THE STORY SO FAR

So far, I have been looking at kinds of loyalty: friendship, patriotism and filial loyalty. Yet, when people talk about the ethical significance of loyalty, they often mean to speak not of loyalty of some particular kind, but of loyalty in general. In describing someone's character, for example, you might say that she is loyal. People sometimes speak of loyalty as a value or a guiding principle. Some philosophers are advocates of the “ethics of loyalty,” believing that loyalty should be the foundational concept for ethical theory. The focus in all these cases is on loyalty itself, or on what different forms of loyalty have in common, not what sets them apart.

The next three chapters consider some questions about the ethical importance of loyalty, taken as a general proposition. This chapter begins by drawing some generalizations from claims made earlier in the book. Then, I will argue in turn that loyalty is not a value (in a sense to be specified), and that loyalty is not a virtue. In making my case for these claims, I will ignore some well-known arguments, associated with the communitarian program in moral and political philosophy, according to which loyalty is a central value or virtue; those arguments will be considered in Chapter 8. Chapter 9 looks at the prospects of the ethics of loyalty.

Sometimes, loyalty is obligatory; I said in Chapter 6 that there appears to be a duty to be loyal to parents, for example.