Attachment and Character: Attachment Theory, Ethics, and the Developmental Psychology of Vice and Virtue - Hardcover

by Edward Harcourt (Editor)

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.

Author Biography

Edward Harcourt, Professor of Philosophy, University of Oxford and Fellow & Tutor in Philosophy, Keble College, Oxford

Edward Harcourt has been a Fellow of Keble Collge, University of Oxford, since 2005, and before that held posts at the University of Kent and at Lady Margaret Hall, Oxford. He has been a Mind Association Research Fellow and has held visiting posts at Berkeley, Leipzig, and Williams College. Before taking the BPhil and DPhil in Oxford he was an undergraduate at Trinity College, Cambridge, where he read Philosophy (Part I) and History (Part II). He convened the seminar series Meaning and Mindedness: Encounters between Philosophy and Psychoanalysis at the Tavistock Clinic (London), and is a director of the biennial Oxford Summer Schools in Philosophy and Psychiatry. He is currently on secondment as Director of Research, Strategy and Innovation at the Arts and Humanities Research Council.