Moral bioenhancement is the attempt to improve human behavioral dispositions, especially in relation to the great ethical challenges of our age. To this end, scientists have hypothesised new molecules or even permanent changes in the genetic makeup to achieve such moral bioenhancement. The philosophical debate has focused on the permissibility and desirability of that enhancement and the possibility of making it mandatory, given the positive result that would follow. However, there might be another way to enhance the overall moral behavior (...) of us humans, namely that of targeting people with lower propensity to trust and altruism. Based on the theory of attachment, people who have a pattern of insecure attachment are less inclined to prosocial behavior. We know that these people are influenced by negative childhood memories: this negative emotional component may be erased or reduced by the administration of propranolol when the bad memory is reactivated, thereby improving prosocial skills. It could be objected that memory-editing might be a threat for the person’s identity and authenticity. However, if the notion of rigid identity is replaced by that of extended identity, this objection loses validity. If identity is understood as something that changes over time, moral bioenhancement through memory-editing seems indeed legitimate and even desirable. (shrink)

The pivotal problem of comorbidity research lies in the psychometric foundation it rests on, that is, latent variable theory, in which a mental disorder is viewed as a latent variable that causes a constellation of symptoms. From this perspective, comorbidity is a (bi)directional relationship between multiple latent variables. We argue that such a latent variable perspective encounters serious problems in the study of comorbidity, and offer a radically different conceptualization in terms of a network approach, where comorbidity is hypothesized to (...) arise from direct relations between symptoms of multiple disorders. We propose a method to visualize comorbidity networks and, based on an empirical network for major depression and generalized anxiety, we argue that this approach generates realistic hypotheses about pathways to comorbidity, overlapping symptoms, and diagnostic boundaries, that are not naturally accommodated by latent variable models: Some pathways to comorbidity through the symptom space are more likely than others; those pathways generally have the same direction (i.e., from symptoms of one disorder to symptoms of the other); overlapping symptoms play an important role in comorbidity; and boundaries between diagnostic categories are necessarily fuzzy. (shrink)

It is generally acknowledged that school discipline is failing. Through a comparison of two very different disciplinary situations, I inquire into possible causes of failure and conditions of success. The argument is made that if discipline is to succeed, students must believe in and identify with the goals it is designed to support. Questions are raised as to just how embracing (pervasive throughout school life), lofty (transcending the classroom), and moralized (emphasizing social over personal) such goals should be. Without specifying (...) the ideal scope and content of an educational mission, I conclude that a moral component is both practical and proper; for it responds to a child's aspirations, builds self-esteem, and provides the social 'glue' that binds members of a society. (shrink)

In this article, we explore to what extent parents should be ‘educators’ of their children. In the course of this exploration, we offer some examples of these practices and ways of speaking and thinking, indicate some of the problems and limitations they import into our understanding of the parent–child relationship, and make some tentative suggestions towards an alternative way of thinking about this relationship.

This paper examines interwoven ethical and epistemological issues raised by attempts to promote responsive childcare practices based on neuroscience evidence on the developmental effects of early stress. The first section presents this “neuroscience argument for responsive early childcare”. The second section introduces some evidential challenges posed by the use of evidence from developmental neuroscience as grounds for parental practice recommendations and then advances a set of observations about the limitations of the evidence typically cited. Section three highlights the ethical implications (...) of the neuroscience argument for responsive early childcare. It argues that the neuroscience argument, first, fuels unwarranted parental anxiety by unduly raising the stakes of families’ early childcare choices and, second, threatens public confidence in developmental science’s potential to inform childcare practices and policy that enhance children’s health and well being. (shrink)

In this article we focus on how the language of developmental psychology shapes our conceptualisations and understandings of childrearing and of the parent-child relationship. By analysing some examples of contemporary research, policy and popular literature on parenting and parenting support in the UK and Flanders, we explore some of the ways in which normative assumptions about parenthood and upbringing are imported into these areas through the language of developmental psychology. We go on to address the particular attraction of developmental psychology (...) in the field of parenting and upbringing within our current cultural context. Drawing on the work of (among others) Zygmunt Bauman, we will show how developmental psychology, as one of the instruments that contributes to a breaking down of our existential condition into a series of well-defined, and thus apparently manageable, tasks and categories, displaces rather than confronts the possibly limitless depth of the enormity of the reality of ‘being a parent’. (shrink)

Network analysis is a promising step forward in efforts to align psychological assessment with explanatory theory in psychological science. The implications of Cramer et al.'s analysis are quite general. Networks analysis may illuminate functional relations not only among observable behaviors that comprise psychological disorders, but among cognitive and affective processes that causally contribute to everyday experience and action.

Response to commentary by author of original keynote article.