Loyalty is faithfulness or a devotion to a person, country, group, or cause. (Philosophers disagree as to what things one can be loyal to. Some, argue that one can be loyal to a broad range of things, while others argue that it is only possible for loyalty to be to another person and that it is strictly interpersonal.)
There are many aspects to loyalty. John Kleinig, professor of Philosophy at City University of New York, observes that over the years the idea has been treated by writers from Aeshylus through John Galsworthy to Joseph Conrad by psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, scholars of religion, political economists, scholars of business and marketing, and — most particularly — by political theorists, who deal with it in terms of loyalty oaths and patriotism. As a philosophical concept, loyalty was largely untreated by philosophers until the work of Josiah Royce, the "grand exception" in Kleinig's words. John Ladd, professor of Philosophy at Brown University writing in the Macmillan Encyclopaedia of Philosophy in 1967, observes that by that time the subject had received "scant attention in philosophical literature". This he attributed to "odious" associations that the subject had with nationalism, including the nationalism of Nazism, and with the metaphysics of idealism, which he characterized as "obsolete". He argued that such associations were, however, faulty, and that the notion of loyalty is "an essential ingredient in any civilized and humane system of morals". Kleinig observes that from the 1980s onwards, the subject gained attention, with philosophers variously relating it to (amongst other things) professional ethics, whistleblowing, frienship and virtue theory.1911 Encyclopaedia Brittanica
The Encyclopaedia Britannica Eleventh Edition defines loyalty as "allegiance to the sovereign or established government of one's country" and also "personal devotion and reverence to the sovereign and royal family". It traces the word "loyalty" to the 15th century, noting that then it primarily referred to fidelity in service, in love, or to an oath that one has made. The meaning that the Britannica gives as primary, it attributes to a shift during the 16th century, noting that the origin of the word is in the Old French "loialte", that is in turn rooted in the Latin "lex", meaning "law." One who is loyal, in the feudal sense of fealty, is one who is lawful (as opposed to an outlaw), who has full legal rights as a consequence of faithful allegiance to a feudal lord. Hence the 1911 Britannica derived its (early 20th century) primary meaning of loyalty to a monarch. This definition of loyalty based upon the word's etymology is echoed by Vandekerckhove, when he relates loyalty and whistleblowing (more on which below).
Biblical and Christian Views
In the Christian Bible, Jesus states "Render unto Caesar the things that are Caesar's and unto God the things that are God's." So, it acknowledges a limit to the authority of man. In the Christian view, there is a sphere beyond the earthly, and if loyalty to man conflicts with loyalty to God, the latter takes precedence.
Moreover, Christianity rejects the notion of dual loyalty. In the Gospel of Matthew 6:24, Jesus states "No one can serve two masters. Either he will hate the one and love the other, or he will be devoted to the one and despise the other. Ye cannot serve God and mammon". This relates to the authority of a master over his servants (as per Ephesians 6:5), who according to (Biblical) law owe undivided loyalty to their master (as per Leviticus 25:44–46).
Josiah Royce’s Conception
Josiah Royce in his 1908 book The Philosophy of Loyalty presented a different definition of the concept. According to Royce, loyalty is a virtue, indeed a primary virtue, "the heart of all the virtues, the central duty amongst all the duties". Royce presents loyalty, which he defines at length, as the basic moral principle from which all other principles can be derived. The short definition that he gives of the idea is that loyalty is "the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause". Loyalty is thoroughgoing in that it is not merely a casual interest but a wholehearted commitment to a cause.
Misplaced Loyalty
Misplaced loyalty (or mistaken loyalty) is loyalty placed in other persons or organizations where that loyalty is not acknowledged or respected, is betrayed or taken advantage of. It can also mean loyalty to a malignant or misguided cause.
Social psychology provides a partial explanation for the phenomenon in the way 'the norm of social commitment directs us to honor our agreements....People usually stick to the deal even though it has changed for the worse'. Humanists point out that 'man inherits the capacity for loyalty, but not the use to which he shall put it...may unselfishly devote himself to what is petty or vile, as he may to what is generous and noble'
Whistleblowing
Several scholars, including Duska, discuss loyalty in the context of whistleblowing. Wim Vandekerckhove, senior lecturer at the University of Greenwich, points out that in the late 20th century there sprung forth the notion of a bidirectional loyalty between employees and their employer. (Previous thinking had encompassed the idea that employees are loyal to an employer, but not that an employer need be loyal to employees.) The ethics of whistleblowing thus encompass a conflicting multiplicity of loyalties, where the traditional loyalty of the employee to the employer conflicts with the loyalty of the employee to his/her community, which the employer's business practices may be adversely affecting. Vandekerckhove reports that different scholars resolve the conflict in different ways, some of which he, himself, does not find to be satisfactory. Duska resolves the conflict by asserting that there is really only one proper object of loyalty in such instances, the community, a position that Vandekerckhove counters by arguing that businesses are in need of employee loyalty. John Corvino, associate professor of Philosophy at Wayne State University takes a different tack, arguing along lines similar to Nathanson and others that loyalty can sometimes be a vice not a virtue and that "loyalty is only a virtue to the extent that the object of loyalty is good". This argument Vandekerckhove characterizes as "interesting" but "too vague" in its description of how tolerant an employee should be of an employer's shortcomings. Vandekerckhove suggests that Duska and Corvino combine, however, to point in a direction that makes it possible to resolve the conflict of loyalties in the context of whistleblowing, by clarifying exactly what the objects of those loyalties really are.
Marketing
Businesses seek to become the objects of loyalty, in order to have their customers return. Brand loyalty is a consumer's preference for a particular brand and a commitment to repeatedly purchase that brand in the face of other choices. Other businesses establish loyalty programs, which offer rewards to repeat customers, and often allow the business to keep track of their preferences and buying habits.
Fan loyalty is similar: an allegiance to and abiding interest in a sports team, fictional characyer, or fictional series. Devoted fans of a sports team will continue to follow it, relatively undaunted by a string of losing seasons.
In Animals
Animals as pets have a large sense of loyalty to humans which may be more [than] human-to-human loyalty. Famous cases include Greyfriars Bobby who attended his master's grave for fourteen years; Hachiko, who returned to the place he used to meet his master every day for nine years after his death; and Foxie, the spaniel belonging to Charles Gough, who stayed by her dead master's side for three months on Helvellyn in the Lake District in 1805 (the fact that Gough's body was eaten by his dog was ignored in subsequent Romantic accounts of the story).
In the Mahabharata, the righteous King Yudhisthira, at the end of his life, appeared at the gates of Heaven. He had previously lost his brothers and his wife to death, and when he appeared at the gates his only remaining companion was a stray dog he had picked up along the way. The god Indra is prepared to admit him to Heaven, but refuses to admit the dog. Yudhistira refuses to abandon the dog, and prepares to turn away from the gates of Heaven. Then the dog is revealed to be the manifestation of Dharma, the god of righteousness and justice, and who turned out to be his deified self. Yudhistira enters heaven in the company of his dog, the god of righteousness. Yudhistira is known by the epithet Dharmaputra, the lord of righteous duty.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Loyalty
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The Philosophy of Loyalty
This social metaphysics lays the groundwork for Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. The book of this title published in 1908 derived from lectures given at the Lowell Institute, at Yale, Harvard and at the University of Illinois in 1906-07. The basic ideas were explicit in his writings as early as his history of California. Here Royce set out one of the most original and important moral philosophies in the recent history of philosophy. His notion of "loyalty" was essentially a universalized and ecumenical interpretation of Christian agapic love. Broadly speaking Royce’s is a virtue ethic in which our loyalty to increasingly less immediate ideals becomes the formative moral influence in our personal development. As persons become increasingly able to form loyalties, the practical and on-going devotion to a cause bigger than themselves, and as these loyalties become unifiable in the higher purposes of groups of persons over many generations, humanity is increasingly better able to recognize that the highest ideal is the creation of a perfected "beloved community" in which each and every person shares. The beloved community as an ideal experienced in our acts of loyal service integrates into Royce’s moral philosophy a Kingdom of Ends, but construed as immanent and operative instead of transcendental and regulative. While the philosophical status of this ideal remains hypothetical, the living of it in the fulfillment of our finite purposes concretizes it for each and every individual. Each of us, no matter how morally undeveloped we may be, has fulfilled experiences that point to the reality of experience beyond what is given to us personally. This wider reality is exemplified most commonly by when we fall in love. The "spiritual union [of the lovers] also has a personal, a conscious existence, upon a higher than human level. An analogous unity of consciousness, an unity superhuman in grade, but intimately bound up with, and inclusive of, our separate personalities, must exist, if loyalty is well founded, wherever a real cause wins the true devotion of ourselves. Grant such an hypothesis, and then loyalty becomes no pathetic serving of a myth. The good which our causes possesses, then, also becomes a concrete fact for an experience of a higher than human level." (The Philosophy of Loyalty, p. 311). This move illustrates what Royce calls his "absolute pragmatism," which is the claim that ideals are thoroughly practical, and the more inclusive ideals are maximally practical. The concretization of ideals cannot therefore be empirically doubted except at the cost of rendering our conscious life utterly inexplicable. If we admit that the concretization of ideals genuinely occurs, Royce argues, then we are not only entitled but compelled to take seriously and regard as real the larger intelligible structures within which those ideals exist, which is the purposive character of the divine Will. The way in which persons sort out higher and lower causes is by examining whether one’s service destroys the loyalty of others, or what is best in them. Ultimately personal character reaches its acme in the recognition that service of lost causes, through which we may learn that our ultimate loyalty is to loyalty itself.
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Afterward by the Blog Author
Aside from Josiah Royce, I find the philosophical approaches to loyalty to be weak and puny in terms of an understanding of human nature and its social norms. It seems obvious that humans are more likely to survive if they exhibit loyalty toward each other, ipse dixit. The animals most likely to form loyal bonds with humans, dogs, have been domesticated thousands of years longer than other animals. Dogs and human beings are more geographically widespread than any other mammals on the planet. In this sense, the section on loyal animals and the story of Yudhistira are the crown jewels of Wikipedia’s treatment of this subject. Loyalty is the observable characteristic of the quality of righteous duty. The philosophers quoted above have fumbled the ball on this vital quality.
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