"Loyalty binds people together. Friendships, marriages, even nations are built on loyalty. Try imagining a person who has no loyalty whatsoever to anything or anyone. Such a person would be friendless, loveless, nationless. She would feel no devotion to any higher cause or principle – like truth or justice. She would not even be a fan of any sports team. A life like that would be empty, devoid of many of the things that make us fully human. Of course, loyalties are not all created equal though. Loyalty to a sports team is a shallow form of loyalty. Loyalty to a nation can sometimes demand too much. Or think of the loyalty that some battered wives display to their abusive husbands. There’s a misplaced loyalty if there ever was one. Loyalty goes hand in hand with trustworthiness. If you can’t trust your spouse not to beat you or cheat on you, then your spouse doesn’t deserve your loyalty. If you can’t trust your government not to send young men off to fight in fruitless, forlorn wars, then your government doesn’t deserve your loyalty. You could think that you just have to decide. You have to decide where your highest loyalty lies. But it doesn’t seem quite right to me that choosing between conflicting loyalties is a brute decision, a matter of simply deciding for yourself to whom or what you owe the higher allegiance. There must be some principles -- some moral principles -- that tell you who and what you owe loyalty to and to what degree you owe loyalty. Such moral principles should help you resolve such conflicts on an objective moral basis. The obvious answer to me is that I’d save my wife. But you’d have a hard time justifying that answer on utilitarian grounds. That’s because utilitarian morality has a hard time justifying giving the kind of special weight to one’s wife that loyalty demands. In deciding what to do, her well-being should count, to be sure, but no more, and no less, in your calculations than the well being of any arbitrary person. That seems wrong to me. But I have to admit that I have hard time putting my finger on just why. My wife means a whole lot more to me than just any arbitrary other person. But does my loyalty and devotion really morally obligate or entitle me to give more weight to her well-being than to the well-being other people?" ---Ken Taylor WOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOWWWWWWWW!!! Something that makes me think. Very true.
Posted on: Tue, 09 Jul 2013 09:52:23 +0000
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