Affect attunement in the caregiver-infant relationship and across species
Expanding the ethical scope of Eros
Keywords:
affect attunement, empathy, cross-species ethics, animal moral agency and socialityAbstract
Donna Haraway calls for a cosmopolitan trans-species ethics. But then on what grounds might we tap into communicative capacities in a world that we inhabit together with other species? How might we gain access to an ethical sense of fairness and reciprocity in nonhuman animals? To explore these questions we take preliminary clues from well-established research on the responsive, preverbal “proto-conversations” between human infants and adult caregivers. Social attunement, more powerfully than mirroring empathy, explains the communication of affects and embodied intentions within and across diverse animal species.
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