Health-professions ethics education often emphasizes reasoning, judgment, and action after an ethical problem has already been recognized. Yet ethically consequential features of clinical situations may never become objects of deliberate reflection because they are overlooked, trivialized, normalized, or interpreted through a narrowed perspective. This conceptual-framework article proposes moral attention as an educational construct situated upstream of, but interacting with, moral reasoning and action. Moral attention is defined as the educable capacity to notice potentially morally salient features, recognize their possible significance, widen the perspectives considered, test initial interpretations, and connect resulting reasons to an ethically responsive course of action. Drawing on scholarship in moral perception, moral sensitivity, compassion, metacognitive reflection, epistemic justice, perspective-taking, patient involvement, and health-professions education, the article develops a five-stage framework: Recognition, Moral significance, Perspective expansion, Interpretive testing, and Ethical response. Corresponding failure modes are non-recognition, trivialization, perspective narrowing, premature closure, and action–reason disconnect. The framework is intended to organize curriculum design, teaching, and assessment without treating agreement with a preferred ethical conclusion as evidence of competence. It also foregrounds structural and epistemic inequities that shape what learners are taught to notice and whose knowledge is treated as credible. The framework is a proposed conceptual synthesis rather than a validated cognitive sequence, competency model, or clinical intervention. Its stages, educational indicators, developmental progression, transfer assumptions, and equity consequences require empirical and consequential validation across professions, settings, and jurisdictions.
