of which side prevails.

• Yao, Ying (2026). Attending to Mortality, Attending to Morality: Moral Transformation through Grief. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2026). The Morally Transformative Attention(s) of Grief. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2026). The Intrinsic Value of Attention. doi: https:/www4.uib.no/en/research/research-groups/bergen-logic-group/events/2026-bergen-oslo-graduate-conference-in-philosophy. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2025). Paradoxes of Moral Attention, Void, and Proactive Grief. doi: https:/philosophie.univie.ac.at/news-events/nachrichten-news-events/detailansicht-news-events/news/the-philosophy-of-iris-murdoch-vdp-summer-school-s2025/?no_cache=1&cHash=51d8a88235f63c99c27b1a4c7859e76. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  This presentation examines the paradoxical tensions inherent in Iris Murdoch's concept of moral attention and proposes "proactive grief"—imaginative attention to the possibility of loss—as a practical method for inhabiting these tensions. I identify four constitutive paradoxes of moral attention: between active guidance and passive receptivity, between striving and purposelessness, between attention to self and attention away from self, and between attending to individual reality and the Good. While discussions of Murdochian attention typically emphasize Eros (love), I show how Murdoch's concept of the Void (MGM)—a state of loss, emptiness, and suffering often connected with death—helps us understand how moral attention requires us to inhabit these paradoxical tensions. I develop the concept of "proactive grief" as a practical method for cultivating moral attention through the Void. By proactively engaging with the possibility of death and loss, we can achieve a reorientation of consciousness that reveals reality more clearly and motivates moral action, even when not immediately confronted with suffering. When we imaginatively attend to someone's possible death, we transcend self-concern and recognize their independent realities as ends in themselves. Furthermore, this practice reorganizes temporal perspectives, counteracting our natural future-bias toward self-interest by integrating multiple temporal viewpoints into a universal stance toward the particular reality. By connecting us to the acceptance of mortality, producing an "unselfing" effect, clarifying moral reality, and deepening our capacity for love and justice, proactive grief enables us to the paradoxical dynamics of moral attention.

• Yao, Ying (2025). Proactive Grief and Moral Aspiration. doi: https:/www.epsse.org/. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  Proactive Grief and Moral Aspiration Grief is typically understood as exclusive, reactive, and egocentric—arising from personal losses tied to the actual deaths of specific individuals, disrupting one’s idiosyncratic practical identity for the sake of self-knowledge of one as an individual (Cholbi, 2022). Furthermore, while it is a tragicallay paradoxical fact of grief that it often teaches us valuable moral lessons about others and our relationship with them, we often cannot address the moral reasons and fulfill the practical possibilities made salient by grief due exactly to the loss. Just as love extends from personal attachment to universal agape, can we grieve inclusively, proactively, non-egocentrically in a way that illuminates the moral possibilities that would restore our morally normative identity when we could still practically fulfill them? This paper answers affirmatively with the concept of proactive grief, a transformative attentional activity directed at the possibility of others’ deaths and how it could constitute a loss of moral possibilities that undermines one’s practical identity as sharing in humanity through a sense of moral pain. Proactive grief is to be practiced when one finds oneself in an akratic situation that is characterized by the intrinsic conflict between two evaluative perspectives (Callard, 2018), when we are aware of the existence of one that coheres with our moral ideal, yet without occupying it. Unlike typical grief, an unchosen transformative experience (Markovic, 2023), proactive grief is a chosen, aspirational form of self-transformative activity in relation to our moral ideals (Brownlee, 2010). Informed by the pain of proactive grief, one revises one’s actual identity to incorporate the moral ideal one seeks to embody. Proactive grief transposes grief’s attentional structure (Cholbi, 2022) into the futural, possible, and impersonal to harness its revelatory potential for moral development when one still has practical possibilities to act accordingly prospectively. It involves actively attending to another’s counterfactual death and the subsequent foreclosure of all moral practical possibilities concerning that person. This attentiveness juxtaposes the morally evaluative perspective—retrospective from the imagined loss—with one’s current, actual, ego-centered perspective, offering an intrapersonally intertemporal, intermodal, and intersubjective perspective --- while these perspectives differ, they are all yet all mine in proactive grief. Such a shift highlights the interdependence, vulnerability, and precarity that underlies our shared humanity and condition moral possibilities, making salient the normative demands that arise from our moral identity that should be constant across perspectives, including now. Proactive grief induces pain in disrupting our practical identity, not primarily and merely of our idiosyncratic identity, but how it diverges from the moral identity that we should embody, as it makes salient the perspective from which the neglect of certain moral obligations, prompted by the concerns that spring from the perspective from our actual particular identity, might contradict and compromise the fundamental self-conception as human beings that it presupposes and springs its normative force from (Korsgaard, 1996). Such pain is morally rectifying for it motivates one to avoid what will undermine one’s moral identity in forgoing certain possibilities for moral action.

• Yao, Ying (2024). An Attentional Account of Architecture. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this paper, I present an attentional account of architecture and illustrate how such an account could provide an unificatory theory for the nature of architecture, the experience of architecture, architecture as art, as well as the aesthetic and normative dimension of architecture. I propose that architecture is structurally and functionally parallel to attention in terms of selectivity, prioritization, and unification. Whereas attention regulates the priority structure of our mental life (Watzl, 2019), brings cognitive processes into unison in relation to a task (Mole, 2017), and guides selection for action (Wu, 2011) in an immanent, sequential, and occurrent manner, architecture orders the priority structure of our public and physical life through setting up transcendent, simultaneous, and recurrent constraints, instantiated as spatial configuration that is stable across time and subjects. Specifically, architecture regulates the organization of its user’s life primarily through privative means - not directly by positive salience or intention, but by the intentional absence or obstruction of salience that in turn suspends or obstructs certain possibilities of action and experience while enabling others.

• Yao, Ying (2024). Proactive Grief as Normative Self-Transformation. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2024). Practising Grief for Moral Attention. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  It is a tragic paradoxical fact of grief that while it often teaches us valuable moral lessons about others and our relationship to them, we often cannot address the moral reasons and fulfill the practical possibilities made salient by grief due exactly to the loss. But if what is revealed in grief is morally edifying, it seems that one would have reason to practice it when one could still practically address the normative possibilities it reveals. In this paper, I examine how proactive grief, which is invoked by directing one's attention to the possibility of loss without any actual or anticipated loss, is an attentional practice that could remedy the unfortunate staggering between epistemic transformation and practical possibility in reactive case of grief, and is an instance of Murdochian moral attention. Drawing from Michael Cholbi's account of grief as an attentional phenomenon (Cholbi, 2022), I give an account of how proactive grief, like grief, is an instance of attentional activity, but unlike grief, is an instance of intentional attentional action and has the possibility of loss as its object. Like grief, proactive grief teaches us about that and how we invest in the people we grieve our practical identity (Cholbi, 2022, p. 16); but furthermore, proactive grief reveals to us how in so far as someone is a possible object of grief, they figure into our practical identity qua humanity, to whom we have moral obligation, which is to not do what our practical identity as fundamental sharing in forbids (Korsgaard, 1992, p. 84). I propose that proactive grief is an instance of Murdochian moral attention by sharing the following characteristics with laughter: (i) Proactive grief is a form of attention; (ii) Proactive grief facilitates acceptance of death and chance that underlies the cultivation of virtue (Murdoch, 1971, p.71); (iii) Proactive grief is "unsefling" by revealing reality from conflicting perspectives with respect to time, possibilities, and persons, in a way that counteracts one's habitual and egoistic way of attending; (iii) Proactive grief motivates moral action by making salient reasons that are invariable across the perspectives, which brings about a sense of the universality of certain reasons, on the one hand, and gives rise to a sense of urgency of actions by brings into relief the practical possibilities that would otherwise be invalidated by loss, on the other.

• Yao, Ying (2024). The Intrinsic Value of Attention. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2024). Temporal Perspective, Proactive Emotion, and Normative Attention. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2023). Practising Proactive Grief for Moral Development. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2023). Delimiting Normative Possibilities with Proactive Grief. Full text in Research Archive
• Yao, Ying (2023). Demarcating Moral Reasons through Practicing Grief. Full text in Research Archive Show summary

  In this presentation, I examine how grief, when evoked as a proactive practice through envisioning hypothetical losses (such as the death of another subject, the termination of a relationship, or the irrecoverable deterioration of one’s living environment, etc.), calibrates ethical discernment and conduces moral progress. Proactive grief confronts an individual with the contingency and vulnerability inherent in actions, subjects, and relationships. In so doing, it reveals moral significances that are intertemporal (discovered only retrospectively yet projected forward), modalized (predicated on potential rather than actuality), and interpersonal (dependent on the perspectives of subjects) — features that distinguish moral considerations. Proactive grief hence grants epistemic insight into moral reasons in situations where prudential concerns might eclipse them, and provides motivational access towards moral ideals, which are often obscured by personal biases and egoistic concerns when one's viewpoint is limited to the present, the actual, and the personal.

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