Philosophy:Aner Govrin's attachment approach to moral judgment

The attachment approach to moral judgment was proposed by Aner Govrin and it is based on evidence from infant research, social psychology and moral psychology. According to this approach, "through early interactions with the caregiver, the child acquires an internal representation of a system of rules that determine how right/wrong judgments are to be construed, used, and understood. By breaking moral situations down into their defining features, the attachment model of moral judgment outlines a framework for a universal moral faculty based on a universal, innate, deep structure that appears uniformly in the structure of almost all moral judgments regardless of their content."

The defining features of moral situations

First, the dyad-superiority effect of moral situations - moral situations are mentally represented as two parties in conflict. This assumption was validated by Gray, Waytz and Young in their theory of dyadic morality. The dyadic structure is a global feature of the narrative of moral situations. It is also the most general component of moral situations: A dyad is always present in these situations regardless of whether it involves many parties, or a group (several individuals, large groups, or even nation states).

Second, most moral situations include an observer who evaluates the dyad. In most moral situations, three sides are involved: two conflicting parties (a dyad) and an observer.

We can represent all moral situations with the following abstraction:

O relates to the following dyad: A→C
O - Observer
A - Perceived wrongdoer
C - Perceived victim
→ relations, what happened between the two, harm done
For example, Capital punishment is represented as:
Does the state have a right to sentence convicted murderers to death?

Observer (O) relates to the following dyad:

(A)State → (C) Convicted murderer

Even though the structure A→ C may take a variety of forms it has one constant component: "someone did something that caused, or might have caused, harm to someone else." The structure points to a strong causal link between A's act and the effect it had or might have had on C.

Third, Moral judgements are observer relative and constrained by our cognitions. Third, the form of A→C is observer relative. It is a configuration which depends on our mind not on objective reality. The recognition of a social situation as moral, and the subsequent judgment, are matters that are never just based on the external properties of social data but are assigned by the observer's mind. The observer never simply reacts to some objective property of the moral situation “'out there”. Fourth, In the process of forming moral judgments the observer will have contrasting cognitions and emotions towards the respective conflicted parties. A mental representation of A→C gives clear direction to our cognitions and emotions. When the moral judgment is unambiguous and the harm is judged serious, the observer will sense negative feelings such as blame and rage toward A, and positive feelings such as compassion, empathy, and pity toward C. The affective response matches a set of cognitive convictions related to the questions of which party is wrong, needs help, deserves punishment, etc. Fifth, The dyad constrains our cognitive apparatus. A dyad will allow certain projections and block others if, and only if, it is construed as A→C. Thus, there is a sense in which a moral dyad can be viewed as being decisively intolerant when it comes to certain possible projections. Sixth, Moral judgment is intuitive and unconscious.

Decoding moral situations

We represent each of the parties (in ways that are comparable to our representation of children (or infants) and adults. All our efforts are geared to construct the reality of the moral situation in terms of an Child – Adult dyad. We judge a conflicted dyad by: (a) Evaluating the child-related characteristics and the adult-related characteristics of each party and deciding, if we can, which of the parties matches an adult schema and which a child schema. (b) Evaluating the relationship between the adult-schema and child-schema parties in terms of (→) where → is the symbol for the harm done within the dyadic relations, and denotes the mode of wrongdoing of the adult vis a vis the dependent. That is to say, we do not only have schemas for children and adults. We also possess a schema for the dyadic relation, centered on our knowledge of adult obligations to children. We perceive moral failure when, as observers, we believe that the conduct of the strong towards the weak has violated our expectations. This social cognition is universal.

The dual nature of morality

Every moral psychology should be able to address the dual nature of moral judgment: On the one hand, there is a remarkable variations in how people judge right/wrong situations in various cultures and societies. Moral judgment seem subjective, relativistic and without order. On the other hand, We feel that moral judgments have a non-negotiable quality, many of them seem objective and universal. Murder is murder is murder. According to the attachment approach to moral judgment rightqwrong judgements are a computational process: we use the same parameters in order to judge, we enegaged in the same cognitive processess. However, we each parameter may have different meaning for two observers. Even though they reach contradictory conclusions the two observers analyze the moral situation using the same parameters. They are engaged in the same cognitive calculation: Detect a dyad, quickly identify the weak and strong parties and assess whether and to what extent there was a violation of expectation. However, even though the cognitive calculation is universal, our relations towards each of the sides, the sympathy and hostility we feel towards them, constitute an unstable and variable set of factors which differ from person to person and from culture to culture.The controversy between the two camps is never about the rules of the dyad. They are in complete agreement in relation to the building blocks of the moral judgment. They completely agree with each other that our expectations must be directed not at the weak side, but at the side perceived as strong.