THE IDEA OF AN ETHICS OF LOYALTY

There are only two major philosophical books about loyalty, but they both express great ambitions for the concept. Royce, in The Philosophy of Loyalty, and Fletcher, in Loyalty, both set out to show that loyalty is the foundation of good moral thinking, and they both defend accounts of morality that are built around the notion of loyalty. Royce calls his account “the philosophy of loyalty,” and Fletcher calls his “the ethics of loyalty.”

While Royce's work on loyalty, especially, has been very influential, the idea of an ethics of loyalty has not really taken hold; no such view stands as a familiar option in debates about ethical theory. Still, the project of grounding morality in loyalty is connected with some prominent recent work in moral and political philosophy, and in particular with certain attacks upon impartial, liberal, or – as I will call it here – universalist morality, and with efforts to find an alternative.

Universalist morality is characterized by two central and related commitments. First, it ascribes value to individuals by virtue of properties that they hold inherently, not by virtue of their relations to particular communities, times or places. Second, it says that many of the most important ethical decisions are made, ideally, from a detached perspective, free of allegiances to some individuals over others.