Loyalty and virtues

Philosophical Quarterly

Volumn 42, Issue 169, 1992, Pages 403-419

  Ewin, R E ^a  

^a NONE

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EID: 84963052537     PISSN: 00318094     EISSN: 14679213     Source Type: Journal    
DOI: 10.2307/2220283     Document Type: Article

References (14)

1. John Ladd, entry on loyalty in Paul Edwards (editor-in-chief), The Encyclopedia of Philosophy (New York: Macmillan and the Free Press, 1967), p. 98.
2. I shall return to further discussion of this case later on.
3. Ladd, in Encyclopedia of Philosophy, p. 98.
4. It is worth noting, too, that countenancing the loyal person’s exclusion of legitimate interests from his consideration presupposes that there can be bad loyalty: If all bona fide loyalty is good loyalty, then whatever interests one’s loyalty requires one to omit from consideration, it is morally legitimate for one so to exclude them.
5. The other virtues also require this capacity for good judgement. Good judgement about the cause is part of what distinguishes the kind person from the dupe, for example. Good judgement about the object is part of what distinguishes the kind person from the busybody. And so on.
6. The same point applies if it should be suggested that, as bad judgement prevents willingness to take risks from being the virtue of courage, so bad judgement prevents the Nazi’s binding himself to the party from being loyalty and means that that case, therefore, does not count against loyalty. That could be so only if judgement has a role in loyalty parallel to the role it has in courage, which is a matter with which I shall be dealing throughout this paper.
7. Stephen Nathanson (‘In Defense of “Moderate Patriotism” ‘, Ethics, 99, 3 (April 1989), p. 538) seems to suggest this sort of move when he says that patriotism (of which he takes loyalty to be at least a part) is a virtue if it leads to actions not in themselves immoral and a vice if it blinds people to the legitimate needs and interests of other nations. His claim is probably best read as one that patriotism (or loyalty) is sometimes a good thing and sometimes a bad thing, really neither a virtue nor a vice.
8. But remember Andrew Oldenquist’s remark (‘Loyalties’, The Journal of Philosophy, 74, 4 (April 1982), p. 188): ‘Feelingshame about something is as much a sign ofloyalty as is pride.’.
9. Compare Philippa Foot’s discussion of pride in ‘Moral Beliefs’, reprinted in her Virtues and Vices (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), p. 114.
10. My insistence that loyalty is something more than simply dutifulness or justice should not be taken to mean that one can never show loyalty simply in doing one’s duty. Loyalty can be the motivation for duty. Sometimes one’s duty might be so onerous that one would not stick at it unless one had loyalty as a motivation; one’s simple sense of duty might not be up to the task.
11. Loyalty that stresses values in this way can even lead me to oppose the group with which I identify. It was loyalty to the American ideal (whether or not that loyalty was misguided) that motivated a lot of the Americans who opposed American involvement in Vietnam.
12. The content of this section is a very quick summary of some of the positions for which I have argued in my Co-operation and Human Values (Brighton: Harvester Press; and New York: St Martin’s Press, 1981).
13. See Oldenquist (‘Loyalties’, p. 177): ‘Our wide and narrow loyalties define moral communities or domains within which we are willing to universalize moral judgments, treat equals equally, protect the common good, and in other ways adopt the familiar machinery of impersonal morality.’ This suggests a similar line, but the emphasis on impersonal morality suggests a concentration on justice at the expense of the other virtues with which I would not agree. Note also that loyalty is not the only feature determining membership of the group with whom I have relationships in terms ofjustice or impersonal morality: As one example, I have such relationships with people with whom I make contracts, but the making of a contract might not lead to any feeling of loyalty.
14. The way in which this is possible, as I have set out the examples, provides a clear solution to one of the problems raised by Nathanson (‘In Defense of “Moderate Patriotism” ‘): It shows how loyalty can lead to preference for a particular group without necessarily leading to injustice or any other vice and leaves us with a much fuller and richer notion of loyalty or patriotism than Nathanson allows for.