Attachment, Security, and Relational Networks

There is now extensive discussion in normative philosophy about personal relationships—from older debates about their nature and value, to more recent discussions of their implications for institutional design and freedom of association. The literature is primarily focused on dyads: close relationships between two people, such as romantic partnerships, two-person friendships, or parent–child relationships, and their perhaps distinctive contributions to our lives.Footnote1

But close dyads are not all there is to our relational lives. Most people have many relationships, of many different types. In the broadest sense, our relational network includes the totality of all relationships in our life, but it can also be divided into more discrete groups, as distinct from dyads, such as friendship groups, colleague groups, or families. What is omitted from a dyadic analysis of personal relationships, and accordingly contemporary philosophical discussion, is an understanding of the distinctive contributions of the wider network to our lives, over and above the more attention-grabbing dyadic relationships.

Attending to the network raises several important questions. How might we conceptualise the complex network of relational threads that make up the fabric of our social lives? Does that fabric ever have a moral value that is ‘over and above’ the value of the individual relationships that constitute it? What draws the various relational threads together, into a tapestry that enriches a person’s life overall? In this paper we address these questions with reference to one important good that relationships can provide: felt security.Footnote2

Roughly speaking, a person enjoys felt security when they receive security-inducing care as a response to security-based attachment. We use ‘attachment-care relationships’ to refer to relationships that embed this good. We believe that, although such care is synonymous with dyads (such as romantic partnerships or close friendships), the good of felt security can be provided by networks, and indeed that networks are structured to provide felt security in ways that are distinctive.

The concept of ‘felt security’ derives from the enormous psychology literature on attachment theory. Within that literature, by far the most-theorised relationships are parent–child and romantic relationships. Just like philosophers, psychologists usually conceptualise these relationships dyadically: the received wisdom is that each person to whom we have a security-based attachment can provide us with security-inducing care entirely on their own. As one group of psychologists put it: “attachment theory presumes that healthy, satisfying relationships are, by definition, dyadic.”Footnote3

We aim to disrupt this presumption. There are many people in our lives who cannot provide us with felt security on their own. But these people can contribute to our felt security, by being part of a network. It is the network overall, but no one individual within the network, that provides felt security, and this is what we mean by networks providing value ‘over and above’ the one-to-one relationships they are made up of.

Of course, relationships (whether conceived as dyads or networks) provide participants with many goods other than felt security. And the value of such relationships might not be reducible to the ‘goods’ they give participants, whether felt security or otherwise. Their value might be, in part, more intrinsic than that. But as we aim to show, the good of felt security illuminates certain overlooked virtues of relational networks, as compared with relational dyads—particularly in the realm of liberal political philosophy.

We argue that there are three crucial differences between dyads and networks with respect to the good of felt security. First, networks are more consistent with liberal freedom than dyads; second, networks (unlike dyads) give us the opportunity to repair, replace, and remove relationships while retaining our felt security, as well as the opportunity to develop that capacity; and third, networks generate felt security more robustly than dyads, providing the good of ‘robust felt security’. These three virtues illustrate some of the benefits of centring networks in the moral-political philosophy of personal relationships.

Our claim is not that networks are overall ‘better’ than dyads—nor even that networks are overall ‘better’ vis-à-vis the good of felt security—but rather that networks can provide us with bona fide felt security and do so in a different way than dyads do. It is this different way of realizing felt security that imbues networks with sources of value that are different from those contained within relational dyads. A single life can contain, and be enriched by, both dyad-based and network-based felt securityFootnote4—so philosophers should attend to both. As we will discuss, the value of networks has important practical implications for the provision of felt security through political institutions. Attending to networks in addition to dyads reveals new depths in the philosophy of personal relationships. Our discussion of felt security merely begins to plumb those depths. Thus, the paper is partly a provocation for others to explore how networks fare with regard to various sources of relational value (sources, that is, other than felt security).

We begin in Section 2 by characterizing attachment-care relationships and theorizing the felt security found within dyads. We highlight the ambivalent nature of dyadic relationships as a source of felt security. In Section 3, we theorise relational networks, explaining how, like dyads, they can provide felt security. In Section 4, we explain the three virtues of security-inducing networks. We close in Section 5 by considering the implications of our network approach, explaining how it can help guide and assess individual actions and institutional design.