Ethics and Attachment How We Make Moral Judgments Philosophy and Psychoanalysis Series

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.

Chapter 1 Why we need a new psychology? Chapter 2 Morality and early interactions – main theories Chapter 3 The moral skills of infants Chapter 4 The building blocks of moral judgment Chapter 5 Decoding moral situations Chapter 6 Variance and consistency in moral judgment Chapter 7 The like-me criterion and turned-off dyads Chapter 8 The Prototype of evil Epilogue

Aner Govrin is a clinical psychologist, psychoanalyst and a director of a doctoral program in the Program for Hermeneutics and Cultural Studies at Bar-Ilan University, Israel. He is a member of Tel Aviv Institute for Contemporary Psychoanalysis (TAICP).