Ethics and Attachment: How We Make Moral Judgments

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Why are we disgusted when an elderly woman is robbed but sympathize with the actions of a Robin Hood? Why do acts of cruelty against a helpless kitten bother us more than does the trampling of ants? In Ethics and Attachment: How We Make Moral Judgments, psychoanalyst and philosopher Aner Govrin offers the attachment approach to moral judgment, an innovative new model of the process involved in making such moral judgments. Drawing on clinical findings from psychoanalysis, neuroscience and developmental psychology, the author argues that infants' experience in the first year of life provides them with the basic tools needed to reach complex moral judgments later in life. With reference to Winnicott and Bowlby, the author examines how attachments affect our abilities to apply to make moral decisions. With its wholly new ideas about moral judgments, Ethics and Attachment will be of great interest to ethics and moral philosophy scholars, law students, and psychoanalytic psychotherapists. Ethics and Attachment- Front Cover Half Title Philosophy & Psychoanalysis Book Series Title Page Copyright Page Dedication Contents Preface The theory in a nutshell Acknowledgments PART 1: Conceptual and empirical foundations Chapter 1: Why we need a new psychology Emotion versus cognition The interaction between affect and cognition Moral psychology and moral judgment How the emotion/cognition debate has haunted moral psychology The social intuitionist model Moral sentimentalism Dual-process theory of moral judgment A critique of sentimentalism Psychopathy Moral development Moral judgments and aesthetic values: the un-specificity of sentimentalist accounts Structural theories of moral judgment Chapter 2: Morality and early interactions: main theories John Bowlby: attachment theory and its moral applications Donald Winnicott: holding environment and the origins of morality Carol Gilligan: ethics of care Narvaez’s triune ethics theory Patricia Churchland: what neuroscience tells us about morality Conclusions Chapter 3: The moral skills of infants Intentionality Moral judgments in preverbal infants Moral evaluation among infants Understanding in-group principle Infants and authority The infant/caregiver dyad Conclusion PART 2: The attachment approach to moral judgment Chapter 4: The building blocks of moral judgment How are moral situations represented in our mind? The dyad-dominance effect of moral situations What do moral situations have in common? Moral situations in context Moral judgments are observer-relative and constrained by our cognitions Moral judgment is intuitive and unconscious The dyad as a whole Chapter 5: Decoding moral situations Evaluating the child-related characteristics and the adult-related characteristics of each party Child- and adult-related schemes Evaluating the relationships between conflicting parties (→) The imposition of child-schema and adult-schema characteristics on facts concerning the dyad Note Chapter 6: Variance and consistency in moral judgment The two types of dispute relating to moral dilemmas Dyad-based intuitions take precedence over moral principles The dispute over capital punishment A principled moral debate Note Chapter 7: The like-me criterion and turned-off dyads The subjective component of moral judgment Turned-off dyads We are all psychopaths: the primacy of the parameters over the content The animal world and us Cultural differences with respect to the treatment of mammals Turned-off dyads and moral principles Chapter 8: The prototype of evil Evil as prototype Why is it so hard to define “evil”? Four salient features of evil Evil as cognitive bias The banality of evil: an attempt to alter the computation of evil? Epilogue References Index