Loyalty

Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue by Eric Felten is excellent.  Read it.

I’d never thought much about the nature of loyalty before reading this book, but now I realize it is a very problematic thing.  Here is the problem:  everyone agrees that loyalty is a good thing, but, too much loyalty is a bad thing.  First off—if you are loyal to two different things, what do you do if those loyalties come into conflict?  Can you rank order your loyalties?  Should  I be more loyal to my wife or my children?  To my wife or my country?  To my employer or my friends?  Try to answer those questions and there is an interesting moral dilemma waiting for you which will make you realize you chose unwisely.  Take the last one—presumably, most people would say that loyalty to friends in more important than loyalty to your employer.  But, if your friend asks you to steal from your company, do you do it out of loyalty?  If your friend cheated your employer (and you had nothing to do with the cheating), do you report your friend?  Suddenly you realize you would probably abandon your friend in a second.  What kind of loyalty is that?  Oh, you say, you’ll be loyal, but only up to a point.  You won’t lie for your friend to help him evade conviction in a criminal proceeding.  So, what exactly does it mean to say you are loyal to your friend?  If you aren’t willing to make a simple sacrifice (lying under oath) for a friend, are you really loyal to your friend?

Loyalties get into conflict with one another all the time.  When you think about it, it starts sounding more and more like a conditional virtue—be loyal, but only when it is convenient to be loyal.  But, in that case, what exactly is the difference between being loyal and not being loyal?  If you are loyal to someone evil, is that a good thing?  Or should you only be loyal to people deserving of loyalty, in which case, again, what does it mean to be loyal?  By the end of the book, I have absolutely no idea how to solve the problem of loyalty—I can’t figure it out—it is, as the subtitle says a vexing virtue.  (A few other examples from the book are here.)

The book is fantastic in making you think about a hard problem.  It also made me change my mind about an interesting moral problem.  Suppose my car went off the road and into a large body of water.  My wife and one of my children are in the car and can’t escape.  I can only save one of them.  Which one would I save?  Until I read this book, I wouldn’t have hesitated to say that I would have saved my wife.  It wouldn’t even have been a hard decision.  But, then while reading this book, I realized something.  If the situation were reversed, and Janet had to decide whether to save me or one of the kids, I would want her to save my daughter.  And that also wouldn’t even have been a hard decision.  So, flipping the situation back, if I think about what Janet would want were she in the car, she would want me to save the kid.  So, if I want to be loyal to Janet, I would need to save not her, but my daughter.  So, now I would save my child.  Presumably, the situation just described will never occur, but it is nice to know what I would do if it does.

(By the way, oftentimes when I discuss things like this with my students, one of them will get very antsy, worrying that because I just talked about a hypothetical like the above, it is now more likely to concur.  There are a lot of superstitious Mount Holyoke students.)

I was reading this book, by the way, when Emma got her Common Read from Mount Holyoke.  MHC, like just about every other college these days (colleges are lemmings), sends out a book every year to all the entering students, encouraging them to read it as part of a giant bonding experience.  Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue would be an outstanding book for colleges to use for the Common Read.  Much better than the drivel schools actually send out.  Sadly, the very things that make this book such  perfect candidate for the Common Read (it is well-written and raises provocative moral issues) are the exact sort of things that disqualify it from actually being chosen by schools like MHC (which prefer journalistic “let’s hector you to be be more virtuous in trendy academic ways” topics).