Ethics and Attachment

Ethics and Attachment
Author: Aner Govrin
Publisher:
Total Pages: 0
Release: 2019
Genre: Decision making
ISBN: 9781138079779

In Ethics and Attachment: How We Make Moral Judgements 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.

Attachment and Character

Attachment and Character
Author: Edward Harcourt
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 261
Release: 2021
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0192898124

There are many exciting points of contact between developmental psychology in the attachment paradigm and the kinds of questions first raised by Aristotle's ethics, and which continue to preoccupy moral philosophers today. The book brings experts from both fields together to explore them for the first time, to demonstrate why philosophers working in moral psychology, or in 'virtue ethics' - better, the triangle of relationships between the concepts of human nature, human excellence, and the best life for human beings - should take attachment theory more seriously than they have done to date. Attachment theory is a theory of psychological development. And the characteristics attachment theory is a developmental theory of - the various subvarieties of attachment - are evaluatively inflected: to be securely attached to a parent is to have a kind of attachment that makes for a good intimate relationship. But obviously the classification of human character in terms of the virtues is evaluatively inflected too. So it would be strange if there were no story to be told about how these two sets of evaluatively inflected descriptions relate to one another. Attachment and Character explores the relationship between attachment and prosocial behaviour; probes the concept of the prosocial itself, and the relationship between prosocial behaviour, virtue and the quality of the social environment; the question whether there even are such things as stable character traits; and whether attachment theory, in locating the origins of virtue in secure attachment, and attachment dispositions in human evolutionary history, gives support to ethical naturalism, in any of the many meanings of that expression.

Constructivism in Ethics

Constructivism in Ethics
Author: Carla Bagnoli
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Total Pages: 271
Release: 2013-07-18
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1107276551

Are there such things as moral truths? How do we know what we should do? And does it matter? Constructivism states that moral truths are neither invented nor discovered, but rather are constructed by rational agents in order to solve practical problems. While constructivism has become the focus of many philosophical debates in normative ethics, meta-ethics and action theory, its importance is still to be fully appreciated. These new essays written by leading scholars define and assess this new approach in ethics, addressing such questions as the nature of constructivism, how constructivism improves our understanding of moral obligations, how it accounts for the development of normative practices, whether moral truths change over time, and many other topics. The volume will be valuable for advanced students and scholars of ethics and all who are interested in questions about the foundation of morality.

Ethics and Attachment

Ethics and Attachment
Author: Aner Govrin
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 430
Release: 2018-10-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1351627244

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.

The Robust Demands of the Good

The Robust Demands of the Good
Author: Philip Pettit
Publisher: Uehiro Practical Ethics
Total Pages: 294
Release: 2015
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0198732600

Philip Pettit offers a new insight into moral psychology. He shows that attachments such as love, and certain virtues such as honesty, require not only their characteristic positive behaviours in the actual world (i.e. as things are), but preservation of those characteristic behaviours across a range of counterfactual scenarios in which things are different from how they actually are. The counterfactual 'robustness', in this sense, of these behaviours is thus partof our very conception of these attachments and these virtues. Pettit shows that attachment, virtues, and respect all conform to a similar conceptual geography. He explores the implications of thisidea for key moral issues, such as the doctrine of double effect and the distinction between doing and allowing. He articulates and argues against an assumption, which he calls 'moral behaviourism,' which permeates contemporary ethics.

The Oxford Handbook of Parenting and Moral Development

The Oxford Handbook of Parenting and Moral Development
Author: Deborah J. Laible
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 442
Release: 2019-09-30
Genre: Psychology
ISBN: 0190638710

The Oxford Handbook of Parenting and Moral Development provides a collection of state-of-the-art theories and research on the role that parents play in moral development. Contributors who are leaders in their fields take a comprehensive, yet nuanced approach to considering the complex links between parenting and moral development. The volume begins by providing an overview of traditional and contemporary perspectives on parenting and moral development, including perspectives related to parenting styles, domain theory, attachment theory, and evolutionary theory. In addition, there are several chapters that explore the genetic and biological influences related to parenting and moral development. The second section of the volume explores cultural and religious approaches to parenting and moral development and contributes examples of contemporary research with diverse populations such as Muslim cultures and US Latino/as. The last major section of the volume examines recent developments and approaches to parenting, including chapters on topics such as helicopter parenting, proactive parenting, parent-child conversations and disclosure, parental discipline, and other parenting practices designed to inhibit children's antisocial and aggressive behaviors. The volume draws together the most important work in the field; it is essential reading for anyone interested in parenting and moral development.

The Enchantment of Modern Life

The Enchantment of Modern Life
Author: Jane Bennett
Publisher: Princeton University Press
Total Pages: 223
Release: 2016-11-22
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1400884535

It is a commonplace that the modern world cannot be experienced as enchanted--that the very concept of enchantment belongs to past ages of superstition. Jane Bennett challenges that view. She seeks to rehabilitate enchantment, showing not only how it is still possible to experience genuine wonder, but how such experience is crucial to motivating ethical behavior. A creative blend of political theory, philosophy, and literary studies, this book is a powerful and innovative contribution to an emerging interdisciplinary conversation about the deep connections between ethics, aesthetics, and politics. As Bennett describes it, enchantment is a sense of openness to the unusual, the captivating, and the disturbing in everyday life. She guides us through a wide and often surprising range of sources of enchantment, showing that we can still find enchantment in nature, for example, but also in such unexpected places as modern technology, advertising, and even bureaucracy. She then explains how everyday moments of enchantment can be cultivated to build an ethics of generosity, stimulating the emotional energy and honing the perceptual refinement necessary to follow moral codes. Throughout, Bennett draws on thinkers and writers as diverse as Kant, Schiller, Thoreau, Kafka, Marx, Weber, Adorno, and Deleuze. With its range and daring, The Enchantment of Modern Life is a provocative challenge to the centuries-old ''narrative of disenchantment,'' one that presents a new ''alter-tale'' that discloses our profound attachment to the human and nonhuman world.

The View from Here

The View from Here
Author: R. Jay Wallace
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Total Pages: 281
Release: 2018-02-06
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 0190918683

Must we always later regret actions that were wrong for us to perform at the time? Can there ever be good reason to affirm things in the past that we know were unfortunate? In this original work of moral philosophy, R. Jay Wallace shows that the standpoint from which we look back on our lives is shaped by our present attachments-to persons, to the projects that imbue our lives with meaning, and to life itself. Through a distinctive "affirmation dynamic", these attachments commit us to affirming the necessary conditions of their objects. The result is that we are sometimes unable to regret events and circumstances that were originally unjustified or otherwise somehow objectionable. Wallace traces these themes through a range of examples. A teenage girl makes an ill-advised decision to conceive a child - but her love for the child once it has been born makes it impossible for her to regret that earlier decision. The painter Paul Gauguin abandons his family to pursue his true artistic calling (and eventual life project) in Tahiti--which means he cannot truly regret his abdication of familial responsibility. The View from Here offers new interpretations of these classic cases, challenging their treatment by Bernard Williams and others. Another example is the "bourgeois predicament": we are committed to affirming the regrettable social inequalities that make possible the expensive activities that give our lives meaning. Generalizing from such situations, Wallace defends the view that our attachments inevitably commit us to affirming historical conditions that we cannot regard as worthy of being affirmed--a modest form of nihilism.

Eudaimonic Ethics

Eudaimonic Ethics
Author: Lorraine L Besser
Publisher: Routledge
Total Pages: 212
Release: 2014-02-03
Genre: Philosophy
ISBN: 1317916786

In this book, Lorraine Besser-Jones develops a eudaimonistic virtue ethics based on a psychological account of human nature. While her project maintains the fundamental features of the eudaimonistic virtue ethical framework—virtue, character, and well-being—she constructs these concepts from an empirical basis, drawing support from the psychological fields of self-determination and self-regulation theory. Besser-Jones’s resulting account of "eudaimonic ethics" presents a compelling normative theory and offers insight into what is involved in being a virtuous person and "acting well." This original contribution to contemporary ethics and moral psychology puts forward a provocative hypothesis of what an empirically-based moral theory would look like.