Alongside its association with the virtues of intimacy, secure attachment is also associated with the disposition to explore the environment, both physical and social, and in a way which does not speak merely to the subject’s immediate needs or interests. So how can a capacity of the first kind be the psychological foundation of a set of capacities of the latter kind? This paper develops that objection, and proposes a second route from secure attachment to virtue, though it remains an empirical matter whether the route is actually taken. There is an a priori consideration to the effect that these efforts cannot succeed: the capacity to love well, and secure attachment itself, is a capacity trained upon a very small number of non-substitutible individuals, whereas the virtues (which include justice, fairness, fidelity to promises and so on) are in their nature said to be impartial. That is the first route from secure attachment to virtue.

This intuition has filtered back into attachment theory, and informs efforts to trace a developmental connection between secure attachment in the early years and adult virtue. And there is a widely held intuition that the capacity to love well is associated with the virtues across the spectrum: loving well makes us good generally – get it right in the love department, and the rest will take care of itself. Secure attachment is reliably associated with ‘the virtues of intimacy’ – the capacity to love well, or to engage in love relations of the best sort. In the paper, I describe this investigative strategy, discuss what motivates Aristotle to employ it in the work, and go through three contradictions that are plausibly identified as examples of its use-specifically, his claims that courageous people do and do not fear death, that friendship is and is not mutually recognized goodwill, and that virtuous people do and do not choose noble actions for their own sake. Though this may seem like a small point, this aspect of the work’s methodology has important consequences for how we should read it-specifically, we should be open to the possibility that some contradictions in the text are the result of his employment of this investigative strategy. This paper focuses on an under-appreciated way that the work is investigative: its employment of an exploratory investigative strategy-that is, its frequent positing of, and later revision or even rejection of, merely preliminary positions.

Aristotle tells us that the Nicomachean Ethics is an “inquiry” and an “investigation” (μέθοδος and a ζήτησις).

Nichomachean ethics by aristotle