>>Loyalty is the virtue of special devotion to things like your family, your friends,
your spouse, your country, your college team. Perhaps you could even be loyal to something
more abstract like the cause of democracy. The late nineteenth, early twentieth century
American Philosopher Josiah Royce thought that there can be loyalty to loyalty and he
thought that loyalty to loyalty can be used as the basis for most of morality. These days
I don’t think we would get many people saying anything like that. And in fact many people
are suspicious of loyalty for political reasons. Nobody will criticize a person for being faithful
to their spouse or their family, but some people think that loyalty to a country undermines
the impartiality we want to encourage in the treatment of all human beings everywhere.
The worry about loyalty stems from the fact that loyalty means favoritism but loyalty
supports and deepens relationships and we would not have a flourishing human life without
those relationships. Let’s talk about loyalty due to friendship. Have you ever told a friend
something you assumed she would keep in confidence but then she broke the confidence? Suppose
she then said but you didn’t tell me it was a secret. The problem with that response
is that it would apply to anyone. If you promise anybody not to reveal something then you shouldn’t.
But a friend should not have to do that. There is an assumed intimacy that involves revealing
more than you would to mere associates and counting on your friend not to damage your
intimacy by treating it as public property. That is part of the reason for Julius Caesars’
surprise and disappointment when he saw that his friend Brutus was among the conspirators.
He knew he had enemies but reportedly his last words when he was assassinated were ‘And
you too Brutus?’ Peter’s denial of Christ is a lesser form of betrayal but it was disloyal
and cowardly. Here you see a magnificent painting of that moment by the Danish painter Carl
Heinrich Bloch. Peter has already denied that he knows Jesus and when Jesus turns and sadly
looks at him while being led away. Peter remembers Jesus’ words ‘Before the cock crows twice
you will deny me three times.’ You see Peter’s deep remorse in this painting but you know
there is more to the story. This loyalty does not necessarily end a relationship. Since
we can be loyal to different people and institutions there can be conflicts of loyalty. I don’t
know of any rule about how to resolve these conflicts, but there is an interesting line
from the early twentieth century the early twentieth century English Novelist E. M. Forster
that has been frequently quoted. Forster wrote, “If I had to choose between betraying my
country and betraying my friend I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” He
goes onto explain, “Such a choice may scandalize the modern reader, and he may stretch out
his patriotic hand to the telephone at once and ring up the police. It would not have
shocked Dante though. Dante places Brutus and Cassius in the lowest circle of Hell because
they had chosen to betray their friend Julius Caesar rather than their country Rome.”
I’m not sure how to react to this because I don’t think I would want everyone to live
by it. But it raises lots of questions that do not involve a choice between outright betrayal
of one’s country and outright betrayal of one’s friend. What if you have reason to
believe a friend or family member committed a crime? Should you report it to the authorities?
What if you work for a company that you believe is causing harm perhaps to the environment?
Of course there is often very little loyalty between employer and employee in the US but
it is different in some other countries. In America whistle blowers can get legal protection
for revealing violations of the law among people with whom they have close business
relationship. What about people like Edward Snowden who leaked many classified documents
from the national security agency to the mainstream media because he thought it was right? He
has been called both patriot and a traitor. But one of the aspects of his case that strike
me as interesting is that the category of loyalty was often over looked. If he could
be called both a patriot and traitor we need a public discussion of what loyalty is. The
psychologist Jonathan Haidt says that loyalty is one of the values that most educated western
liberals have lost. And conservatives of liberals have often talked past each other because
they inhabit different moral worlds with different categories of value that dominate their thinking.
Loyalty is one of the values that conservatives respond to and liberals generally do not.
This difference corrupts public discourse and makes it very difficult to find common
ground for public policy discussions. I think it is important to examine loyalty as a virtue
carefully and critically. Bringing into the discussion how loyalty might be defended as
a virtue and how it affects peoples’ lives for better or for worse. If we want to give
up loyalty as a moral category we should have a clear idea of what we are giving up.