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Article Excerpt
Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), xii + 232 pp.
The Limits of Loyalty is an interesting, well-written book that covers a wide range of issues involving the concept of loyalty. After an introductory chapter on the nature of loyalty, Keller devotes one chapter to friendship, two chapters to patriotism, and two to parent/child relationships. He then goes on to discuss and reject both the idea that loyalty is a value or a virtue and the communitarian view that loyalty is a foundational ethical value. Finally, Keller devotes a chapter to central ideas in Josiah Royce's The Philosophy of Loyalty and concludes with an analysis of disloyalty, arguing that disloyalty can be morally bad even though loyalty is not itself inherently morally good.
Loyalty has attracted considerable attention in recent years. It is one of the forms of moral partiality that various thinkers have used to counter claims made on behalf of universalist and impartialist views of morality. Like the "ethics of care," the ethics of loyalty emphasizes the centrality of particular relationships, but while proponents of care generally stress relations between individuals, defenders of loyalty generally focus on relations between individuals and groups. If these relational features of our moral life are central, that is taken to discredit the claims of those who stress universalist and impartialist aspects of morality. Since the dominant traditional moral theories (such as utilitarianism and Kantian views) fall into the universalist camp, these relational views of morality pose a strong challenge to influential, widely held ideas.
Keller thinks that the contrast between loyalty and universal morality rests on various mistakes and wants to distance himself from this debate. This debate tends, he says, "to obscure the questions I am most interested in" (ix). Here, Keller misdescribes his own interests. In spite of his strong interest in arriving at a detailed understanding of the ways in which loyalties to friends, countries, product brands, and football teams differ from one another, Keller returns time and again to the clash between partialists and impartialists, communitarians and universalists. He even inserts a brief postscript on the issue following the concluding chapter of the book.
This dual focus is, in fact, a virtue of the book. Because of it, Keller's discussion of loyalty will be of interest both to readers who share his special interests in friendship, patriotism, and family relations and to others whose interest is less focused on individual loyalties and who care more about the larger partialist vs. impartialist controversy. On this larger issue, Keller consistently argues against the claims of partialists and communitarians such as Alasdair MacIntyre, George Fletcher, and Andrew Oldenquist. Nonetheless, though he frequently invokes universal values in arguing against partialists, he never fully embraces impartialist views.
One of Keller's important claims early in the book is that "there is no such value or virtue as loyalty" (x). Rather there is a plurality of diverse loyalties, and we go wrong if we make inferences from the value of one type of loyalty to the value of another. Nor can we infer from the value of diverse loyalties that loyalty itself is valuable. A key example of such an error, he says, is the tendency of recent defenders of patriotism to argue that if loyalty to friends and family members is morally legitimate, then, similarly, loyalty to one's country can be morally legitimate. Keller rejects this view, claiming that it is a mistake...
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