Other to Self

Abstract

Abstract Modern moral thought, exemplified in the work of Bernard Williams, finds a fundamental conflict between love and morality. Drawing on material from attachment-oriented psychoanalytic theories, this chapter argues that “the other” is developmentally fundamental for the infant, connected with primitive forms of moral emotion (some strongly negative), whose resolution partly constitutes a self, setting out on a path to a potentially creative form of moral agency. Instead of intractable conflict between love and morality, we find a complex dynamic account of their mutual dependence. There is no gap between other and self; the right sort of independence is the moral achievement.

Cite this work

No public copy is stored for this record, so only the metadata is cited.

Stored only when both papers are in the corpus — 18 citations exist upstream.

Papers that cite the same references — the relational fallback while embeddings are still backfilling.