Loyalty - Concepts From The Mid-20th Century Onwards

Concepts From The Mid-20th Century Onwards

John Ladd challenges Royce's view of loyalty, as does Andrew Oldenquist (professor of Philosophy at Ohio State University). (Anthony Ralls observes that Ladd's article is the Macmillan Encyclopaedia's only article on a virtue, and praises it for its "magnificent" declaration by Ladd that "a loyal Nazi is a contradiction in terms".) Ladd asserts that, contrary to Royce, causes to which one is loyal are interpersonal, not impersonal or suprapersonal. He states that Royce's view has "the ethical defect of postulating duties over and above our individual duties to men and groups of men. The individual is submerged and lost in this superperson for its tends to dissolve our specific duties to others into 'superhuman' good.". Ronald F. Duska, holder of the Charles Lamont Post Chair of Ethics and the Professions at The American College, extends Ladd's objection, saying that it is a perversion of ethics and virtue for one's self-will to be identified with anything, as Royce would have it. Even if one were identifying one's self-will with God, to be worthy of such loyalty God would have to be the summum bonum, the perfect manifestation of good. Ladd himself characterizes loyalty as interpersonal, i.e. a relationship between persons, as between (for examples) a lord and a vassal, a parent and a child, or between two good friends. Duska states that doing so leads to a problem that Ladd overlooks. Loyalty may certainly be between two persons, but it may also be from a person to a group of people. Examples of this, which are unequivocally considered to be instances of loyalty, are loyalty by a person to his/her family, to a team that he/she is a member/fan of, or to his/her country. The problem with this that Duska identifies is that it then becomes unclear whether there is a strict interpersonal relationship involved, and whether Ladd's contention that loyalty is interpersonal not suprapersonal is an adequate description.

Ladd considers loyalty from two perspectives: its proper object and its moral value. Further aspects, enumerated by Kleinig, include the exclusionary nature of loyalty and its subjects.