Attachment and Character

Abstract

There are many exciting points of contact between the questions pursued by attachment theory and those first raised by Aristotle’s ethics, and which continue to preoccupy moral philosophers today. For the first time this volume brings experts from ethics and from attachment theory together to explore them, in order to show philosophers working in moral psychology or in ‘virtue ethics’ that they both have more to learn from, and more to teach, developmental psychology in the attachment paradigm than has been thought to date. Attachment theory is a theory of psychological development. The characteristics attachment theory is a developmental theory of 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 and vices is evaluatively inflected too. This collection of chapters explores the latest empirical findings on the relationship between attachment and the vices and virtues, and the relative importance of attachment status as against other determinants of prosocial behaviour. It also probes the concept of the prosocial itself, and the connections between prosocial behaviour, virtue, and the quality of the social environment; explores whether what we know about these connections casts light on whether there are even 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.