Loyalty to Loyalty : Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life [1 ed.] 9780823246649, 9780823242696

Citation preview

loyalty to loyalty



Foust-FM.indd i

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Foust-FM.indd ii

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

american philosophy Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors

Foust-FM.indd iii

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Foust-FM.indd iv

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

lo y a l t y t o l o y a l t y Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life



mathew a. fo ust

fordham universit y press

Foust-FM.indd v

new york

2012

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Copyright © 2012 Fordham University Press All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means—electronic, mechanical, photocopy, recording, or any other—except for brief quotations in printed reviews, without the prior permission of the publisher. Fordham University Press has no responsibility for the persistence or accuracy of URLs for external or third-party Internet websites referred to in this publication and does not guarantee that any content on such websites is, or will remain, accurate or appropriate. Fordham University Press also publishes its books in a variety of electronic formats. Some content that appears in print may not be available in electronic books. Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Foust, Mathew A. Loyalty to loyalty : Josiah Royce and the genuine moral life / Mathew A. Foust. — 1st ed. p. cm. — (American philosophy) Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-8232-4269-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 1. Royce, Josiah, 1855–1916. 2. Loyalty. I. Title. B945.R64F68 2012 170.92—dc23 2011043951 Printed in the United States of America 14 13 12 5 4 3 2 1 First edition

Foust-FM.indd vi

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

For BER, in loyal memory

Foust-FM.indd vii

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Foust-FM.indd viii

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Contents

 Acknowledgments

xi

Introduction: The Treachery and Ambivalence of Loyalty

1

1

Loyalty, Justice, Virtue: Contemporary Debates

10

2

The Nature of Loyalty

26

3

Loyalty to Loyalty

51

4

Learning Loyalty

82

5

Loyalty and Community

110

6

Disloyalty

136

7

Loyalty, Disaster, Business: Contemporary Applications

157

Conclusion: The Need for Loyalty

169

Notes 173 Bibliography 203 Index 209

{ ix }

Foust-FM.indd ix

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Foust-FM.indd x

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Acknowledgments



M

y life so far has funded me with indelible impressions of both the preciousness and precariousness of loyalty. Long before I learned anything of Josiah Royce, experiences both joyous and miserable taught me well the need for loyalty in a meaningful life. I suspect that in this regard I am entirely ordinary. This book exists because loyalty matters— not just to me, not just to Royce—but to everyone. I wish to acknowledge Helen Tartar, Thomas C. Lay, Kathleen A. Sweeney, Eric Newman, and Nicholas Frankovich of Fordham University Press. Each played a vital role in bringing this book to fruition and it is better because of them. I thank Emily Higgins for assistance related to the cover art. I thank Scott L. Pratt, Naomi Zack, Mark Johnson, and Mary Jaeger for their loyal support and encouragement throughout the development of this manuscript and at various other times during my life as a graduate student. I thank John J. McDermott and Brenda Wirkus for the same. I also thank Catherine Burke, Brent Crouch, Kim Diaz, Kim Garchar, John Kaag, Melissa Shew, and Joseph J. Tanke, loyal friends and colleagues during and beyond our time together as classmates. I thank my students, who continually provide me with opportunity for loyal service that is both rigorous and rewarding. Of especial note are Matt Jacobs, Claire Papas, Miles Raymer, Justin Wafer, Jessica Waring, and Mo Wernet, who in winter and spring 2010 joined me in Loyalty Club, a reading group devoted to Josiah Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty. I thank Karen Fierman and Raymond Chang, loyal friends and neighbors from opposite corners of the globe. I thank John Delzoppo, Adam LaSota, and Mike Salamone, loyal friends and neighbors back home. I remember fondly the loyalty of Stella Salamone. { xi }

Foust-FM.indd xi

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

xii

acknowledgments

I thank my family for unwavering belief in me. Although philosophy has had a way of taking me far from home, as we learn from Royce, “the loyal indeed are always at home.” The research related to this manuscript was supported in part by an Oregon Humanities Center Dissertation Fellowship (2009–10), a Gary E. Smith Summer Professional Development Award (2009), and a Graduate Research Grant from the Department of Philosophy (2008), each in affiliation with the University of Oregon. Earlier research that became part of this manuscript was supported by a Melbern G. Glasscock Center for Humanities Research Stipendiary Fellowship for Graduate Research (2003–4), in affiliation with Texas A&M University.

Foust-FM.indd xii

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

loyalty to loyalty



Foust-FM.indd xiii

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

Foust-FM.indd xiv

6/6/2012 12:23:56 PM

i nt r o d uction The Treachery and Ambivalence of Loyalty



J

ohn J. McDermott opens his introduction to Josiah Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty with the question “Is there a more treacherous and ambivalent virtue than that of loyalty?”1 The question is rhetorical, however, for it is at once a confrontation and a declaration. There is, for McDermott, no more treacherous and ambivalent virtue than that of loyalty. Whether or not we find ourselves in agreement with McDermott, undoubtedly our tendency is to bristle at the suggestion of treachery and to be unnerved by the presence of ambivalence. Thus, we hardly need further provocation to consider the eight lectures of Royce’s that follow McDermott’s introduction, centered as they are on this apparently beleaguered virtue—a virtue that we tend to value if not, indeed, to cherish. Should we wish to assess McDermott’s description of loyalty, however, we must ask ourselves at least two questions: Is loyalty, in fact, a virtue? Is loyalty, in fact, treacherous and ambivalent? Let us assume for the moment that loyalty is a virtue. In order to establish the treachery and ambivalence of loyalty, let us raise with McDermott another question {1}

Foust-Introduction.indd 1

6/5/2012 1:52:45 PM

2

introduction

that is at once confrontation and declaration: “If we were to revisit that canonical figure of loyalty, Antigone of Sophocles, could we come to agreement on whether it was she or Creon who answered with noble loyalty?”2 We may recall Antigone’s loyalty to her brother, Polynices, as embodied in her insistence on burying his body, in defiance of Creon’s edict. We may recall too that this edict is a manifestation of Creon’s loyalty to the state, for Polynices is regarded as a traitor to Thebes, and denying him a burial is a punishment fitting of the crime. While we may find ourselves ready to defend one or the other as having “answered” with “noble loyalty” the problem presented by Polynices’ death, McDermott is undoubtedly correct to suggest that we will not come to a consensus. If this is so, then we find ourselves again confronted— confronted with the treachery and ambivalence of loyalty. If we believe Antigone’s loyalty to be noble, we believe Creon’s loyalty to be ignoble. A proponent of Antigone would claim Creon’s loyalty to be treacherous, for its results reach far beyond the corpse of Polynices, leading eventually to irreversible and widespread agitation and ruin. If we believe Creon’s loyalty to be noble, we believe Antigone’s loyalty to be ignoble. A proponent of Creon would claim Antigone’s loyalty to be treacherous, for its results reach far beyond the corpse of Polynices, leading eventually to the exact same irreversible and widespread agitation and ruin that the defender of Antigone would cite. This example should serve as clear illustration of not just the treachery of loyalty but also the ambivalence of loyalty. The loyalty of each, Antigone and Creon, may be considered, on one hand, noble, and on the other hand, ignoble. Indeed, we may laud either figure as tragically heroic or condemn either figure as needlessly and monumentally stubborn. The case of Antigone brings the treachery and ambivalence of loyalty into clear relief. If treachery connotes a lack of security, and ambivalence connotes a lack of clarity, we should indeed be impelled to pay close attention to this virtue. This book is an instance of such attention. With the treachery and ambivalence of loyalty as a starting point, this book proceeds with the aims of clarifying what loyalty is and what place it ought to have in our lives. The title of this book, Loyalty to Loyalty: Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life, should be indicative that the figure whose thought about loyalty I will mainly consider is Josiah Royce. My choices to invoke the example of Antigone and to focus on the

Foust-Introduction.indd 2

6/5/2012 1:52:45 PM

introduction

3

philosophy of Royce may lead the reader to think that this book describes a historical problem; that is, the reader may think that this book is best described as an intellectual history concentrating on the notion of loyalty. While there is nothing objectionable about such an approach, it is not the approach of this book. The treachery and ambivalence of loyalty has persisted well beyond the scenes of Sophocles, and philosophical discourse about loyalty endures past the pages of Royce—although it is worth nothing that Royce stood alone for nearly a century as the only philosopher to engage the virtue of loyalty in explicit and sustained (that is, book-length) fashion. The approach to this book is to recognize loyalty as problematic while at the same time holding that life has sense and meaning only when it is characterized by loyalty. Before I can establish the latter, I must acknowledge the former and attempt to clarify and navigate those problems that loyalty presents. Is there better evidence in contemporary American life of the treachery and ambivalence of loyalty than that presented in the worlds of business and international relations? We are hard pressed to determine which loyalties a businessperson should value more or less: loyalty to one’s employer, to one’s coworkers, to one’s profession, (if one is an employer) to one’s employees, to one’s stockholders, to one’s stakeholders, or to someone or something else. The controversy in business surrounding the practice of whistleblowing (that is, informing on someone in one’s own company who is engaged in illicit activity) illustrates the point. Sissela Bok describes the scenario this way: The whistleblower hopes to stop the game; but since he is neither referee nor coach, and since he blows the whistle on his own team, his act is seen as a violation of loyalty. In holding his position, he has assumed certain obligations to his colleagues and clients. He may even have subscribed to a loyalty oath or a promise of confidentiality. Loyalty to colleagues and clients comes to be pitted against loyalty to the public interest, to those who may be injured unless the revelation is made.3

Undoubtedly, a scandal such as that surrounding Enron Corporation and its accounting firm, Arthur Andersen, in the 1990s through the first decade of the twenty-first century would not have reached such heights had an employee “blown the whistle” regarding their corrupt accounting practices.

Foust-Introduction.indd 3

6/5/2012 1:52:45 PM

4

introduction

Instead, these practices were kept opaque, with debts and losses that Enron incurred being withheld from its financial statements, while much of Enron’s profits and revenues were generated from deals with specialpurpose entities (limited partnerships under its control) hidden from the public. In refusing to “blow the whistle,” employees of Enron who were aware of the illegitimate nature of its accounting procedures adhered to loyalty to the company, as the company’s sales and stocks soared because of these very procedures. It was not long after these procedures came to light, however, that Enron declared bankruptcy and its investors were forced to suffer excessive losses. As the case of Enron shows, the world of business demands a variety of loyalties from its inhabitants, and the preference chosen when these loyalties conflict can lead to far-reaching and damaging consequences. At the same time that loyalty is a source of treachery in the world of business, some herald it as the key to flourishing there. Many companies employ the “loyalty business model,” believing that loyalty leads to profitability. While traditionally this model centers on the loyalty of employees and customers, it is expanded in Frederick F. Reichheld’s The Loyalty Effect.4 Reichheld maintains that businesses will increase profitability by increasing the loyalty of employees, customers, investors, suppliers, distributors, shareholders, and the board of directors. This increase in profitability hinges on what Reichheld believes to be a significant impact of loyalty on growth, learning, and productivity. To be sure, Reichheld’s “economics of loyalty,” centered on “the loyalty effect,” has attracted a wide and unmistakably loyal following.5 The pairing of the treachery of loyalty as illustrated by Enron and the benefits of loyalty as indicated by Reichheld point clearly to the ambivalence of loyalty in the business world. The treachery and ambivalence of loyalty is all the more vividly illustrated in the world of international relations. Consider the terrorist attack on the United States on September 11, 2001. There is perhaps no clearer case of the treachery of loyalty than this, with nineteen loyalists to the Islamic terrorist network, al Qaeda, hijacking four commercial passenger planes and intentionally crashing two of them into the Twin Towers of the World Trade Center in New York City. The third plane was also intentionally crashed, into the Pentagon in Arlington, Virginia; the fourth plane, presumed to be headed toward the White House or the Capitol,

Foust-Introduction.indd 4

6/5/2012 1:52:45 PM

introduction

5

crashed into a field in rural Somerset County, Pennsylvania, when the passengers, having learned of the earlier attacks, attempted to take control of the cockpit. Approximately three thousand people in total died as a result of these attacks, most of them civilians. Nobody, including the terrorist hijackers, survived any of the plane crashes. Of course, the terrorists intended such results, aware that they would be taking several lives, including their own. If the ultimate expression of loyalty is that of dying for one’s cause, it may be said—perverse as it may sound to American ears—that the perpetrators of the 9/11 attacks demonstrated exceptional loyalty. It can indubitably be said that the perpetrators of these attacks demonstrate clearly the treachery of loyalty. In addition to underscoring the treachery of loyalty, the 9/11 attacks highlight the ambivalence of loyalty, perhaps most clearly in America’s response to the catastrophe. Americans admired as heroes those firefighters and rescue workers who—loyal to their profession and to their country—risked their lives in attempt to save others. At the same time, Americans condemned with vitriol those members of al Qaeda who— loyal to their mission and to their founder—ended their lives and those of others. Americans adorned homes, schools, offices, and automobiles with American flags, to proudly demonstrate loyalty to their country. At the same time, America heightened security at airports, governmental offices, major sporting events, and other places thought vulnerable to attack, to proactively oppose the terrorists’ possible reexpression of loyalty to their cause. In the wake of 9/11, the ambivalence of loyalty was most manifest; loyalty was at once our greatest ally and greatest enemy.6 These examples should adequately demonstrate that McDermott is right to describe loyalty as treacherous and ambivalent. Because we tend to place such a high premium on loyalty, as witnessed in our considerations of the worlds of Antigone, of Enron, and of 9/11, we are well warranted in undergoing the project of attempting to understand the nature of loyalty and what its significance in our lives ought to be. At this point, I will add that, for Royce, loyalty—and in fact, loyalty to loyalty—figures significantly in the genuine moral life. For Royce, loyalty lies at the foundation of what it is to be moral and lies in fact at the foundation of what it is to be in the first place. The Philosophy of Loyalty is Royce’s most explicit effort to articulate and demonstrate these views. For this reason,

Foust-Introduction.indd 5

6/5/2012 1:52:45 PM

6

introduction

The Philosophy of Loyalty will receive the closest attention in this book, though other texts of Royce’s will be considered as appropriate. Chapter 1 focuses on contemporary debates in moral and social philosophy, in which the nature and value of loyalty figures prominently. One debate concerns the apparent conflict between partiality and impartiality. On one hand, it seems that moral action requires impartiality. Consider, for instance, the expectation of impartiality that we place on judges, journalists, and referees. Because impartiality is so critical to ethical action, the partiality characteristic of loyalty seems at odds with morality. On the other hand, an absence of the partiality characteristic of loyalty seems also at odds with morality. Consider, for instance, the expectation of partiality that we place on parents, spouses, and friends. The tendency in moral and social philosophy has been to favor impartiality over and against partiality. This view is sometimes expressed in terms of the value of justice trumping that of loyalty. Here I situate Royce within this debate, with a fuller account of how Royce’s philosophy of loyalty meets the appeals to both impartiality and partiality being developed in subsequent chapters. The second debate addressed concerns the value of virtue. This discussion is motivated by the first, as a popular proponent of the split between justice on the side of impartiality and loyalty on the side of partiality, Alasdair MacIntyre, is also a popular proponent of virtue. Here I provide a comparative engagement of the concepts central to MacIntyre’s moral philosophy with their counterparts in Royce’s moral philosophy. I argue that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty conceives of the moral life much as MacIntyre does and that understanding their projects as similar in motivation reveals remarkable likenesses while highlighting their most critical point of divergence. Each seeks a return to virtue, but only for Royce does this mean that, first and foremost, we must be loyal. Chapter 2 focuses on the nature of loyalty. Noticing Royce’s stated wish to break from conventional associations with the term “loyalty,” I explore these associations to more clearly recognize how it is that Royce takes himself to be recovering “loyalty” with his philosophy of loyalty. It is shown that the main association with the term that Royce wishes to avoid is that of its connection to war. Because Royce wishes to emphasize what is essential to loyalty rather than its accidental

Foust-Introduction.indd 6

6/5/2012 1:52:45 PM

introduction

7

associations, a thorough etymological examination of the term is consulted. Royce’s preliminary and completed definitions of loyalty are then described, and objections to each are raised and responses furnished. Royce’s account of the nature of loyalty is nearly complete, but the question of what makes one instance of loyalty more moral than another is left unsettled. Chapter 3 focuses on Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty. This principle is invoked to settle the question with which we are left in chapter 2. The principle of loyalty to loyalty aids us in discriminating between better and worse causes and is an aid in helping to resolve apparent conflicts of loyalties. Royce’s philosophy of loyalty is thus encapsulated in the imperatives to be loyal and to be loyal to loyalty. This way of conceiving of the project of living morally, and thus navigating moral deliberation, is described in detail and compared to traditional ethical systems. These traditional ethical systems are consequentialism, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics. The comparisons are fairly general but result in showing that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty involves elements of each of these ethical frameworks. Also shown is that several moral goods can be understood in terms of loyalty. To these two reasons for finding Royce’s centering of his moral philosophy on loyalty, a third reason is added: Without loyalty, there is no social order, and without order, we are left wanting for sense and meaning. Chapter 4 focuses on learning loyalty. The chapter is motivated by the desire to see how it is that we become loyal and loyal to loyalty. Another motivation for the chapter is presented, however, in addressing the claim made recently by Dwayne A. Tunstall that Royce fails to account for the origins of ethical experience. These issues are addressed simultaneously, with Royce’s account of the origins of ethical experience described in order to build an account of how we develop into loyal people. In addition to Royce’s philosophical writings, several of his psychological writings are explored in this context, especially those on the imitative processes. Descriptions as to how to learn loyalty from childhood through adulthood are provided. Prolonged attention is given to Royce’s notion of the lost cause, highlighted by Royce as a particularly instructive teacher in the life of the loyal. Chapter 5 focuses on loyalty and community. Having just articulated how to develop into a loyal individual, in this chapter I am concerned

Foust-Introduction.indd 7

6/5/2012 1:52:45 PM

8

introduction

with understanding how to be loyal in the context of communities. Royce’s distinction between wise and unwise provincialism is considered, with wise provincialism interpreted as loyalty to community, which is loyal to loyalty, and unwise provincialism interpreted as the opposite. While Royce intends for wise provincialism to address three problems commonly confronting communities, Tommy J. Curry has recently claimed that Royce’s theory is fraught with a major problem of its own— anti-Black colonialist racism. Royce’s theory of provincialism is described in detail, and this charge is addressed. Royce’s philosophy of loyalty is placed in dialogue with a contemporary concern about the tenability of loyalty in the context of community—particularly the concern that loyalty is burdensome for the individual attempting to be loyal while at the same time engaging in liberatory struggle with one’s community. It is shown that, in two very different contexts, Royce was well aware of this problem and that his philosophy of loyalty provides theoretical resources with which to navigate it. It is argued that there is a way in which one may commit acts that are apparently disloyal to one’s community but that, in fact, are loyal to loyalty. Chapter 6 focuses on disloyalty. Having raised the subject of disloyalty in the previous chapter, and noting that Royce describes disloyalty as moral suicide, here I offer a sustained treatment to understanding the nature of disloyalty. This treatment involves distinguishing between disloyal acts and nonloyal acts and articulating a phenomenology of disloyalty. This phenomenology of disloyalty describes the experience of disloyalty for both the disloyal agent and the agent who is the victim of the betrayal. After describing the nature and phenomenology of disloyalty, I address the matter of coming to terms with and responding to disloyalty through the process of atonement. It is then suggested that acts of the kind described at the end of the previous chapter—those that are apparently disloyal but, in fact, loyal to loyalty—may be viewed as acts of atonement for the sins of others in one’s community. Finally, the matter of whether and when it is justifiable to detach oneself from one’s community—described as distinct from being disloyal to one’s community—is addressed. Chapter 7 focuses on applying the philosophy of loyalty described herein to two contemporary moral arenas—times of disaster and the business world. These arenas have been entered in the present introduction

Foust-Introduction.indd 8

6/5/2012 1:52:46 PM

introduction

9

and, fittingly, are reentered immediately preceding the conclusion. Naomi Zack’s recent suggestion that diligence and integrity are vital to disaster response is countered with the suggestion that loyalty and loyalty to loyalty are vital. A number of scholars’ suggestions as to the appropriateness of whistleblowing are engaged, with a response given that is based on the philosophy of loyalty articulated and defended in the previous chapters. In the conclusion, it is urged that, in order for our lives to have sense and meaning, and in order to live genuinely moral lives, we must be loyal—and, indeed, loyal to loyalty.

Foust-Introduction.indd 9

6/5/2012 1:52:46 PM

o ne

l o y a l t y , ju s t ice , vi r tue Contemporary Debates



Loyalty and Impartiality One ongoing debate in contemporary moral and social philosophy involves how to negotiate the competing claims of partiality and impartiality. Participants in this debate often cite Alasdair MacIntyre as articulating this problem in his essay “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” Therein, he contrasts “liberal morality” with “the morality of patriotism.” Liberal morality is a morality of universal, impersonal, and impartial principles while the morality of patriotism is a morality of particularist ties and solidarities. According to MacIntyre, these moralities are deeply and systematically incompatible. For instance, if each of two communities require the same natural resource in order to survive and flourish, “the standpoint of impersonal morality requires an allocation of goods such that each individual person counts for one and no more than one, while the patriotic standpoint requires that I strive to further the interests of my community only and you strive to further those of yours.”1 The problem with which contemporary philosophers are thus beset is that of determining which of these moralities is appropriate, or the conditions { 10 }

Foust-Chap01.indd 10

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

11

under which each might be appropriate. Samuel Scheffler summarizes MacIntyre’s argument as holding that “a moral outlook is sensitive to the value of loyalty only if it holds that individuals have special duties to give priority to the interests of their own communities; that liberalism rejects such duties because of its commitment to moral egalitarianism; and hence, that liberalism is insensitive to the value of loyalty.”2 Himself a participant in this debate, Scheffler finds MacIntyre’s argument unsatisfactory, holding that MacIntyre “overlooks the fact that most liberals who endorse the idea of moral equality, as a claim about the equal worth or value of persons, nevertheless deny that this idea fully determines the content of the principles governing the conduct of individual agents.”3 Instead, as Scheffler explains, “facts that have special significance for an individual agent can sometimes have special weight in determining what that agent may permissibly do, despite the fact that the agent is no more valuable or important than anyone else.”4 Scheffler’s position is well captured by Yael Tamir’s assertion that “when I claim that charity begins at home I do not intend to imply that the poor of my town are better but merely that . . . I have a greater obligation toward them than to strangers because they are members of my community. . . . [Such] claims do not . . . imply an objective hierarchy among different forms of life.”5 Some participants in this debate view partiality as at odds with justice. For example, in After Virtue, MacIntyre holds that “justice requires that we treat others in respect of merit or desert according to uniform and impersonal standards; to depart from the standards of justice in some particular instance defines our relationship with the relevant person as in some way special or distinctive.”6 Several other authors have fastened on the association of justice with impartiality.7 In a way of understanding the conflict between partiality and impartiality that synthesizes those aforementioned, George P. Fletcher concludes Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships with the claim that “the challenge for our time is uniting the particularist leaning of loyalties with the demands, in some contexts, of impartial justice and the commitment, in all contexts, to rational discourse.”8 In Fletcher’s remark, we find not only the association of impartiality with justice but also the association of partiality with loyalty. As in the case of MacIntyre’s association of impartiality with justice, Fletcher is not alone.9

Foust-Chap01.indd 11

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

12

loyalt y, justice, virtue

Forgotten in this debate, however, is the thought of Royce. Indeed, Scheffler advises readers in a footnote, “For a book-length discussion of loyalty, see George Fletcher, Loyalty,” neglecting to mention Royce’s booklength discussion of loyalty, which antedates Fletcher’s by eighty-five years. My view, however, is that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty can be entered into this contemporary debate with fruitful results, providing a way of negotiating the apparent conflict between partiality and impartiality— loyalty and justice—that minimizes the conflict between these spheres. This suggestion might appear anachronistic, but in what follows we will see that there is good reason to resist such appearance. It is worthwhile to engage in a brief comparison of the thought of MacIntyre and Royce. Doing so will demonstrate, through striking likenesses between their thought, the plausibility that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty might be understood as similar in motivation and approach to MacIntyre’s and that it might be fruitfully deployed toward grappling with concerns addressed by MacIntyre and those whose thought he has influenced. This comparison will also reveal, through salient points of divergence in their thought, ways in which Royce’s thought has the potential to be advantageous where MacIntyre’s and that of those influenced by him is not. MacIntyre and Royce At least two scholars of Royce precede us both in finding it helpful to compare Royce’s thought to that of MacIntyre and in finding Royce’s thought more advantageous than MacIntyre’s. In Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities, a book proposing a public philosophy inspired by Royce’s moral thought, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley writes that “dealing with MacIntyre’s views will allow us to see how Royce’s philosophy might interpret and deal with important concepts developed by MacIntyre,”10 with the results of this juxtaposition being that “a Roycean public philosophy is more adequate than the attempt . . . to reconstruct such a philosophy on a base very similar to that of MacIntyre.”11 In The Loyal Physician, a book proposing a medical ethics inspired by Royce’s moral philosophy, Griffin Trotter remarks of MacIntyre and Royce that “the similarities between the thinkers are so extensive that the charge of redundancy might be leveled at the present work.”12 But, Trotter stipulates, MacIntyre and Royce “cover similar material in a complementary,

Foust-Chap01.indd 12

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

13

rather than overlapping, manner” and “differences between the two thinkers certainly do exist.”13 For Trotter, MacIntyre serves “as a useful orienting device to those who are unfamiliar with Royce,”14 but ultimately readers will discover that Royce’s thought “tends to complement and enrich MacIntyre’s.”15 We will take the examinations of MacIntyre and Royce provided by Kegley and Trotter as signposts, though we will not simply repeat their analyses, for the present project is not identical to either of theirs. We need to consider MacIntyre and Royce with our own purposes in mind—namely, to understand the nature of loyalty and its proper place in the moral life. Kegley hones in on four important concepts from MacIntyre— “virtue,” “narrative quest,” “tradition,” and “practice”—and speculates as to how Royce might interpret and deal with them. This engagement of MacIntyre and Royce is, for Kegley’s purposes, aimed at dealing with questions concerning the nature of professional and vocational training. Trotter attends to four similarities that he sees in the thought of MacIntyre and Royce, with the belief that highlighting these similarities—and the ways that Royce’s thought enriches MacIntyre’s—will justify his choice of Royce as the philosopher on whose thought he is basing his medical ethics. For our purposes, we will note two of these similarities: “They employ a similar historico-philosophical method, embodying similar views about the mission and status of philosophy; they offer an account of the virtues, including a unifying virtue, which intertwines the notion of selfhood with the notion of community.”16 First, let us consider Trotter’s suggestion that MacIntyre and Royce employ a similar historico-philosophical method, embodying similar views about the mission and status of philosophy. The aspect of Trotter’s discussion of most interest to us is his observation that “MacIntyre and Royce identify the stimuli to philosophical inquiries as historically contingent problem situations.”17 In other words, texts such as Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty or MacIntyre’s After Virtue, if genuinely philosophical, are attempts to relieve what Charles S. Peirce referred to as the “irritation of doubt,” that feeling of uneasiness accompanying uncertainty.18 Philosophical inquiry, if successful, results in settling—even if provisionally—on a belief. This settled-on belief itself may indeed be subject to doubt, thus giving rise to further inquiry. The idea, though, is that philosophical inquiry is a method of dealing with indeterminacy; through it, we attempt to come to terms, to adopt belief, to understand.

Foust-Chap01.indd 13

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

14

loyalt y, justice, virtue

Moreover, our settled-on belief disposes us toward action consonant with that belief. For instance, we may be unsure of how to go about crafting the introduction to a book. We undergo inquiry, perhaps surveying the introductions to previously written books and asking counsel from our colleagues who have published books. Eventually, we settle on the belief that one method of proceeding with the introduction is most advantageous. We proceed in that way. We may find ourselves faced with unforeseen difficulties as we proceed, however, and we are then prompted to inquiry as to how to overcome them. This inquiry may result in a revision of the belief on which we formerly settled; we may conclude that a way of proceeding that we had formerly rejected would, in fact, be more beneficial than the way we had chosen. This pattern holds for all types of inquiry, including questions more clearly philosophical (e.g., “How should I live?”) than that regarding how to go about writing the introduction to a book. These considerations reveal to us at least two facts about philosophical inquiry. First, philosophical inquiry is not merely an intellectual exercise; we must be impinged on by a problematic situation for philosophical inquiry to get off the ground. Second, while philosophical inquiry seeks to settle on belief, it is aware that experience may prove recalcitrant and that in such a scenario a recommencement of inquiry will be in order. In After Virtue, MacIntyre holds that since modernity we have lived in a time “after virtue,” such that “the language—and therefore also to some large degree the practice—of morality today is in a state of grave disorder.”19 MacIntyre is thus led to inquire as to how to restore the language and practice of morality to a state of order. Considering Aristotle’s virtue ethics and contending that all attempts to provide an alternative account of the nature and status of morality have failed, MacIntyre claims that “if a premodern view of morals and politics is to be vindicated against modernity, it will be in something like Aristotelian terms or not at all.”20 MacIntyre cites Enlightenment and post-Enlightenment figures such as Hume, Kant, Marx, and Nietzsche as emblematic of the abandonment of central strands of Aristotelian ethics, the most important of which is teleology. That is, for MacIntyre, the principal failure of the aforementioned figures is that they lack the notion of human life having a proper end or character, and thereby lack the concomitant conception of the project of being moral as cultivating one’s character in order to reach this end. MacIntyre sees this neglect of teleology as yielding its most nefarious

Foust-Chap01.indd 14

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

15

consequences in the moral philosophy of Nietzsche. According to MacIntyre, Nietzsche’s Übermensch is “the man who transcends, finds his good nowhere in the social world to date, but only that in himself which dictates his own new law and his own new table of the virtues,” a new law and new table of virtues that amount to a “set of individualist fictions.”21 A striking similarity arises when we consider MacIntyre in tandem with Royce, for Royce motivates The Philosophy of Loyalty as being, in part, a text in response to proponents of “Socialism and Individualism,” naming both Marx and Nietzsche on the first page of the opening lecture. Royce decries the popularity of Nietzsche’s “transmutation of all moral values,” with its insistence that conventional morality of the past is false and a mere stage in moral evolution. Royce refers to the popularity of this view as entailing “troubling” and “bewildering” consequences. Indeed, for Royce, restlessness regarding the foundations of morality shakes our confidence in matters of both the seen and the unseen worlds. “For what is science worth, and what is religion worth,” Royce asks, “if human life itself, for whose ennoblement science and religion have both labored, has no genuine moral standards by which one may measure its value?”22 As we saw to be the case for MacIntyre, Royce is prompted to inquiry concerning how to recover the foundations of moral life in the face of predominant attitudes undermining those foundations and engendering disorder with respect to morality. While Royce, like MacIntyre, calls for an embrace of virtue to restore moral standards, he does not explicitly recommend a return to “something like Aristotelian” virtue ethics. Rather, he proposes a moral philosophy with loyalty—a virtue not explicitly dwelled on by Aristotle—as its centerpiece. “In loyalty, when loyalty is properly defined,” writes Royce, “is the fulfillment of the whole moral law.”23 So, Royce’s moral theory will satisfy MacIntyre’s desire for a teleological ethics; it will recognize loyalty as the proper end or character of human life. Moreover, Royce’s moral philosophy will conceive of the ongoing project of the moral life as that of becoming and being loyal. In considering MacIntyre’s thought further, we soon recognize that all four of MacIntyre’s concepts highlighted by Kegley—“virtue,” “narrative quest,” “tradition,” and “practice”—are closely related. Because of this close interrelation, even when we are taking up one of these concepts in particular, we will be unable to avoid referring to others. Consider MacIntyre’s claim that “to adopt a stance on the virtues” is to “adopt a

Foust-Chap01.indd 15

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

16

loyalt y, justice, virtue

stance on the narrative character of human life,” since human life is “a progress through harms and dangers” and excellence in avoiding or overcoming these harms and dangers is achieved through excellences in character.24 This position invokes, explicitly or implicitly, each of the four concepts in question. To see this, we need to unpack the position. We will begin with “the narrative character of human life,” for MacIntyre seems to be suggesting this description of human life to be fundamental to any discussion of the virtues. If human life is characterized by progressing through harms and dangers, and if excellence in avoiding or overcoming these harms and dangers is achieved through excellences in character, then the choice of quest to describe human life is apt, calling to mind medieval knights, whose adventures we might describe in identical prose. In fact, MacIntyre explicitly harkens to the medieval conception of a quest, stressing that no quest begins without some conception of the final telos, or of the good in mind, and that while this is so, a quest is always an education in the character of what is sought as well as in self-knowledge.25 What about narrative? According to MacIntyre, each human life embodies “a story whose shape and form will depend upon what is counted as a harm and danger and upon how success and failure, progress and its opposite, are understood and evaluated.”26 In the course of After Virtue, MacIntyre relates the elements basic to various narrative quests throughout history. Virtues find their place in these narratives as “qualities the possession and exercise of which generally tend to success,” while vices find their place as “qualities which likewise tend to failure.”27 Of course, it is MacIntyre’s view that virtue and vice have vanished from the foreground of narrative quests and that our narrative quests stand a chance at coherence and success only if the concepts of virtue and vice regain a place of prominence within them. Although Royce does not explicitly refer to human life as a narrative quest, he often employs language indicative of such a conception. Take, for instance, his lamentation of what he sees as the relationship between humans and moral ideals at the time of The Philosophy of Loyalty: “I do not like that mere homesickness and spiritual estrangement, and that confusion of mind about moral ideals, which is nowadays too common. I want to know the way that leads our human practical life homewards, even if that way prove to be infinitely long.”28 We should not ignore that these words are among the first of Royce’s in The Philosophy of Loyalty,

Foust-Chap01.indd 16

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

17

for this fact is indicative that Royce views the task of the text to be that of alleviating homesickness and spiritual estrangement, clarifying confusion of mind about moral ideals, and leading human practical life homewards. The notion of “home” occurs twice here, and “estrangement” signals a separation, perhaps from some kind of “home.” Confusion of mind about most things leads to a feeling of uneasiness and, when about matters of greater significance, may lead to distress. Had we formerly not been confused about the matter in question but, in fact, settled, the feeling of confusion might very well be analogous to that of being unsettled from a place of comfort—for instance, home. Peirce’s description of inquiry as a method of relieving the irritation of doubt finds a new metaphorical expression, then, in the words of Royce. Royce’s description of inquiry is, however, decidedly more poignant than Peirce’s. One senses that because the situation in which we find ourselves when confused of mind about moral ideals is so unsettling, Royce would not settle for any other description of it. We may understand Royce’s intention to lead us “homewards” as an effort to fruitfully guide our narrative quests. If we can gain clarity with respect to moral ideals, we can feel “at home,” even in the face of obstacles and dangers. Indeed, some of life’s most difficult obstacles come in the form of difficult decisions of moral import. If one can feel at home in a world replete with such dangers, one has likely navigated one’s narrative quest excellently, becoming educated about that final end which one has sought, and about oneself.29 Returning to MacIntyre, we find that, for him, narrative quests are in great part informed by tradition. “The story of my life,” MacIntyre elaborates, “is always embedded in the story of those communities from which I derive my identity.”30 This means that all humans are born with a past that is, in significant part, constitutive of their present narrative. Take, for instance, the narrative of anyone born in America today. The narrative of anyone born in America today will include plots of some complexity surrounding race, culture, and religion, owing to the conglomeration of numerous episodes in American history, with 9/11 serving as a clear and forceful recent example. Should someone born in America today claim, several years from now, that because he or she was not yet born when 9/11 occurred, that the event has nothing to do with his or her identity, we will likely recognize this individual as mistaken, just as we would recognize as mistaken an American claiming today that, because he or she was born

Foust-Chap01.indd 17

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

18

loyalt y, justice, virtue

after the time of slavery in the antebellum South, the fact that the practice of slavery endured has had no bearing on his or her identity. Because communities of today are the products of communities of yesterday, and because our identities are intimately bound with our membership in communities, it is factually incorrect to suppose that one’s narrative is not to a significant degree shaped by tradition. Consequently, we must recognize, as MacIntyre seems to, that the traditions that pervade our narratives in the present play a role in constituting the character of our narratives of the future. For MacIntyre, the tradition of conceiving of morality in terms of virtue and the concomitant tradition of striving to be virtuous have, since modernity, eroded into extinction. Modernity, it seems, maintains only one tradition, which it has itself borne—that of disregarding tradition. This disregard of tradition has led to the aforementioned regrettable consequences, with the solution to these problems lying in a revisit of tradition, even if this revisit includes revision. (Recall that MacIntyre’s vindication of premodern views of morals and politics will be effected in “something like” Aristotelian terms.) When speaking of the relationship between tradition and morality, Royce takes a similar tack: I want, as well as I can, not merely to help you revise some of your moral standards, but to help you to give to this revision some definitive form and tendency, some image and hint of finality. Moreover, since moral standards, as Antigone said, are not of today or yesterday, I believe that revision does not mean, in this field, a mere break with the past. I myself have spent my life in revising my opinions. And yet, whenever I have most carefully revised my moral standards, I am always able to see, upon reviewing my course of thought, that at best I have been finding out, in some new light, the true meaning that was latent in old traditions. Those traditions were often better in spirit than the fathers knew.31

While being led “homeward” can instill “some image and hint of finality,” the vicissitudes of human life preclude finality, just as settling on belief does not preclude our belief from being subject to doubt and revision. At the same time, revision is not destruction or deletion. Indeed, revision of belief or attitude may involve becoming more consistent with the belief or attitude one formerly advocated, though one may not recognize this aspect of one’s revision until in retrospect. Royce recommends

Foust-Chap01.indd 18

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

19

such a course of action with respect to moral ideals, particularly dramatic prose: “Let us bury the natural body of tradition. What we want is its glorified body and its immortal soul.”32 We have seen that, for MacIntyre, virtues are qualities conducive to success within human life, which he conceives of as a narrative quest. We have also seen that for MacIntyre narrative quests are shaped largely by tradition and that a call to a return to virtue is a call to reestablish and preserve an old tradition conducive to guiding and enriching narrative quests, a tradition that has been largely neglected since the time of modernity. What we have not yet seen is what the return to virtue, once it has been made, “looks like.” Now is the time that MacIntyre’s notion of “practice” becomes pertinent. A practice, as MacIntyre conceives of it, is any coherent and complex form of socially established cooperative human activity through which goods internal to that form of activity are realized in the course of trying to achieve those standards of excellence which are appropriate to, and partially definitive of, that form of activity, with the result that human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended.33

Because this definition is not succinct, it behooves us to think through this definition before proceeding further. To distinguish goods internal to a practice from those external to a practice, MacIntyre imagines that he would like to teach a seven-year-old child how to play chess. The child does not have any desire to learn the game but does have a desire for candy. So, MacIntyre proposes to give the child fifty cents’ worth of candy if the child will play chess with him once a week and fifty more cents’ worth of candy if the child wins. In this case, candy is an external good; it is a good that is obtainable via the practice of playing chess, but only contingently. The child may, however, come to value goods internal to chess (or practices similar to it), such as analytic skill, strategic imagination, and competitive intensity. If the child values chess for its internal goods, the child has reasons “for trying to excel in whatever way the game of chess demands.”34 The notion of excelling is crucial to the notion of practice. All practices involve standards of excellence. The pursuit of excellence in a particular practice is “the good of a certain kind of life.”35 While not many children

Foust-Chap01.indd 19

6/5/2012 2:01:34 PM

20

loyalt y, justice, virtue

who learn the game of chess evolve into professional chess players, one who comes to value the goods internal to chess may identify as a chess player, such that excelling at chess (or practices similar to it) is meaningful in measuring the success of one’s narrative quest. We are brought now to the relationship between practice and virtue. Articulation of this relationship requires elaboration on the notion of virtue: “A virtue is an acquired human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable us to achieve those goods which are internal to practices and the lack of which effectively prevents us from achieving any such goods.”36 Thus, while the child might, when playing for the external good of candy, be motivated to cheat, the child will not be motivated to cheat when motivated by the internal goods we have identified. Cheating is dishonest, and in virtually all games, fair play (or simply, fairness or honesty) is a human quality the possession and exercise of which tends to enable one to achieve goods internal to those games. Indeed, although the child might exercise imaginative strategy in finding successful ways to cheat, the child would largely be undermining the goods internal to chess if he or she were to do so. So, if the child engages in the practice of chess, in quest of its internal goods, the child will excel, in part, to the degree to which he or she is honest. Other virtues will likely be relevant. Whatever the case, the point is that if the child is excellent or virtuous qua chess player, this aspect of his or her narrative quest will be characterized by excellence or virtue. We can now consider the last portion of MacIntyre’s definition of “practice.” He claimed that via the attempt to achieve standards of excellence appropriate to and partially definitive of practices, human powers to achieve excellence, and human conceptions of the ends and goods involved, are systematically extended. This means that the child who is virtuous qua chess player more readily recognizes what sort of action is virtuous with respect to other practices. This includes the practice of morality, which is relevant to virtually all human action. It should be noted that tradition is relevant to practice, for every practice has its own history. “To enter into a practice,” MacIntyre explains, “is to enter into a relationship not only with its contemporary practitioners, but also with those who have preceded us in the practice, particularly those whose achievements extended the reach of the practice to its present point.”37 Thus, the child learning chess is introduced to, and educated by, the achievement and authority of tradition, namely,what has

Foust-Chap01.indd 20

6/5/2012 2:01:35 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

21

given shape to the practice of chess as it obtains in the present. Again, we might take this a step further and assert that the child harbors the potential to give shape to the practice of chess playing as it will obtain in the future; at the least, one would hope, the child will not popularize the practice of cheating, which would undermine the integrity of the game. Indeed, were cheating extremely popularized, the game would likely cease to exist as such. Despite the many similarities he sees in the thought of MacIntyre and Royce, Trotter remarks, “MacIntyre’s notion of a practice is rich and useful, and it has no well-defined correlate within the work of Royce.”38 For her part, Kegley does not identify such a correlate either. I believe, however, that there is such a correlate in the thought of Royce. Before substantiating this claim, though, we should make one other comparison between MacIntyre and Royce. This comparison will assist in elucidating what amounts to a practice in the thought of Royce. As we have noted, Trotter observes that not only do MacIntyre and Royce each provide accounts of virtue, but each maintains that there is a unifying virtue. We have seen quite a bit of MacIntyre’s accounts of virtue, but we have not said much of Royce’s account of virtue, nor anything of the matter of a unifying virtue with respect to either thinker. Let us first consider the unifying virtue in the thought of MacIntyre. Trotter quotes the following passage of MacIntyre’s, to highlight this aspect of his thought: I have suggested so far that unless there is a telos which transcends the limited goods of practices by constituting the good of a whole human life, the good of a human life conceived as a unity, it will both be the case that a certain subversive arbitrariness will invade the moral life and that we shall be unable to specify the context of certain virtues adequately. These two considerations are reinforced by a third: that there is at least one virtue recognized by the tradition which cannot be specified at all except with reference to the wholeness of human life— the virtue of integrity or constancy. . . . This notion of singleness of purpose in a whole life can have no application unless that of a whole life does.39

Trotter does not directly address the matter of why integrity or constancy, understood as singleness of purpose, is a unifying virtue for MacIntyre. It is likely that Trotter thinks that integrity or constancy is a unifying virtue because it refers to the wholeness of human life, as opposed to, say,

Foust-Chap01.indd 21

6/5/2012 2:01:35 PM

22

loyalt y, justice, virtue

a feature of it. Still, it is not yet altogether clear what it would mean for a virtue to be a unifying virtue. Perhaps we can gain some clarity when we consider Trotter’s comparison of Royce to MacIntyre on this point: If we substitute natural communities for “practices,” and loyalty for “integrity,” this quote would be a wholly adequate statement of Royce’s position. This observation is of no small moment—it seems that both Royce and MacIntyre have specified a unifying virtue, and, though they call it by different names, it is in each case the same virtue. Royce, however, gives a much fuller account of this virtue than MacIntyre.40

We are not immediately helped a great deal here. Knowing, however, that Trotter finds loyalty to be a unifying virtue for Royce, perhaps we can derive from Trotter’s account of the unifying nature of loyalty for Royce an augmentation to his account of the unifying nature of integrity or constancy for MacIntyre. Unfortunately, Trotter does not elaborate on how it is that loyalty is a unifying virtue for Royce in the context of his claim that MacIntyre and Royce seem both to specify a unifying virtue. Elsewhere in his book, however, Trotter refers to the “comprehensiveness of loyalty,” stating that “for Royce, it is the virtue of loyalty that encompasses all the others. It is through our own peculiar form of loyalty—the comprehensive virtue—that we express ourselves to the world.”41 Drawing on The Philosophy of Loyalty, we find support for this interpretation of Royce: You can truthfully centre your entire moral world about a rational conception of loyalty. Justice, charity, industry, wisdom, spirituality, are all definable in terms of enlightened loyalty. And as I shall maintain, this way of viewing the moral world,—this deliberate centralization of all the duties and of all the virtues about the one conception, of rational loyalty—is of great service as a means of clarifying and simplifying the tangled moral problems of our lives and of our age.42

This passage clearly points to what we might call the “comprehensive,” “encompassing,” or “unifying” nature of loyalty, for justice, charity, industry, wisdom, spirituality—and presumably other virtues and qualities— are definable in terms of a “rational” or “enlightened” conception of loyalty. What is meant by these descriptors is important, and we will

Foust-Chap01.indd 22

6/5/2012 2:01:35 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

23

attend to this matter later in this book. What of the claim that it is through our own peculiar form of loyalty that we express ourselves to the world? Royce writes: Now, in all ages of civilized life there have been people who have won in some form a consciousness of loyalty, and who have held to such a consciousness through life. Such people may or may not have been right in their choice of a cause. But at least they have exemplified through their loyalty one feature of a rational moral life. They have known what it was to have unity of purpose.43

As is made clear in this passage, loyalty to a cause indicates unity of purpose, regardless of the nature of the cause to which one is loyal. Indeed it seems that it is through our own peculiar form of loyalty—our own peculiar cause that we choose to serve—that we express ourselves to the world. Returning to the matter of a unifying virtue in the thought of MacIntyre, we might say that it is through our own peculiar form of integrity or constancy that we express ourselves to the world. With respect to what, though, do we exhibit integrity or constancy? The response to this question seems clear: participation in practices, for these are part and parcel of our narrative quest. We may think of the “singleness of purpose in a whole life” to which MacIntyre alludes as directly analogous to the “unity of purpose” to which Royce refers. Indeed, Royce refers often to one’s unity of purpose as one’s “plan of life.”44 If my fleshing out of the “unifying virtues” in MacIntyre and Royce is accurate, then I have shown that there is, in Royce’s thought, a rough correlate to MacIntyre’s notion of a practice. That correlate is, simply, loyalty to a cause. Returning to the example of the child chess player will make this clearer. The child’s loyalty to the commitment of playing chess may involve several motives; the child may seek external goods such as candy or internal goods such as analytical skill. If the object of the child’s loyalty, however, is (or comes to be) the game of chess, then the child will seek goods internal to that practice. In other words, loyalty to the cause of playing chess is equivalent to playing chess in quest of its internal goods. And one who does this identifies, at least in part, as a chess player. Further, the force of tradition on a practice is readily observed in terms of loyalty to a cause. One cannot be a loyal chess player

Foust-Chap01.indd 23

6/5/2012 2:01:35 PM

24

loyalt y, justice, virtue

if one does not adopt the stance toward the tradition of that practice that MacIntyre describes. Indeed, that stance seems to be nothing other than loyalty to the tradition of the practice in question. We have seen that for Royce, loyalty is a unifying virtue. We have not yet witnessed from Royce, however, an account of virtue, in the form of a definition, as we did from MacIntyre. In fact, although we would expect him to, in The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce does not provide the definition we are wanting. Still, we may construct such a definition out of what he does give us. In addition to loyalty being a unifying virtue, “Loyalty is a perfect synthesis of certain natural desires, of some range of social conformity, and of your own deliberate choice.”45 If loyalty is a unifying virtue—the virtue that encompasses all other virtues—then virtues must themselves be syntheses of natural desire, social conformity, and deliberate choice. Moreover, if loyalty when properly defined is, as Royce stated, the fulfillment of the whole moral law, then virtues must be conducive to—if not constitutive of—excellence in character and conduct. At the onset of our comparison of MacIntyre and Royce, we set out not merely to repeat the comparisons of these thinkers made by Kegley and Trotter but also to use their comparisons as aids in the process of articulating our own comparison, with our own purposes in mind. Our purposes are to achieve an understanding of the nature of loyalty and of its proper place in the moral life. We have found that, although MacIntyre’s focus is not on loyalty, his project is quite like Royce’s and that the affinities between his thought and that of Royce are fairly remarkable. This has resulted in our reading of one through the other, such a reading helping to clarify the meaning and amplify the significance of the thought of each. Related to this point, the comparison of MacIntyre and Royce brings into relief how crucial each finds his respective philosophical undertaking; each sees the return to virtue as intractably critical to sustained human flourishing. For our purposes, through our comparison, we have gained a richer appreciation than we had before for why Royce would expend the effort to develop a moral philosophy centered on loyalty. Still, this difference between MacIntyre and Royce—that Royce’s return to virtue calls us, above all, to be loyal—demands our further consideration and evaluation. This consideration and evaluation is

Foust-Chap01.indd 24

6/5/2012 2:01:35 PM

loyalt y, justice, virtue

25

particularly needed in light of the precarious position of loyalty in contemporary discourse, as we have previously observed. Ultimately, we will find that loyalty can help us to navigate contemporary exigencies and lead genuinely moral and meaningful lives. Indeed, we will see that a life lived without loyalty is in a very real sense not a life lived at all.

Foust-Chap01.indd 25

6/5/2012 2:01:35 PM

two

t h e n a t ur e of l oyal ty



T

he natural way of beginning a sustained reflection on loyalty is to indicate why we should do so. Accordingly, that was the task of the previous chapter. The next thing to do, however, is to attain a clear notion of what loyalty is. Because our primary focus will be on Royce’s philosophy of loyalty, we will also want to establish what Royce conceives loyalty to be, should his conception differ from other accounts. Further, we need to understand why Royce chooses “loyalty” instead of related terms, such as “faithfulness,” “commitment,” or “devotion.” One might think such words to be interchangeable, but as McDermott observes, “for Josiah Royce, however, none but the word loyalty will do. He resists substitutes at every turn and, for reasons perhaps personal, sometimes philosophical, but frankly, mostly unclear, he clings to that word loyalty and to that word, alone.”1 It is evident that Royce believes that no concept other than “loyalty” can adequately serve his purposes of clarifying and simplifying the moral life. While McDermott finds the reasons for Royce’s preference “mostly unclear,” our analysis of the term and Royce’s usage of it will suggest good reason for Royce’s deliberate choice to articulate and defend a philosophy of loyalty. { 26 }

Foust-Chap02.indd 26

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

27

Briefly yet informatively, Royce addresses his use of loyalty in the preface to The Philosophy of Loyalty: Loyalty is indeed an old word, and to my mind a precious one; and the general idea of loyalty is still far older than the word, and is immeasurably more precious. But this idea has nearly always been confused in men’s minds by its chance social and traditional associations. Everybody has heard of loyalty; most prize it; but few perceive it to be what, in its inmost spirit, it really is,—the heart of all the virtues, the central duty amongst all duties. In order to be able to see that this is the true meaning of the idea of loyalty, one has to free this idea from its unessential if somewhat settled associations with this or that social habit or circumstance. And in order to accomplish this latter end, one has indeed to give to the term a more exact meaning than popular usage defines.2

Although we do not yet know what “settled associations” had been made with respect to ‘loyalty’ at the time that Royce is writing, nor the details of the “more exact meaning” that Royce will provide, we see clearly that there is a distinction for Royce between the usual conception of loyalty and his own conception as well, it seems, as between the usual attitude taken toward loyalty and the attitude that he advocates. It is “this freeing of the idea of loyalty from its chance and misleading associations; it is this vindication of the spirit of loyalty as the central spirit of the moral and reasonable life of man,” Royce emphasizes, “it is this that I believe to be somewhat new about my ‘Philosophy of Loyalty.’ ”3 Let us proceed, then, as follows. First, we will investigate the “chance and misleading” associations with loyalty that Royce wishes to resist. Royce offers clues as to these associations in The Philosophy of Loyalty, but consulting additional sources will fill out the account of the loyalty that Royce is attempting to move beyond. Next, we will examine Royce’s preliminary definition of the term in The Philosophy of Loyalty. Doing so will reveal much of how Royce feels he advances on the then accepted ways of thinking about loyalty. If the associations that Royce wishes to avoid are chance and misleading, then there must be for Royce a way of understanding loyalty rooted in what is essential and accurate about loyalty. Noticing Royce’s description of “loyalty” as an “old” and “precious” word, we will then investigate the etymology and history of the term. A thorough investigation of just this kind is given in Sophie Bryant’s entry “Loyalty” in the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, and we will

Foust-Chap02.indd 27

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

28

the nature of loyalt y

devote our attention to this treatment. Through Bryant’s analysis, we will come to a clearer understanding of “loyalty” and of why Royce insists on this term rather than another. We will next examine Royce’s completed definition of loyalty, taking account of how it develops from his preliminary definition. We will then consider and respond to an objection to this finished definition, voiced by John Ladd in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. We will conclude by acknowledging aspects of Royce’s account of loyalty that we will not, by the end of this chapter, have adequately addressed—but for which we will have prepared in this chapter. These acknowledgments will thus serve as a bridge to chapter 3, “Loyalty to Loyalty.” Popular Associations with Loyalty at the time of The Philosophy of Loyalty In what is considered the definitive biography of Royce, John Clendenning describes Royce, born in 1855 and growing up in the 1860s, as “profoundly affected by news of the Civil War,” such that the “questions he asked of his world and the knowledge of it he gathered were the first efforts in a lifelong meditation on the form and meaning of the social order.”4 Royce’s own remarks mainly corroborate those of Clendenning. Offering some autobiographical remarks near the end of his life, Royce recounts, “Since I grew during the time of the civil war, heard a good deal about it from people near me, but saw nothing of the consequences of the war through any closer inspection, I remained as vague about this matter as about most other life problems,—vague but often enthusiastic.”5 This enthusiasm would lead Royce out of vagueness, for he would later, and with frequency, point to the Civil War as an instructive example in the course of his writings. In 1900, for instance, Royce writes, “When the frivolities and the frequent social ills that are indeed present in some aspects of our national life sometimes sadden us Americans, the memory of the Civil War always helps us to look deeper.”6 The memory of the Civil War helps us to look deeper, he suggests, because we are able to recognize that in times of great national conflict or crisis, what appear to us to be weaknesses of character in our fellow citizens are often superficial, symptomatic of the conflict or crisis. Royce’s interest in the Civil War is probably not insignificant in the genesis of his philosophy of loyalty. Loyalty oaths gained prominence

Foust-Chap02.indd 28

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

29

during the time of the Civil War, with Harper’s Weekly newspaper publishing such oaths in its issues during the nation’s conflict (1861–65). One such oath read: I do hereby solemnly and sincerely swear, in the presence of Almighty God, that I will support, protect, and defend the Constitution and Government of the United States against all enemies, whether domestic or foreign, and that I will bear true and faithful allegiance and loyalty to the same—any ordinance, resolution, or law of any State, Convention, or Legislature to the contrary notwithstanding; and further, that I take this oath, and assume all its responsibilities, legal and moral, of my own free-will, and with a full determination, pledge, and purpose to observe and fulfill it, and without any mental reservation or evasion whatever; and, further, that I will well and faithfully perform all the duties that may be required of me by law, as a true and loyal citizen of the United States. And may God help me so to do! (Signed) Sworn to and subscribed before me, this — day of —, 1863.7

Harold M. Hyman describes the context in which such an oath would occupy popular public space: “Americans of 1861–1865 lived under a complex of laws, edicts, and local understandings concerning their allegiance. Loyalty was a factor in the lives of millions, second only to the paramount fact of war itself.”8 One feature of Civil War America reflective of the significance of loyalty is President Lincoln’s disloyalty-prevention program, which made American civilians subject to arrest for a broad array of offenses construed as disloyal.9 The prominence of loyalty oaths did not guarantee univocal endorsement of the conflict. George M. Fredrickson details the formation by Northern intellectuals of Loyal Publication societies and Union League clubs, which were aimed at countering what was perceived as waning patriotism among Northerners in the midst of the conflict. Much of the effort of these Northern intellectuals was occasioned by public opponents of the war such as John L. O’Sullivan, who urged in pamphlets of 1862 and 1863 that the North’s war against the South was unjustifiable, denying the basic American principle “ ‘that the only just foundation of government is ‘the consent of the governed’ ” and effectively acting so as to “ ‘blaspheme our very Declaration of Independence’ ” and “ ‘repudiate all our history.’ ”10 In response, Northern intellectuals “contributed a flood

Foust-Chap02.indd 29

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

30

the nature of loyalt y

of sermons, speeches, and articles meant to convey a sense of what the situation demanded from the citizen in terms of loyalty and obedience.”11 A major element at stake was the right of revolution; it was “therefore vital for Northern philosophers of loyalty to redefine the right of revolution and the underlying theory of ‘government by consent’ in such a way that they could not conceivably apply” to the situation of the South.12 A popular approach, such as that shared by Francis Lieber in response to O’Sullivan and Joseph Parrish Thompson in an address to the Union League Club of New York, was that of holding that the right of revolution is void once a free popular government has been established. “If American ‘loyalty’ meant anything to men like Lieber and Thompson,” Fredrickson states, “it meant that the American Revolution was over and that revolutionary ideology had no further application to American society.”13 Such a view was central to Northern discourse in support of the war. For instance, in his war sermon of 1863, “Unconditional Loyalty,” Henry W. Bellows “tried to show how the cause of Lincoln as chief executive was the ‘sacred cause of government itself’ and that the critics of his apparently unconstitutional actions were taking a dangerous path. . . . To criticize the nation’s leader in time of crisis . . . was criminal; for ‘it is not the policy but the strength of the government that is to save us.’ ”14 In his article of the same year, “The Doctrine of Loyalty,” Horace Bushnell described loyalty as an “ ‘undiscriminating’ ” instinct “ ‘which attaches us to our native locality and country,’ ” for “ ‘our very nature is political, in short, just as it is domestic; configured to the state as to the family, craving after loyal emotion, even as after family love.’ ”15 If his conception of loyalty were accepted, “the pressures of war would lead to a strengthening of respect for established authority” and would replace what Bushnell “considered the unreliable and qualified patriotic ideal of a people who believed in ‘government by consent.’ ”16 Related discourse surrounding “loyalty” is further emblematized in texts such as John de Forest’s Civil War novel Miss Ravenel’s Conversion from Secession to Loyalty (1867) and Mary W. Westcott’s Footfalls of Loyalty (1886), a collection of letters written by soldiers during the Civil War. The preponderance of “loyalty” in discourse concerning the Civil War reveals a deeply felt connection between loyalty and country. That an oath to remain faithful to one’s country in a time of conflict and turmoil should emphasize loyalty such that “loyalty” appears near its start and “loyal” appears near its close indicates a deep association of loyalty

Foust-Chap02.indd 30

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

31

with patriotism. That both detractors and defenders of the war claimed to be loyal to the ideals of the country again signals such a deep association and a deep ambivalence the likes of which are described in the introduction. That Miss Ravenel’s conversion should be one from secession to loyalty underscores a critical contrast. The secession of the eleven Southern states from the Union gave rise to the Civil War; to convert from secession to loyalty is to shift from advocacy of internal separation to embrace of national unity. That letters from soldiers should be collected under the heading of “footfalls of loyalty” renders the words of soldiers—some perhaps fallen—onomatopoeic, audible perhaps as their footsteps marching in the distance. To listen to (or read) their words is to honor their loyalty and perhaps to in some way reciprocate it. The Spanish–American War of 1898 served as another major American conflict that would contribute to the landscape of Royce’s thought leading up to The Philosophy of Loyalty. By the time of this conflict, of course, Royce was a grown adult. He had also just published his fourth book. As Clendenning details, “On May 5, 1898, the Nation announced the publication of Studies of Good and Evil; the same issue described one of the most decisive battles of the Spanish-American War in which Admiral Dewey’s forces destroyed the Spanish fleet in the Philippines. The war had been coming for more than three months.”17 While Clendenning refers to the “prophetic insight” of Studies of Good and Evil, for exploring “the dangers of the sentiments that accompanied his country’s entry into the war,”18 it should be made clear that Royce did not explicitly address this particular conflict in Studies of Good and Evil. We catch a glimpse, however, into how the Spanish-American War—a war Royce saw not vaguely, but clearly—figures in Royce’s philosophy of loyalty when considering Royce’s 1898 exchange with Boston feminist reformer Anne Whitney. On learning that the government would serve its armed forces bread in wrappers labeled “Remember the Maine” (an allusion to the USS Maine, the explosion and sinking of which was a major event precipitating the Spanish–American War), Whitney drafted a petition expressing “abhorrence of the spirit of vengeance” manifested in war cries such as “Remember the Maine” (in a longer version of the war cry, “Remember the Maine” is antecedent to “to Hell with Spain!”) and “discountenance of use of this or any other motto calculated to foster the spirit of savagery against which we are contending.”19 Whitney solicited Royce’s signature,

Foust-Chap02.indd 31

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

32

the nature of loyalt y

but he refused, believing that the agitation that Whitney’s petition represented could lead “only to stirring up yet further confusion in the emotions” of those whom she wished to enlighten.20 Clendenning’s account of the exchange between Whitney and Royce includes a turn of phrase that lends itself to misleading interpretation. Clendenning writes: “Furthermore, he told her, war is not totally evil; it also encourages the virtues of loyalty, sacrifice, patience, and self-restraint. ‘These,’ he insisted, ‘are the best means of serving humanity.’ ”21 To see what is misleading about Clendenning’s choice of words, consider those of Royce: The virtues that war encourages,—these however remain possible, and worthy of being popularly emphasized at such times. These virtues are loyalty, sacrifice, patience, and self-restraint. These are the best means of serving humanity. The rest of the war passions had better be, not indeed encouraged, not countenanced, but gently ignored. Do you teach the deaf to hear by protesting against deafness, or the wanderers to be neat by calling attention to the mire? There are cures for such ills, indeed; but the cure belongs to the time of peace. This is the time to serve our country otherwise than by arousing new hatreds, through protests that are as certain to be misunderstood by passion as they are to be justified, by and by, by the enlightenment that peace will bring.22

While it is true that Royce’s remarks imply a belief that war is not totally evil, Clendenning’s account of Royce’s response to Whitney seems to suggest that Royce offers the benefits of continued conflict as reason to withhold his signature from her petition. Royce refuses to sign Whitney’s petition because to do so would be to embody “the rest” of the war passions (e.g., belligerence, stubbornness) as opposed to “gently ignoring” them. Rather than joining the government in battle, Royce opts to take the opportunity presented by the war to embody virtues that he cites as tending to be encouraged by war, such as loyalty, sacrifice, patience, and self-restraint. Refusing to sign Whitney’s petition is consonant with these virtues (the latter two most clearly) and functions as a promotion of them at a time when they are sorely needed. Royce finds this course of action more potentially productive in the face of national conflict than that represented by Whitney, and this is why he does not extend to her his endorsement.

Foust-Chap02.indd 32

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

33

Ten years pass between Royce’s exchange with Whitney and the publication of The Philosophy of Loyalty. The title of The Philosophy of Loyalty is, as Royce imparts, inspired by the title of Die Philosophie des Krieges (The philosophy of war), a book published the previous year by the distinguished Dutch sociologist and ethnologist Sebald Rudolf Steinmetz.23 Royce describes Steinmetz as accepting a traditional association of war and loyalty such that Steinmetz embraces the warrior as “the most typical representative of rational loyalty,” holding that “war gives an opportunity for loyal devotion so notable and important that, if war were altogether abolished, one of the greatest goods of civilization would thereby be hopelessly lost.”24 Royce is careful to point out that he and Steinmetz agree that loyalty is central to the moral life but that he parts ways with Steinmetz’s adherence to the traditional association of war and loyalty.25 “It will be part of the task of these lectures,” Royce declares, “to break up, so far as I can, in your own minds, that ancient and disastrous association, and to show how much the true conception of loyalty has been obscured by viewing the warrior as the most typical representative of rational loyalty.”26 Reconsidering Royce’s response to the request of Whitney in light of his resistance to the positions of Steinmetz, we may find that Royce’s position concerning the connection between war and loyalty changes. On one hand, Royce highlights as a merit of war the fact that it promotes loyalty. On the other, Royce highlights as a fault of Steinmetz’s text his adherence to the traditional association of war and loyalty. We need not view these cases as in conflict, however, and thus need not posit any particular shift in Royce’s thought between these moments. When Royce states that he wants to break up, so far as he is able, the traditional association of war and loyalty, we can take him to be fending against a perceived necessary conditional relation between the two, the likes of which appears to mark Steinmetz’s thought. While Royce would admit that where there is war, there is loyalty, he would not claim that there can be loyalty only where there is war. In the fifth lecture of The Philosophy of Loyalty, “Some American Problems in Their Relation to Loyalty,” Royce recasts the problem of the ordinary attitude toward and understanding of loyalty in terms of what he regards as the twofold moral dangers of American civilization: a lack of emphasis on loyalty as a social ideal in America, and a

Foust-Chap02.indd 33

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

34

the nature of loyalt y

misrepresentation of loyalty at the times that it does receive emphasis. Royce sees the lack of emphasis on loyalty and the presence of misrepresentation of loyalty as dangers, for these tendencies result in loyalty being discouraged and misunderstood. Further, the discouragement and misunderstanding of loyalty, if unchecked, “must lead to a great decrease in loyalty.”27 Although we have not yet encountered Royce’s notion of loyalty, we can undoubtedly by this junction gather that a great decrease in loyalty—in an individual, let alone in a country—is a result that Royce would find deleterious and would therefore wish to avoid. Now would seem as apt a time as any to acquaint ourselves with Royce’s account of loyalty.

Royce’s Preliminary Account of Loyalty It is worth repeating that according to Royce, in loyalty, when loyalty is properly defined, is the fulfillment of the whole moral law. Therefore it is crucial that we obtain an accurate picture of what Royce believes to be the proper definition of the term. The Philosophy of Loyalty is a collection of eight lectures throughout which Royce develops a concentrated account of his philosophy of loyalty. Royce offers, in the opening lecture, “a merely preliminary and tentative view” of the topic: I must first attempt a partial and provisional definition of the term “loyalty” as I shall use that term. I wish that I could begin with a final and adequate definition; but I cannot. Why I cannot, you will see in later lectures. At the moment I shall try to direct your minds, as well as I can, merely to some of the features that are essential to my conception of loyalty.28

Loyalty, according to this preliminary definition, is “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.”29 This preliminary definition calls for elaboration. First, however, let us emphasize that Royce explicitly states that this definition is “partial and provisional,” not yet “adequate,” and representative of only “some of the features that are essential” to his definition of loyalty. In fact, Royce does not reveal his complete definition until the eighth and final lecture of the series. Until then, Royce utilizes this preliminary definition, constantly reminding his audience that the definition is just that— preliminary. Later in this chapter we will address the remarks of some

Foust-Chap02.indd 34

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

35

who have commented on this preliminary definition of loyalty. For now, let us elaborate on Royce’s preliminary definition, knowing that, although it is only preliminary, it does contain features essential to that finished conception. First, loyalty is, according to this definition, the devotion to a cause. One might argue that this part of the definition is too narrow, for loyalty may be found in not only the devotion of a person to a cause but in the devotion of a person to another person, to an institution, to an ideal, or to any number of things other than causes. In a treatment of loyalty situated within the framework of engineering ethics, Marcia Baron states that Royce would find the notion of an engineer being obligated to be loyal to some particular group of people “elliptical and inaccurate,” for “the engineer is supposed to be loyal to, he thinks, a cause—not a person, not a group of people, not an organization of people.”30 Baron suggests that Royce’s position thus fails to capture both our ordinary conception of loyalty and the notion of loyalty that she takes to be relevant to engineering ethics. Royce’s notion of a cause, however, encapsulates each of these kinds of instances of loyalty. Royce first cites as examples “the devotion of a patriot to his country” and “the devotion of a ship’s captain to the requirements of his office”31 but soon adds the loyalty of lovers to his list, noting that they “are loyal not merely to one another as separate individuals, but to their love, to their union, which is something more than either of them, or even than both of them viewed as distinct individuals.”32 In short, supposed loyalty to an object other than a cause really just is loyalty to a cause. A patriot’s loyalty to his country can be understood, for instance, as loyalty to the cause of promoting the well-being and flourishing of his country. The loyalty of a ship’s captain to the requirements of his office can be understood as loyalty to the cause of fulfilling the duties of ship’s captain. The loyalty of a lover can be understood as loyalty to the cause of sustaining the strength of the bond uniting the lover to the beloved. Before elaborating on additional aspects of this definition of loyalty, more should be said concerning the nature of a cause. Although Royce offers plentiful examples of causes in The Philosophy of Loyalty, he does not explicitly state a clear definition of cause. It seems that Royce became aware of this shortcoming, for in “Loyalty and Insight,” a commencement address delivered at Simmons College in Boston in June 1910,

Foust-Chap02.indd 35

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

36

the nature of loyalt y

Royce immediately follows a nearly identical definition of loyalty with a definition of cause: By loyalty I mean the thoroughgoing, the voluntary, and the practical devotion of a self to a cause. And by a cause I mean . . . some sort of unity whereby many persons are joined in one common life. The cause to which a loyal man is devoted is of the nature of an institution, or of a home life, or of a fraternity, wherein two or more persons aim to become one; or of a religion, wherein the unity of the spirit is sought through the communion of the faithful.33

Reconsidering the examples of causes that Royce provides in light of this elaboration on the nature of causes, it becomes clear that the notion of union is essential. The loyalty shared between two people, as in the example of two lovers, is perhaps the most intuitively problematic counterexample against the thesis that the object of loyalty is always a cause. This may explain Royce’s emphasis, in describing this particular instance of loyalty, on the loyalty of the lovers being directed at their union, with his description of that union as being something more than either of them or both of them viewed as distinct individuals. The clause “joined in one common life” in the passage here quoted from “Loyalty and Insight” suits the example of the lovers quite fittingly. A cause, then, is a chosen ideal that brings individuals together into a common life—indeed, as Royce goes on to put it in “Loyalty and Insight,” “into one common higher selfhood.”34 Second, loyalty is willed. One cannot be loyal if one does not choose to be. “The loyal man’s cause,” Royce asserts, “is his cause by virtue of the assent of his own will.”35 This explains why the notion of an involuntary patriot would strike one as peculiar. One cannot authentically be a patriot if one is not willingly devoted to one’s country. The need for loyalty to be voluntary is brought into sharper relief by the supposition that loyalty requires devotion that is both practical and thoroughgoing. By practical, Royce means that loyalty requires the loyal to act. Loyalty is not, therefore, merely a feeling or an emotion. “Adoration and affection may go with loyalty,” Royce explains, “but can never alone constitute loyalty. . . .The loyal man serves.”36 Thus, the loyalty of the patriot to his country is not simply his feeling of pride to be a citizen of his country; loyalty requires action expressive of that feeling. He might, as many identifying as patriots in the wake of 9/11 did, fly the American flag outside

Foust-Chap02.indd 36

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

37

his home. He might go further than this, enlisting in the U.S. Army or engaging in any number of pursuits that may be construed as furthering the cause of promoting the flourishing of the country. Similarly, the loyalty of the ship captain to the requirements of his office requires him to fulfill those requirements; he cannot merely feel that it is duty to do so. Likewise, the lover is not loyal merely owing to sentiment concerning his or her loving union; to be loyal, the lover must embody this sentiment in action. Part of what Royce means in claiming that the willing and practical devotion of the loyal to his or her cause must be thoroughgoing is that the devotion must be sustained. Loyalty does not flicker on and off like a light switch but instead is consistent and enduring. In other words, if one is loyal to a cause, one does not waver in one’s devotion to it. Another part of what Royce means is that while the cause of one’s loyalty is “viewed by [one] as something outside of [one],”37 the loyal is also “ready to live or to die as the cause directs.”38 The patriot, then, recognizes that his country, while it includes himself, is much larger than his private self. Thus, it has its own value, which it would maintain even if his private interest were not considered. It is this value, prized as it is by the patriot, that makes him ready to live or to die for his cause of promoting the flourishing of his country. Royce adds one other feature to his preliminary sketch of loyalty, namely, that loyalty is social. “If one is a loyal servant of a cause,” he writes, “one has at least possible fellow-servants.”39 For Royce, the cause to which a loyal person is devoted always concerns other persons. The ship captain’s loyalty to his ship clearly concerns other persons, among whom are his crew and any other passengers on his ship, as well, perhaps, as those anticipating his ship’s arrival on successful completion of its voyage. The captain’s crew might counsel him as to how best to loyally serve the cause, or they may act as fellow-servants by showing confidence in decisions that he has made in this regard. The fact that loyal service to a cause bears consequences for more than the individual serving the cause necessitates that loyalty to a cause is, as Royce suggests, always at least potentially a social affair. One might notice that Royce confines loyalty to the domain of persons and object that persons are not the only beings capable of loyalty. Dogs are commonly characterized as loyal pets; they are referred to with frequency as “man’s best friend.” Indeed, in her argument against Royce’s

Foust-Chap02.indd 37

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

38

the nature of loyalt y

view of causes as the object of loyalty, Baron points out, “The loyal dog is loyal to his master.”40 Royce explicitly denies the capacity of dogs to be loyal, however, holding that “the fidelity of a dog to his master is only a pathetic hint of loyalty, or a fragment of the disposition that, in human beings, expresses itself in the full reasonableness of loyal life.”41 Because loyalty to a cause entails the duty of willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion, dogs and other nonhuman animals are, for Royce, precluded from being loyal in any meaningful sense. The level of awareness and reflection required to recognize and honor the duty of loyalty, Royce would contend, is beyond what dogs and other nonhuman animals typically display.42 As a “representative instance”43 of loyalty, an example that Royce claims to have “for years used in [his] own classes,”44 Royce offers the following example: In January, 1642, just before the outbreak of hostilities between King Charles I and the Commons, the King resolved to arrest certain leaders of the opposition party in Parliament. He accordingly sent his herald to the House to demand the surrender of these members into his custody. The Speaker of the House in reply solemnly appealed to the ancient privileges of the House, which gave to that body jurisdiction over its own members, and which forbade its arrest without its consent. The conflict between the privileges of the House and the royal prerogative was herewith definitely initiated. The King resolved by a show of force to assert at once his authority; and, on the day following that upon which the demand sent through his herald had been refused, he went in person, accompanied by soldiers, to the House. Then, having placed his guards at the doors, he entered, went up to the Speaker, and, naming the members whom he desired to arrest, demanded, “Mr. Speaker, do you espy these persons in the House?”45

In response, Royce continues, the Speaker “at once fell on his knee before the King and said: ‘Your Majesty, I am the Speaker of this House, and, being such, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as this House shall command; and I humbly beg your Majesty’s pardon if this is the only answer I can give to your Majesty.”46 According to Royce, then, when one is loyal, one “can say with the Speaker: ‘I am the servant of this cause, its reasonable, its willing, its devoted instrument, and,

Foust-Chap02.indd 38

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

39

being such, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as this cause shall command.’ ”47 That the loyal should be described as an “instrument” with “neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak” except as the cause commands may lead one to think that loyalty prohibits critical reflection. Baron interprets Royce’s use of this language in just this way: How can I act responsibly if I make myself a willing instrument of something else? If I say, “No, I will not consider what dangers there are in nuclear power; I will promote the cause of my company without any regard to what happened at Browns Ferry,” can I be acting responsibly? The answer is clearly “No.” I cannot act responsibly if I avert my eyes from all warning signs. It is crucial that I remain open to new information and that I be willing to revise my plans . . . if I find that things are not quite as they seemed. To charge ahead despite indications that all will not go well is irresponsible. If loyalty demands such ostrich-like behavior, that only goes to show that loyalty needs to be tempered by other considerations.48

Summarizing her critique of Royce, Baron laments, “It is a sad fact about loyalty that it invites—according to Royce, demands—singlemindedness. Single-minded pursuit of a goal is . . . hardly something to advocate to engineers, whose impact on the safety of the public is so very significant.”49 In response to Baron’s criticisms, Royce would assert that, while loyalty demands single-mindedness in the sense of sustained concentration on and devotion to one’s cause, loyalty does not demand single-mindedness in the sense of “ostrich-like” behavior. Loyalty to the cause of one’s company would, in fact, demand keeping one’s eyes open to warning signs, remaining open to new information, and being willing to revise plans. The example of the Speaker of the House of Commons is instructive in this regard, for, as Royce points out, “the moment was an unique one in English history. Custom, precedent, convention, obviously were inadequate to define the Speaker’s duty in this most critical instance.”50 Adopting Baron’s metaphor, we might say that Royce is indicating that there was no hole in which the Speaker might, in acting loyally, hide his head. The charge that loyalty demands slavishness is significant, and we would do well to consider further how the example of the loyalty of the

Foust-Chap02.indd 39

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

40

the nature of loyalt y

Speaker—again, an instance that Royce introduces as “representative”— avoids this characterization: The beautiful union of formal humility (when the Speaker fell on his knee before the King) with unconquerable self-assertion (when the reply rang with so clear a note of lawful defiance); the willing and complete identification of his whole self with his cause (when the Speaker declared that he had no eye or tongue except as his office gave them to him),—these are characteristics typical of a loyal attitude. The Speaker’s words were at once ingenious and obvious. They were in line with the ancient custom of the realm. They were also creative of a new precedent. He had to be inventive to utter them; but once uttered, they seem almost commonplace in their plain truth. The King might be offended at the refusal; but he could not fail to note that, for the moment, he had met with a personal dignity greater than kingship; —the dignity that any loyal man, great or humble, possesses whenever he speaks and acts in the service of his cause.51

Against the characterization of loyalty as “ostrich-like,” or slavish, we should highlight Royce’s emphases on self-assertion, creativity of new precedent, inventiveness, and dignity. These four qualities tend not to be ascribed to the “ostrich-like” or slavish; indeed, they run counter to typical characterizations of such persons. Royce was not unfamiliar with criticisms such as Baron’s, for much of her sentiment is anticipated and expressed by an interlocutor whom Royce describes as “a teacher who has charge of many youth.” The teacher states that if Royce were to address his students, he would want him to make clear that loyalty to their various organizations, clubs, secret societies, and their student body generally does not excuse the making, encouraging, or concealing of mischief. “What these youth need,” Royce quotes his critic as saying in substance, “is the sense that each individual has his own personal duty, and should develop his own conscience, and should not look to loyalty to excuse him from individual responsibility.”52 Royce points out that his critic is, on one hand, expressing wariness at the various special causes to which his students are loyal. On the other hand, his critic is holding that loyalty is opposed to the development of autonomy of the moral will. At this point in The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce is not addressing how to adjudicate among the worthiness of causes; likewise, at this point in the present work, neither are we. The latter matter, however, concerning

Foust-Chap02.indd 40

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

the nature of loyalt y

41

autonomy, is immediately pertinent. Royce believes that his objector is not as much his opponent as he seems to believe he is: For he himself, by virtue of his own autonomous choice of his career, is a very loyal teacher, devoted to his office, and loyal to the true welfare of his students as he sees that welfare. I am sure that his spirit must be the very loyalty which I have been describing to you. He is an independent sort of man, who has chosen his cause and is now profoundly loyal. Otherwise, how could he love, as he does, the hard tasks of his office and live, as he does, in devotion to that office, accepting its demands as his own? He works like a slave at his own task,—and of course he works lovingly. Yet he seemed to condemn the loyalty of his students to their clubs as essentially slavish. Is there not some misunderstanding here?53

The central point of Royce’s appraisal of his critic is that loyalty may appear slavish; the teacher, like anyone profoundly devoted to one’s cause, “works like a slave.” This appearance, however, conceals that the loyal freely choose their cause and to work as such in its service. To be sure, in loyalty, one binds oneself to a cause—but one does so willingly and thrives in so doing. Loyalty shows us “outside of ourselves the cause which is to be served, and inside of ourselves the will which delights to do this service, and which is not thwarted but enriched and expressed in such service.”54 Thus, “the only way to be practically autonomous is to be freely loyal.”55 Royce’s teacher critic is a living example of this dictum. We may summarize Royce’s account of loyalty, as we are acquainted with it at this point, in the following way. Loyalty is the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause. Such devotion is not solipsistic, for the loyal recognizes that his or her cause exists independent of his or her private existence. Loyalty to a cause, then, involves conferring value on the cause beyond the benefit that the loyal receives from it. In short, the loyal believes that one’s cause has either intrinsic value or instrumental value beyond what he or she can enjoy. Furthermore, loyalty is social; the potential for fellow loyal servants to a cause always exists. Because loyal devotion affects persons other than the loyal individual in question, it is always possible for other persons to join the loyal individual in loyal service to the given cause. Finally, while the loyal regards oneself as an instrument of one’s cause, this does not mean that loyalty engenders passivity or slavishness. On the contrary, to be an instrument of one’s cause is to serve one’s cause

Foust-Chap02.indd 41

6/6/2012 12:24:36 PM

42

the nature of loyalt y

willingly and intelligently. Such service demands self-expression, critical reflection, and creativity. In loyalty, duty and autonomy are united. At the start of this chapter, we noticed with McDermott that Royce insists on “loyalty,” actively resisting substitutes for the term. Prodded by an objector regarding his apparent inability to “avoid the endless repetition of [his] one chosen term, ‘loyalty,’ ” Royce briefly distinguishes “loyalty” from terms suggested by his objector.56 “Devotion” is inadequate, for loyalty is a special kind of devotion; one who is devoted to the pursuit of pleasure is not loyal as Royce understands the term. “Fidelity” and “faithfulness”—which Royce appears to regard as synonymous—are inadequate because loyalty, again, involves a special kind of fidelity or faithfulness; one may be faithful without decisiveness and acceptance of a cause, but decisiveness and acceptance of a cause are necessary conditions for loyalty. “Absorption” is inadequate, for while the loyal are absorbed in their cause, so the angry person is absorbed in one’s anger. Again, loyalty is a special kind of devotion. “Trustworthiness” is inadequate, as the term applies as accurately to watches as it does to persons and therefore fails to express the willing nature of loyalty. Royce rarely draws these distinctions, but he here presents what I find— contrary to the appraisal of McDermott—to be a fairly clear account as to why he emphasizes “loyalty” rather than a related term. Still, this distinguishing of loyalty from its relatives occurs rather rapidly. It is useful to take Royce’s brief attention to the differences among these terms and supplement that with an account of loyalty in close historical proximity to his own, which observes the etymological roots of “loyalty.” Bryant’s Account of Loyalty Writing in 1916, eight years after the publication of The Philosophy of Loyalty, Sophie Bryant begins her description of “loyalty” by noting, “The connexion between the common meaning of this word and its derivation is obscure enough to suggest that a clearer apprehension of its significance may be gained by considering its probable origin.”57 Thus, like Royce before her, Bryant sees disconnection between the popular usage of “loyalty” and its original usage. Bryant takes her task as author of an encyclopedia entry on the term as occasion to recover and reveal to the public the original meaning of the term. It is likely no accident that she is

Foust-Chap02.indd 42

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

the nature of loyalt y

43

so motivated, given that the encyclopedia is for the fields of religion and ethics and that “loyalty” is a term operative in each of these spheres. Bryant identifies the origin of “loyalty” as such: “Loyalty” is the Anglicized form of the French loyauté; its base is loi, and corresponds to the English “law” and the Latin lex. . . . Now loi in French, and more particularly in the derivative loyal, means in respect of its denotation much more than “law” in the limited sense of a definite written code. It is a generic term, and stands for that which ought to be obeyed.58

On this conception, what is the source of that which ought to be obeyed? Apropos of the “generic” nature of this conception, the source may vary. Bryant lists as candidates the will of an acknowledged ruler or ruling class, popular consent, and personal agreement by contract or voluntary allegiance, though this list is not indicated as exhaustive. The range of applications of loyalty is wide, Bryant asserts, and the claim for loyal service “goes very deep: it is the service of those who desire to serve, and to do so up to the limit of their ability. The law is to be within them, written on their hearts, as the Scripture says, and incorporate in their will.”59 With this remark, Bryant distinguishes the actions of the loyalist from those of the legalist. Bryant believes that a distinction between these types of devoted people may be found in all times and places and that it applies to allegiances of all kinds. Elaborating on this distinction, Bryant writes: There is the legalist who does what he is told, breaks no rules; he keeps faith to the word that is written and can be read. There is the loyalist who does this but can by the very nature of the spirit that is in him be counted on for more, who puts his whole mind into his duty, who forms his spirit in accordance with the spirit of the purpose to be served.60

Recalling that loyal in French “means in respect of its denotation much more than ‘law’ in the limited sense of a definite written code,” we now have a sense of what this “much more” amounts to. If one is loyal, one has internalized the duty to obey what one obeys. The dedication characteristic of the loyal is, in fact, part of who they are. Thus, the dedication of the loyal runs deep, such that loyalty is a quality of character. This is distinct from the situation of the legalist, whose dedication, even if unwavering, is nothing other than consistency in following rules.

Foust-Chap02.indd 43

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

44

the nature of loyalt y

The loyalist can be “counted on for more” than the legalist, for the dedication of the loyalist is part of his identity. Clarification of what “more” the loyalist can be counted on for comes with Bryant’s defining “loyalty” as “the quality of character which issues in free devoted service to the appointed person or the appointed cause. Thus the perfectly loyal person is certain to obey, to serve, despite all obstacles, at all costs, to the best of his ability.”61 The “best of his ability,” Bryant goes on to explain, means that the loyal cultivates knowledge, skill, and understanding of the requirements of his loyalty, embodying intelligence, alertness, and resourcefulness. Further, these qualities are required in proportion to the importance and difficulty of his task in service of his loyalty. The loyal “carries out his instructions—which are his loi—with zealous care to undertake them so that, by fulfilling them in the spirit as well as in the letter, the purpose may be accomplished even should the letter fail.”62 Bryant does not explain how the purpose of the loyal may be accomplished by fulfilling instructions in the spirit, should the letter fail, though it can be inferred that the spirit to which she refers is the “zealous care” with which the loyal attends to the object of his loyalty. This point seems significant, however, so we should consider subsequent accounts of loyalty with an eye toward finding what it would mean for the spirit of loyalty to have this power. Bryant devotes a portion of her discussion of loyalty to the distinction between loyalty and fealty. Her etymological remarks are instructive: “Fealty,” from Latin fidelitas, “faithfulness,” has an equivalent in all the Romance languages, and so has “legality.” But loyalty was neither of these. English adopts the French loyal to mean “law-fulfilling” in the sense of the Sermon on the Mount, and distinguishes it from “lawful,” or “legal,” which means allowable, and from “law-abiding,” which connotes submissiveness to the law, the passive quality of the orderly citizen.63

While “fealty” is not particularly common in English parlance, the term it derives from, “faithfulness,” is. In this passage, Bryant indicates that neither of these is interchangeable with “loyalty” but elaborates only on the nature of “loyal,” not on “fealty” or “faithfulness.”64 Bryant goes on to distinguish the two, however, stating, “Loyalty specializes in respect of the object of service, fealty in respect of faith to the pledge.”65 So, loyalty pertains to the relationship between one and the object of

Foust-Chap02.indd 44

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

the nature of loyalt y

45

one’s obedience—the appointed person or appointed cause—while fealty or faithfulness pertains to the relationship between one and one’s loyalty. “Loyalty,” it seems, admits of no obvious synonym. By distinguishing “loyalty” from related concepts through recourse to etymological analysis, we might understand Bryant’s account of loyalty as helping to explain Royce’s insistence on a philosophy of “loyalty.” Given the temporal proximity of Bryant’s account to Royce’s, it is peculiar that Bryant does not acknowledge Royce’s thought in a list of the “little of note” that has been written directly on the subject.66 This is especially peculiar as Bryant often sounds as though she is parroting Royce. In one instance, Bryant distinguishes the loyal from the law-abiding by holding that the former “serves with his whole heart and mind, making of himself a veritable organ of expression for the purpose, or the master, or the mandate, under which he serves.”67 Bryant’s account of loyalty is so similar to Royce’s that we might regard Bryant’s as an explicitly historically informed version of Royce’s. Bryant’s account is useful, for she shows us more clearly than Royce does what makes “loyalty” loyalty and not something else. In turn, we perhaps see why Royce insists on a philosophy of loyalty rather than a philosophy of any of its kin. Royce’s Completed Account of Loyalty From the first to the penultimate lecture of The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce works with the preliminary definition of “loyalty” as the “willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause.” It is not until the final lecture, “Loyalty and Religion,” that Royce completes his definition: “Loyalty is the will to manifest, so far as is possible, the Eternal, that is, the conscious and superhuman unity of life, in the form of the acts of an individual Self.”68 In what he calls “plainer and more directly obvious terms,” he writes that “loyalty is the Will to Believe in something eternal, and to express that belief in the practical life of a human being.”69 We have seen how typical cases of loyalty support Royce’s preliminary definition. But how are examples such as the loyalty of lovers or of the sailor instances of manifesting one’s in one’s actions belief in the eternal? Royce provides an answer in The Philosophy of Loyalty, but we are best served by turning to The Problem of Christianity, a book published five years after The Philosophy of Loyalty, in which Royce further develops this point.

Foust-Chap02.indd 45

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

46

the nature of loyalt y

The Problem of Christianity is a text in which Royce attempts to answer the “problem” posed by the question “In what sense can the modern man consistently be, in creed, a Christian?”70 Royce is not necessarily advocating Christianity but finds promise for a remedy to the troubled nature of the modern world in certain ideas from Christianity,71 which he believes to be “the most effective expression of religious longing which the human race, travailing in pain . . . has . . . been able to bring before its imagination as a vision, or has endeavored to translate, by the labor of love, into the terms of its own real life.”72 Royce immediately states in the preface to The Problem of Christianity that the text “is the result of studies whose first outcome appeared, in 1908, in my ‘Philosophy of Loyalty.’ ”73 We should not ignore Royce’s explicitly conceiving of The Problem of Christianity as “the result” of studies begun, in print, in The Philosophy of Loyalty. In The Problem of Christianity, Royce conceives of a relationship between individuals and communities that embodies the ideals he put forth in The Philosophy of Loyalty. In other words, Royce is not, in The Problem of Christianity, moving beyond The Philosophy of Loyalty in the sense of recognizing the views articulated in the latter as defective or incomplete but rather, in thinking about “the problem of Christianity,” he has found an arena that he thinks is particularly useful for applying and conveying his philosophy of loyalty.74 “Whatever may hereafter be the fortunes of Christian institutions, or of Christian traditions,” Royce writes, “the religion of loyalty, the doctrine of the salvation of the otherwise hopelessly lost individual through devotion to the life of the genuinely real and Universal Community, must survive, and must direct the future both of religion and of mankind, if man is to be saved at all.”75 Royce’s language here is very telling. The “troubled” human world is that consisting of “hopelessly lost” individuals, whose recovery, or salvation, is achieved through devotion to the “Universal Community.” This devotion is “the religion of loyalty,” a “religion” that may be adopted independent of institutionalization.76 At the same time, Royce sees in Christianity a description of the natural human situation that resonates with what he witnesses in the world, and a vision for its salvation that seems to him to be promising.77 This description and vision are encapsulated in three ideas central to Christian doctrine: the universal community, the moral burden of the individual, and atonement. At present, we need attend to only the first of these ideas.

Foust-Chap02.indd 46

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

the nature of loyalt y

47

A community is not, for Royce, merely an aggregate of individuals. Thus, a community cannot be exhaustively described through exhaustive descriptions of each of its constituent members. Rather, a community takes on properties of its own; communities grow and decay, are healthy, are diseased, are young, are aged. Moreover, “not only does the community live, it has a mind of its own,—a mind whose psychology is not the same as the psychology of an individual human being.”78 It is the mind of a community that forms languages, customs, and religions—products that an individual human mind, or a collection of such minds, “when they are not somehow organized into a genuine community, cannot produce.”79 Thus, individual members of communities come to treat communities as entities that behave like units but, beyond this, may treat communities as precious and worthy beings. An individual may “love his community as if it were a person, . . . be devoted to it as if it were his friend or father, . . . serve it, . . . live and die for it, . . . do all this, not because the philosophers tell him to do so, but because it is his own heart’s desire to act thus.”80 Royce calls “the problem of grace”81 that of the transformation of the essence of each individual from natural individuality to devoted member of the community. With grace, the faithful in the Church regard their community as a universal and divine spiritual being, a being to be treated as precious and worthy. Royce writes, “I know of no better name for such a spirit of active devotion to the community to which the devoted individual belongs than the excellent old word, ‘Loyalty.’ ”82 Recalling that Royce rephrases the “Eternal” as “the conscious and superhuman unity of life,” we can now see that by the “Eternal” Royce has in mind the Universal Community—that community of all conscious beings, which itself is a being, composed of but not reducible to the aggregate of its individual members. “To serve universal loyalty,” Royce holds, is “to view the interests of all conscious life as one.”83 It follows, then, that our various local loyalties are fragmentary to universal loyalty. We may be loyal to our lover, to our children, or to our ship, with or without the interests of all conscious life in view, but insofar as we are loyal at all, we are to some degree serving the cause of universal loyalty.84 It is in this way that Royce’s preliminary definition of loyalty, which intuitively accommodates local loyalties, is of a piece with his finished definition of loyalty, applying to much broader—indeed, eternal or universal—loyalty.

Foust-Chap02.indd 47

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

48

the nature of loyalt y

Ladd’s Criticism of Royce’s Completed Account of Loyalty In his own account of loyalty, appearing as an entry in The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, published in 1967,85 John Ladd rejects Royce’s account of loyalty. Ladd quotes Royce as claiming that the object of loyalty is not only “a cause beyond your private self, greater than you are . . .impersonal and superpersonal,” but in fact “an eternal reality.” Concerning this position, Ladd comments: Apart from familiar metaphysical and logical objections to this concept of a superpersonal reality, this view has the ethical defect of postulating duties over and above our duties to individual men and groups of men. The individual is submerged and lost in this superperson not only ontologically, but also morally, for it tends to dissolve our specific duties and obligations to others into a “superhuman” good.86

It is worth our while to closely consider this objection to Royce’s account, on two fronts. First, the former portion of this quoted text is a misquotation, for Royce does not claim the object of loyalty to be impersonal. In fact, two paragraphs before this passage, Royce claims just the opposite: “You cannot be loyal to a merely impersonal abstraction.”87 Further, Ladd’s critique of the superpersonal nature of the cause rests on a wrongheaded understanding of “superpersonal.” Let us consider the entire passage from Royce’s text: Whenever a cause, beyond your private self, greater than you are,— a cause social in its nature and capable of linking into one the wills of various individuals, a cause thus at once personal and, from the purely human point of view, superpersonal,—whenever, I say, such a cause so arouses your interest that it appears to you worthy to be served with all your might, with all your soul, with all your strength, then this cause awakens in you the spirit of loyalty. If you act out this spirit, you become, in fact, loyal. And upon the unity of this spirit, amidst all its countless varieties, our future argument will depend. It is essential to that argument to insist that the humblest, as well as the wisest and mightiest of men, may share in this one spirit.88

As is evident, there is not here even an implication that the cause is impersonal. Moreover, the “superpersonal” nature of the cause does not equate

Foust-Chap02.indd 48

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

the nature of loyalt y

49

to “superhuman” in the sense that only a “superperson” can serve it. On the contrary, “superpersonal” simply means beyond merely my private interest, and as Royce explicitly points out at the end of this passage, it is essential that all persons, including the most ordinary of us, are capable of being loyal in the way that he is describing. The second aspect of Ladd’s criticism of Royce’s account that we should attend to is that, in referring to the individual as “submerged and lost,” Ladd invokes the language of John Dewey in “The Lost Individual,” a chapter from Individualism Old and New.89 Now Dewey does not, in this discussion, like Royce in The Philosophy of Loyalty, refer to the “superpersonal.” But this difference serves only to dramatize Ladd’s objection. In Dewey’s essay, we meet the “lost individual,” who is “lost” in two senses. On one hand, the individual is removed from sight as such, as the homogenizing forces of corporatization favor and, indeed, force the abandoning of the personal projects of individuals for a lifestyle of conformity in the pursuit of a purportedly greater ideal. This sense of “lost” is likely intended by Ladd’s use of “submerged.” On the other hand, the individual is bewildered (i.e., lost), struggling to find footing in a world of polarizing political landscapes and shifting social mores, which cause turbulence and confusion on a seemingly chronic scale. This sense of “lost” is likely intended by Ladd’s use of “lost.” Importantly, Dewey conceives of the source of the problem for the lost individual in terms of loyalty: “Stability of individuality is dependent upon stable objects to which allegiance firmly attaches itself,” while “ . . . traditional objects of loyalty have become hollow or openly repudiated, and [lost individuals] drift without sure anchorage.”90 We might say that Ladd provides a Deweyan critique of Royce, with the problem of the lost individual being exacerbated by Royce’s apparently lofty demands of the loyal, which appear to be more difficult to serve than the already problematic ideals of corporatization. While this criticism rests on the aforementioned misconception of Royce’s terms, a similar criticism will arise when we consider Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty.

Conclusion We have now arrived at a thorough account of Royce’s conception of loyalty. We have considered both his preliminary definition of “loyalty”

Foust-Chap02.indd 49

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

50

the nature of loyalt y

in The Philosophy of Loyalty as the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion to a cause and his completed definition of “loyalty,” again in The Philosophy of Loyalty, as the will to manifest, so far as is possible, the conscious and superhuman unity of life, in the form of the acts of an individual self. Consideration of relevant text from The Problem of Christianity has enabled us to see how the latter definition completes the former. We have considered Ladd’s objection to Royce’s completed account of loyalty, which we found to rest on a misunderstanding of Royce’s view. Still, we were aided by engaging this criticism, for, in addition to its prodding us to clarify Royce’s account of loyalty, it prepares us for similar criticisms to come as we delve deeper into Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. In addition to all this, our engagement of Bryant’s account of loyalty has added to our understanding of the nature of loyalty insofar as Bryant distinguishes loyalty from several other related concepts. While there is no guarantee that Royce’s insistence on “loyalty” is informed by considerations similar to those of Bryant’s in her delimiting of that term from other terms, the close affinities between Bryant’s and Royce’s accounts of loyalty render such a supposition warranted. Still, our picture is not complete. On several occasions, we have been led to points at which it would have been opportune to introduce Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty. We have withheld from doing so, for we needed to focus as closely as possible on the nature of loyalty itself without delving into other, albeit closely related, territory. “In a world of wandering and of private disasters and unsettlement,” Royce tells us, “the loyal indeed are always at home. For however they may wander or lose, they view their cause as fixed and as worthy.”91 Let us continue to wander, then, viewing our cause as fixed and as worthy.

Foust-Chap02.indd 50

6/6/2012 12:24:37 PM

th re e

l o y a l t y t o l oyal ty



I

n the previous chapter, we saw that for Royce, the object of loyalty is always a cause. What we did not see, however, is what makes a cause worthy. Related to this, we are presently unclear as to how to adjudicate between or among what appear to be conflicting worthy causes. Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty—without which we have caught only a glimpse of Royce’s view—furnishes a reply to these questions: A cause is good, not only for me, but for mankind, in so far as it is essentially a loyalty to loyalty, that is, is an aid and a furtherance of loyalty in my fellows. It is an evil cause in so far as, despite the loyalty that it arouses in me, it is destructive of loyalty in the world of my fellows. My cause, is, indeed, always such as to involve some loyalty to loyalty, because, if I am loyal to any cause at all, I have fellow-servants whose loyalty mine supports. But in so far as my cause is a predatory cause, which lives by overthrowing the loyalties of others, it is an evil cause, because it involves disloyalty to the very cause of loyalty itself.1

In this passage, Royce reveals that loyalty to loyalty demands that one’s loyalty be an aid and a furtherance of loyalty in one’s fellows. Royce admits, { 51 }

Foust-Chap03.indd 51

6/5/2012 10:35:51 AM

52

loyalt y to loyalt y

however, that all loyalties involve some loyalty to loyalty insofar as loyalty is social and thus implies the fostering of loyalty in fellow servants (or, we might suggest, at least one fellow servant). As will become clear, one should infer that Royce is calling the loyal to aid and further as much as possible and to overthrow as little as possible; one’s cause should be nourishing rather than predatory. For Royce, this dictum will determine the goodness of a cause and will guide one when deliberating between or among competing causes. In this chapter, we will attend to Royce’s articulation and defense of loyalty to loyalty. Introducing this principle will allow us to fill out the picture of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty that we began sketching in the previous chapter. We will see that, although he is generally not explicit concerning these theoretical underpinnings, Royce’s philosophy of loyalty incorporates elements of each of three major traditional approaches to ethical theory, referred to today by the terms “consequentialism,” “deontology,” and “virtue ethics.” Assessing the relationship that loyalty to loyalty has to consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics will give rise to two arguments in favor of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. The first argument holds that, because Royce’s philosophy of loyalty shares views entailed by each of these major ways of conceiving of moral goods and moral deliberation, his position is reflective of widely shared moral intuitions. The second argument holds that, because the virtues can be described in terms of loyalty to loyalty, Royce is right to give loyalty a central place in the moral life. Each of these arguments supports the conclusion that, in our quest to live meaningful and moral lives, we are well guided by Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. In addition to these arguments, I provide a third in support of this conclusion. It is based on the relationship among order, loyalty, and the moral life and holds that the moral life is unintelligible without loyalty and rudimentary without loyalty to loyalty. Securing the Greatest Possible Increase of Loyalty Having supposed that causes are good insofar as they are loyal to loyalty, Royce articulates a principle by which one may guide oneself in choosing one’s cause: In so far as it lies in your power, so choose your cause, and so serve it, that, by reason of your choice and of your service, there shall be more

Foust-Chap03.indd 52

6/5/2012 10:35:51 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

53

loyalty in the world rather than less. And, in fact, so choose and so serve your individual cause as to secure thereby the greatest possible increase of loyalty amongst men. More briefly: In choosing and in serving the cause to which you are to be loyal, be, in any case, loyal to loyalty.2

Let us examine this framing of the principle of loyalty to loyalty more closely. We should not skip over the phrase “in so far as it lies in your power.” With this locution, Royce admits that there are circumstances in which it is beyond one’s ability to be loyal to loyalty, or at least to ensure that one’s loyalty is loyal to loyalty. Royce does not state what these circumstances might be, but the remainder of this passage implicitly suggests candidates. One may not be able to be loyal to loyalty if one cannot choose one’s cause. For much of childhood, for example, our causes—if it is even accurate to say that we have them then—are chosen for us. The cause of advancing beyond kindergarten, for instance, is not one adopted with thoroughgoing devotion by a five-year-old but is one that is inculcated in the child. On Royce’s conception of loyalty, the five-year-old is not loyal to this cause, let alone loyal to loyalty. Adults who are unable to choose their causes would also be rendered incapable of loyalty to loyalty. An enslaved adult, for instance, may appear to be loyal, but again, the cause of serving his or her master is not one that is willingly chosen. While it may be argued that the enslaved adult always has the option of revolting or escaping, we cannot in seriousness say that the loyal service of the slave is performed willingly when it is performed under compulsion and threat of great harm or death. The slave cannot be loyal to loyalty because, on Royce’s conception of loyalty, the slave cannot be loyal in the first place. Similar to the thought behind the examples just used is that one cannot be loyal to loyalty if one cannot serve one’s cause. An athlete may willingly choose to adopt the cause of representing his or her country in the Olympics but, on suffering a serious injury, become unable to serve that cause. Another athlete may willingly choose to adopt this same cause but, if he or she is not extraordinarily talented, will be unable to serve it. While the impediments to ability to serve differ from athlete to athlete, their predicament with respect to loyalty to their cause is the same: Inability to serve the cause means inability to be loyal to the cause,

Foust-Chap03.indd 53

6/5/2012 10:35:51 AM

54

loyalt y to loyalt y

which in turn means inability to be loyal to loyalty in loyal service to the cause. Is there a case in which one can at the same time be loyal and have it be beyond one’s power to be loyal to loyalty? Let us recall what Royce described as a representative case of loyalty, that of the Speaker of the House, who, when confronted by King Charles I, acted as a “reasonable,” “willing,” and “devoted instrument” to the cause of his office by effectively refusing to turn in to the king the members of the House whom he sought to arrest.3 When asked by the king if he espied the members he was seeking, the Speaker replied, “Your Majesty, I am the Speaker of this House, and, being such, I have neither eyes to see nor tongue to speak save as this House shall command; and I humbly beg your Majesty’s pardon if this is the only answer that I can give to your Majesty.” Royce notes, “The King might be offended at the refusal; but he could not fail to note that, for the moment, he had met with a personal dignity greater than kingship,—the dignity that any loyal man, great or humble, possesses whenever he speaks and acts in the service of his cause.”4 Despite Royce’s confidence in it, the supposition that the king could not fail to note that he had met with a personal dignity greater than kingship seems unsafe. The king might note this, just as the king might be offended. In fact, there are a number of possibilities of ways the king might react. The king might, for instance, make the note that Royce suggests that he could not fail to make and, suffused with admiration of this representative of the House, his aggression toward the offending parties whom he sought to arrest allayed, extend a friendly truce. Consonant with Royce’s view that loyalty is contagious, with instances of loyalty illustrating for others the value of being loyal,5 perhaps other kings who are contemporaries of the king in question catch wind of this episode, as do kings in the future—and each is moved to respect and embody loyalty such as that characterizing the Speaker. Tensions between kings and Houses largely diminish. In this case, the loyal act of the Speaker of the House may be said to have brought about a great increase in loyalty in the world. Alternatively, the king might, moved to vitriol by this representative of the House, his aggression toward the offending parties whom he sought to arrest inflamed, wage a bloody rampage. Consonant with the converse of Royce’s view that loyalty is contagious, with instances of disloyalty illustrating for others the value of being disloyal (or the lack of value in

Foust-Chap03.indd 54

6/5/2012 10:35:51 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

55

being loyal), perhaps other kings who are contemporaries of the king in question catch wind of this episode, as do kings in the future—and each is moved to disrespect and repudiate loyalty such as that characterizing the Speaker. Tensions between kings and Houses largely intensify. In this case, the loyal act of the Speaker of the House may be said to have brought about a great decrease in loyalty in the world. The Speaker of the House might have some idea of the sort of reaction to expect from the king, but he has no guarantee. This lack of guarantee concerning the consequences of his action limits his ability to ensure that his loyalty is loyal to loyalty. Now if the Speaker of the House serves as a representative case of loyalty, then our cases are typically or optimally like his. Indeed, it is rare, if it happens at all, that we are certain of what all of the consequences of our actions will be. So it is quite plausible that we may never be sure that our loyalties are loyal to loyalty. This does not mean, however, that we cannot have better or worse ideas. Surely the Speaker is sensitive to the delicacy of the situation and has measured his actions such that he expects that his loyalty will bring about results closer to the first set of consequences we considered rather than to the second. Presumably, such is the case for us as well when we find ourselves in particularly difficult situations that call us to be loyal to our cause. We might say, then, that all cases in which we are loyal are cases in which it may be beyond our power to be loyal to loyalty, but we must see to it—so far as it lies in our power—that our loyalty is loyal to loyalty. Decisiveness and Fidelity That we must see to it, so far as it lies in our power, that our loyalty is loyal to loyalty is both Royce’s solution to the question of what makes a cause good and his answer to the problem of how to negotiate conflicting causes. In cases of such conflict, one ought to privilege that loyalty that, so far as it lies in the power of one’s service, appears to be more or most loyal to loyalty. Crediting his students with formulating and urging the example, Royce offers the following scenario as an illustration: A young woman is conflicted between loyalties to her beneficent profession and to her family. On one hand, her profession promises worldly success and general good to the community in which she works. Indeed, such success has already begun to be experienced. On the other hand, disease or death

Foust-Chap03.indd 55

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

56

loyalt y to loyalt y

has entered her home and her younger family members are in need of such parental care as she can provide as elder sister or maiden aunt. Devotion to either cause involves complete absorption and therefore precludes the possibility of sustaining both loyalties. How should she choose? Royce imagines the principle of loyalty to loyalty answering thus: Look first at the whole situation. Consider it carefully. See, if possible, whether you can predict the consequences to the general loyalty which your act will involve. If, after such consideration, you still remain ignorant of decisive facts, then look to your highest loyalty; look steadfastly at the cause of universal loyalty itself. Remember how the loyal have always borne themselves. Then, with your eyes and your voice put as completely as may be at the service of that cause, arouse all the loyal interests of your own self, just as they are now, to their fullest vigor; and hereupon firmly and freely decide. Henceforth, with all your mind and soul and strength belong, fearlessly and faithfully, to the chosen personal cause until the issue is decided, or until you positively know that this cause can no longer be served without disloyalty. So act and you are morally right.6

Loyalty to loyalty so personified is perhaps a bit long-winded. Let us unpack its guidance with reference to our example. Suppose that the young woman looks first at the whole situation as Royce recommends. Knowing who would substitute for her in her absence from her profession, she feels confident that about the same general good will come to the community as would come were she to remain in the profession. While she would miss out on goods that she personally enjoys from her work in the profession, these goods are ancillary to the goods that come to others as a result of loyal service to the cause of the profession. Meanwhile, the young woman knows that nobody would adequately substitute for her when it comes to the role she has been presented with respect to her family. Perhaps she is the only elder family member available, and the service called for when it comes to providing care for her younger family members is service that she is sure will most loyally be carried out by her. Deferring to her similarly qualified substitute with respect to her profession appears to be loyal service to that cause, while assuming parental duties appears to be loyal service to the cause of her family. Alternatively, while choosing her profession would be an instance of loyalty to that cause, if she knows that no substitute will

Foust-Chap03.indd 56

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

57

perform adequate loyal service to her family, such loyalty would amount to disloyalty to the cause of her family. Forgoing her profession, at least for the time she is needed by her family, is clearly the right action, for it promotes loyalty more so than its alternative. Suppose, however, that the young woman does not feel that the consequences of each prospective action are so easily predicted. The quality of substitutes in either sphere may be unknown, or their quality may be known and appear commensurable. What is she to do, then? She is to firmly, freely, fearlessly, and faithfully decide, and to loyally serve whichever cause she chooses unless she finds that such loyalty engenders disloyalty. This advice may appear to expose a limit of the power of the principle of loyalty to loyalty. In a sense, it does. “If,” states Royce, “at the critical moment, I cannot predict which of two modes of serving the cause of loyalty to loyalty will lead to the more complete success in such service, the general principle certainly cannot tell me which of these two modes of service to choose.”7 Nonetheless, Royce insists, loyalty to loyalty is a guide in the face of such ignorance, for “it now becomes the principle, Have a cause; choose your cause; be decisive.”8 In other words, “Decide, knowingly if you can, ignorantly if you must, but in any case decide, and have no fear.”9 How is it that loyalty to loyalty becomes this new principle? Acknowledging the influence of “The Will to Believe,” the essay by his Harvard colleague William James, Royce instructs: “As soon as further indecision would itself practically amount to a decision to do nothing,—and so would mean a failure to be loyal to loyalty,—then at once decide. This is the only right act.”10 In other words, because the failure or refusal to choose any cause would be anathema to the promotion of loyalty, when the question becomes “Choose a cause or do not,” loyalty to loyalty always instructs, “Choose.” As stymied as the young woman of our example might be, she must decide, as her lack of a decision augurs no loyal service and may indeed portend the opposite; continued inactivity may harm either her profession or her family or both. Once the young woman has chosen her cause, she must loyally serve it unless she comes to know that continued service to it is, in fact, destructive to loyalty or conducive to disloyalty. Otherwise, her turning away from her chosen loyalty sets an example of apparently arbitrary disloyalty, which itself would be destructive of loyalty or conducive to disloyalty. Royce compares the choice of a cause to the institution of marriage: “The marriage to your cause is not to be dissolved unless it becomes

Foust-Chap03.indd 57

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

58

loyalt y to loyalt y

unquestionably evident that the continuance of this marriage involves positive unfaithfulness to the cause of universal loyalty. But like any other marriage, the marriage of each self to its chosen personal cause is made in ignorance of the consequences.”11 Royce is aware that this analogy is imperfect, pointing out that it is not everyone’s duty to marry, but it is everyone’s duty to choose a cause. Shifting mores concerning marriage and divorce might suggest other imperfections of the analogy. The analogy is appropriate, however, insofar as a marriage is a socially recognized commitment of two fellow servants to the cause of their relationship, and this commitment is generally not relinquished unless the fellow servants find that persistent commitment to the cause is causing, and will continue to cause, more harm than good. The fellow servants in a marriage cannot know ahead of time whether they will discover that loyalty to this cause is pernicious. Like the young woman uncertain as to what will result from her decision, they marry in ignorance. In many cases, Royce would claim, “thus only can you be loyal to loyalty.”12 The Art of Loyalty In February 1909, Royce gave three lectures on loyalty that to this day remain unpublished.13 The second of these, “The Art of Loyalty,”14 is intended to instruct his audience in how to navigate difficult conflicts of loyalties, such as that besetting the young woman of our example in the previous section. Royce explains the aptness of his term “art of loyalty”: Now I believe that art of loyalty to be beautifully simple in its spirit, and like all fine arts, endlessly complicated in its details. I believe that its complexity is simply due to the wealth and to the mysterious situations, sometimes beautiful, situations sometimes tragic and terrible, situations in which life daily places us. I believe that the loyal, without being in the least infallible, can be as clear and simple and reasonable in spirit in dealing with all these mysteries and with these complexities, as the consummate artists can be who somehow adapt their fine art to undertakings which appear to the inexpert hopelessly confusing.15

The one difference between fine arts and the art of loyalty, however, is that anybody can be skilled at the practice of the art of loyalty. This is a point on which Royce insists in The Philosophy of Loyalty, holding there

Foust-Chap03.indd 58

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

59

that loyalty is “no aristocratic gift for the few.”16 In that text and in “The Art of Loyalty,” Royce employs several different terms (e.g., “plain,” “simple-minded,” “straightforward,” “obscure,” “humble”) to describe what appears simply to be the ordinary person. The point is that the ordinary person is just as capable of excellence with respect to loyalty as an individual regarded, for whatever reason, as extraordinary. Three principles constitute the art of loyalty. Because Royce expresses them in a number of fashions throughout the lecture, I choose to quote his summarization of them at the lecture’s end: First the principle: Steadfastly train yourself to the resolve that your various causes shall be harmonized; Secondly the principle: In case of the appearance of conflict, look beneath the superficial conflict to find if possible the deeper common loyalty, and act in the light of that common loyalty; Thirdly, the principle: If conflict cannot otherwise be resolved, act in consistency with your prior loyalty, remembering that, if a change of flag may indeed be sometimes required by some transformation of your insight, fickleness itself is never a part of loyalty. Your cause, once chosen, is your larger self.17

This set of principles is not stated in The Philosophy of Loyalty and represents an important advancement on that text. Comparing Royce’s elaboration on each of these principles to relevant text from The Philosophy of Loyalty will demonstrate this. Let us consider the first two principles in tandem. While it is true that Royce does not state this set of principles in The Philosophy of Loyalty, we do find the first and second principles more or less articulated there. In the lecture “Loyalty to Loyalty,” Royce states all of our loyalties need to be “controlled and unified by a deliberate use of the principle that, whatever my cause, it ought to be such as to further, so far as in me lies, the cause of universal loyalty. . . . My causes must form a system. They must constitute in their entirety a single cause, my life of loyalty.”18 Elaborating on this injunction, Royce claims that when conflicts arise among one’s causes, abiding by this principle will “reduce the conflict to the greatest possible harmony.”19 How does one train oneself to resolve that one’s various causes shall be so harmonized? First, one wants to always bear in mind the project of being loyal to loyalty. If the causes in question appear to be equals with respect to this criterion, then one must try to locate a central cause that unites the apparently conflicting causes. It may be that

Foust-Chap03.indd 59

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

60

loyalt y to loyalt y

a course of action recommends itself when one sees that what was thought to be a conflict is actually not a conflict at all. For instance, in the case of a familial conflict, should one be torn between one’s loyalty to each of two individual family members, one should remind oneself of one’s loyalty to the family in general. So doing, Royce recommends, may very well dissolve what might otherwise appear to be irreconcilable conflict, harmonizing two apparently discordant loyalties. This, in turn, means that one’s course of action need not be destructive of loyalty, and so instantiates loyalty to loyalty at least in this negative fashion. We are brought now to Royce’s “principle of the prior loyalty.” Royce intends “prior” in two ways. One should seek first to “give preference to the cause to whose service you were already most fully committed before the conflict appeared to arise.”20 If this consideration does not provide a clear course of action, then one should “prefer the one to which you have first, or most certainly committed yourself.”21 This principle is not to be found in The Philosophy of Loyalty. As we have seen, Royce suggests that, when still caught in a stalemate between or among conflicting loyalties, one must exercise “Decisiveness” and “Fidelity.” To repeat, in such a case, loyalty to loyalty “commands simply but imperatively that, since I must serve, and since, at this critical moment, my only service must take the form of a choice between loyalties, I shall choose, even in my ignorance, what form my service is henceforth to take.”22 Royce thus instructs his audience, “Decide, knowingly if you can, ignorantly if you must, but in any case, decide, and have no fear.”23 In his review of The Philosophy of Loyalty, published in October 1908—enough time before the Pittsburgh Lectures for Royce to have considered it in their formulation—W. R. Sorley lambastes precisely these lines, assuring his reader, “This is no caricature,” and stating of the italicized line, “Nothing can better illustrate the bare formality of the principle than this statement.”24 It is plausible that the “principle of the prior” is prodded by Sorley’s excoriation, for not only does Royce emphasize this principle, but he neglects to comment as to what one would do if this principle still could not yield a clear answer—perhaps one is as deeply loyal to two causes formed at exactly the same time. It would stand to reason that one would have to decide, ignorantly, if one must, and have no fear. As we have seen Royce explain, doing so would be preferable to failing to act at all.

Foust-Chap03.indd 60

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

61

Royce admits that the art of loyalty is not a precise art, closing his lecture by stipulating that, while the art of loyalty employs its three principles to arrive at determined courses of action, it is not an art that conforms to a rule of thumb. Rather, the art of loyalty is that of discovering—as far as one is able—what one’s own rational will is and how best to be faithful to that will in the face of the vicissitudes of experience. Thus, while in “The Art of Loyalty” Royce augments his prior instruction concerning how to negotiate conflicting loyalties, he does not relinquish his view that experience is too unwieldy to be neatly codified into a universal moral formula. Still, Royce presumes that loyalty to loyalty is as useful a guide to moral living as we will find, as will be emblematized in his calling us to adopt a single cause—the cause of a life of loyalty. The Cause of My Life of Loyalty In the previous chapter, we saw that Royce conceives of loyalty as uniting duty and autonomy. While one is a servant or instrument of one’s cause, one chooses one’s cause and serves it willingly. Royce emphasizes this dual aspect of loyalty in his discussion of loyalty to loyalty, citing fundamental desires appealed to by the principle. “We are by nature proud, untamed, restless, insatiable in our private self-will. We are also imitative, plastic, and in bitter need of ties. We profoundly want,” Royce asserts, “both to rule and to be ruled.”25 Royce refers to this situation as one in which our being is divided; loyalty unites the sundered parts of our being by simultaneously satisfying our basic desires to pursue private passion (by choosing our cause) and to conform to the customs of a community (by serving a cause in communion with fellow servants). Because the being of all humans is characterized by such division, all humans stand to benefit from loyalty; loyalty is as much a good to one person as it is to another. These considerations prompt Royce to ask, “What cause could be more worthy than the cause of loyalty to loyalty; that is, the cause of making loyalty prosper amongst men?”26 Of course, for Royce, no cause could be more worthy. Of the cause of loyalty to loyalty, Royce states, “If I could serve that cause in a sustained and effective life, if some practical work for the furtherance of universal human loyalty could become to me what the House was to the Speaker, then

Foust-Chap03.indd 61

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

62

loyalt y to loyalt y

indeed my own life-task would be found.”27 Royce is thus led to wonder if there is a practical way in which one may serve the cause of loyalty to loyalty and, if so, what it is. In order to be loyal to loyalty, one must first “choose forms of loyal conduct which appeal to [one’s] own nature.”28 Royce describes this choosing as adopting causes that appeal to one’s temperament and which are suggested by one’s social opportunities. There is nothing unfamiliar about this method of choosing forms of loyal conduct, for this is precisely what we do when we attempt to figure out “what we want to do with ourselves.” Our temperament may be such that we are both skilled at and enjoy the arts. Should opportunity be available to pursue the arts as a vocation—via art school, professional tutelage, or the like—we may adopt the arts (or a particular art) as our cause. Of course, we will adopt causes of kinds other than the vocational. We will be loyal in relation to our friends, family, community, and country. All of these will be served partly because we find interest in them. While we may have more power over our choice of friends than we do over the rest, in each case we actively choose, from some favorable sentiment, to maintain loyalty to each. We will likely be loyal to more causes than these. The number is irrelevant. What is crucial is that our loyalties are united by the principle that whatever our causes, they ought to further, so far as in us lies, the cause of universal loyalty. As described in the previous section, for Royce our causes constitute in their entirety a single cause, a life of loyalty. It may appear that Royce contradicts himself in asking us to privilege the cause of loyalty to loyalty and then asks us to privilege the cause of a life of loyalty. We need to recognize, however, that functionally these are the same. The latter formulation simply appears more practical. While Royce states outright, “I cannot be loyal to barren abstractions,”29 loyalty to loyalty may very well appear to be one. Wanting to simplify and clarify our moral situation, Royce needs to articulate loyalty to loyalty such that his audience recognizes the principle as pertinent and viable. Calling us to live “a life of loyalty” accomplishes this end in a way that calling us to be “loyal to loyalty” might not. Moreover, the examples of causes that Royce cites as possibly constituting the system that is one’s life of loyalty are entirely ordinary. This does not mean, of course, that the life of loyalty is easy. As we have seen, loyalties will sometimes conflict. Other times, we will learn that our loyalties are, in fact, disloyal to loyalty, and that we

Foust-Chap03.indd 62

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

63

need to revise them. The loyal life calls for adaptation. “My loyalty,” declares Royce, “will be a growing loyalty. Without giving up old loyalties I shall annex new ones. There will be evolution in my loyalty.”30 Again, as we have seen, there may be times when we will give up old loyalties. Royce’s point here is that we will not abandon old loyalties to accommodate new ones, just as we need not abandon old friendships when we forge new ones. Recalling that loyalty to loyalty calls for the greatest possible increase in loyalty, and that loyalty has a contagious character, we can now state the principle of loyalty to loyalty in these terms: “Find your own cause, your interesting, fascinating, personally engrossing cause; serve it with all your might and soul and strength; but so choose your cause, and so serve it, that thereby you show forth your loyalty to loyalty, so that because of your choice and service of your cause, there is a maximum of increase in loyalty amongst your fellow-men.”31

All Recognized Virtues Definable in Terms of Loyalty In the previous chapter, we saw Royce claim that in loyalty, when loyalty is properly defined, is the fulfillment of the whole moral law. In his discussion of loyalty to loyalty, Royce puts the point as follows: My thesis is that all those duties which we have learned to recognize as the fundamental duties of the civilized man, the duties that every man owes to every man, are to be rightly interpreted as special instances of loyalty to loyalty. In other words, all the recognized virtues can be defined in terms of our concept of loyalty. And this is why I assert that, when rightly interpreted, loyalty is the whole duty of man.32

We will need to unpack this claim, but even without doing so in detail, we can immediately issue the following reaction. If Royce is right that all those duties that we recognize as fundamental to being civilized are instances of loyalty to loyalty, we can again be assured that this principle is far from a barren abstraction. In fact, it would seem that loyalty to loyalty is altogether familiar, although perhaps often lost sight of. What we might first notice is that Royce seems to be appealing to a definite set of fundamental duties that humanity has, in fact, learned to recognize as being owed to one another without exception. Royce is persistent with respect to this point, asking his audience to review

Foust-Chap03.indd 63

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

64

loyalt y to loyalt y

“the usually recognized range of human duties” and witness “how easily they group themselves about the one principle: Be loyal to loyalty.”33 This would appear to entail that, under appropriate circumstances, all persons could identify the fundamental duties in question. This consequence is not self-evident, however, nor is it clear that most persons would agree that this is so. What we might next notice is that Royce seems to draw a relationship of identity between duties and virtues. Like the aforementioned aspect of Royce’s position, the view that our duties are virtues is not self-evident, nor is it clear that most persons would agree. Furthermore, Royce describes these virtues as “recognized,” again seeming to indicate an appeal to a definite set of virtues that humanity has, in fact, recognized as salient in the way he is describing. Various enumerations and descriptions of the virtues have been embraced, with differing depictions of virtue coming from ancient Greeks, Romans, Abrahamic religions, Hindus, Buddhists, Confucians, Daoists, Japanese Samurai, and Benjamin Franklin, among others. Nonetheless, we need to consider Royce’s case. Royce supports his claim by invoking examples of duties that he apparently takes to be universally recognized as owed by each to each. The first duty that he describes is that of honesty. “When I speak the truth,” Royce explains, “my act is directly an act of loyalty to the personal tie which then and there binds me to the man to whom I consent to speak. My special cause is, in such a case, constituted by this tie. My fellow and I are linked in a certain unity,—the unity of some transaction which involves our speech one to another.”34 Thus, we can understand our duty to be honest, or the virtue of honesty, as loyalty to the link or unity inhering between ourselves and the person(s) to whom we are honest. If we lie, we undermine this link or unity between ourselves and the person to whom we are dishonest. In being decisively faithful to the transaction involving our speech one to another, we are loyal to loyalty. We increase the confidence that humans place in one another, thus facilitating the spread of loyalty. If we were to lie, however, we would decrease the confidence that humans place in one another, thus encumbering the spread of loyalty. Royce turns next to duties to oneself. The one duty we have to ourselves, according to Royce, is “the duty to provide my cause with one who is strong enough and skilful enough to be effective according to my own natural powers.”35 We should not be surprised by this duty, for if the

Foust-Chap03.indd 64

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

65

devotion of loyalty is willing, practical, and thoroughgoing, vitality is required in order to be loyal. Observing this duty to oneself increases one’s ability to be effectively loyal, in turn increasing the amount of loyalty in the world. Again, remembering both the social and contagious characters of loyalty, our own observation of this duty will likely encourage others to follow suit, again resulting in an increase in loyalty. So, “care of health, self-cultivation, self-control, spiritual power”36—these are forms of loyalty to loyalty. “The highest personal cultivation for which I have time is thus required by our principle. But,” Royce stipulates, “self-cultivation which is not related to loyalty is worthless.”37 Thus, narcissism and loyalty to loyalty are incompatible. Finally, Royce considers justice and benevolence in tandem, holding that these duties, or virtues, are those in terms of which all duties to one’s neighbors are defined. Thus, it follows, as Royce indicates, that justice and benevolence are two aspects of loyalty to loyalty. Justice, which Royce understands as “fidelity to human ties in so far as they are ties,” represents the “more formal and abstract side of loyal life,” for it “concerns itself with the mere forms in which loyalty expresses itself.”38 Benevolence, for which Royce does not provide a definition, “concerns itself with your influence upon the inner life of human beings who enjoy, who suffer, and whose private good is to be affected by your deeds.”39 Benevolence, then, represents the more empirical, felt side of loyal life as concerns those affected by our loyal service. These conceptions of justice and benevolence are plausible enough, and if we think of other duties to one’s neighbors, we can, in fact, imagine these definable in terms of justice and benevolence. Take, for instance, compassion. Compassion might be defined as pity for the suffering of a fellow to whom one is tied—owing to this tie—or it might be defined as a sympathetic pity for someone to whom one is tied, with one sharing in the suffering of the fellow. Either fashion of conceiving of compassion lends itself to that duty, or virtue, being understood as a special instance of loyalty to loyalty. Nonetheless, Royce’s short discussion of justice and benevolence raises questions. Although he does not elaborate on these claims, he asserts that justice without loyalty is “a vicious formalism”40 while benevolence without loyalty is “a dangerous sentimentalism.”41 Given his view that justice and benevolence amount to aspects of loyalty to loyalty, it is hard to see how either true justice or true benevolence could obtain without loyalty. Perhaps Royce is referring

Foust-Chap03.indd 65

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

66

loyalt y to loyalt y

to disingenuous shows of justice and expressions of tenderness; the matter is unclear. Every Form of Dutiful Action is a Case of Loyalty to Loyalty The title of this section may appear to basically repeat the substance of the previous section. Indeed, Royce takes himself to be repeating his “general thesis” when he utters this phrase.42 I intend, however, to appropriate Royce’s phrase toward a different purpose. My aim is to demonstrate that each of the three traditional major ways of determining moral values and right action—consequentialism, deontology, and virtue ethics—finds expression in Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty. This interpretation of Royce’s normative ethics will be accompanied by a similar interpretation of Royce’s moral psychology—his view of what the nature of moral agency is, and how moral agency develops, in chapter 4, “Learning Loyalty.” loyalt y to loyalt y and consequentialism The term “consequentialism” was not part of philosophical parlance at Royce’s time.43 The notion that good moral action is what maximizes good consequences and minimizes bad ones, however, was certainly familiar. This is the theory of consequentialism. While such a view may appear to be obviously correct, consider that an action bringing about good consequences may be inspired by a motive that is less than commendable, even nefarious. Imagine two individuals who donate an identical sum of money to the same charity. The first individual does so with the interest of furthering the cause of that charity. The second individual does so, however, with no interest in furthering the cause of the charity but with interest in enjoying a tax write-off as well as the praise that will be bestowed on him when others learn of his donation. Those who would claim that the actions of the second individual are less praiseworthy than those of the first individual, on account of their respective motives, are at odds with consequentialism. Consequentialism considers motives immaterial to assessing the moral value of actions; consequences of those actions matter exclusively. There are a variety of types of consequentialism. In fact, we have already seen Royce describe how loyalty unites two types, ethical egoism

Foust-Chap03.indd 66

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

67

and ethical altruism. Ethical egoism holds that good moral action is what maximizes good consequences and minimizes bad ones for the moral agent. Ethical altruism holds that good moral action is what maximizes good consequences and minimizes bad consequences for others. In conceiving of loyalty as simultaneously self-will and self-sacrifice, Royce proposes a guide to moral action that harmonizes these antithetical consequentialist ways of conceiving of morality. The most influential variety of consequentialism is utilitarianism. There are a variety of types of utilitarianism, with the most popular being those formulated by British philosophers Jeremy Bentham in the eighteenth century and John Stuart Mill in the nineteenth century.44 Each of these thinkers holds that good moral action is that which maximizes pleasure or happiness and minimizes pain or unhappiness. “Utility” is understood as the promotion of these dual goals. Bentham is considered an act utilitarian, while Mill is considered a rule utilitarian. The difference between these lies in the object calculated when determining the utility of a proposed action. Act utilitarianism calls the moral agent to consider the potential consequences, in terms of utility, of potential acts. In other words, the act utilitarian asks herself what act will maximize utility given the particular circumstances. Rule utilitarianism calls the moral agent to consider the potential consequences, in terms of utility, of following potential rules of action. In other words, the rule utilitarian asks herself what act will maximize utility, if it tended—as a rule—to be followed. While act and rule utilitarians can concur regarding what course of action might be best in a given situation, it is possible, given this difference in the object calculated when gauging the utility of prospective actions, that act and rule utilitarians would offer divergent prescriptions. For instance, an act utilitarian might approve of a starving person’s stealing food if it is a necessary means to continue living, while a rule utilitarian might hold that a rule that would permit stealing would be contrary to utility. This contrast is made problematic by the fact that the rule in question might vary based on selective interpretation of the scenario; the rule under consideration may be centered on the effort to persevere in being rather than on the theft. In any case, the example illustrates the difference between act and rule utilitarian methods of moral deliberation. We have seen Royce formulate the principle of loyalty as the injunction to “so choose and so serve your individual cause as to secure thereby

Foust-Chap03.indd 67

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

68

loyalt y to loyalt y

the greatest possible increase of loyalty amongst men.” In light of his language, Royce might be taken as endorsing a position like utilitarianism, with the difference being that he calls not for the maximization of pleasure or happiness but for the maximization of loyalty. It would seem, then, that the principle of loyalty to loyalty might be described not as utilitarian but as a unique loyalty-centered variety of consequentialism. Royce himself takes care to draw something like this distinction, holding that his philosophy of loyalty “aim[s] at something much larger and richer than the mere sum of human happiness in individual men.”45 We should hesitate to label loyalty to loyalty consequentialist, however, given the lack of concern on the part of consequentialism for the motives of a moral agent. One is loyal to loyalty if, insofar as it lies in one’s power, one’s choice and service of one’s cause maximizes loyalty. One may fully intend to maximize loyalty but for whatever reason find it beyond one’s power to successfully do so. That loyalty is not promoted as much as it could have been in the absence of the constraint is not, for Royce, a moral failing. Loyalty to loyalty and consequentialism thus share in common a description of moral goods in terms of consequences but differ in that loyalty to loyalty entails that intentions are not only salient but significant. l oyalt y to loyalt y and d e o n to l o g ic a l et h ic s The term “deontological ethics” was, like “consequentialism,” not a part of the philosophical parlance in Royce’s time.46 Still, Royce was undoubtedly familiar with the moral theory that now carries that label. Deontological ethics is contrasted with consequentialism insofar as deontological ethics assesses the moral value of a proposed act based not on the consequences that it produces but on the nature of the act itself. This contrast is commonly thought of in terms of ends justifying means; the consequentialist believes that ends maximizing good consequences justify what might otherwise seem to be immoral means, while deontologists hold that good ends never justify immoral means. To return to the example of the starving person stealing bread, one can imagine a consequentialist such as an act utilitarian endorsing the theft on account of its maximizing utility in the particular situation, with a deontologist holding that, because stealing is wrong, the act cannot be endorsed, regardless of the situation. This stance is similar to that which we assigned to the rule

Foust-Chap03.indd 68

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

69

utilitarian when considering the example earlier. The difference is that the rule utilitarian disapproves of the theft because she believes that a rule permitting theft would be contrary to utility. The deontologist disapproves of the theft because she believes that theft is, by its very nature, wrong, no matter what consequences it brings about. How acts are construed as being by their very nature right or wrong varies from deontologist to deontologist. The most popular brand of deontological ethics, however, is that formulated by Immanuel Kant in the late eighteenth century. Kant’s theory begins with the view that the only thing that is good without qualification is a good will. Even the pleasure or happiness of the utilitarian is not good without qualification, for it is conceivable that one can experience pleasure or happiness with reference to something bad, such as the pleasure or happiness a thief might feel on successfully executing a particularly risky and lucrative heist. Many qualities thought to be good without qualification are not so, for much the same reason. Intelligence, for instance, might be employed toward an immoral end; the intelligence of the thief is instrumental in pulling off the heist. For Kant, good will is not susceptible to these perversions and is therefore the only thing that is good without qualification. So, the only actions that we can with certainty call good are those coming from a good will. Whereas the consequentialist looks to the promotion of certain ends or consequences when assessing the moral value of an act, the deontologist looks to the motive behind the act, and in the case of Kant, the motive of the agent must be to act from a good will. After all, bad consequences could accidentally arise from what is otherwise a good act, just as good consequences could accidentally arise from what is otherwise a bad act. This, Kant would insist, is all the more reason to look to the will of the agent in assessing the moral value of the agent’s acts rather than to the consequences induced by the acts. It is important to emphasize “will” here, as Kant holds that one can only truly act from a good will when one explicitly intends to do so. The agent sees acting from a good will as her duty and desires and chooses to follow her duty. Kant encapsulates his deontological ethics in a “categorical imperative,” which, as the term suggests, applies to all acts. Kant gave this imperative at least three different formulations.47 These are: Act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law;

Foust-Chap03.indd 69

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

70

loyalt y to loyalt y

Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end; Act as though you were, through your maxims, a lawmaking member of the Kingdom of Ends. Let us briefly explain each of these formulations. First, let us consider “Act only according to that maxim by which you can also will that it would become a universal law.” Kant is suggesting that one must be able to imagine all persons adopting the maxim, or proposed action, in question and that, if one can do so, one must be willing to assent to this universalization. Hypothetically universalizing one’s proposed action thus involves disconnecting the action from the particular circumstances giving rise to it. If an attempt at universalizing a maxim results in logical contradiction—that is, the maxim cannot be willed that it would become a universal law—then the maxim must be abandoned. Kant dubs this a perfect duty, for the logical contradiction, or lack thereof, holds irrespective of human preferences or opinions concerning duty. Attempting to universalize the maxim “It is permissible to steal” leads to logical contradiction; the concept of stealing presupposes the concept of property to be stolen, but if everyone is permitted to steal, the concept of property is negated. In other words, universalizing stealing results in making stealing impossible. If one fails to adhere to the duty to act only according to maxims that can also be willed that they would become universal laws, Kant believes, one acts in a way that is basically morally blameworthy. Should a maxim, on being universalized, result in no logical contradiction, the agent must then act only according to that maxim which one desires would become a universal law. Kant dubs this an imperfect duty, for the desire will be contingent on what humanity prefers concerning duty. Supposing that universalizing the maxim “It is permissible for me to not develop my talents” does not result in logical contradiction, Kant would regard this maxim as immoral, based on the imperfect duty to develop one’s talents. The progress of education and industry, one might suppose, would be radically retarded if a maxim allowing for one to not develop one’s talents were universalized. Because humanity prefers such progress, furthering it is an imperfect duty, to be upheld as long as doing so does not violate the perfect duty to act only according to that maxim that one can also will that it become universal law.

Foust-Chap03.indd 70

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

71

Next, let us consider “Act in such a way that you always treat humanity, whether in your own person or in the person of any other, never simply as a means, but always at the same time as an end.” This formulation of the categorical imperative rests on the assumption that moral action arises from an autonomous will. If a person were regarded as merely a means to an end, then that person is only an instrument; she is not a moral agent. Consonant with the first formulation of the categorical imperative, one could not will such treatment of persons to become universal law, as this universalization would lead to logical contradiction; one would will the impossibility of willing, or freely choose to not be free. This second formulation of the categorical imperative generates the perfect duty not to use the humanity of oneself or another merely as a means to some other end. Thus, one cannot, for instance, be a slave owner. This formulation also generates the imperfect duty to further the ends of oneself and others. While it is one’s duty to develop one’s talents, it is also one’s duty to seek that end for all people equally, as long as doing so does not violate the perfect duty to treat humanity never simply as a means but always at the same time as an end. Finally, let us consider “Act as though you were, through your maxims, a law-making member of the Kingdom of Ends.” An autonomous will, such as that characterizing one whose humanity is never used merely as a means, is subject only to those laws that it makes for itself. One must, however, hypothetically universalize such laws, such that they bind all of humanity. Kant suggests that when performing moral deliberation, one should consider oneself a member and head of a hypothetical Kingdom of Ends, with which our maxims must harmonize. This third formulation of the categorical imperative generates the perfect duty not to act according to maxims that create logical contradictions when hypothetically universalized, while it generates the imperfect duty not to act according to maxims that lead to greatly undesirable states of affairs. Of the three moral theories we are considering in this section, deontological ethics—and, indeed, Kant’s deontological ethics in particular—is that to which Royce’s moral philosophy bears the closest resemblance. Some reviewers of The Philosophy of Loyalty were quick to note the affinity. Frank Thilly described the resemblance in these words: “Like Kant, [Royce] seeks to establish a supreme standard which shall serve as a guide even to the commonest reason and in all the relations of life, a criterion that will put an end to our moral doubts and give meaning and stability

Foust-Chap03.indd 71

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

72

loyalt y to loyalt y

to human conduct, a concept from which all the other duties may be rationally deduced. This basal virtue is loyalty.”48 Sorley also saw similarity between Royce’s moral philosophy and Kant’s but found the similarity problematic: “The fundamental difficulty of the whole position is that loyalty to a cause is, after all, a merely formal conception. Professor Royce is thus in the same difficulty as Kant was when he attempted to deduce a moral code from a formal principle.”49 We will hold off, for now, on appraising whether the Kantian character of loyalty to loyalty embroils Royce in difficulty. For now, noting the agreement on the similarity between Kant’s and Royce’s moral philosophies suffices.50 The Kantian character of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty is most strongly described not in a review of The Philosophy of Loyalty but in the original work of one of Royce’s students. In 1915, Annie Lyman Sears published The Drama of the Spiritual Life: A Study of Religious Experience and Ideals.51 Therein, we find the following: We want to find some universal principle which shall not only unify “the many” of fleeting individual experience, but one which shall harmonize the conflicting variety of ideals of the world of many individuals. That is, as already suggested, that which shall unify the self’s discrepancy is an ought, an universal, ethical ideal, an ideal for all selves. I know of no better expression of such an ethical principle than that of Kant’s categorical imperative. This universal law is a command to every one to so act that the principle of his action might become a law for all intelligent beings. Or, otherwise expressed, Will always the good-will. This universal statement of the ought is, of course, highly abstract, and to religious experience it seems cold. Professor Royce has given more concreteness and warmth to the principle in his statement of it. “Be loyal to the spirit of loyalty, everywhere.”52

Here, Sears interprets the principle of loyalty to loyalty as Kant’s categorical imperative in Royce’s hands. The moral principles are thus not merely similar, on her account, but in fact identical, with Royce’s statement of the principle being less abstract than Kant’s. This interpretation of Sears is significant, not only because she was a student of Royce’s, but also because Royce authored a ten-page introductory note to the book wherein the interpretation is put forth. It is improbable that Royce would write such a note without having read the entirety

Foust-Chap03.indd 72

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

73

of Sears’s text, and improbable that Royce would allow Sears’s remark to go unqualified as merely representing her reading of Royce, had he thought her understanding of his principle of loyalty to loyalty to be inaccurate. In fact, throughout his introductory note, Royce makes so many explicit references to discussions found in Sears’s text, and to the arc of the text as a whole, that it is exceedingly difficult to imagine these scenarios. Moreover, while urging the reader to recognize the originality of opinion, idea, and method in Sears’s text, Royce acknowledges that Sears’s book “has to a considerable extent grown up under the influence of criticisms and suggestions of [his] own.”53 For her part, Sears singles out Royce as a teacher who helped her to clearer thinking and “without whose wise counsel and stimulating suggestions, this book could hardly have been written.”54 One gathers that the two shared a close collaborative relationship, such that Sears’s depiction of loyalty to loyalty as a more concrete statement of Kant’s categorical imperative is an informed interpretation, if not Royce’s own presentation to her of the principle. Considering loyalty to loyalty in light of the first formulation of the categorical imperative, we find a strong resemblance in terms of what is expected of moral agents. Should one attempt to universalize a maxim calling for abandoning loyalty, what should occur? One finds that one must be loyal to the cause of abandoning loyalty; this is a logical contradiction and thus prohibited by the perfect duty generated by the first formulation of the categorical imperative. Therefore, it is a universal duty that one be loyal to loyalty. This much was implicit in Royce’s remark that all loyalties—even nefarious ones—are loyal to loyalty inasmuch as loyalty is necessarily social. As an example of the imperfect duty generated by the first formulation of the categorical imperative, we cited the duty to cultivate one’s talents. Royce clearly thinks this to be a duty as well, though he states the matter in terms of loyalty. For Royce, we must cultivate our talents, but we do so in the service of finding a cause toward which we can be loyal. Indeed, we cultivate our talents out of loyalty to loyalty. Further, we do not choose causes at random but choose causes toward which our talents are well suited, so that our service is effective and might aid and further loyalty in others. Again, we find Kant’s deontological ethics in Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty.

Foust-Chap03.indd 73

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

74

loyalt y to loyalt y

Additional reasons to think accurate Sears’s depiction of loyalty to loyalty as an alternative statement of Kant’s categorical imperative come with her elaboration on the latter: [Kant’s] expression is, in effect, Reverence personality everywhere. By a person Kant means that whose nature is to be an end in itself, that is, a rational and self-determining being. The categorical imperative then becomes: “Act so as to use humanity whether in your own person or that of another always as an end, never as merely a means.” This is the essential teaching, also, I take it, of the Sermon on the Mount and the parables of Jesus, and likewise of Paul’s chapter on Caritas (1 Cor. 13).55

We find here at least two more pieces of support for the hypothesis in question. First, Royce’s call to foster the prospering of loyalty among humanity seems strongly analogous to what Sears interprets as Kant’s call to revere personality everywhere. In the second formulation of the categorical imperative, Kant indicates that we are to respect the rational, selfdetermining nature of fellow humans. With the principle of loyalty to loyalty, Royce appropriates this perfect duty by indicating that we are to respect the loyalties—the rationally and autonomously formed plans of life—of fellow humans. The imperfect duty to further the ends of oneself and others generated by Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative is, as should now be apparent, also expressed in Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty. Royce simply states this duty in terms of loyalties rather than ends, holding that it is our duty to further our own loyalty and those of others. Second, Sears’s comparison of Kant’s categorical imperative to the teachings of the Sermon on the Mount, to the parables of Jesus, and to Paul’s chapter on Caritas mimics her teacher’s comparison, in “The Art of Loyalty,” of these very same teachings to his principle of loyalty to loyalty. Therein, Royce describes, in turn, the Ten Commandments, the Sermon on the Mount, and the thirteenth chapter of First Corinthians as being not moral codes but portrayals of a spiritual attitude.56 “The dutiful spirit is indeed precisely a spirit,” Royce writes. “No letter is able exhaustively to characterize it.”57 Royce reminds his audience that by loyalty he means “not a code, but first an attitude towards life, and secondly, an art of living.”58 As we have seen, Royce then goes on to guide performance of

Foust-Chap03.indd 74

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

75

this “art” with respect to several types of difficult conflicts of loyalty, with the principle of loyalty to loyalty being central to this art. Finally, the third formulation of Kant’s categorical imperative is also reflected in Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty, although to a lesser extent than the first two formulations are. Whereas Kant insists that we imagine that we are acting, through our maxims, as a lawmaking member of the Kingdom of Ends, Royce has us imagine that our prospective actions are those of a vital constituent of humanity at large. While Royce does not have us imagine that we legislate over humanity, he does have us think through, so far as we can, the implications of our prospective actions for humanity. Loyalty to loyalty is not obviously consistent with the perfect duty generated by the third formulation of the categorical imperative, prohibiting prospective actions that would lead, when hypothetically universalized, to logical contradiction.59 The sorts of actions that Kant cites as doing so, however—such as lying and stealing—do seem to be actions that loyalty to loyalty would generally prohibit. Loyalty to loyalty is more clearly consistent with the imperfect duty generated by the third formulation of the categorical imperative, prohibiting prospective actions that would lead to greatly undesirable states of affairs. It is abundantly clear that Royce thinks that loyalty to loyalty engenders desirable states of affairs and that disloyalty to loyalty engenders the opposite.60 To summarize, Royce’s philosophy of loyalty bears a strong resemblance to the deontological ethics of Kant. Interlocutors and followers of Royce have good reason to suggest that Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty may be viewed as an expression of Kant’s categorical imperative. We have seen that the principle of loyalty to loyalty is readily articulated in terms of the first two formulations of the categorical imperative and that it shares commonality with the third formulation. Moreover, we have seen that loyalty to loyalty is, at least in most cases, both a perfect and an imperfect duty, for loyalty to loyalty is reasonable and desirable whereas violations of loyalty to loyalty are unreasonable and undesirable.

loyalt y to loyalt y a n d v irt u e et h ic s Virtue ethics is distinguishable from consequentialism and deontological ethics insofar as its assessment of the moral value of actions refers not to

Foust-Chap03.indd 75

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

76

loyalt y to loyalt y

the consequences produced by the actions or to the nature of the actions themselves but to the character of the agent performing the action. To return to the example of the starving person stealing bread, a virtue ethicist judges the morality of the act based on what the act of stealing indicates about one’s character. Such judgments turn on what values are considered virtuous and what values are considered vicious. As previously mentioned, many sets of virtues and vices have been proposed and embraced. Moreover, as with consequentialism and deontological ethics, interpretations of the act of stealing (e.g., helping onself to persevere in being, taking another’s property without permission) will color the evaluation of the act. We need not detain ourselves with these details. What we will do now is highlight the way in which Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty is expressive of elements of virtue ethics, in addition to the elements of consequentialism and deontological ethics that we have already recognized. One of the oldest and most influential virtue ethics is that articulated by Aristotle. As we learned in chapter 1, MacIntyre wishes for a return to something like an Aristotelian virtue ethic. A few terms are key to this ethic and, as we will see, these notions are present in Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty. First, there is arete¯ (“excellence” or “virtue”), meaning excellence in fulfillment of a particular function. Next, there is phronesis (“practical wisdom” or “moral wisdom”), the ability to reflect on and choose acts aimed at certain ends. Finally, there is eudaimonia (“wellbeing” or “happiness”), the flourishing that results from arete¯, the end toward which phronesis is directed. It should be noted that eudaimonia does not refer to subjective emotion or feeling but to objective proper functioning. For humans, to experience eudaimonia means performing the function of human beings as excellently as possible. According to Aristotle, this function is to exercise the quality that characterizes humans as such—namely, reason. Thus, optimally sound reasoning, as in phronesis, should result in arete¯, which leads to eudaimonia.61 Royce does not utilize these terms, but these concepts seem implicitly at work in his philosophy of loyalty. Remember that for Royce, loyalty establishes selfhood and strikes a harmony between self-will and selfsacrifice. Employing loyalty to loyalty as a regulative ideal guides one in ensuring that one’s loyal action is good, rather than bad, or better rather than worse. Arete¯ with respect to being loyal to loyalty, then, might be

Foust-Chap03.indd 76

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

77

viewed as necessary for a Roycean notion of eudaimonia, with the development of a kind of phronesis required to achieve this arete¯. At the same time that loyalty to loyalty shares affinity with aspects of virtue ethics, the agent-centered evaluation of moral conduct characteristic of virtue ethics is not neatly compatible with Royce’s view. While Royce certainly wants for us to become and be loyal people, his articulations of the principle of loyalty to loyalty surpass the individual agent in scope, implicating humanity at large. Perhaps in this respect loyalty to loyalty resembles the virtue ethics of Confucius, sometimes referred to as a role ethic, with virtue being explicitly tied to interpersonal relations rather than to individual traits of character. Royce would likely find compelling the Confucian notion of moral development as beginning in the context of family and proceeding, as if outwardly in a series of concentric circles, into one’s roles in community, country, and the cosmos.62 Loyalty and Order In the previous chapter we considered Sophie Bryant’s entry “Loyalty” for the Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics. Royce, too, was a contributor to this series.63 Here we will focus on his entry “Order.” Royce begins this entry by claiming that in dealing with “sets or collections that consist of individual objects—sets of objects such as the stars in the sky, the men who are members of a social group, or the articles of furniture that are present in a given room,”64 there are two ways of proceeding. The first way is that of noting characteristics of individual objects by themselves and then considering their relations to other objects in the collection. For instance, we might see that one star is visible in the east while another is visible in the west, and observe how still another star stands in relation to a particular constellation. Royce regards such a method of studying these objects as useful but unable to impart knowledge of the orderliness of the collection being considered. The second way of dealing with such a collection is to observe some or all of its various individuals and infer generalities about the set, laws to which the members of the collection are subject. According to Royce, a collection of objects possesses order if “from a knowledge of what is true of some of its members we can infer in definite ways what is or will be true about the other objects of the collection, or about some portion of them.”65

Foust-Chap03.indd 77

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

78

loyalt y to loyalt y

It is useful to pair Royce’s entry “Order” with portions of a letter that Royce wrote to Warner Fite, in which Royce purports to reveal “the most elementary logical problem involved in my theory of the ‘community,’ ”66 beginning by calling the relation of an individual entity to a collection to which it belongs the ∈-relation. In other words, “x∈a” means that the individual entity x belongs to the collection a. So, “sŒc” means that this star belongs to this constellation. If I have knowledge of some aspect of members of c (e.g., star s and those stars designated t and u), I can draw inferences about other members of c (e.g., stars v and w) with respect to that aspect. For instance, if I know that s, t, and u are stars of a certain age, I can infer that by virtue of sharing membership in c, v and w are stars of this same age. The accuracy of my inferences will vary, but denoting order, the ∈-relation affords the possibility of such inferences. Noticing that “men who are members of a social group” is as apt an example for Royce as is “stars in the sky,” we should not be startled on learning that order is “what makes possible the realization of those ethical ideals most characteristic of organized communities.”67 It is here that loyalty becomes salient: If an organized and orderly community either exists or is in process of making, we can be loyal to it. For in such a community the individual can devote himself to activities whose fruit does not merely remain his own, but falls to the lot of the other hæcceities with whom he is bound by relational ties. Order, therefore, or at least possible order, is the condition upon which depends the existence of anything lovable about our social system. If each acts only as an individual, the mere fact that he happens to be benevolent does not render his benevolence other than capricious. Loyal activity, on the other hand, is always orderly, since it involves acting in ways that are determined not merely by personal desires, or by the interest of other individuals, but by the relations in which one stands to those other individuals.68

In this passage we hear echoes of Royce’s remarks about benevolence in The Philosophy of Loyalty—benevolence void of loyalty, we might recall, is a dangerous sentimentalism—but Royce now presents us with a clearer picture as to why this is so. If my benevolence is borne of loyalty, my benevolent deed is done by me as an individual whose deeds are determined by a binding relation—that between myself and the other member(s) of my community.69 There is no distinction between my

Foust-Chap03.indd 78

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

79

interests and the interests of those with whom I am in community. Given the order that obtains in loyal relations, were one to have knowledge of my interests, one would thereby have knowledge of the interests of those with whom I stand in relation. Benevolence void of loyalty is a dangerous sentimentalism, perhaps, because it leads to faulty inferences. Should I act only with apparent benevolence toward someone (i.e., with the outer appearance of benevolence but void of loyalty), this person may mistake me for a reliable fellow. In thinking me to be loyal to the same relation to which he is loyal, he may, for instance, invest trust in me that I will come to abuse. This demonstrates a way in which my benevolence is a dangerous sentimentalism, as far as he is concerned. This sentimentalism is a danger not only to him, however, but to me. If I make a habit of committing only apparently benevolent acts or otherwise only apparently moral acts, my choice against genuinely moral acts—i.e., loyal acts—is made at the peril of my inferring from such “successful” acts that I can flourish free of loyal relations (i.e., relations in which I am ∈ of something, relations characterized by order). If I am not disabused of this inference, however, I risk leading myself down a path of loneliness and purposelessness. “If order is only one aspect of the spiritual world,” Royce writes, “it is an indispensable aspect. Without it life would be a chaos, and the world a bad dream. Loyalty would have no cause, and human conduct no meaning.”70 To further appreciate the fundamental nature and indispensable significance of order, consider Royce’s closing words to Fite: That the ∈-relation although itself so abstract & formal is a presupposition of relations that may be rich & concrete any ordered assemblage shows. The moral relations simply exemplify all this on an especially high level. . . . The ∈-relation is a necessary basis and presupposition of all our deeper social relations. That is why my “consciousness” of another individual, or of countless other individuals can never do for me what my consciousness of my community can do. That is why I can never save myself,—simply because I am not ∈ of myself.71

Although Royce does not refer explicitly to the principle of loyalty to loyalty in “Order” or in his letter to Fite, we can infer that loyalty to loyalty is vital for order and therefore vital for the salvation that loyalty

Foust-Chap03.indd 79

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

80

loyalt y to loyalt y

can provide. While I am not ∈ of myself, I am ∈ of various communities, including that of humanity at large. While loyalty can save me from the world that is a bad dream and ensure me that my conduct will have meaning, it can do so only if my loyalties are ∈ of universal loyalty. After all, if my loyalties are not ∈ of universal loyalty, they do not belong to the ordered series from which we can reliably infer the promotion of sense and meaning that loyalty provides. Indeed, if my loyalties are disloyal to loyalty, they vitiate sense and meaning, thereby quite literally producing disorder. Thus, not only must I be loyal, but I must be loyal to loyalty. Moreover, I need the loyalty of my fellows to also be loyal to loyalty. If either of us is disloyal to loyalty, we weaken our community and thus endanger our binding relation, our being ∈ of the community. Thus, if our lives are to have sense and meaning, we must mutually reinforce, through loyal actions, one another’s status as ∈ of our community. Without loyalty, then, sense and meaning are impossible. Without loyalty to loyalty, sense and meaning are doomed. With loyalty and loyalty to loyalty, however, sense and meaning are made possible, sustained, and enriched. Conclusion In this chapter, we have considered Royce’s principle of loyalty to loyalty, a principle that is at once uniquely Royce’s and, as we have argued, expressive of several major traditional ways of conceiving of moral duty. Through analysis of Royce’s various articulations of this principle, we have come to a clearer understanding of his claims that in loyalty lies the whole duty of man and that every form of dutiful action is a case of loyalty to loyalty. We have claimed that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty, encapsulated in the principle of loyalty to loyalty, embodies intuitions of several major, traditional, and influential ways of thinking about moral obligation. Elements of consequentialism, deontological ethics, and virtue ethics are all to be found in Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. We might summarize these findings by describing Royce’s philosophy of loyalty as a deontological ethic that obliges us to cultivate the virtue of loyalty, with this cultivation attending to the consequentialist consideration of the maximization of loyalty among humanity. We have also found, through attention to the relationship between loyalty and order, the indispensable role that loyalty and loyalty to loyalty play in providing

Foust-Chap03.indd 80

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

loyalt y to loyalt y

81

our lives with sense and meaning. Thus, Royce’s philosophy of loyalty is instructive not just in the quest to live morally but in the quest to live in the first place. Still, we do not know how one develops into a loyal being— into someone who genuinely desires to be loyal to loyalty, is competent in determining what courses of action are consistent with that desire, and acts accordingly. In other words, we have not yet learned how it is that we learn to be loyal. This is the task of the next chapter.

Foust-Chap03.indd 81

6/5/2012 10:35:52 AM

fo ur

l e a r ni n g loyal ty



I

n a recent book dealing with Royce’s moral philosophy, Dwayne A. Tunstall asserts: “The serious problem with Royce’s ethics is that it neglects the origins of ethical experience. Instead, he conceives of ethics as the rational inquiry into how we ought to live.”1 Tunstall goes on to call the failure to describe the origins of ethical experience “a noticeable and damning oversight on Royce’s part”2 and states that Royce’s conception of ethics is “dangerous” because it “seems to consider a person as having moral worth only to the extent that we rationally recognize them as persons.”3 “Even when we encounter other human persons who have their own unique temporalities,” Tunstall, interpreting Royce, continues, “there is a strong probability that we will consider them simply as alter egos, and thus regard them as being meaningful not in themselves, but only insofar as they are assimilated into our own subjectivity.”4 When this happens, the other person becomes “merely another ‘construct’ of ours,” leading us “dangerously close to denying our responsibility to live by any immemorial ethical imperative, since such a self-enclosed subjectivity precludes the possibility for anyone to have any significance beyond { 82 }

Foust-Chap04.indd 82

6/5/2012 10:37:40 AM

learning loyalt y

83

whatever meaning we happen to confer on him or her.”5 These observations lead Tunstall to propose supplementing Royce’s thought with insights from the phenomenology of Emmanuel Levinas. Once such a combination is executed, we realize that our encounters with other persons presuppose that there is an ethical dimension to each and every encounter. Accordingly, our temporality derives its meaning from our encounters with other persons, or more specifically, from our response to an ethical imperative that has called us since time immemorial, an ethical imperative that expresses itself in the face of the concrete Other. This ethical imperative, then, demands that we live for-the-other and tend to his or her material, psychological, and spiritual needs and interests whenever we have the means to do so. Moreover, we are expected to be exemplars of this ethical imperative by assuming responsibility for-theother, even if no one reciprocates our acts of non-egological altruism.6

Tunstall’s charges are serious, and if he is right, Royce’s moral philosophy is significantly deficient for failing to account for the origins of ethical experience and for engendering an ethic that precludes the possibility of anyone having significance beyond whatever meaning we happen to confer on him or her. We must determine, then, whether Tunstall is right. There is no question that at least one aspect of Tunstall’s account of Royce is correct: As we have seen, Royce clearly conceives of ethics as the rational inquiry into how we ought to live. Tunstall does not clarify, however, how this conception of ethics is in conflict with a conception of ethics accounting for the origins of ethical experience. In fact, it seems that a rational inquiry into how we ought to live would involve accounting for the origins of ethical experience. Thus, Royce’s conceiving of ethics as the rational inquiry into how we ought to live need not entail a neglect of the origins of ethical experience. Still, Tunstall believes there to be positive evidence of Royce’s “damning oversight” of the origins of ethical experience. In contrast to this dramatically accusatory rhetoric, Tunstall hedges when articulating the consequences of Royce’s alleged error: Royce seemingly considers persons as having moral worth only to the extent that we rationally recognize them as persons; there is a strong probability that we will regard others as meaningful not in themselves but only insofar as they are assimilated into our own subjectivity; we are led dangerously close to denying our

Foust-Chap04.indd 83

6/5/2012 10:37:40 AM

84

learning loyalt y

responsibility to live by any immemorial ethical imperative. Noting the difference in strength of claims here is instructive, for the more damning contention is that of Royce’s “damning oversight” of the origins of ethical experience. Of course, Royce’s treatment of the origins of ethical experience is a subject integral to the concern of this chapter, “Learning Loyalty.” Once it is demonstrated that Royce does, in fact, account for the origins of ethical experience, the ground on which Tunstall’s weaker accusations rest is undermined. Consequently, one finds that Tunstall’s coupling of Levinas with Royce is superfluous, as those features that Tunstall believes that Levinas’s philosophy adds to Royce’s are already present in Royce’s. Indeed, it is difficult to see how the principle of loyalty to loyalty is not itself “an ethical imperative that expresses itself in the face of the concrete Other” that “demands that we live for-the-other and tend to his or her material, psychological, and spiritual needs and interests whenever we have the means to do so,” with our being “expected to be exemplars of this ethical imperative by assuming responsibility for-the-other, even if no one reciprocates our acts of non-egological altruism.” In this chapter, we will join Royce in tracing the origins and development of ethical experience. As we have seen, for Royce the genuine moral life is what is loyal and, indeed, what is loyal to loyalty. Thus, in articulating a Roycean view of the cultivation of loyalty, we will be presenting a Roycean picture of moral development. In addition to The Philosophy of Loyalty, other salient texts of Royce’s and of earlier commentators on Royce will guide our investigation. Tunstall neglects many of these texts, most notably Royce’s Studies of Good and Evil and Outlines of Psychology, and Peter Fuss’s The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce.7 We will find that attention to these texts not only rectifies Tunstall’s readings of Royce but also generates a somewhat robust Roycean account of moral development. We will then appraise Royce’s account, considering it in light of some recent efforts in philosophical scholarship to account for the learning of morality. In chapter 1, we encountered Royce’s use of the term “plan of life,” which we understood as the unity of purpose in one’s life. We saw that for Royce loyalty is a unifying virtue and that loyalty to a cause reflects one’s plan of life. Employing the term “plan of life” in his highly influential A Theory of Justice, John Rawls writes that “the rational plan for a person determines his good. Here I adapt Royce’s thought that a person

Foust-Chap04.indd 84

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

85

may be regarded as a human life lived according to a plan. For Royce an individual says who he is by describing his purposes and causes, what he intends to do in his life.”8 For Royce, the ability to live one’s life according to a plan—the ability to be loyal to a cause—is vital to personhood or selfhood. If one is bereft of a life plan, one is bereft of unity of purpose. If one is bereft of unity of purpose, one is bereft of any meaningful sense of personhood or selfhood. One does not form life plans overnight. In fact, Royce traces the beginning of the formation of life plans—again, we should stress, the formation of loyalty to causes—as far back as infancy. Thus, to join Royce in describing the processes involved in the formation of life plans is to join Royce in describing the origins of ethical experience. To these processes we now turn.

Imitative Processes as the Origins of Ethical Experience “Plans of life,” Royce asserts in The Philosophy of Loyalty, “first come to us in connection with our endless imitative activities. These imitative processes begin in our infancy, and run through our whole life.”9 The account that Royce gives of these processes in The Philosophy of Loyalty lacks the detail of what he provides in earlier psychological texts. Fuss’s treatment of these texts is thorough and much of my own account will echo his. My account will build on Fuss’s, however, by making explicit the connection of imitation to loyalty. In particular, I will establish the connection of Royce’s more explicitly psychological writings to his subsequent, more explicitly philosophical writings concerned with loyalty.10 Fuss’s discussion of Royce’s treatment of imitation draws on, among other resources, a series of twelve unpublished lectures of Royce’s entitled “Topics in Psychology of Interest to Teachers.”11 Fuss highlights the significance of imitation for Royce by sharing the following passage, in which Royce defines humanity in terms of imitation: Whatever else man is, he is above all an imitative being. His whole social life is a system of imitations. His morality is a doctrine concerning what ought to be imitated. His art is more than half an explicit imitation of the beautiful aspects of things. His science is an elaborate imitation of the conceivable structure of things.12

Foust-Chap04.indd 85

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

86

learning loyalt y

While discussions of art and science would take us beyond the scope of our study, that Royce defines these, as well as morality, in terms of imitative processes underscores the pervasiveness of the indispensability of imitation. Our concern, of course, is with the significance of imitation to the social and moral lives of humanity. We would benefit from knowing what Royce supposes imitation to be. Fuss finds Royce reluctant to offer a definition of imitation in these lectures but notes Royce’s definition of imitation in “Preliminary Report on Imitation,” an article published two years after these lectures. According to this definition, the imitative act is a more or less conscious motor adjustment that tends to set off a series of given experiences by furnishing from within the conscious counterpart of some one or more of the aspects of the first series— a counterpart which is both like and unlike the original, and whose contrast is therefore often as instructive as its similarity.13

This definition is dense, but Royce’s description of imitation in other texts helps to elucidate its meaning. What we first notice about imitation, as defined here, is that it is “a more or less conscious motor adjustment.” Identifying the origin of imitation will help to elucidate the motivation of this motor adjustment. Royce asks, “Does man learn to imitate because he is brought up in a social environment; or, on the contrary, is he capable of life in a social environment only because he is first, by nature and instinct, an imitative animal?”14 According to Fuss, “Royce has a predilection for the former, without wishing to exclude the latter.”15 In “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature,” an essay included in Studies of Good and Evil, Royce explicitly voices this predilection, holding that “a child is taught to be self-conscious just as he is taught everything else, by the social order that brings him up.”16 How does Royce distinguish between behavior that is self-conscious and that which is not? For Royce, one is self-conscious only by virtue of recognizing a contrast between one’s consciousness and some consciousness that one regards as external to one’s consciousness. Crying for food as an infant is an example of not yet self-conscious behavior, as is showing disappointment at unmet expectations when a bit older. Royce describes self-conscious behavior by use of several more examples:

Foust-Chap04.indd 86

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

87

When later, as older child, he struts about, playing soldier, or shyly hides from strangers, or asks endless questions merely to see what you will say, or quarrels with his fellows at play, or shrinks from reproof, or uses his little arts to win praise and caresses, he is self-conscious. These latter conditions are all of them such as involve a contrast between his own deeds and meanings and the deeds and meanings that he takes to be those of other conscious beings, whom, just as his conscious fellows, he loves or hates, fears or imitates, regards with social curiosity, or influences by devices adapted to what he thinks to be their states of mind.17

Still, as Fuss indicates, Royce holds on to the view that we are, by nature and instinct, imitative animals. It seems that Royce takes imitation to be instinctual but, in early childhood, rudimentary or immature. The instinct of imitation grows more complex as we are brought up in an increasingly complex social environment. In “Preliminary Report on Imitation,” Royce implicitly articulates such an understanding of imitation with his outlining of three types of imitative processes: (1) elementary and instinctual imitations of the actions of our fellows, (2) subsequently acquired tendencies to reproduce or to picture things in our physical environment, and (3) consciously idealized, playfully falsified, and symbolically abbreviated imitations of the interesting aspects of things.18 A familiar example of the first type of imitation is that of infants who react to others’ smiling at them by smiling. Royce’s example of the child pretending to be a soldier is a familiar example of the third type of imitation. Momentarily, Royce will provide us with an example of the second type. Given his preoccupation with imitation for several years before the publication of Outlines of Psychology, it is curious that, on introducing the term “imitation” in that text, Royce reverts to avoiding articulating a definition and instead refers the reader to James Mark Baldwin’s Mental Development in the Child and in the Race. Perhaps Royce finds a text purporting to provide “outlines” of psychology an inappropriate venue to delve deeply into the nuances of the phenomenon. Still, as Fuss accurately points out, Royce finds Baldwin’s conception of imitation too narrow, for it overlooks the contrast between what is me and what is not me. Whereas Baldwin has it that imitation amounts to mere repetition of stimuli, Royce holds that imitation is never mere repetition. Fuss paraphrases Royce as holding that “the most obvious contrast brought

Foust-Chap04.indd 87

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

88

learning loyalt y

to light in every imitative act is that the imitator experiences his series of imitative motor processes as being relatively controllable, plastic, and reproducible at will, whereas the perceived series imitated clearly is none of these things.”19 In describing imitation in The World and the Individual, two years before Outlines of Psychology, Royce highlights this contrast: An act of imitation . . . is essentially the construction of something that lies, in a technical sense, between the acts of my model, and what were formerly my own acts . . . [for] I never merely repeat his act. Imitation is a kind of experimental origination, a trial of a new plan, the initiation of a trial series of acts.20

That Royce thinks imitation to amount to something more than mere repetition should by now be clear. What is not yet clear, however, is how imitation constructs, originates, tries something new, or initiates a trial. We receive the rudiments of an answer to this question in Royce’s remark that “one may also call our judgments Imitative Processes, whereby we reconstruct our views of objects by putting together successive ideas of our own.”21 Significant to this conception of judgment is Royce’s further claim that “such imitations do not get their complete meaning for us until we have recognized that they express, in our own terms, what we find in the object that our imitative reconstruction is analyzing.”22 Royce describes, as an illustration of this conception of judgment as imitation, the act of studying the nature of an object by drawing a picture of it—an instance of the second of the three types of imitation outlined in “Preliminary Remarks on Imitation.” It is relevant that Royce supposes in this example that one is drawing a picture of the object in order to study the nature of the object, as such a picture would likely be as conducive toward this end as the depiction is an accurate imitation. While drawing such a picture is clearly an act of duplication, creative judgment plays a sustained role in the process. One judges whether one has duplicated sufficiently, one judges what measures need to be taken to come closer to this ideal, and one judges one’s picture as having been drawn sufficiently accurately to guide further study of the nature of the object depicted. These judgments are but a few of those successive ideas

Foust-Chap04.indd 88

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

89

put together in the process of reconstructing the object in question, or, in other words, these judgments are but a few involved in the process of imitation. At the same time that this imitative process issues a copy, it has been marked by creativity and indeed creates something new. The imitator has made not merely an image of the object in question but, at the least, a new tool by which the imitator can learn the nature of the object when the object itself is no longer accessible. The creativity marking this imitation is similar to, but more basic than, what occurs in the case of the child pretending to be a soldier. This act of imitation is characterized by more complexity insofar as the child duplicates not merely an object but a persona replete with mannerisms and attitudes; the child struts about as a dutiful soldier. Correlated with growth in complexity in imitation is growth in complexity of creativity. Whereas it seems doubtful that creativity marks the returned smile of the infant, and surely some creativity marks the drawing of the object for the purposes of studying it further, a wealth of creativity may come to characterize the impersonation of the soldier. In addition to strutting dutifully, the child might identify as a particular soldier, in a particular location, embroiled in a particular conflict, hampered by particular weaknesses, buoyed by particular advantages, and affected in myriad ways by various strokes of fortune. Moreover, all of these circumstances may be, while conjured in acts of imitation, entirely fictional and therefore, to a significant degree, original. The child may, for instance, be Soldier Krang from Planet Suspenders, embroiled in a battle against his arch nemesis, Soldier Trang, with whom he shares a long and storied rivalry. In Outlines of Psychology, Royce distinguishes social processes of imitation from phenomena of social opposition “and of the love for contrasting one’s self with one’s fellows in behaviour, in opinion, or in power.”23 Royce describes both imitation and opposition as instinctive and, as illustrated in these passages, pervasive: It is by imitation that the child learns its language. It is by imitation that it acquires all the social tendencies that make it a tolerable member of society. Its imitativeness is the source of an eager and restless activity which the child pursues for years under circumstances of great difficulty, and even when the processes involved seem to be more painful than pleasurable. Imitativeness remains with us through life. It attracts

Foust-Chap04.indd 89

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

90

learning loyalt y

less of our conscious attention in our adult years, but is present in ways that the psychologist is able to observe even in case of people who suppose themselves not to be imitative.24 These phenomena of social contrast and opposition . . . appear very early in childhood. They last in most people throughout life. They may take extremely hostile and formidable shapes. In their normal expression they constitute one of the most valuable features of any healthy social activity.25

In fact, for Royce, both imitation and opposition are normally indicative of healthy social activity, while both admit of the possibility of taking on unhealthy or harmful forms. We have considered cases of the former; Royce cites as a case of the latter “any lively conversation or discussion.”26 I suspect that he stops short of citing any lively disagreement or debate as an example of healthy social activity marked by opposition because in cases in which these are sufficiently animated, they bring about divisiveness and are thus unhealthy. Indeed, such cases are loci for disloyalty and loyalties that are disloyal to loyalty. The phenomenon of mob mentality, an example to which Royce refers in many places throughout his corpus, is illustrative of the dangers both of imitativeness and of opposition. We will discuss this issue further in chapter 5, “Loyalty and Community.” What are the implications of Royce’s accounts of imitation and opposition for the origins of moral experience? Of these instincts, Royce remarks: The entire process of conscious education involves the deliberate appeal to the docility of these two types of social instincts. For whatever else we teach to a social being, we teach him to imitate. And whatever use we teach him to make of his social imitations in his relations with other men, we are obliged at the same time to teach him to assert himself, in some sort of way, in contrast with his fellows, and by virtue of the arts which he possesses.27

If the entire process of conscious education involves the deliberate appeal to imitation and opposition, then it follows that moral experience must derive from these social instincts. Moreover, if moral experience is to be understood in terms of loyalty, then the learning of loyalty is rooted in appeal to these social instincts.

Foust-Chap04.indd 90

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

91

The Paradox of Plans of Life In The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce refers to the following “paradox” inherent in his notion of a plan of life: I, and only I, whenever I come to my own, can morally justify to myself my own plan of life. No outer authority can ever give me the true reason for my duty. Yet I, left to myself, can never find a plan of life. I have no inborn ideal naturally present within myself. By nature I simply go on crying out in a sort of chaotic self-will, according as the momentary play of desire determines.28

We must recognize that while Royce is, in this passage, denying the innateness of ideals, he is not, as Tunstall might suggest, neglecting to account for the genesis of ideals. On the contrary, on presenting this paradox, Royce hazards its solution, holding that “one gets one’s various plans of life suggested through the models that are set before each one of us by his fellows.”29 These models are objects of our imitation, where, as we have seen, imitation involves not merely duplication but creative expression and opposition. The interplay of imitation and opposition is brought into sharp relief in another articulation of the paradox of plans of life, in which Royce describes a “seemingly endless play of inner and outer”:30 We hereupon look within, at what we call our own conscience, to find out what our duty is. But, as we do so, we discover, too often, what wayward and blind guides our own hearts so far are. So we look without, in order to understand better the ways of the social world. We cannot see the inner light. Let us try the outer one. These ways of the world appeal to our imitativeness, and so we learn from the other people how we ourselves are in this case to live. Yet no,—this very learning often makes us aware of our personal contrast with other people, and so makes us self-conscious, individualistic, critical, rebellious; and again we are thrown back on ourselves for guidance.31

Entangled in this seemingly endless play of inner and outer, one becomes “more wayward and . . . more perplexed . . . the longer [one] continue[s] this sort of inquiry.”32 As we have seen in previous chapters, waywardness and perplexity are ailments with which Royce was persistently preoccupied. They are,

Foust-Chap04.indd 91

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

92

learning loyalt y

on one hand, natural, for persons are complex beings and fundamental features of our being often stand at tension with one another. The instincts of imitation and opposition are illustrative. On the other hand, waywardness and perplexity are tractable. The complexity of persons includes plasticity, the ability to adapt to changes in environing conditions, including those conditions initially rendering us wayward and perplexed. Royce envisions what he describes as a happy union between the inner and outer realms, in which waywardness and perplexity are diminished. “This happy union,” Royce explains, “is the one that takes place whenever my mere social conformity, my docility as an imitative creature, turns into exactly that which, in these lectures, I shall call loyalty.”33 Recalling that for Royce “morality is a doctrine concerning what ought to be imitated,” and that “one gets one’s various plans of life suggested through the models that are set before each one of us by his fellows,” one wonders what models are to be imitated. In general terms, the models in question would need to enable us to formulate plans of life in such a way that we are able to subvert the paradox of plans of life. Further, the models to be imitated would need to foster genuinely moral and fulfilling lives. While Royce does not develop a detailed educational program centered on a set of such models, he does in several places offer indications of what might serve as better or worse models for achieving these ends. That Royce relies on the models of fellows as formative guides to developing plans of life underscores his locating the origins of ethical experience in childhood manifestations of imitation. Royce dedicates an entire lecture of The Philosophy of Loyalty to the topic of “training for loyalty.” Therein, Royce asserts: Before true loyalty can appear in any but rather crude and fragmentary forms in the life of a growing human being, a long discipline of the whole mind must have preceded. One must have become capable of conceiving what a social cause is. One must have learned decisiveness and fidelity through an elaborate general preparation of the will. Therefore, while the beginnings of loyalty extend far back into the life of childhood, its full development must belong to mature years.34

In what follows, we will see how, for Royce, children become capable of conceiving what a social cause is and what sort of preparation of the will is required to teach children decisiveness and fidelity—the pair of

Foust-Chap04.indd 92

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

93

qualities that Royce found critical in times when distinguishing which loyalty, among competing loyalties, is most loyal to loyalty. I believe that we can understand the development of these skills as the gradual wresting of oneself from the existentially weighted paradox of plans of life. The abilities of conceiving what a social cause is and being decisive and faithful are earmarks of having formulated a plan of life characterized not just by loyalty but by loyalty to loyalty. We should regard all that goes into learning loyalty in youth as propaedeutical to living loyally as an adult, though this is not to discount the importance of loyalty in youth. The fact is, however, that as we grow older, we find ourselves situated in more, and more-varied, communities than we do when we are younger, and the causes uniting these communities carry the potential of conflict. Negotiating such conflict is, as we have seen, highly precarious. Indeed, as many of the examples we have considered have made clear, such negotiations are among the most difficult experiences that we undergo.

Learning Loyalty in Childhood and Adolescence Royce cites the “well-known disposition to idealize heroes and adventures, to live an imaginary life, to have ideal comrades, and to dream of possible great enterprises”35 as an early childhood contribution toward preparation for loyal living. “If I have never been fascinated in childhood by my heroes and by the wonders of life,” Royce claims, “it is harder to fascinate me later with the call of duty.”36 A variety of imagined heroes and wonders populate the minds of children, and children often imagine themselves as such heroes in contact with such wonders. Such imaginings are very often, Royce believes, fragmentary forms of loyalty. We have considered one such example in our imagined battle between Soldiers Krang and Trang. Myriad examples might be invoked, however, and, consonant with Royce’s effort to deemphasize the association of loyalty and martial virtue, we do well to invoke at least some other kinds. Virtually any game in which children act out roles would seem to serve the same function. Thus, “playing house,” in which children adopt the roles of mother, father, baby, and the like, serves as practice in enacting loyal relations; one “plays house” well if one is a good mother, for instance, performing the duties that those playing expect of mothers. The mother

Foust-Chap04.indd 93

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

94

learning loyalt y

in the game is susceptible to the moral castigation of others if, for example, she neglects to feed the baby. Pretending to be what one wants to be when one grows up seems also to be an early experience in learning loyalty. A child aspiring to be a singer, for instance, might imitate the model of a popular singer, attempting to sing the songs the singer sings in the way the singer sings them. In so doing, the child demonstrates faithfulness to perceived qualities of excellence characterizing the practice of singing. The child is, in her imagined world, an excellent singer, owing perhaps in part to natural talent but also in part to devoted service to the cause of singing. She will be successful if loyal to her cause, not so if not. With three sons of his own, Royce surely had empirical evidence for his claim that “children appreciate the loyalty or disloyalty of our conduct towards them sooner than they can define their own duty. And the one who would train for loyalty must therefore be, in his dealings with children, peculiarly scrupulous about his own loyalty.”37 The aforementioned examples of childhood imagination and idealization of heroes are only partly illustrative of formative preoccupations with loyalty. Royce warns those adults who would “outrag[e] the embryonic conscience”38 of children under their supervision by trifling with children’s codes of honor by encouraging a talebearer or requiring a child to be an informer. It is not long before children, when placed into a social environment, form loyalties that they indeed serve. Royce cites the loyalty of a bad gang of schoolboys as a less than optimal example but also highlights the loyalty to the ideal of truth-telling among schoolchildren who forbid their peers from telling tales to their teacher. As children grow into adolescents, more-complex forms of loyalty develop. As examples, Royce cites loyalty to fraternal organizations and to “one’s own side in an athletic contest, or to one’s college or institution, viewed as an athletic entity.”39 Royce is careful to stipulate that such loyalties are not unequivocally praiseworthy, for they are marked by abuses, particularly in the form of excesses. Fraternities “may become organizations for general mischief and disorder,” while athletic contests “may involve overmuch passion, and may even do harm to the general loyalty by fostering the spirit of unfair play.”40 Consistent with the emphasis on the indispensability of imitation in the development of the moral self, Royce remarks that “it is notable that both of these sorts of abuses increase when the fraternities and the athletic organizations are imitated in the

Foust-Chap04.indd 94

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

95

lower schools by the children. The resulting dangers show that loyalty ought not to be a prematurely forced plant. It should grow, in its various forms, in its due time.”41 This is not the lone instance in The Philosophy of Loyalty of Royce employing a horticultural metaphor to describe the development of morality, and we should not consider his doing so merely a rhetorical flourish. Royce describes conscience as “the flower rather than the root of the moral life,” a flower that should never sprout “unless we possessed an innate power to become reasonable, unless we were socially disposed beings, unless we were able to so develop our reason and our social powers as to see that the good of mankind is indeed also our own good, and in brief, unless we inherited a genuine moral nature.”42 Thus, the learning of loyalty is a kind of growth, requiring regular attention on the part of those responsible for its nourishing. As a child transitions from adolescence to adulthood, of course, the metaphor loses some of its aptness; humans must nourish themselves and each other in a way that flowers cannot. The athletic contest is Royce’s favored example when he is discussing the learning of loyalty by children and adolescents. The attention that Royce pays to this example is not confined to the pages of The Philosophy of Loyalty. In at least two other places he elaborates at length on the influence that athletics has on the learning of loyalty: “Some Relations of Physical Training to the Present Problems of Moral Education in America,” an essay that he included in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, and “Football and Ideals,” a subsequently composed essay that is included in the recent, expanded reissue of that text. Because Royce finds athletics such an illustrative domain for the learning of loyalty, we must consider these discussions. In “Some Relations of Physical Training to the Present Problems of Moral Education in America,” Royce inquires as to what is entailed by the moral training of any given individual. This question is best approached, Royce believes, by sketching a moral ideal—an ideal “of what, as I suppose, we all, more or less consciously, desire any moral agent to become.” Continuing, he asserts that “if we define this ideal, then the moral training of an individual will be defined as the training that is best adapted to help that individual to approach this moral ideal.”43 Unsurprisingly, Royce defines the “the ideal human moral agent” as “wholeheartedly and effectively loyal to some fitting object of loyalty.”44

Foust-Chap04.indd 95

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

96

learning loyalt y

An object of loyalty is fitting, of course, if it promotes loyalty (i.e., the loyalty is loyal to loyalty). In language that recalls his description of imitation as a motor process, Royce here describes loyalty as “essentially an active virtue. It involves manifold sentiments,—love, good-will, earnestness, delight in the cause; but it is complete only in motor terms, never in merely sentimental terms. It is useless to call my feelings loyal unless my muscles somehow express this loyalty.”45 Nobody can be effectively loyal unless “trained on the motor side,” Royce explains, “so it is indeed plain that surely one way, at least, to prepare a man for a loyal life, is to give him a careful and extended motor training, such as organizes his conduct in harmony with his nobler sentiments.”46 Royce is emphasizing the “practical” nature of loyalty—the notion that loyalty is never mere emotion but is manifested in action. Just as imitation is never mere imitation but involves self-willing, loyalty is never merely sentiment but involves deeds. “Hence,” Royce asserts, “the loyal attitude is one which especially interests any teacher who is concerned with what his pupil does.”47 Teachers of physical education are clearly no exception, and, given Royce’s point of emphasis in this discussion, are indeed among the most fitting examples. After presenting his conceptions of loyalty and loyalty to loyalty, Royce summarizes three ways in which physical education is integral to the learning of loyalty. Supplanting his use of “practical” in his definition of loyalty with reference to the “whole active self,” Royce remarks that, because loyalty is “a willing and thoroughgoing devotion of the whole active self to a chosen cause or to a chosen system of causes,” devotion is “a motor process. One must be in control of one’s powers, or one has no self to give to one’s cause.”48 Royce compares the situation of the loyal agent to that of the person engaged in a particularly strenuous exercise. The exercise demands that one remain focused and engaged in the face of the strain or excitement that may be prompted by the difficulty or exhilaration associated with it. “So the work of the effectively loyal person,” Royce suggests, “is always one which requires that he should stand in presence of undertakings large enough to threaten to cloud his judgment and to crush his self-control, while his loyalty still demands that he also should keep his head despite the strain, and should retain steady control of his personality, even in order to devote it to the cause.”49

Foust-Chap04.indd 96

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

97

Royce’s counsel to seek causes that threaten to cloud one’s judgment and crush one’s self-control may sound strange, but we must appreciate the psychological state that Royce is attempting to highlight as characteristic of the exemplary loyal agent. The loyal person remains loyal in the face of obstacles—for the devotion of loyalty is thoroughgoing—and one’s loyalties are often most clearly recognized in times of distress associated with obstacles to service to one’s cause(s). One is less likely to run up against such obstacles if one’s causes are few and/or narrow and more likely to do so if one’s causes are many and/or vast. To draw out the exercise analogy, one may adopt a regimen in which one persistently performs the same exercises at the same level of strenuousness. While it is good for the exercising agent to be exercising at all, the benefits of such a regimen are limited. One’s body eventually reaches a level of comfort with the tasks being imposed on it such that the effectiveness of the exercise diminishes; the enrichment of the exerciser stagnates. One needs to continually challenge the body by adapting one’s exercise regimen to one’s progress. For instance, if one achieves one’s goal of running a mile in ten minutes, one is generally better served by attempting to run a mile in less time or by running farther in the same duration than by continually running a mile in ten minutes. In this way, one maintains the active and strenuous nature of one’s exercising and becomes more capable of facing more-strenuous tasks in the future. Such a runner would be a more plausible candidate to run a marathon, for instance, than the runner whose regimen consists solely of running a mile in ten minutes. The situation of the runner is comparable to the situation of the loyal in general inasmuch as the loyal maintains the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing nature of one’s devotion to one’s cause. Remaining willingly, practically, and in a thoroughgoingly loyal in the face of obstacles now prepares one to be so in the face of greater obstacles later. The need to persist despite challenges and defeats appears “to the consciousness of the athlete and to the consciousness of the moral hero in decidedly analogous ways.”50 The analogousness of this lesson illustrates one way in which one learns loyalty via physical education. One may also learn loyalty via physical education by participation in group athletic activities. Such activities are, according to Royce, instances of “loyalty itself,—loyalty in simple forms, but in forms which appeal to the natural enthusiasm of youth, which are adapted to the boyish and .

Foust-Chap04.indd 97

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

98

learning loyalt y

later to the adolescent phases of evolution, and which are a positive training for the very tasks which adult loyalty exemplifies.”51 While Royce’s reliance on the masculine pronoun in his writing should generally be construed as conformity to the convention of his time,52 his use of “boyish” most likely is intended to refer to the male gender in particular. It was commonly held at Royce’s time that physical exercise was too strenuous and potentially harmful for girls and women—a view that would render group athletic activities exclusively the domain of boys and men. That group athletic activities should be associated exclusively with masculinity lent itself to the association of training in athletics to training in militarism—an association that we have already seen Royce meet with disfavor. Here, Royce states, “I should view militarism as a decidedly blind, although often sincere and intense, form of loyalty,—a form which will vanish from the earth whenever men come to an enlightened sense of what loyalty to loyalty implies.”53 Given that Royce distances his philosophy of loyalty from what associates it necessarily with militarism, it may be judicious to resist dwelling long on his reference to the “boyish” phase of evolution. The tasks that Royce sees adult loyalty exemplifying are those that draw one out of one’s private self and into the greater social world, and, as his own many and varied examples show, Royce believes women entirely capable of being so loyal. The third way in which physical training assists one in learning loyalty concerns the spirit of fair play encouraged by competitive athletic activities. In The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce states the significance of fair play in rather dramatic fashion: “The coach, or the other leader in college sports, to whom fair play is not a first concern, is simply a traitor to our youth and to our nation.”54 Why should the coach who fails to prioritize fair play be so condemned? Royce sees the spirit of fair play as that of the spirit of loyalty to loyalty. “Fair play depends upon essentially respecting one’s opponent just because of his loyalty to his own side,” Royce claims. “It means a tendency to enjoy, to admire, to applaud, to love, to further that loyalty of his at the very moment when I keenly want and clearly intend to thwart his individual deeds, and to win this game if I can.”55 It may appear that Royce contradicts himself in holding that fair play encourages furthering the loyalty of one’s opponent while also encouraging the thwarting of the opponent’s deeds performed in service of his cause. These effects are certainly at tension with one another, but Royce believes that fair play engenders “the spiritual power to appreciate that

Foust-Chap04.indd 98

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

99

common good for which even those who are mutually most hostile are contending.”56 In the case of an athletic contest, perhaps the common good is victory. Our team prizes victory as does our opponent. Recognizing that we each value victory, we respect the efforts of our opponent to attain the very victory that we are attempting to attain. This respect, like loyalty, is not exhausted by sentiment. We play fairly, refraining from cheating that would confer to us an unfair advantage in our competition for the sought-after victory. At the same time that we further our opponent’s loyalty, our loyalty in this competition requires us to thwart the loyal deeds of our opponent. Of course, such is the case for our opponent with respect to our loyal deeds. Our cause and that of our opponent stand in mutual opposition. All the same, if we and our opponent adhere to fair play, our competition promotes rather than negates loyalty. This phenomenon may be witnessed on a grand scale in the case of Olympic games, in which athletes representing numerous countries compete against one another for the honor associated with a gold medal. Those found cheating—for instance, by taking illegal substances that enhance one’s natural abilities—are barred from participation. If their cheating is discovered after they have won a medal, their medal is revoked. Their actions are regarded as an affront to the expectation of fair play, or, as Royce would understand it, their actions are viewed as instances of disloyalty to loyalty. This lesson transfers beyond the athletic arena to life in general. “We human beings cannot agree as to the choice of our individual causes,” writes Royce, but “we can learn to honor one another’s loyalty.”57 We should recall that, for Royce, narcissism and loyalty are incompatible. Thus, the example just furnished concerning athletes aspiring toward victory may seem inappropriate to the effort to capture the relationship that Royce sees between physical training and learning loyalty. As we have seen, Royce stresses fulfillment in self-sacrifice, not in posterity gained through awards, such as medals, or public opinion, as is expressed, for example, in the fervor of fans celebrating the victory of their favored team or athlete. The loyal come from all walks of life, and it seems that many whom Royce regards as exemplary in their loyalty live in virtual anonymity. Reconciling his discussion of the exhilaration of the successful loyal athlete with that of other types of loyal persons, Royce suggests a way of estimating the ideals held by each. This reconciliation turns on the notion of maximal experiences, those times in which we feel as though

Foust-Chap04.indd 99

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

100

learning loyalt y

“life reached for the time its highest expression, the maxima of our curve of existence.”58 The experience of victory may count as such a maximal experience, though various other types abound; “a conversion or a sudden relief from great sorrow, a homecoming, the reunion of lovers long parted, the moment of hearing the first cry of some newborn infant,— these are familiar instances of what may be such maxima in the curve of experience of this or of that human being,—glorious discoveries of new success or of great attainment.”59 These experiences are extraordinary and exhilarating, but Royce wonders how they might be evaluated in terms of morality. Addressing the experience of victory on the part of athletes, Royce asks, “With what exultation are they filled when they contemplate their greatest attainments? Tell me that, and I can do something to comprehend their moral attitude toward their work, and the perils and the uses of this attitude.”60 The point, for Royce, is that the athlete ought to contemplate something in addition to victory—something that “is of the nature of a morally significant enlargement or fulfillment” of a “higher self, so that the memory of this maximum is indeed any sort of moral inspiration in later life.”61 One can see how such thoughts attend those of the other types of maximal experiences Royce has enumerated. Contemplation of any of these events may prompt heightened awareness of the precariousness of existence, replete with setbacks, surprises, and successes. Such a heightened awareness lends itself to deepened appreciation of the value of toil and struggle and may thereby renew the enthusiasm with which one serves one’s various causes. The ideal maximal experience of the athlete is that in which he is “clearly in possession of himself, and of his loyal relations to his mates and his rivals.”62 If the maximal experience of the athlete is of this description, then the athlete conceives of the good life in terms consonant with loyalty. He will pursue other aspects and relations in the fashion that he has pursued athletics, driven by the hope for other experiences similar in type. Such is an example that Royce would encourage youth learning loyalty to follow. Royce again discusses the moral influence of athletics in “Football and Ideals,” an essay in which he asks whether football, as an American institution and great social force, is conducive to the moral education of the American people. He reiterates many of the themes of “Some Relations of Physical Training to the Present Problems of Moral Education in

Foust-Chap04.indd 100

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

101

America” but broadens the scope of those whose moral education is affected by sport, directly addressing the matter of spectators. “The moral effect upon the players is an effect of vanishing quantity when compared with the moral effect upon the masses who do not play,” Royce suggests. The critical question, then, is: “Does it train me in loyalty to see another man showing his physical prowess in a loyally devoted way? He, the player, indeed, is loyal. Does that make me, the spectator, a loyal man?”63 While children and adolescents do, of course, constitute part of the audience of a typical football game, it is evident that Royce is mainly considering adults—though, perhaps most pointedly, young adults in college, who often find themselves swept up in the hoopla of college football. We have seen that for Royce loyalty is contagious and, in the context of this discussion, he reminds us of this. The example of another person’s loyalty is typically most influential on us, Royce believes, either when we ourselves were already working with this person in the same sport, task, or other cause or were inspired by the example of this person to practically imitate her or translate her loyal spirit into our own deeds in service of our own cause. Therefore, while a spectator approves praiseworthy action in cheering the loyal athlete, such cheering “is the cheapest and tamest form in which you can possibly honor loyalty.”64 Royce cites the self-professed noble loyalty of the fan who cheers, waves his flag, and loses his wits while a spectator to an athletic contest. Reacting to such a person, Royce asks: What does this enthusiasm make you do? These players are setting you the example of loyalty. They risk their bodies, they devote their toil, they suffer and endure,—for their cause. And you,—you should regard it as a deep disgrace to have sat there staring and glowing, to have enjoyed the spectacle of their devotion, to have made your holiday out of their pain, to have gloried in their care and in their service,— unless in your life there is some service, some effective loyalty, which is at least as hard, as long, as painful, as cheerful in danger, as resolute in the face of apparent defeat, as patient when defeat has come,—as their loyalty has taught them to be.65

If a spectator internalizes the example of the players on the football field, inspired to be more practically devoted to their own tasks, football has been educational. If, on the other hand, the prevailing effect of watching

Foust-Chap04.indd 101

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

102

learning loyalt y

football has simply been emotional enervation, the experience has been educationally prohibitive. Indeed, such an experience renders one “less, not more loyal,” for one has “gloated over the sacrifice of others” while not sacrificing and not intending to sacrifice anything oneself.66 We can imagine that Royce would allow his commentary on football to be extended to any sport or strenuous activity attracting spectators. I believe it to be a defect of Royce’s that, after his discussion of the role of physical training in the learning of loyalty, he does not add a discussion of other types of training. Royce could not have assumed that every child, adolescent, and young adult participates in athletics, whether as athletes, coaches, or spectators. Compatible with his view that each person must find a vocation that suits his talents, thereby allowing him to be most effectively loyal, Royce would surely concede that physical training is just one type of training by which one learns loyalty. One may learn loyalty via the sorts of training characterizing the arts, for instance, as well as the sciences. Close examination of Royce’s thought suggests that these alternatives are particularly apt. Royce often refers, in the same breath, to art and science as examples of domains of loyalty67 and is recorded as having stated during the time of the First World War, “If peace comes—artists & scientists will help it to come.”68 “Art supports loyalty,” Royce indicates, “whenever it associates our cause with beautiful objects, whenever it sets before us the symbols of our cause in any worthy expression, and whenever, again, by showing us any form of the beautiful, it portrays to us that very sort of learning and unity that loyalty ceaselessly endeavors to bring into human life. Thus viewed, art may be a teacher of loyalty.”69 In another context,70 Royce highlights the range of invention, self-control in production, and objective portrayal of human life characteristic of literary art—qualities that transfer to the art of being loyal (originality in expression of loyalty, ensuring as well as one can that one’s loyalty is loyal to loyalty, and sensitivity to the vicissitudes of one’s own life and those of others in one’s quest to live loyally). Likewise, the “calm and laborious devotion to science” serves as an example of the spirit of loyalty, “an example full of the same strenuousness, the same fascinated love of an idealised object, and, best of all, full of the willingness to face unknown fortunes, however hard, and to abandon, when that is necessary, momentary joys, however dear, in a pursuit of one of the principal goods which humanity needs— namely, an understanding of the wonderful world in which we mortals

Foust-Chap04.indd 102

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

103

are required to work out our destiny.”71 We might improve on Royce by placing greater emphasis on the fact that models other than that of physical training and sport can be greatly conducive to the learning of loyalty. While he seems impressed by the extent of the punishment through which football players are willing to put their bodies, citing public servants who trace their capacity for loyalty to “broken bones” incurred on the football field,72 Royce also cautions the loyal against hazards to their health, for endangering one’s health means endangering one’s capacity to be loyal. Given the pervasiveness of life-shortening and life-threatening sports injuries—for instance, the commonality of concussions suffered by players in the National Football League—making nonathletic examples more prominent in the teaching of loyalty to our youth would seem a more reasonable approach than we might extrapolate strictly from the writings of Royce. Learning Loyalty in Adulthood “We constantly need, all of us,” Royce writes, “individual training in the art of loyalty.”73 Loyalty must continue to be learned, then, beyond the time of adolescence. Royce outlines three guides of loyalty in mature life: “First, our loyalty is trained and kept alive by the influence of personal leaders. Secondly, the higher forms of training for loyalty involve a momentous process which I shall call the Idealizing of the Cause. Thirdly, loyalty is especially perfected through great strains, labors, and sacrifices in the service of the cause.”74 Given our propensity toward imitation, the influence of personal leaders should be evident. Through the contagion of their loyalty, loyal leaders foster loyal fellows. Envisioning the formation of a new club, Royce explains: “Some group of persons, sometimes a single leader, must be found, willing to devote time and energy to directing the new organization. The leader(s) must believe the enterprise worth while, must proclaim its importance in vigorous terms, and must patiently stand by the club through all the doubtful first period of its existence.”75 The club is more likely to be sustained and to prosper if its leadership performs these actions. “The club must become a cause,” Royce states, “in whose service members are one.”76 Inspired by the loyalty of the leader(s), the members join in loyal service of the club in question, regarding their own loyalty as partly constitutive of that shared by the club, leader(s) and fellows alike.

Foust-Chap04.indd 103

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

104

learning loyalt y

Such loyalty is achieved when the cause—in this case, the club—is idealized. “The whole history of loyalty,” Royce states, “is the history of the inseparable union of the personal influence of leaders with the tendency to idealize causes.”77 In language evocative of Kant’s second formulation of the categorical imperative, Royce describes the process of idealizing the cause as that of showing that the cause is not “merely an instrument to further a loyalty that is intelligible apart from the existence of this very instrument” but is rather “an end in itself.”78 While “learning to ascribe to the new club the ideal dignity of a common cause is sometimes a difficult process,”79 this process is carried out in several ways. Among the methods cited by Royce are those of personifying the club in various poetical ways; praising the club as a sort of superhuman being; endowing the club with a legal personality; holding club ceremonials, festivals, or rituals; creating club emblems and symbols; and naming the club after famous or beloved people, including, in their honor, the dead. That personification of causes is a chief method of idealizing causes should not go unnoticed. We learn to be loyal to causes when we recognize their personal—and indeed, superpersonal—nature. The cause “needs to become incarnate, as it were, in the person of the leaders,”80 for, inspired by leaders, others come to embody the cause in the form of their own loyal deeds. “Loyalty means giving the Self to the Cause,” writes Royce, and “the art of giving is learned by giving.”81 Strain, toil, sacrifice, and endurance borne of loyal service teach anew the significance and meaning of loyalty. While such is the lesson that we have found Royce to view as imparted by athletics, and such is the lesson that we have seen Steinmetz to find imparted by war, psychical toil is as much a teacher of loyalty as its physical counterpart. Describing “the dear pangs of labor at the moments when perhaps defeat and grief most seem ready to crush our powers, and when only the very vehemence of labor itself saves us from utter despair,” Royce insists that “the loyalty of the most peaceful enables us all to experience, sooner or later, what it means to give, whatever it was in our power to give, for the cause, and then to see our cause take its place, to human vision, amongst the lost causes.”82 Thus, our own strenuous loyal efforts teach us the value of such efforts, even when our purposes fail to reach fulfillment. To better understand how this is so, let us focus on Royce’s notion of a lost cause.

Foust-Chap04.indd 104

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

105

Loyalty to Lost Causes While Royce does not explicitly announce a definition of “lost cause,” his various remarks on lost causes lead to a general notion of the term, which he likely adopts at least in part because of its Civil War associations. “Lost Cause” refers to the Lost Cause of the Confederacy, a movement that portrayed the Confederacy, led by Robert E. Lee, as chivalrous in battle while portraying the Union, led by Ulysses S. Grant, as winning the Civil War by overwhelming force. Royce alludes to Lee with some frequency in writings concerned with loyalty. The following passage is particularly illustrative of Royce’s opinion of Lee: “Lee was the foe of that Union in whose triumph we now rejoice. Yet we may and should look upon him as, in his own personal intent, a model of the spirit of true loyalty, for he gave all that he had and was to what he found to be his cause.”83 According to Gary W. Gallagher, one of the motives of the architects of the Lost Cause was “to justify their own actions and allow themselves and other former Confederates to find something positive in all-encompassing failure.”84 But as David W. Blight details, Lost Causers sought to “write and control the history of the war and its aftermath,” with white supremacy serving both as means and end.85 Noting the history of “lost cause” and believing that “Royce’s discussion of loyalty to lost causes should be read explicitly as a defense of the ‘Lost Cause,’ ”86 Marilyn Fischer asserts that “a serious philosophical examination of loyalty to loyalty would assess Royce’s position in the context of the Lost Causers’ contributions to white supremacy.”87 I will provide such an assessment—albeit one admittedly too brief—in chapter 5, “Loyalty to Community.” For now, let us bracket the issue of whether and to what degree Royce’s use of “lost cause” is shaped by sympathy with—or loyalty to—the Lost Cause. If his use of “lost cause” is so conditioned, he is decidedly silent in The Philosophy of Loyalty about this influence. For now, let us examine what Royce does say about the “lost cause” in The Philosophy of Loyalty, with an eye toward seeing how loyalty to lost causes aids in the learning of loyalty. According to Royce, “When a cause is lost in the visible world, and when, nevertheless, it survives in the hearts of its faithful followers, one sees more clearly than ever that its appeal is no longer to be fully met by any possible present deed. Whatever one can just now do for the cause is

Foust-Chap04.indd 105

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

106

learning loyalt y

seen to be inadequate.”88 “All the more, in consequence,” Royce continues, “does this cause demand that its followers should plan and work for the far-off future, for whole ages and æons of time; should prepare the way for their Lord, the cause, and make his paths straight.”89 While Royce refers to the early Christian church as being founded directly on loyalty to its own lost cause, this example and his description of the cause as its followers’ “Lord” should not be interpreted as entailing that only religious causes can be lost causes. Lost causes are those in which great loyal service has been invested and yet, despite this loyal service, fulfillment of the cause appears interminably evasive. When one serves lost causes, one begins to “discover that, in some sense, one ought to devote one’s highest loyalty precisely to the causes that are too good to be visibly realized at any one moment of this poor wretched fleeting time world in which we see and touch and find mere things, mere sensations, mere feelings of the moment.”90 At the same time that remarks such as this make lost causes appear forever lost, Royce urges that loyalty to lost causes is “attended by two comrades, grief and imagination,”91 each of which sustains the loyal in continued devotion to the lost cause: Yet loyalty, always strenuous and active, is not enervated by these deep emotions, nor yet confused by the wealth of these visions; but rather devotes itself to resolving upon what shall be. Grief it therefore transforms into a stimulating sense of need. If we have lost, then let us find. Loyalty also directs its deeds by the visions that imagination furnishes; and meanwhile it demands in turn that the imagination shall supply it with visions that can be translated into deeds. When it hears from the imagination the story of the coming triumph, it does not become passive. Rather does it say: Watch, for ye know not the day or the hour when the triumph of the cause is to come.92

Thus, while lost causes appear forever lost, there is no absolute guarantee against their recovery. We continue to serve such causes, animated by hope for their fulfillment, however remote this fulfillment might appear to be. Loyalty to lost causes may be seen as involving each of the three guideposts to loyalty in mature life that are described by Royce. First, loyalty to a lost cause is loyalty to “a cause whose worldly fortunes seem lost, but whose vitality may outlast centuries, and may involve much novel growth

Foust-Chap04.indd 106

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

107

of opinion, of custom, and of ideals.” Such “deeply pathetic motives” are, as Royce describes, those to which leaders “constantly appeal.”93 Second, such appeals lead to “one of the most potent influences of human history,” with the lost cause coming “to be idealized through its very failure to win temporary and visible success,” potentially teaching, to generation after generation, a loyalty that “may develop into endlessly new forms, and so may appeal to peoples to whom the cause in question was originally wholly strange.”94 Royce gives the example of the foundation of the early Christian church, holding that it “was at first founded directly upon a loyalty to its own lost cause,—a cause which it viewed as heavenly just because here on earth the enemies seemed to have triumphed, and because the Master had departed from human vision.”95 It should again be noted, however, that lost causes need not be religious in nature. “Loyalty to loyalty,” Royce writes, “is indeed just now in far too many ways a lost cause amongst men. But that is the fault of the men, not of the cause.”96 We might interpret Royce’s lament as suggesting that loyalty to loyalty is hidden from human vision, but there is nothing about loyalty to loyalty that, in principle, precludes it from being realized. Recall from chapter 2 what Royce identified as the twofold moral dangers of American civilization: “Loyalty is not sufficiently prominent amongst our explicit social ideals in America,” and “when loyalty is indeed emphasized and glorified, it is then far too seldom conceived as rationally involving loyalty to universal loyalty.”97 These states of affairs could be different, however, with Royce clearly serving the cause—lost, though it may be—of inspiring such changes. Third, service to a lost cause exacts strain and sacrifice, becoming “all the more strenuous, just because its consequences are viewed as so far-reaching and stupendous.”98 The examples of the founders of the Christian church and of Royce or anyone wishing to revise the ideals of a people suffice to illustrate the strenuousness of loyal service to lost causes. One last word about lost causes as teachers of loyalty warrants mention. Royce frequently expresses the sentiment that “when they are incurred in the service of a cause,” defeat, disappointment, failure, and sorrow ought each to be seen as “a positive aid to loyalty.”99 Of death, a typically devastating defeat and source of sorrow, Royce writes: The most familiar of all those blows of fortune which seem to us, for the moment, to make our personal cause a lost cause, is death,

Foust-Chap04.indd 107

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

108

learning loyalt y

when it comes to those with whom our personal cause has so far been bound up. And yet what motive in human life has done more to idealize the causes of individuals than death has done? Death, viewed as a mere fact of human experience, and as a merely psychological influence, has been one of the greatest idealizers of human life. The memory of the dead idealizes whatever interest the living have in former days shared with the departed.100

Earlier we acknowledged that leaders of clubs sometimes honor the dead by forming or naming their clubs in honor of them. We may regard such an act of reverence as the idealizing of the cause of “carry[ing] on the work that they began, or that, if they died in childhood, our fond desire would have had them live to do.”101 We should note, however, that in most cases clubs are formed or named in honor of people with whom our personal causes were not directly bound up, let alone at the time of their death. Royce is referring here to the “familiar” blow of death—what strikes at the end of the life of someone to whom we are loyally bound. Such death is starkly symptomatic of the transient nature of human existence; characteristic of a lost cause, such death removes the object of our loyalty from our earthly vision. While “grief minister[s] to loyalty,”102 and defeat and bereavement may take the form of “loyalty’s opportunity,”103 in many cases the suffering of another’s death constitutes the ultimate in strain and sacrifice. Conclusion This chapter began by highlighting Tunstall’s interpretation of Royce as having failed to account for the origins of moral experience. Having drawn on several of Royce’s works, as well as on the commentary of Peter Fuss, we should now recognize that Tunstall misinterprets Royce on this count. In addition to this claim, Tunstall asserted that Royce’s moral philosophy entails the probability that we will regard others as being not meaningful in themselves but only insofar as they are assimilated into our own subjectivity. The account of loyalty to loyalty provided in the previous chapter may be invoked to counter this claim. It is clear that, with the principle of loyalty to loyalty, Royce would never permit for us to regard others as meaningful only insofar as they are assimilated into our own subjectivity, for this would mean that we negate

Foust-Chap04.indd 108

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

learning loyalt y

109

their autonomy and, a fortiori, their ability to adopt and serve causes. Moreover, the account of learning loyalty given in this chapter highlights the reliance that we have on others in developing into loyal beings, as well as the need to sustain a respect and honor of others throughout our adult lives, even when their service to their cause acts as a foe to our service to our own. Loyalty to loyalty, such as Royce recognizes embodied in fair play, can only be understood as entailing the interpretation of Royce that is opposite Tunstall’s. My opponent is loyal to a cause; I should value him because of this. His cause may require him to act in such a way that interferes with my ability to be loyal to my cause; still, I should value him.104 “To any enlightened survey of life,” Royce writes, “all the loyal, even when chance and human blindness force them at any moment to war with one another, are, in fact, spiritual brethren. They have a common cause—the cause of furthering universal loyalty through their own choice and their own service.”105 We might say that, for Royce, it is the function of moral education to render such an enlightened survey of life ordinary. That is, to learn loyalty—to learn to live a genuine moral life—is to cultivate the disposition that all persons have value, and to select and serve one’s causes in such a way that this disposition is honored and promoted. In the next chapter, we will envision such a scenario in the context of community, attending to perils confronting the loyal along the way.

Foust-Chap04.indd 109

6/5/2012 10:37:41 AM

five

l o y a l t y a nd community



I

n a recent book-length examination of the relationship between virtue ethics and liberatory struggle, Lisa Tessman discusses several “burdened virtues,” virtues that are costly to those bearing them—particularly, those who are engaged in liberatory struggle. Given the supposedly eudaimonistic nature of virtues—embodying them is thought to be conducive to the well-being of the moral agent1—the notion of virtues engendering burden for those bearing them is problematic. Among these burdened virtues is that of loyalty. According to Tessman, while loyalty is a virtue that is praised in oppositional movements, it is also heavily burdened. Because loyalty forbids actions aimed at undermining the existence of the object of loyalty, or, in Royce’s terms, one’s cause, those engaged in liberatory struggle find themselves caught between the felt need of criticizing and dissenting from their cause—their community—and the felt need of upholding and preserving this cause. While one may maintain loyalty to one’s community while adopting a critical stance, effectively becoming what Tessman terms a “loyal critic,” far from enjoying conciliatory stasis, loyal critics face the prospect of shouldering heavy burdens: { 110 }

Foust-Chap05.indd 110

6/5/2012 10:39:53 AM

loya lt y and communit y

111

They may find themselves tied to a community whose practices reflect internal dynamics of dominance and subordination, or they may belong to the community only uncomfortably, for their critical activities will tend to alienate them from other community members. Maintaining a critical stance either leaves one burdened by ties to a problematic object of loyalty or makes group loyalty as a virtue entirely unavailable.2

The burden of loyalty in times of liberatory struggle calls us to ask whether loyalty ought to be valued as ultimately as Royce values it. Even if we concede Royce’s view of loyalty as necessary for becoming a self and, indeed, a moral self, we may doubt that loyalty is required or even relevant in critiquing or overhauling the conditions under which one’s being—moral and otherwise—is sustained. In the face of such exigencies as oppression or violence, we might find that the need of loyalty is marginalized or else removed altogether, for “one cannot be said to be loyal to a group if one calls into question or undermines its basis for existence.”3 While the context of community would seem the natural setting for the flowering of loyalty, when community is strained by deep conflict or injustice, the role of loyalty is rendered unclear. In this chapter, I take up the problem raised by Tessman and address it through the lenses of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty, particularly as it concerns community. I suggest that Royce would embrace Tessman’s description of loyalty as a burdened virtue, maintaining that, despite its burden, loyalty is vital to all communities, whatever shifts in their constitution might arise. In fact, for Royce, this burden—or, in his terms, this struggle—is itself vital to the flowering of loyalty. While loyalty may exist in the absence of burden, it is in the presence of burden that loyalty is most needed and therefore most important. This burden most dramatically presents itself in the context of community, particularly at times characterized by conflict and upheaval. Before proceeding any further, let us state what is here meant by “community.” Royce describes community in these terms: Now when many contemporary and distinct individual selves so interpret, each his own personal life, that each says of an individual past or of a determinate future event or deed: “That belongs to my life;” “That occurred, or will occur, to me,” then these many selves may be defined as hereby constituting, in a perfectly definite and objective, but also in a highly significant, sense, a community.4

Foust-Chap05.indd 111

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

112

loya lt y and communit y

Royce calls a community that is constituted by the fact that each of its members accepts as a part of her own individual life the same past event(s) that each of her fellow members accept as such a “community of memory,” whereas such a group constituted by the fact that each of its members accepts as a part of her own individual life the same expected future event(s) is a “community of expectation” or “community of hope.” Of course, communities are communities both of memory and of expectation or hope, and Royce’s distinction is one merely of emphasis; a group founded on the shared goal of honoring the memory of some person who has died might be called a community of memory with respect to their memory of this person, but they are also a community of hope with respect to their wish to see proper tribute paid to the person whom they fondly remember. In considering the relationship between loyalty and community, we will find it instructive in the first place to encounter Royce’s theory of provincialism. While “provincialism” is a term that conjures many associations, it will become clear that it signifies, for Royce, nothing other than loyalty to community. Royce believes that, when manifested appropriately, provincialism can effectively combat three evils commonly confronting communities. I concur with Griffin Trotter’s assertion that “each of these evils are instances where loyalty to loyalty is antagonized,”5 but I will articulate, more explicitly than Trotter does, how these evils antagonize loyalty to loyalty. I suggest that since provincialism is loyalty to community and these three evils are combated with provincialism, combating these evils can be understood as willfully incurring burdened loyalty. Indeed, the variety of provincialism that Royce advocates is loyalty to community that is loyal to loyalty. So, the battle between provincialism and these three evils is not just burdened loyalty but burdened loyalty to loyalty. In support of this interpretation, I will appraise episodes of community recounted by Royce in his history of California, a history that he retrospectively describes as being seen through the prism of his theory of provincialism. I will engage the section of California titled “The Struggle for Order: Self-Government, Good-Humor and Violence in the Mines.” I choose this discussion rather than others in order to dwell on Royce’s notion that the moral life is a life of struggle or burden.6 Indeed, as Royce claims in The World and the Individual, “All finite life is a struggle with evil.”7 I will also draw on Royce’s treatment of community in

Foust-Chap05.indd 112

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

113

The Problem of Christianity. Therein, Royce explicitly engages the notion of moral burden, and as I will argue, we find theoretical resources that can assuage doubts of the loyal critic about the value of loyalty in the midst of liberatory struggle. Engaging Kara E. Barnette’s suggestion that, from the conceptions of community and treason put forth in The Problem of Christianity, one can derive a Roycean “feminist traitor” whose “loyalty is mostly intact, because her ultimate goal is to move her community toward a higher moral place,”8 I will hold that the burdened loyalty of all loyal critics not only can be preserved but can flourish in the face of oppressive or otherwise morally problematic conditions. In support of this contention, I will consider a number of examples raised by Tessman and others in which the value of loyalty to community appears questionable on account of its attendant burdens. Provincialism and Three Evils Confronting Communities “The problem of the training of our American people as a whole to a larger and richer social loyalty,” Royce writes in The Philosophy of Loyalty, “is the problem of educating the self-estranged spirit of our nation to know itself better.”9 The solution to this problem, Royce asserts, is “a new and wiser provincialism.”10 Royce has in mind, in contrast to a “mere renewal of the old sectionalism” of America’s past, “the sort of provincialism which makes people want to idealize, to adorn, to ennoble, to educate, their own province; to hold sacred its traditions, to honor its worthy dead, to support and to multiply its public possessions.”11 According to Royce, “we want to train national loyalty through provincial loyalty,” for national government can best represent its people if it takes into account the distinct ideals of the various provinces that constitute the nation: For, I insist, it is not the sect, it is not the labor-union, it is not the political partisan organization, but it is the widely developed provincial loyalty which is the best mediator between the narrower interests of the individual and the larger patriotism of our nation. Further centralization of power in the national government, without a constantly enriched and diversified provincial consciousness, can only increase the estrangement of our national spirit from its own life.12

Therefore, Royce declares, “To the increase of a wise provincialism in our country I myself look for the best general social means of training our

Foust-Chap05.indd 113

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

114

loya lt y and communit y

people in loyalty to loyalty.”13 Loyalty to loyalty, then, when engendered by wise provincialism, can serve as an antidote to the self-estranged spirit of the nation. In other words, wise provincialism can place the “unity” back in “community” when members of a given social group have lost sight of it. These remarks concerning provincialism come at the close of “Some American Problems in Their Relation to Loyalty,” the fifth lecture of The Philosophy of Loyalty. Much of the content of the sixth lecture, “Training for Loyalty,” was considered in “Learning Loyalty,” chapter 4 of the present work. Royce does not, however, discuss provincialism in the lecture “Training for Loyalty”; nor does he discuss it in any further depth elsewhere in The Philosophy of Loyalty. Royce did devote a treatment of the topic to an address given in 1902, and he went on to publish it as the leading essay in Provincialism, Race Questions, and Other American Problems.14 In “Provincialism,” Royce outlines what he takes to be three evils with which the United States as a community must contend. He proposes a remedy to them—namely, provincialism. Royce seems never to describe provincialism in the same words twice. Defined concisely in the eponymous essay, “provincialism” as used by Royce refers to “both the social habits of a given region, and to the mental interest which inspires and maintains these habits.”15 At the same time, however, Royce admits that he “intends to use this word in a somewhat elastic sense.”16 In one instance, he is more specific in his usage of the term, identifying social habits such as the customs, social dispositions, dialects, and types of civilization characteristic of a community.17 In another case, he refers to a fondness or pride in the customs or social tendencies of a community.18 In concluding his explication of provincialism, Royce offers a threefold definition: “first, the tendency of . . . a province to possess its own customs and ideals; secondly, the totality of these customs and ideals themselves; and thirdly, the love and pride which leads the inhabitants of a province to cherish as their own these traditions, beliefs, and aspirations.”19 The third prong of this definition particularly foretokens the description of provincialism in The Philosophy of Loyalty as inspiring people to want to idealize, adorn, ennoble, and educate their own province, to hold sacred its traditions, honor its worthy dead, and support and multiply its public possessions. While all three of these aspects of provincialism are relevant to Royce, the third receives the lion’s share of his attention. This is unsurprising,

Foust-Chap05.indd 114

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

115

for expressions of love and pride in one’s province may be viewed as expressions of one’s loyalty to one’s province. Royce mentions that the pride felt by a province with regard to its social habits may make it “indisposed to conform to the ways of those who come from without, and anxious to follow persistently their own local traditions.”20 This resistance to the ways of strangers is related to the first of the evils with which Royce is concerned, namely, “the evil due to the presence of a considerable number of not yet assimilated newcomers in most of our communities.”21 Addressing Royce’s theory of provincialism and his singling out of the presence of unassimilated newcomers as an evil, Tommy J. Curry argues that “Royce’s philosophy is fraught with racist colonialism.”22 Curry draws from “Provincialism” purportedly “crystal clear” evidence of Royce’s view of the role of provincialism in assimilating newcomers but distorts Royce’s words in the process. Curry quotes Royce as writing: Now you, who know well your own local history, will be amongst you of this tendency to idealize your past, to glorify the bounties that nature has showered upon you, all in such wise as to give the present life of your community more dignity, more honor, more value in the eyes of yourselves and of strangers. In fact, that we all do thus glorify our various provinces, we well know; and with what feelings we accompany the process, we can all observe for ourselves. But it is well to remember that the special office, the principle [sic] use, the social justification of such mental loyalty to our community, and in assimilating to our own social order the strangers that are within our gates. It is the especial art of the colonizing peoples such as we are, and such as the English are, to be able by devices of this sort rapidly to build up in their own minds a provincial loyalty in a new environment [emphasis added by Curry].23

Royce’s actual words are these: Now you, who know well your own local history, will be able to observe the growth amongst you of this tendency to idealize your past, to glorify the bounties that nature has showered upon you, all in such wise as to give the present life of your community more dignity, more honor, more value in the eyes of yourselves and of strangers. In fact, that we all do thus glorify our various provinces, we well know; and with what feelings we accompany the process, we can all observe for ourselves. But it is well to remember that the special office, the

Foust-Chap05.indd 115

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

116

loya lt y and communit y

principal use, the social justification, of such mental tendencies in ourselves lies in the aid that they give us in becoming loyal to our community, and in assimilating to our own social order the strangers that are within our gates. It is the especial art of the colonizing peoples, such as we are, and such as the English are, to be able by devices of this sort rapidly to build up in their own minds a provincial loyalty in a new environment [emphases added].24

The differences that I have highlighted may, at first, seem immaterial. It is important to recognize, however, that Curry represents Royce’s endorsement of provincialism as a response to unassimilated newcomers as a banding together against the unassimilated; “mental loyalty to our community” is here portrayed as preservation of purity in the face of the threat of dilution from foreigners. As Curry puts it, “Diversity, be it racial, historical, or linguistic was a threat to this national coherence, and it inspired in Royce a fear of national plurality that would usher into America the same type of crisis he saw in British imperialism during the early 1900s.”25 It is perhaps the case that Royce feared such crisis,26 but if we read Royce’s actual words—Curry himself urges that “Royce’s actual texts are the best testimonies of his philosophy”27—it is not clear, let alone crystal clear, that such fear entails a fear of diversity or the endorsement of racist colonialism. Royce holds that provincial tendencies aid us both in becoming loyal to our community and in assimilating others to our community. At this juncture, all this seems to mean is that cultivating pride in customs, ideals, and the like of our community is conducive to becoming loyal to our community and that helping newcomers to such pride will be conducive as well to their becoming loyal to our community. Such a position could very well be put forth by a racist colonialist, but it could just as plausibly be put forth by a person wishing for the harmonious coexistence of diversity and unity. Even if Royce were a begrudging accepter of diversity, the wish to avoid crisis by means of harmonious coexistence of diversity and unity constitutes an embrace of national plurality, not an attempt at its obviation. When we read “Provincialism” further, this interpretation is rendered plausible. Royce stipulates that he is not advocating “narrowness of spirit,” distinguishing his provincialism from “false sectionalism,” dubbing it at some times “Higher provincialism” and at others “wise provincialism.”28

Foust-Chap05.indd 116

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

117

Here, as in chapters 2 and 4, we see the Civil War looming large for Royce: The time was (and not very long since), when, in our own country, we had to contend against very grave evils due to false forms of provincialism. What has been called sectionalism long threatened our national unity. Our Civil War was fought to overcome the ills due to these influences. . . . False sectionalism, which disunites, will indeed always remain as great an evil as ever it was. But the modern world has reached a point where it needs, more than ever before, the vigorous development of a highly organized provincial life. Such a life, if wisely guided, will not mean disloyalty to the nation; and it need not mean narrowness of spirit, nor yet the further development of jealousies between various communities.29

Whatever Royce’s various personal predilections may have been,30 he is clearly declaring the need for a shift from unwise provincialism—the kind that he sees as deeply divisive and as responsible for the Civil War (as well as for the crisis in Britain)31—and wise provincialism, the kind that sustains unity and therefore reduces the chance of conflict, especially on the scale of war. With respect to Royce’s reference to “the especial art of the colonizing peoples,” it is important to take account of how Royce instructs those engaged in this art to respond to the newcomer. “The stranger, the sojourner, the newcomer, is an inevitable factor in the life of most American communities. To make him welcome is one of the most gracious tasks in which our people have become expert. To give him his fair chance is the rule of our life.”32 Admitting that Royce’s estimation of Americans as “expert” at this task is at best exaggeration, we should not ignore his stated openness to widening the scope of the community to include members from outside its immediate ken. His worry is that the social tendencies of a community will undergo constant mutation in attempting to accommodate the social tendencies of newcomers, resulting in a diminution of community spirit. “The newcomers themselves are often a boon and welcome indeed,” Royce writes. “But their failure to be assimilated constitutes, so long as it endures, a source of social danger, because the community needs well-knit organization.”33 In other words, if a community adopts the various provincialisms of newcomers in the interest of their accommodation, the community relinquishes its own provincialism. To relinquish this provincialism is nothing less than to

Foust-Chap05.indd 117

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

118

loya lt y and communit y

relinquish the ties that bind the community. Returning to the portion of Royce’s text that Curry omits, we read that provincialism “aids us in becoming loyal to our community,” where “our community” is a dynamic structure, taking on new forms with the inclusion of new members while at the same time striving to remain the same (that is, our community, by virtue of various recognizable ties that bind us). The development of wise provincialism enables a community to subvert this first evil. This pride for the ways of the community confers a certain dignity on the social order. This dignity attracts the newcomer to share in the practices of the community. As Trotter suggests, assimilation, then, is “a process in which new members of a community consciously situate themselves—with their own unique personal talents, interests and perspectives—within the context of the new community.”34 With the newcomer eager to conform to the tendencies of the community, the danger of the community relinquishing its local pride, and thereby its coherence of identity, is avoided. We can understand this battle that wise provincialism wages with the evil of unassimilated newcomers as bound up with loyalty to loyalty. If newcomers to a community view themselves not as members of a community but simply as individuals residing in a community with whom they are disconnected, it is unlikely that they will embody the spirit of loyalty with respect to that community. If, however, newcomers are encouraged to integrate their practices within their new community, they can become genuine members of the community, instilled with the spirit of loyalty with respect to that community. Likewise, the loyalty of the welcoming community is augmented by this instance of wise provincialism. Were their provincialism of the unwise sort, resulting in newcomers not being welcomed, they would, in fact, be loyal to their community. This loyalty would act against itself, however, in consciously restricting the scope of those to whom and with whom they can be loyal. Being wisely provincial, however, the community invites newcomers to be a part of the whole, reinforcing its own tendency toward cooperation in the pursuit of shared causes. The second evil that Royce identifies as threatening to the community is the leveling tendency of civilization. By the “levelling tendency,” Royce means that aspect of modern civilization which is most obviously suggested by the fact that, because of the ease of communication amongst distant places, because of the spread of popular education, and because

Foust-Chap05.indd 118

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

119

of the consolidation and of the centralization of industries and of social authorities, we tend all over the nation, and in some degree, even throughout the civilized world, to read the same daily news, to share the same general ideas, to submit to the same overmastering social forces, to live in the same external fashions, to discourage individuality, and to approach a dead level of harassed mediocrity.35

As we saw in chapter 4, Royce finds the strong disposition of humans toward imitation particularly instructive. Indeed, communities of individuals grow cohesive only through the sharing of histories, beliefs, customs, anticipations, and the like. While Royce does not altogether decry imitation—he thinks it indispensable to the cultivation of loyalty—he does warn against the danger of its “tendency to crush the individual.”36 Just as Royce laments the relinquishing of provincialism, he also laments the relinquishing of individuality. Community spirit is a healthy and vital component of a flourishing community. However, this tendency toward conformity must be balanced by individuals asserting themselves as such, separating themselves in various aspects from the hegemony that inheres in the communal structures of which they are a part. Provincialism can counteract this second evil by fostering in the individual a pride that motivates her to maintain self-respect in the face of tendencies that work against her individualism. In building this local pride, the individual becomes less susceptible to leveling influences from without. Although willing to learn from those outside her immediate ken, she is self-possessed; she remembers that her identity is significantly bound up with her community. If the individual holds her local community in such high regard as to love and cherish it, to take pride and honor in serving it, then she should be able to avoid succumbing to the leveling tendency of civilization. Looking at this battle that wise provincialism wages with the evil of the leveling tendency of civilization, we can understand it as bound up with loyalty to loyalty. When individuals succumb to the leveling tendency of civilization, the distinctiveness of their causes diminishes, and the potential for innovative service to the community in the form of willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion is difficult to inspire. “The initiative of individuals would be quelled,” Trotter explains, “through an inability to differentiate a unique role for themselves and their local community.”37 Thus, individuals and communities alike undermine their impetus to be loyal if they do not proactively fend against the leveling tendency of civilization. Through wise

Foust-Chap05.indd 119

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

120

loya lt y and communit y

provincialism, however, individuals and communities safeguard against this tendency—in fact, in their very resistance to the leveling tendency, acting as fellow loyal servants to a cause. The third and final evil that Royce highlights as problematic for the community is closely related to the second. Royce regards the presence of “mob spirit” as a substantial obstacle to the flourishing community. It is perhaps an instance of the leveling tendency of civilization just discussed. It is, however, an instance that carries so much negative weight for communities that Royce is compelled to address it as an evil on its own. Though “mob spirit” might elicit images of a disgruntled mass engaged in violent revolt, Royce has in mind nothing more than a resigning of individual judgment in the midst of some sort of emotional disturbance that affects a community: Suppose a condition of things such as may readily occur in any large group of people who have somehow come to feel strong sympathy with one another, and who are for any reason in a relatively passive and impressible state of mind. In such company of people let any idea which has a strong emotional coloring come to be suggested, by the words of the leader, by the singing of a song, by the beginning of any social activity that does not involve clear thinking, that does not call upon a man to assert his own independence. Such an idea forthwith tends to take possession in an extraordinarily strong degree of every member of the social group in question. As a consequence, the individual may come to be, as it were, hypnotized by his social group.38

Although for Royce “mob spirit” need not refer to that attitude that animates the actions of groups of rioters or looters, he still views the phenomenon as decidedly dangerous. The hypnotism of the individual by the community is a double-edged sword. The damage done to the individual is perhaps obvious; opinions that she once held that do not accord with the mentality of the “mob spirit” are not only silenced by the sonorous wave of popular opinion but are swept up in this wave and transmogrified into the view held in common by the community. The damage done to the community is less obvious but no less serious. The community, closed off to novelty in opinion, shows itself to be unreflective and thus unenlightened. When mob spirit prevails, the individual resigns her ability to make judgments while the community resigns its ability to

Foust-Chap05.indd 120

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

121

make criticisms. In either case, the growth of the individual or the community is halted. Individuals and communities can be saved from the debilitating effects of mob spirit, Royce argues, with adoption of wise provincialism. While communities composed of millions of members might fall under the “hypnotic influence of a few leaders” or even “a few fatal phrases,” such communities “may be saved from the disastrous hypnotic slumber so characteristic of excited masses of mankind” if provincialism is kept awake.39 Put another way, the fostering of local pride is instrumental to thwarting the mob spirit, in that a strong “willingness to remember one’s ways and ideals” can stand firm against whirlwinds of emotion that might otherwise carry one away from one’s loyalties.40 We can understand this battle of wise provincialism with the evil of mob mentality as bound up with loyalty to loyalty. When overcome by mob mentality, individuals and communities are rendered irrational and are therefore unable to soundly determine whether their loyal action is, in fact, loyal to loyalty. Indeed, under the influence of mob mentality, the possibility that one’s loyalty is not loyal to loyalty may very well never enter one’s mind. Bereft of such reflective capacity, loyalty to loyalty is jeopardized. With wise provincialism, however, the possibility of being induced by mob mentality is lessened, and considerations of loyalty to loyalty are not only likely to be made but to be reflected on rationally. As Trotter explains, “the effectiveness of human action at the level of community will be enhanced by a pluralism of ideas and strategies [for serving a chosen cause] which can be realized only through the cultivation of individual differences.”41 Wise provincialism calls the community to foster such a plurality of ideas and strategies precisely because the community wishes to be effectively loyal to its causes. While the community is indeed of one mind insofar as its members are loyal to the same causes, causes are served best by effective action, and what constitutes effective action is very often best determined by harnessing the reflective power of multiple perspectives. In combating mob mentality, then, wise provincialism is loyal to loyalty. Taking stock of this section, we may state the following. Provincialism is, for Royce, loyalty to community. Like loyalty to any cause, loyalty to community may or may not be loyal to loyalty. When loyalty to community is marked by the narrowness and exclusionary nature of unwise

Foust-Chap05.indd 121

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

122

loya lt y and communit y

provincialism, it is disloyal to loyalty. When loyalty to community is marked by the pride and inclusiveness of wise provincialism, it is loyal to loyalty. When loyalty to community involves the burden of combating evils confronting community, wise provincialism is required. In other words, when the loyal spirit of a community is threatened, loyalty to loyalty is necessary. Burdened Loyalty in Royce’s California In 1886, Josiah Royce’s history of the state of California was published. Despite his lack of expertise in the subject at the time that he agreed to author the book—Royce was approached only at the sudden death of the intended author42 and deliberated a good deal before assuming the task43—California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco [1856]: A Study of American Character is eloquent and rich. Royce reveals his disposition toward the project in a letter composed early in its development: I have promised to have ready in a year or two a sketch of the history of my native State, California, and I am collecting facts as I have time. The book will be a side-work, an amusement of idle hours, not an attempt to do expert work; but then even such amusements are pretty serious things, and I do not want to do it ill. A study of the political life of a growing state is, I find, of great use to a man like me, whose airy studies take him often so far from concrete facts.44

Despite his apparent ambivalence toward the work—a mere semicolon separates descriptions of his attitude toward the endeavor as half-hearted, on one hand, and earnest, on the other—a fermenting philosophical preoccupation with community piqued Royce’s interest in the plethora of observations that could be culled from the study.45 According to John Clendenning, “Royce saw the upheavals of early California history as parables that might teach philosophic truth.”46 On Clendenning’s account, several of the historical episodes described and discussed by Royce in California “dramatize the issues which Royce would later raise in The Philosophy of Loyalty and The Problem of Christianity.”47 Kevin Starr makes a similar connection of California to Royce’s subsequent writings, stating that as Royce “probed with more and more profundity the nature of human community, the memory of his earlier experiences

Foust-Chap05.indd 122

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

123

in California rose to consciousness, entering into the composition of his theory of Provincialism.”48 In fact, the year following the publication of “Provincialism” in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, Royce published “Provincialism: Based Upon a Study of Early Conditions of California,” a short essay in which Clendenning’s and Starr’s remarks find corroboration. There, Royce reveals that the frontier social life of California was “the struggle for and toward a provincial consciousness”49 and that the “ ‘winning of the West’ . . . has been the history of the formation of local institutions,—the tale of the rise of local traditions and of local loyalty.”50 One also observes that Royce includes “An Episode of Early California Life: The Squatter Riot of 1850 in Sacramento” in his Studies of Good and Evil. In a preliminary note to the essay in its appearance in that text, Royce defends his decision to include the essay among his studies of good and evil, holding that “if the affair here in question is one of local history, the passions, the social forces, and the essential ideas concerned, are of permanent significance.”51 Such incidents as those described in this vignette of his history of California “may seem petty, local, transient, accidental, but their meaning is permanent, and they will recur, over and over, and perhaps on a constantly grander and grander scale, as long as our national history lasts.”52 It was Royce’s hope that we might learn from the past in order to effectively meet obstacles that we would confront in the future. If we pair the observations of Clendenning and Starr and add to them Royce’s own pronouncements, we may reasonably claim to detect a thread running through Royce’s moral thought as represented by writings spanning his corpus.53 There is clearly in Royce’s thought a sustained concern for the relation between individual and community, marked by a vested interest in learning from and attempting to overcome—to whatever degree possible—the moral entanglements with which they are ineluctably afflicted.54 Royce’s history of California is consistent with this thematic trend. There and elsewhere, Royce’s philosophy of loyalty presents itself—sometimes latently and other times explicitly—as integral to the enterprise of coping with moral problems. “California was full of Jonahs,” writes Royce, “whose modest and possibly unprophetic duties had lain in their various quiet paths at home. They had found out how to escape all these duties, at least for the moment, by fleeing over seas and deserts.”55 The California gold rush brought

Foust-Chap05.indd 123

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

124

loya lt y and communit y

many newcomers to California in the years between 1848 and 1856. The primary interest of these sojourners undoubtedly was to stumble on financial security or affluence, obtainable in the form of gold. With the search for gold as the focus of the miner, the effort to assimilate to the ways of native Californians went ignored. Immediately, one senses the imminence of Royce’s first evil. Perhaps owing in part to this lack of effort, Royce characterizes this group as a “community of irresponsible strangers.”56 The irresponsibility of the community, however, reaches far beyond its disdain for assimilation. Because they sought wealth and ignored social order, “they neglected their duties as freemen, as citizens, and as brethren among brethren.”57 In other words, they neglected their duty to be loyal. Royce would later describe the situation as follows: Nobody regarded his customs or his dialect or his ideals as especially fitting to this new community. One’s memories, and usually one’s hopes, lay elsewhere. One owed at first no loyalty to the place, or to its social order. One’s heart and one’s social ideals, if one had such, generally clung to the old home. One meant, by lucky mining, to collect quickly the means to pay off the mortgage on the New England farm, or to make a fortune wherewith to grow old in one’s native place. . . . Home was not here.58

If home was not here, then one did not feel bound to one’s place, spatially or morally. One could go where one felt and feel no compunction about doing so. Loyalty was simply not an operative concept. “Two very familiar errors exist concerning the California of the years between 1848 and 1856,” Royce claims, “both misconceptions of the era of the struggle for order. One of these errors will have it that, on the whole, there was no struggle; while the other affirms that, on the whole, there was no order.”59 Both struggle and order obtained during those times, however, and Royce’s concern is to tell the stories of both. Although the miner was primarily interested in gold, not social order, “if the nature of the place permitted steady work, men must prepare to dwell together in numbers, and for a long period.”60 Thus, the “vital problem of the community’s finding itself, the problem of creating a province, of converting a frontier into a rational social order . . . could not be postponed or neglected,” for “the conditions of the frontier made the problem pressing, unavoidable.”61 Governments were organized quickly and were at least temporarily effective. Councils of miners met to decide disputes,

Foust-Chap05.indd 124

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

125

brief codes of laws were drafted, accused crimes were met with (typically juried) trial, and those found guilty of crimes were met with punishment. According to Royce, the willingness to compromise on matters in dispute was highly instrumental toward the achievement of order in the mining camp. If not for the democratic procedures of the “little republic,”62 a peaceable spirit such as that enjoyed by the mining communities could never have come to exist. Equally helpful was the good humor displayed by individuals in their interactions with one another. That individuals were on pleasant terms with one another in public effected a general avoidance of disturbances in that sphere. Still, Royce insists, this is only a partial picture of the life of the mining community. This order was “unstable, since it had not been won as a prize of social devotion, but only attained by a sudden feat of instinctive cleverness.”63 Because voluntary devotion was not a feature of these ordered mining communities, they were not at all secure from corruption from within. If the evolution of disorder can be traced to a lack of social devotion, then it can be said that Royce’s second evil was very much a presence in the mining communities. The order that obtained among these communities was hollow, a mere leveling tendency toward an avoidance of conflict. The evil in this tendency lies not in its end but in its means. Avoidance of conflict stands a strong chance of perpetuation if performed by strong-willed individuals who confer on it value and honor, working toward it consciously and persistently. In the case of the mining communities, however, order was fated to be temporary, for it was not itself cherished as an object to be held securely. Leveling tendencies give way to new leveling tendencies and, with no positive effort to preserve order, there was no strong defense against the emerging tendency to disorder. “The California newspapers of 1850, 1851, and 1852 generally . . . show us two things,” says Royce: First that the miners’ justice was not usually sharply distinguished from mob law, even in the minds of those concerned in it; and secondly that, in the concrete instances of the use of miners’ justice, we can discover all possible gradations, from the most formal, calm, and judicial behavior of a healthy young camp, driven by momentary necessity to defend itself against outrage, down to the most abominable exhibitions of brutal popular passion, or even of private vengeance.64

Foust-Chap05.indd 125

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

126

loya lt y and communit y

The two things shown to us by the California newspapers, then, are the presence of Royce’s third evil in the California mining communities and its manifestation in miner law. Royce gives ample description of the mob spirit of miner law in “The Struggle for Order.” To treat his entire account here would be impractical. It is largely for this reason that I will refer only to his section entitled “Miners’ Justice in Action—Characteristic Scenes and Incidents.” In this section, Royce discusses the lynching that was a feature of popular justice in the mines. He takes care to dispel commonly accepted notions of the mining camp as “especially delighted in its lynching parties,” going about them “with all the jovial ferocity of young tigers at play,” while at the same time “a timely offer of drinks, a good joke, or far better still, an ingenious display of ruggedly pathetic eloquence, might suffice to turn the court aside from its dangerous undertakings.”65 The lynching scenes were, in actuality, far from jocund and were not readily quelled. Good humor and sentimentalism had little import with mining communities induced with mob spirit, with a mind determined to right wrongs. Flogging and death were the two penalties for theft in California mining communities. The severity of these punishments can only be attributed to the highly charged emotional reaction the crime incited. Theft of another’s gold, supplies, or other possessions undermined the order of the community. Lynching was implemented, says Royce, for the sake of satisfying a momentary popular passion, aroused against the forces of disorder. Just because the miner was accustomed to be so tolerant and easy-going, these moments of the outburst of popular fury found him, whether orderly or not, in all typical cases, merciless, deaf to all pathetic appeals, unconscious of anything save the immediate public necessity.66

With regard to the practice of lynching, the mining communities undoubtedly exhibited mob spirit as described by Royce in “Provincialism.” Still, it should be noted that considerations were made on the part of these communities with regard to the humaneness of their penalties. Indeed, lynching was viewed as more humane than flogging, for it resulted in the relatively quick end of the life of the thief rather than the extended punishment of a hundred fifty lashes and banishment from the community. Because “a dead thief steals no more,”67 lynching was also perceived as more efficient than flogging, for a thief flogged and banished from a

Foust-Chap05.indd 126

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

127

community was thought likely to appear elsewhere and continue his roguery, vengeful at the violent beating that he suffered. Mob spirit took its toll as an evil by infecting the popular conscience of the mining communities. Royce characterizes this conscience as “debased by the physical brutality of the business” such that “so soon as the lynching habit was once established, this conscience was put to sleep by a false self-confidence, engendered of the ease wherewith justice seemed in such cases to be vindicated.”68 The widespread practice of lynching, then, was more detrimental to the mining communities than it was beneficial. In fact, claims Royce, “the mining society made itself the friend and upholder of the very roguery that it flogged and hanged.”69 The mining society was made an ally with the thieves for whom it felt contempt in its neglect to create, among other things, a stable public headed by worthy officers. Submissive to mob spirit, camps were their own judges, juries, and executioners. And “so long as [the society] flogged and hanged in this rude popular way, it could not be convinced of its errors, but ever and anon, after one of these popular outbursts of vengeance, it raised its bloodstained hands in holy horror at crime, lamenting the fate that would doubtless force it still in future to continue its old business of encouraging bloodshed.”70 Owing to the “hypnotism” of mob spirit, there was no self-discipline. The individuals constituting the community were uncritical and careless, so long as thieves, when caught, received their due. This careless attitude only exacerbated the condition of the community, however, for rogues found encouragement in a loosely structured government and a speciously secure public. It would not be until mob spirit and its penchant for lynching subsided that roguery would cease to be a thorn in the side of the mining communities: The mining population was, at the start, a prevailingly peaceful one, which settled its disputes at regular miners’ meetings, by the method of the town meeting. Its disorderly stages were acquired social diseases, due to the lack of any settled community consciousness, due to the absence of loyalty on the part of the individual in his relation to his town and to his State. Because the provincial consciousness was lacking, the community tended to a rapid degeneration into a disorderly state.71

Degeneration and disorder, as debilitating forces as they were, did have a positive result for the mining communities. This effect, says Royce,

Foust-Chap05.indd 127

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

128

loya lt y and communit y

“lay in the very horror begotten by the popular demoralization that all this violence tended to produce.”72 While leveling tendencies and mob spirit did not fully diminish, the majority of every mining community learned from “the fearful effects of their own irresponsible freedom.”73 As Royce details, the mining communities soon grew orderly, forming stable town governments that condemned the very evils to which they had formerly fallen prey. Perhaps most significant of all discouragements was that against mob violence. A resistance against mob violence was a resistance against those forces that had spawned it. It could be argued that each of Royce’s three evils were parents to the mob violence of the mining communities. Making way for the conservative and orderly communities of later mining days, “the romantic degradation of the early mining life, with its transient glory, its fatal fascination, its inevitable brutality, and its resulting loathsome corruption”74 was in some sense, then, quite valuable. As Royce stipulates, however, its value lies only in its ability to excite “in the minds of sensible men a horror of its own disorderly atrocities.”75 Of course, this excitation is not enough on its own; it must lead to ameliorative action. In the case of the mining communities, the successes and failures of their early lives were capable of provoking this excitation and promoting improvement in their social condition. This improvement took its form, Royce would argue, in an embrace of wise provincialism. That the mining communities came to generally disapprove of all that their unwise provincialism had them previously endorsing is indication that wise provincialism was at work in their restoration of order. The coming of women, the growth of families, the formation of church organizations, and the building of schoolhouses are all advances cited by Royce that are further indicative of the presence of wise provincialism in the mining communities. Those institutions that developed were borne from a new sense of pride, which served to motivate aspirations for the achievement of permanence, structure, and growth within the communities. The concerted and zestful promotion of these new tendencies serves, perhaps, as an example of provincialism at its wisest. Royce ends his account by telling us the lesson that can be learned from the experiences of the mining communities: “The moral elasticity of our people is so great, their social vitality so marvelous, that a community

Foust-Chap05.indd 128

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

129

of Americans could sin as fearfully as, in the early years, the mining community did sin, and could yet purify itself within so short a time, not by a revolution, but by a simple progress from social foolishness to social steadfastness.”76 As Royce sees it, the story of the California mining communities is one of sin and atonement. That is, the period of disorder in California is comparable to sin, while struggle toward the attainment of order is akin to the long process of whereby a community washes away that sin by its own hands. Indeed, for Royce, “this swiftly acquired provincial consciousness, despite its incidental narrowness, was indeed the salvation of California.”77 He writes that “even thus a great river, for an hour defiled by some corrupting disturbance, purifies itself, merely through its own flow, over its sandy bed, beneath the wide and sunny heavens.”78 Moreover, “whatever our social ills, however difficult our present or future problems, we have learned one lesson—namely, that in the formation of a loyal local consciousness, in a wise provincialism, lies the way towards social salvation.”79 That Royce understands the story of the California mining communities in terms of sin, atonement, and salvation should not be passed over. Sin, atonement, and salvation figure significantly as themes in his treatment of community in The Problem of Christianity. Moreover, the language of sin, atonement, and salvation must be regarded as the language of burden and the process of its relief. Sin is inherently corrosive of the character of the sinner. Atonement, while restorative, often exacts sustained and strenuous effort. Salvation, as an end of atonement, not only exacts sustained and strenuous effort but stands as a distant if not ultimately unreachable destination. We augment our account of Royce’s awareness of the burden of loyalty by turning to The Problem of Christianity. Burdened Loyalty in Royce’s The Problem of Christianity In chapter 2 we noted that in The Problem of Christianity Royce engages three ideas central to Christianity that, he believes, offer an accurate description of the human situation and a promising vision for its salvation. The first of these ideas was that of the Universal Community, “the idea of a spiritual life in which universal love for all individuals shall be completely blended, practically harmonized, with an absolute loyalty for a real and universal community.”80 While the Universal Community

Foust-Chap05.indd 129

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

130

loya lt y and communit y

remains relevant, it is now time to address the other two ideas, the moral burden of the individual and atonement. The second idea from Christianity that Royce engages is that of the moral burden of the individual. According to Christian doctrine, the individual human being is by nature subject to an overwhelming moral burden from which, if unaided, one cannot escape. This burden is “at once a natural inheritance and a burden of personal guilt.”81 Royce echoes Paul’s observations in the seventh chapter of his epistle to the Romans: “Sinfulness belongs to our elemental nature, to our flesh as it is at birth; . . . sin is not cured but increased by cultivation; . . . our sinfulness belongs not to especially defective or degenerate sinners, but to the race in its corporate capacity.”82 Royce interprets the first point as implying that “being as to the flesh what we are,—that is, being essentially social animals,— . . . moral cultivation, if successful, can only make us aware of our sinfulness.”83 The second point is seen when one attempts to overcome sin through moral cultivation, for one’s individualism (on being taught independence and self-reliance) wars with one’s collectivism (on being taught the need for obedience to the social will), resulting in further entanglement in confusion and continued inability to overcome sin.84 The third point emphasizes that this situation is universal; nobody can escape spiritual ruin without divine assistance. This divine assistance comes with membership in the Universal Community. “Paul’s doctrine,” Royce explains, is that salvation comes through loyalty . . . loyalty (which is the love of a community conceived as a person on a level superior to that of any human individual)—loyalty—and the devotion of the self to the cause of the community—loyalty, is the only cure for the natural warfare of the collective and of the individual will—a warfare which no moral cultivation without loyalty can ever end, but which all cultivation, apart from such devoted and transforming love of the community, only inflames and increases.85

Through love of the Universal Community, then, the spirit of this community becomes one’s own. Salvation comes through expressions of this love, for, as a loyal member of the Universal Community, one sheds one’s natural wayward self for a selfhood enlivened by simultaneous self-expression and self-sacrifice. The third idea from Christianity that Royce engages is that of atonement. According to Christian doctrine, the only escape for the burdened

Foust-Chap05.indd 130

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

131

individual, the only union with the divine spiritual community that one can obtain, “is provided by the divine plan for the redemption of mankind,” a plan that includes atonement “for the sins and for the guilt of mankind.”86 Royce focuses on “the problem of the traitor”87 as a typical case of the need for atonement. The traitor “has had an ideal, and . . . has loved it with all his heart and his soul and his mind and his strength. . . . He must have embraced it . . . with full loyalty.”88 At the same time, the traitor knows that he has, in “at least some one voluntary act” of his life, “been deliberately false” to, or betrayed, his cause.89 Because human action is irrevocable, “no good deeds of the traitor’s future will ever so atone” for the act of treason such that the action is nullified.90 Because the stain of sin can never be cleanly washed away, atonement for the traitor must involve instead conferring a new value on the act of treason. The traitor, however, cannot do this alone. Because he has, by his deed, destroyed the community in whose life and in whose spirit he had found his guide and ideal, the shattered community must also reconcile itself to the deed and to the traitor who committed it. Like the traitor, the community can “never be restored to its former purity of unscarred love.”91 So, after it “lovingly mourns with a sorrow” for its loss, the community or “a steadfastly loyal servant who acts, so to speak, as the incarnation of the very spirit of the community itself” must “bring out of the realm of death a new life that only this very death rendered possible.”92 Thus, the atoning agents perform a deed or various deeds for which only the traitor’s treason furnishes the opportunity, giving the occasion and supplying the condition of the atoning deed(s). As a result, all may say, “The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.”93 Royce finds this theory of atonement at work in Genesis: “Treason did its work (so the legend runs) when man fell. But Christ’s work was so perfect that, in a perfectly objective way, it took the opportunity which man’s fall furnished to make the world better than it could have been had man not fallen.”94 Summarizing his discussion of atonement on the heels of his interpretation of Genesis, Royce formulates “the central postulate” of the human community’s “highest spirituality”: “No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world, but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.”95

Foust-Chap05.indd 131

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

132

loya lt y and communit y

To summarize, The Problem of Christianity adds at least three more crucial pieces to the picture of the relationship of loyalty and community in the thought of Royce. These pieces come in the form of the concepts of the Universal Community, the moral burden of the individual, and atonement. In considering each, we find significant burden incumbent on the individual who strives to be loyal to community. It is by no means easy—and, in fact, apparently impossible—to sustain loyalty to the Universal Community without being guilty of a moral failing symptomatic of the moral burden of the individual, and again by no means easy to carry out the process of atonement, whether one has sinned or been sinned against. All the same, the labor of the loyal is a labor of love. Commenting on Royce’s conception of the resilience of the loyal, C. Hannah Schell writes, “Buoyed, and focused, by loyalty, the loyal agent knows what it means to redouble efforts, in the face of loss or betrayal, toward achieving an ideal.”96 The burden of loyalty is no intractable obstacle; ultimately, it serves to reinforce loyalty already present and to inspire more fervent loyalty in its train.

Conclusion At the start of this chapter, we witnessed the worry of Tessman that in times of liberatory struggle loyalty becomes a burdened virtue. So far, in expositing Royce’s treatment of the burden of loyalty, I have focused on the struggle associated with maintaining perfervid loyalty in the face of various kinds of burdens while situated within the context of community. The burdens placed on the shoulders of both the California goldmining communities and the Pauline community of Christianity are the burdens incumbent on us all. If our communal life is to be characterized by order, stability, and growth, we must accept responsibility for these burdens and work wisely and loyally to cultivate healthy, flourishing communities. Still, with these pronouncements we may not have entirely allayed Tessman’s worry. Indeed, at this juncture, it appears that only half of her worry may be vanquished. This is the first of two “stumbling blocks regarding loyalty” that she concludes political resisters may face: When they are loyal to a group that calls for critique but not deconstruction, they are burdened with a commitment to a community that

Foust-Chap05.indd 132

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

133

may still do significant damage to their selves (because the community has not yet been critically transformed in ways that would reduce its internal dynamics of domination and subordination) and with the hardships of always being a critic, never fully belonging as a comfortably accepted member.97

A Roycean account of the burden of loyalty addresses this problem by acknowledging the burden of commitment of critique—as for, instance, in the case of the community under the sway of mob mentality, or a community that has lost sight of its membership in the Universal Community— and insisting that loyal commitment to the well-being of the community is most needed and thus most valuable at precisely these times. It is true that being a critic comes with hardship and that always being one may result in never feeling that one belongs comfortably as an accepted member. One must remember, however, that living well and acting rightly need not be compatible with being accepted. Indeed, in many cases, such as the tragic case of Antigone, the former is achieved at the expense of the latter. Tessman spells out a second stumbling block of loyalty for political resisters, however, one that I have not yet adequately addressed: When political resisters consider loyalty to communities that—as their own critical judgments may lead them to believe—would better be deconstructed, they find not that they are saddled with loyalty as a burdened virtue, but rather that loyalty becomes unavailable as a virtue. In these cases disloyalty is morally prescribed.

Imagining an individual whose community is plagued by each of the three evils described by Royce, and whose passionate pleas for wise provincialism continually go ignored or are hostilely attacked, one appreciates the scenario Tessman envisages. It appears, however, that a Roycean response to this problem may be crafted. Concerned with feminists engaged in liberatory struggle, Barnette finds value in Royce’s description of the traitor: A traitor has the important role of forcing the community to atone, and in this way bettering the community indirectly from his or her treachery. The traitor also serves to highlight the important role of choice and loyalty within community members, crystallizing Royce’s notion that the community is never a purely accidental occurrence. . . . By providing a model of a traitor whose sins against the community

Foust-Chap05.indd 133

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

134

loya lt y and communit y

play a large role in advancing the community toward salvation, Royce creates ample room for feminist traitors, who actively betray their communities for the goals of feminism and, thereby, positively transform their communities.98

Barnette seems to be on the same page as Tessman in advocating deconstruction of one’s community on the part of a loyally inspired—in this case, feminist—critic. Moreover, just as Tessman urges disloyalty as a moral prescription in such a case, Barnette lauds the feminist traitor for forcing the community to self-reflection and self-improvement. In fact, Barnette goes on to put the point more strongly, holding that “from the perspective of Royce’s idea of loyalty to loyalty, the feminist traitor is a necessity.”99 The feminist traitor is a necessity insofar as patriarchy stifles communities. Not only does patriarchy limit the ability of women to formulate and carry out plans of life, but it indoctrinates men to believe that patriarchal attitudes and social structures are natural and appropriate, which prompts resistance of reflection if ever the opposite is suggested. Patriarchy is thus deleterious to all whom it affects, cutting against the capacity of both men and women to be their loyal best.100 Barnette parts ways with Tessman in asking “if feminist traitors are working for the betterment of the community as a whole, is it correct to call their actions truly traitorous?”101 That is, Tessman assumes that the actions of, say, a feminist traitor are to be understood as no longer acts of loyalty but of disloyalty. As such, the feminist traitor has relieved herself of the burden of loyalty, for loyalty can no longer be attributed to her. While a traitor is indeed disloyal, Barnette suggests that what appear to be acts of disloyalty can in some cases be understood qua loyalty: If a woman who lived in Connecticut during the turn of the twentieth century knowingly and actively violated the Comstock Laws by providing contraception and information on family planning to other women, her actions are traitorous inasmuch as she is actively breaking a law, violating her community’s officially established regulations. In this way, she is a traitor. Her actions undercut her community’s position and destabilize her society, causing unrest by undercutting the authoritative forces of her community. However, in doing so, her deed advances the autonomy of women and their ability to freely choose causes and foster loyalty, and her action, once discovered by the community, must be reckoned with.102

Foust-Chap05.indd 134

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

loya lt y and communit y

135

Thus, in the case of this Connecticut woman, a critically loyal member of her Connecticut community, her traitorous deed may be seen as, at the core, an act of loyalty. One might say, in fact, that her disloyalty is committed in loyalty to loyalty. The Roycean loyal traitor seems coextensive with the Tessmanian burdened loyal critic. Whereas Tessman believes that this individual relinquishes loyalty to her community in her loyalty to a cause that provokes liberatory struggle, Royce would claim the contrary. Such a loyal critic is the kind of loyal person whom communities need most, even when—and indeed perhaps most when—they are blind to such need. When we see that our own communities are ailing, it is our task to begin the work to resuscitate, rejuvenate, or reconstruct them. It is only as a last resort that we should resign ourselves to their abandonment—only when it is clear that their continued existence will perpetuate disloyalty to loyalty. Such is how we understand loyalty to causes in general. We should therefore understand loyalty to community no differently.

Foust-Chap05.indd 135

6/5/2012 10:39:54 AM

six

di s l o y al ty



I

n preceding chapters, I have considered the nature of loyalty, the principle of loyalty to loyalty, how to learn loyalty, and how to be loyal in the context of community. In this chapter, I focus on disloyalty. While one may be tempted to describe disloyalty as simply the antonym of loyalty, the discussion of the loyal traitor in chapter 5 suggests that distinguishing between loyalty and disloyalty may not be so tidy an affair. I will here focus for some length on the account of disloyalty given recently by Simon Keller, who holds that “it is possible to say what is wrong with disloyalty, when it is wrong, without making a more fundamental commitment to the value of loyalty.”1 While I agree with some aspects of Keller’s account of disloyalty, I conceive of disloyalty as wrong precisely insofar as it negates something we value: loyalty. Thus Keller’s account of disloyalty stands in need of revision. Royce’s treatment of disloyalty aids in this revision. In addition to proposing necessary and sufficient conditions for an act to be characterized as one of disloyalty, the account of disloyalty articulated in this chapter includes phenomenological descriptions of disloyalty as experienced by both the betrayer and the betrayed. { 136 }

Foust-Chap06.indd 136

6/5/2012 10:41:29 AM

disloyalt y

137

These descriptions more clearly illustrate what occurs when disloyalty is afoot and highlight the need for betrayer and betrayed to confront disloyalty as a problematic situation to be dealt with and, if possible, overcome. Following Royce, I then argue for the mutual value of atonement, for both the betrayer and the betrayed, in the wake of disloyalty. At the same time, however, I conclude by proposing conditions under which it could be appropriate to forgo atonement, choosing to detach oneself from a cause that has been maligned by disloyalty. The Nature of Disloyalty Keller offers the following definition of “disloyalty”: “To be disloyal is to fail to take the side of something with which you share a special relationship, when the relationship is such that you are expected to do so.”2 I find Keller’s definition of “disloyalty” compelling though not entirely accurate. In order to show where I believe he goes wrong, Keller’s definition must be unpacked. In particular, we must clarify what is meant by “fail to take the side of,” “special relationship,” and “such that you are expected to do so.” It will make most sense to discuss first what is meant by a special relationship with something such that one is expected to take its side. After doing this, we can discuss what it means to fail to take the side of that thing. I think it straightforward that the special relationship in question— that in which one is expected to take the side of the thing with which one shares this special relationship—is a relationship of loyalty. This relationship is “special” in at least two senses of that term; the relationship is unique and it is momentous. The relationship is unique, for most of our relationships are not those marked by loyalty; we do not exhibit—on Royce’s conception of loyalty—willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion in our relationships to all persons. We tend to have, for instance, many more acquaintances than friends. When pressed to say how many “true” or “really close” friends we have, we typically cite a precious few. These relationships are, of course, highly meaningful, their vast quality more than compensating for their scant quantity. Relationships marked by loyalty are thus special, and they are relationships such that we are expected to take the side of those with whom we share such a relationship. Indeed, we are not expected to take the side of an acquaintance as we are expected to take the side of a friend. Suppose I have an acquaintance

Foust-Chap06.indd 137

6/5/2012 10:41:29 AM

138

disloyalt y

and a friend, both of whom I know to be rather nervous leading up to public speaking engagements. It is surely good for me to encourage my acquaintance, perhaps by assuring him that his presentation will go well. If I fail to do so, however, and simply do nothing, I will generally not be regarded as having acted disloyally. While I may indeed have acted more beneficently, because I do not share a special relationship with him, I did not act disloyally. Should I fail to encourage my friend, however, this failure will generally be regarded more critically. Friends are expected to help each other in times of need, and my failure to help him when I recognized that he was in a time of need constitutes an affront the likes of which is not committed with respect to my acquaintance. This is because I am expected to take the side of my friend, whereas I am not expected to do so with respect to my acquaintance. A relationship marked by loyalty binds the moral agent in a way that a relationship not marked by loyalty does not. I am not obligated to support my acquaintance as I am obligated to support my friend. What does it mean to “take the side of” something with which I share a special relationship? I have just referred to my obligation to “support” my friend and my lack of obligation to “support” my acquaintance. I believe that “support” adequately captures what is meant by “take the side of.” Being supportive by encouraging my friend and acquaintance may help to ameliorate the problematic situation of each. I am expected to lend such support, however, only in the case of my friend. The loyalty characterizing our relationship demands it. I may fail to take the side of my friend in one of two ways. I may lack in support (e.g., I do nothing) or I may demonstrate my lack of support in a way that announces not only that I am not on his side but that I am on the side opposed to him (e.g., cognizant of his anxiety, I tell him that nothing in the world is going to save his presentation from disaster and that I greatly anticipate my amusement on witnessing the spectacle). Now if in the former case (in which I do nothing) I am not cognizant of my friend’s nervousness, it should not be said that I have been disloyal. As far as I know, I am on the side of my friend. If, however, in the former case, I am cognizant of my friend’s nervousness, standing by idly and doing nothing to help is an instance of disloyalty. I have chosen to not support him, effectively aligning myself with “the side against him.” Knowing that the support that I have withheld could have, if given, at least mitigated the difficulty of his situation, I have allowed him to be worse off when I could have improved his situation.

Foust-Chap06.indd 138

6/5/2012 10:41:29 AM

disloyalt y

139

My honing in on the significance of affronts and expectations follows Keller’s approach to articulating what constitutes disloyalty. In fact, Keller rephrases his definition of disloyalty to read, “To be disloyal to something—call it X—is to do X an affront by failing to meet a certain sort of expectation to which you are subject: namely, an expectation that exists by virtue of some special relationship between you and X, and that demands that you, in some sense or other, take X’s side.”3 I have focused so far on the case of a special relationship between friends. Of course, several other kinds of special relationship exist. Familial relationships, clubs, teams, organizations, one’s relationship to one’s vocation, and one’s relationship to one’s country as one of its citizens are all examples of relationships that are at least potentially of this special status. We might imagine Royce offering a similar definition of disloyalty that reads as such: “To be disloyal to a cause is to do the cause an affront by failing to meet a certain sort of expectation to which you are subject: namely, an expectation that exists by virtue of your loyalty to your cause, and that demands that you, in some sense or other, are loyal to your cause.” In my failing to “take the side of” or support my friend, I have done an affront to him by failing to be loyal to him as our relationship of loyalty expects and demands that I be. I am disloyal when I commit this sort of affront with respect to any cause to which I am related such that I am expected to be loyal (i.e., any cause to which I am loyal). If loyalty is, for Royce, the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause, then perhaps the Roycean definition of “disloyalty” ought to be “the failure of a person to be willingly, practically, and thoroughgoingly devoted to a cause.” We must take care, however, to address the ambiguity of such a definition. On one reading, this definition has it that a person who does not choose and does not serve any causes whatsoever willingly, practically, and with thoroughgoing devotion is to be understood as disloyal. On another reading, this definition has it that a person who chooses and serves a cause is disloyal if he fails to serve his chosen cause willingly, practically, and with thoroughgoing devotion. Royce would refute the plausibility of the first reading, however, for he would deny the coherence of referring to the personhood of such a being. If one does not choose and does not serve any causes whatsoever, one lacks order and purpose, existing as a site of fleeting chaotic impulses and desires.4 “This I certainly know,” Royce asserts firmly, “if a man has made no choice for himself of the cause that he serves, he has not yet come to his rational self, he has not yet found his business as

Foust-Chap06.indd 139

6/5/2012 10:41:29 AM

140

disloyalt y

a moral agent.”5 Thus, rather than brand such an individual disloyal, Royce would hesitate to brand such an individual an individual in any meaningful sense. The second reading of the proposed Roycean definition of disloyalty seems more apt; one is disloyal if one has chosen a cause but fails to serve this cause willingly, practically, and with thoroughgoing devotion. I am disloyal to my nervous friend when, cognizant of his nervousness, I elect to do nothing rather than give him my support, as I am disloyal to this same friend when I attack him rather than give him my support. I am, in these moments, clearly exhibiting my unwillingness to serve the cause of my friendship (or the well-being of my friend) practically and with thoroughgoing devotion. Notice, however, that I just described disloyalty as my exhibiting unwillingness to serve my cause practically and with thoroughgoing devotion. This is different from referring to disloyalty as a failure to serve one’s cause willingly, practically, and with thoroughgoing devotion. In many contexts, in order to fail at something, one must first attempt it. One can fail a driving examination, for instance, only if one takes a driving examination. I take this consideration to be salient with respect to the case in which I am unaware of the nervousness of my friend. In this case, it is plausible that I have been willingly, practically, and thoroughgoingly devoted to the cause of my friendship (or the well-being of my friend). My friend’s harbored fear has evaded me. Perhaps he has intentionally kept his fear well-hidden. Have I failed to serve my cause willingly, practically, and with thoroughgoing devotion? Perhaps my devotion has not been thoroughgoing despite my best efforts. If it were, I would have somehow or another detected my friend’s nervousness and then given him my support. On this understanding of the scenario, I have indeed failed to be loyal. Does this then mean that I have been disloyal? I contend that it does not. To be disloyal is not to fail to be loyal; rather, to be disloyal is to choose to not be loyal. This rendering of what it means to be disloyal captures our intuitions about each of the scenarios that I have considered with respect to my nervous friend. I should be called disloyal when I have chosen to not be supportive of the object of my loyalty, but should not be so called when I may have been more supportive of the object of my loyalty but was unable to be so for whatever reason (e.g., ignorance of my friend’s need for more support). A grey case—at least for how I have just distinguished between what ought to be considered an act of disloyalty and what ought not—is raised

Foust-Chap06.indd 140

6/5/2012 10:41:29 AM

disloyalt y

141

by Keller, although it is a case that he labels one of disloyalty. He describes a scenario in which you have been loyal to your friend but, in contrast, she “never has time to talk to you when it is you who needs to discuss things, she regularly stands you up, she is careless with your personal information, and so on.” This friend would, as Keller describes her, be shocked to be accused of disloyalty. “The reason why she is disloyal,” Keller explains, “may be not that she means to be, but that she is preoccupied or distracted, or is going through a time during which she is forgetful and self-absorbed.”6 I find Keller’s explanation of this friend’s apparent disloyalty overly vague, if not incoherent. If the friend never has the time to talk to you and regularly stands you up, it is not clear that this individual is really a friend at all. If we suppose, however, that it is accurate to refer to this person as a friend, before labeling her action disloyal, more needs to be known concerning the nature of her preoccupation or distraction or concerning the time during which she is forgetful and self-absorbed. Certainly our judgment of this friend will differ if the cause of her distraction is the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one, as opposed to her penchant for playing video games. One does not choose the sudden and unexpected death of a loved one, but one does choose to play video games. In the former case, it would be inappropriately harsh to refer to our friend as disloyal. In the latter case, however, the more critical label may well be warranted. I propose, then, the following amendment to Keller’s definition of “disloyalty”: To be disloyal to something—call it X—is to do X an affront by choosing not to meet a certain sort of expectation to which you are subject: namely, an expectation that exists by virtue of some special relationship between you and X and that demands that you, in some sense or other, take X’s side. Articulating this same definition of “disloyalty” in Royce’s vocabulary, I describe “disloyalty” as the choice of a person to not be willingly, practically, and thoroughgoingly devoted to a cause, where the choice is being made with respect to a cause to which one is normally loyal. I am disloyal, then, when I am cognizant of my friend’s nervousness and choose to do nothing to help him, as I am disloyal when I am cognizant of my friend’s nervousness and choose to antagonize him. If choosing to spurn an expectation of loyalty constitutes disloyal action, and if choosing to honor an expectation of loyalty constitutes loyal action, what lies between? How should we describe actions in which

Foust-Chap06.indd 141

6/5/2012 10:41:29 AM

142

disloyalt y

we are neither seeking to undermine nor seeking to support a cause? Royce uses the term “non-loyal” to describe such actions. “Let loyalty be your pearl of great price,” Royce writes. “Sell all the happiness that you possess or can get in disloyal or in non-loyal activities, and buy that pearl.”7 It should not go unnoted that Royce is here alluding to the parable of the pearl in Matthew 13: 45–46: “Again, the kingdom of heaven is like unto a merchant man, seeking goodly pearls: Who, when he had found one pearl of great price, went and sold all that he had, and bought it.”8 If loyalty is the pearl of great price, disloyalty and nonloyalty are those pearls that are easier to come by and thus of lesser value.9 The happiness that one derives from disloyalty and nonloyalty pales in comparison to that what may be gained via loyalty. Indeed, for Royce, such happiness would be nominal, transient, and perhaps even illusory. Nonloyal actions and disloyal actions should not, however, be regarded as moral equals. With no trace of equivocation, Royce states that “disloyalty is moral suicide.”10 Nonloyal action receives rare mention from Royce, let alone excoriation. Disloyal action, on the other hand, incurs his persistent criticism, with the description of disloyalty as moral suicide reappearing in his description of the traitor in The Problem of Christianity.11 In the phenomenology of disloyalty to follow, I will look closer at Royce’s account of the traitor and at the idea that disloyalty is moral suicide. First, however, I will describe disloyalty from the perspective of the victim of disloyal action. Phenomenology of Disloyalty By “phenomenology of disloyalty,” I mean nothing other than a description of the experience of disloyalty. The preceding chapters have thus involved, among other things, a phenomenology of loyalty. Recall, for instance, that loyalty involves self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment, both at least potentially of great intensity. Disloyalty has been contrasted with loyalty by being described as the choice to not be loyal. Thus, we might expect disloyalty to be conceived, phenomenologically, as a turning away from self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment. A phenomenology of disloyalty that stops here, however, would not do it justice. Our understanding of the experience of disloyalty is impoverished if we lack an understanding of the experience of “turning away.” We have also described the experience of those who enjoy the loyalty of others as that of being buoyed and

Foust-Chap06.indd 142

6/5/2012 10:41:29 AM

disloyalt y

143

enriched, but we have not as of now given much in the way of a description of the experience of suffering disloyalty. Just as a robust account of loyalty takes account of the experience of the loyal and those to whom they are loyal, a robust account of disloyalty must take account of the experience of the disloyal and those to whom they are disloyal. Identifying two harms coming to those who suffer disloyalty, Keller writes: “First, there is the harm involved in the disloyal person’s act, considered independently of the fact that it is disloyal. Second, there is the distinct harm of having that first kind of damage done through an act of disloyalty.”12 The examples considered thus far bear Keller’s claim out. My nervous friend will be hurt by anyone’s revealing to him a relishing of his imminent failure at public speaking. Should I reveal to him, however, that I partake in such relishing, he will be all the more hurt, because the loyalty characterizing our friendship carries with it the expectation that I will not turn away from him as my words indicate that I have. That I should look forward to his failure is especially painful and is indeed a betrayal, for I have betrayed the expectation of support that he rightly has of me, as his friend. “To feel a victim of another’s disloyalty,” Keller claims, “is, characteristically, to feel assaulted. . . . It is to feel that the disloyal person was out to get you, or at least prepared to take advantage of your vulnerability in order to achieve her nefarious goals.”13 The goal of setting out to enjoy another person’s failure is nefarious indeed; such a betrayal constitutes a personal attack and so may legitimately be described as a kind of assault. “The experience of the victim of disloyalty,” Keller adds, “is also, in paradigm cases, an experience of loss. What you lose is, in a sense, the disloyal person herself.” Although Keller does not elaborate as to what he means by “paradigm cases,” I infer that he has in mind cases of disloyalty that initiate the end of a given relationship. “You learn,” he continues, “that you do not have the special, valuable relationship that you thought you had, or that you would have hoped to have.”14 In the case of my nervous friend, should I betray him by antagonizing him, he may very well reevaluate what he has in our friendship. He has been loyal to this friendship; I have just been disloyal to it. While Keller is right to suggest that my friend experiences loss, it is not just me that he loses. He loses the we or us emergent from the loyal bond that we shared. Because the we or us is composed partly of me and partly of him, in the loss produced by my disloyalty he loses not only me but a part of himself. He can no longer cite

Foust-Chap06.indd 143

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

144

disloyalt y

as part of his identity, “friend of ——.” Who he is has changed; a part of his identity has perished. How are we to understand the experience of the person who has been disloyal? We have seen that Royce dubs disloyalty “moral suicide.” He provides the following elaboration in The Philosophy of Loyalty: “If I loyally consent, I mean to be faithful; I give myself; I am henceforth the self thus given over to the cause; and therefore essential unfaithfulness is, for me, moral suicide.”15 In The Problem of Christianity, Royce gives a good deal of attention to the figure of the traitor, who commits “acts such that they would involve for him a kind of moral suicide,—a deliberate wrecking of what makes life, for himself, morally worthwhile.”16 There is in the thought of Royce no apparent distinction between disloyalty and treason. If one has been disloyal, one has committed treason against one’s cause; if one has committed treason, one has been disloyal to one’s cause. In The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce notes that he can say of another person “that he is disloyal only when I know what cause it is to which he has committed himself, and what it is that he has done to be false to his chosen fidelity.”17 In The Problem of Christianity, Royce considers the words of the traitor at some time before his treason and imagines them as a vow against committing this very act: “ ‘If I were to do that, I should be false to all that I hold most dear; I shall throw away my honor; I should violate the fidelity that is to me the very essence of my moral interest in my existence. . . . If I were to do that of my own free will, I could thereafter never forgive myself.’ ”18 It is evident that what Royce has in mind by “what makes life, for himself, morally worthwhile” is the traitor’s cause. While individuals may be loyal to various local causes, recall that Royce conceives of the collection of such causes as a system that may be referred to as a moral agent’s sole cause (i.e., one’s “plan of life” or “life of loyalty”). Indeed, Royce insists that “one must think of one’s voluntary life in terms of fidelity to some such ‘ideal,’ or set of ideals” and describes the traitor as having surveyed “his plan of life in a resolute way,” articulating his ideals to the best of his ability, determining “what makes his voluntary life, from his point of view, worth living.”19 To commit such an act of treason would be to be false to one’s most central ideal or ideals such that one has truly betrayed what makes one’s life one worth living. In the wake of such action, one may indeed feel as though one has thrown away one’s honor and rendered oneself unforgivable, at least to oneself.

Foust-Chap06.indd 144

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

disloyalt y

145

But how, precisely, are we to understand what occurs when the traitor turns away from his cause, rendering his loyalty his former loyalty? Because Royce’s most extensive discussion of disloyalty is his discussion of the traitor in The Problem of Christianity, the most detailed phenomenological description that Royce offers invokes concepts pertinent to Christianity. Disloyalty is, in this context, a sin. While The Problem of Christianity is also the site of Royce’s most extensive treatment of sin, we are fruitfully guided by his discussion of sin in The World and the Individual. In the second lecture of the series, “The Linkage of Facts,” Royce asserts that “every least shifting of our conscious momentary attention is one of these small steps whereby we continually undertake to make good the original sin, as it were, with which our form of consciousness is beset.”20 Our form of consciousness is beset by its finite capacity. We are able to attend to only a small portion of the universe at once, much of the vast detail of the universe appearing to us only vaguely or escaping our attention altogether. “Our finitude means, then,” Royce explains, “an actual inattention—a lack of successful interest, at this conscious instant, in more than a very few of the details of the universe.”21 Royce does not dwell on sin in “The Linkage of Facts” but takes up the subject again in the eighth lecture, “The Moral Order.” Here, Royce asserts that “all sin is a free choosing of the sort of narrowness which, in our second lecture, we found to be, in one aspect, the natural fate of the human being.”22 In other words, all sin is a deliberate inattention to some detail of the universe. The detail of the universe in question, Royce claims, is “an Ought already present to one’s finite consciousness.”23 In other words, sin is the deliberate inattention to a moral obligation of which one is cognizant. If sin is a deliberate inattention to obligation, when cast as a sin, disloyalty is a deliberate inattention to obligation entailed by one’s loyalty. In this vein, Royce in The Problem of Christianity writes: “One who has found his loyalty is indeed, at first, under the obsession of the new spirit of grace. But if, henceforth, he lives with a will of his own, he can, by a willful closing of his eyes to the light, become disloyal.”24 Royce’s viewing disloyalty as an intentional closing of one’s eyes to the light is clearly in line with his description of sin as a deliberate inattention to an Ought. The “light” of The Problem of Christianity is thus Royce’s Christianization of the “Ought” of The World and the Individual. What are we to make of Royce’s description of the loyal as being under the obsession of the new spirit of grace? In The Philosophy of Loyalty,

Foust-Chap06.indd 145

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

146

disloyalt y

he refers to the grace that is characteristic of loyal “patriots, soldiers, mothers, and martyrs” who effectively say to their cause, “ ‘I am, even of my own will, thine. I have no will except thy will. Take me, use me, control me, and even thereby fulfil me and exalt me.’ ”25 “It is, then, with the cause to which you personally are loyal, as it was with divine grace in an older theology,” Royce explains. “The cause must control you, as divine grace took saving control of the sinner; but only your own will can accept this control, and a grace that merely compels can never save.”26 This explanation receives elaboration in The Sources of Religious Insight, in which Royce describes loyalty as a finding of an object that comes to you from without and above, as divine grace has always been said to come. . . . The cause is a religious object. It finds you in your need. It points out your way to salvation. Its presence in your world is to you a free gift from the realm of the spirit—a gift that you have not of yourself, but through the willingness of the world to manifest to you the way of salvation. This free gift first compels your love. Then you freely give yourself in return.27

Returning to The Problem of Christianity, we see that, on Paul’s account, “the individual man has to be won over, not to a loyalty which at first seems, to the fleshly mind, natural, but to an essentially new life.” This essentially new life is that of a member of the Christian community. “The natural man has to be delivered from a doom to which ‘the law’ only binds him faster the more he seeks to escape. And this escape involves finding, for the individual man, a community to which, when the new life comes, he is henceforth loyal as no natural clan loyalty or family loyalty can make him.”28 As Royce’s remarks on grace indicate, being won over to the new life furnished by the cause is not a passive affair; one embraces the cause, thereby embracing the new life. With respect to the cause of Christianity, grace is “the power that gives to the Christian convert the new loyalty.”29 With respect to any cause, then, grace is that power conferred to the loyal by the cause that enables the loyal to give oneself over to the cause. With the situation of the traitor in mind, Royce states: “Whoever, through grace, has found the beloved of his life, and now freely lives the life of love, knows that he could, if he chose, betray his beloved. And he knows what estimate his own free choice now requires him to put upon such betrayal. . . . The more precious the light that has seemed to come

Foust-Chap06.indd 146

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

disloyalt y

147

to me, the deeper is the disgrace to which, in my own eyes, I can condemn myself, if I voluntarily become false to this light.”30 If loyalty comes to the traitor through grace, and disloyalty is a betrayal of what has come to him through grace, then disloyalty is, for the traitor, quite literally disgraceful.31 The traitor has treated as expendable what is precious; he has treated as meaningless what brings his life meaning. Awareness of one’s own disloyalty is recognition not only of one’s “turning away” from another but of one’s “turning away” from oneself. Atonement “No baseness or cruelty of treason so deep or so tragic shall enter our human world,” Royce writes, “but that loyal love shall be able in due time to oppose to just that deed of treason its fitting deed of atonement.”32 Royce’s discussion of atonement in The Problem of Christianity occurs directly on the heels of his description of the traitor. For Royce, the situation of the traitor serves as a typical case of the need for atonement. Thinking through the situation of the traitor enables one to conceive of what, precisely, an atoning act would be, as well as what it would and would not accomplish. With his account of atonement, Royce brings to light what “reconciliation of the traitor with his own moral world, and with himself” may be possible. Such reconciliation is, in fact, “possible, although always imperfect.”33 The reason for this is that, like any act— like all acts performed by all people—the traitor’s disloyal act cannot be undone. While all acts, once committed, enter the domain of the irrevocable, acts such as that of the traitor reside in what Royce calls, with flair, the “hell of the irrevocable”: The hell of the irrevocable: all of us know what it is to come to the border of it when we contemplate our own past mistakes or mischances. But we can enter it and dwell in it only when the fact “This deed is irrevocable,” is combined with the further fact “This deed is one that, unless I call treason my good, and moral suicide my life, I cannot forgive myself for having done.”34

With the traitor’s act understood as such, “no good deeds of the traitor’s future will ever so atone for his one act of treason.”35 Still, an imperfect reconciliation is possible. Royce canvasses traditional “penal” and “moral” conceptions of reconciliation, applying each

Foust-Chap06.indd 147

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

148

disloyalt y

to the case of the traitor. As John E. Smith reports, Royce rejected the penal theory of reconciliation “because it cannot speak to the condition of the sinner who, because he must be reconciled to himself as well as to God, looks for something more than a theory maintaining that another has been substituted or given as a ransom for his sin.”36 The moral conception of reconciliation is inadequate because “it counsels the sinner to do something—namely, to repent—which he not only has already done, but something the very doing of which constitutes his hell of remorse.”37 These accounts of reconciliation are unfit, for each misses that atonement is an affair to be carried out not solely by the traitor but also by the community of which he is a member—the very community that he has betrayed. Smith suggests that Royce aspires to introduce a novel formulation of atonement that addresses the question of how the community can reconcile itself to the deeds of the traitor. The disloyal deed of the traitor “is not only ‘private’ in the sense that it is confined to the person of the doer alone, but it is ‘public’ in that it breaks an objective bond of unity, that is, sin destroys the community. For if betrayal involves an ideal and an ideal is a cause, then the traitor is one who, to a degree, destroys the community that has existed and been sustained by free allegiance to that cause.”38 Thus, Royce modifies the question concerning the possibility of the traitor’s reconciliation so that it becomes a question concerning the possibility of the community’s reconciliation of the traitor to himself and to itself. While the community knows that it will always be the case that its unity was fractured by his traitorous act, “if reconciliation there is to be,” it must concern “not only the traitor but the shattered or wounded community.”39 Individual betrayer and community betrayed must both play active roles in the process of atonement. The following remarks of Royce’s in The World and the Individual are fitting in the present context: If the individual needs his social world as a means of grace and a gateway of salvation, the social order, in turn, needs individuals that are worth saving and can never be saved unless it expresses itself through the deeds and inner lives of souls deeply conscious of the dignity of selfhood, of the infinite worth of unique and intensely conscious life.40

Individuals and communities require one another as sources of grace and therefore loyalty. Without grace culminating in loyalty, individuals and communities flounder.

Foust-Chap06.indd 148

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

disloyalt y

149

That betrayer and betrayed must both be proactive in the process of atonement leads Royce to favor speaking of creating reconciliation rather than finding reconciliation. “This creative work,” Royce explains, “shall include a deed, or various deeds, for which only just this treason furnishes the opportunity.”41 That Royce mentions opportunity in this context is significant. Opportunities are open possibilities; they are potentialities of action, which we elect or decline to seize. “Great calamities,” Royce notes, “are . . . great opportunities.”42 The calamity of disloyalty is, therefore, also the opportunity for the state of reconciliation that will follow in its train. While such a view of things may not immediately inspire solace, Royce’s view is that it ultimately should. As both betrayer and betrayed will come to find, “The world, as transformed by this creative deed, is better than it would have been had all else remained the same, but had that deed of treason not been done at all.”43 In other words, the creative act of atonement performed in response to the traitor’s disloyalty will make the world a better place than it had been before the traitorous act was committed. For the traitor, the creative act “breaks open, as it were, the tomb of the dead and treacherous past, and comes forth as the life and the expression of the creative and reconciling will.”44 For the community, the creative act “transforms the meaning of that very past which it cannot undo” via a “transfiguration of the very loss into a gain that, without this very loss, could never have been won.”45 While it is not clear how Royce can be certain that the world is better than it was before the occurrence of the sin, nor is it clear what “better” here amounts to, Royce cites as an illustration of his theory of atonement the biblical narrative of Joseph’s being sold into slavery by his brothers. This act was one of their disloyalty against Joseph and their father and, on Royce’s account, the act was indeed directed against their familial community as a whole. James Harry Cotton recounts the story through the lenses of Royce’s theory of atonement: The sin of the brothers in selling Joseph into slavery was treason against the community, the family. Their act once done was irrevocable. No “forgiveness” could reconcile them to their deed, if their conscience were once fully awakened. The family was broken. Jacob had mourned his son as dead. But Joseph through his fidelity in Egypt was able one day to turn the treason of his brothers into an opportunity for a creative deed which, combined with the treason of his brothers, made a better family than had the treason never

Foust-Chap06.indd 149

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

150

disloyalt y

been done. The famine came and the brothers went to Egypt seeking grain. Joseph as the minister of agriculture had contrived to store enough surplus grain to outlast the years of famine. When he made himself known to his brothers they were aghast. It was then that Joseph spoke his atoning word, a word that the brothers themselves could never say. God had sent him into Egypt, so Joseph now interpreted the brothers’ treason, that he might provide for the family in this desperate time.46

In Royce’s own words, we find the following conclusion: “The community is renewed; the spirit has triumphed; and the traitors are glad that the irrevocable deed which they condemn has been made a source of a good which never could have existed without it. They are in a new friendship with their community, since the ends that have triumphed unite the new will with the old and evil will, through a new conquest of the evil.”47 In other words, the disgraceful action of the brothers brought about Joseph’s graceful atoning action, which in turn caused the brothers to gain grace anew. Individuals, family, and world are all made better than they were before the brothers’ disloyalty—better than they would have been had the deed of disloyalty not taken place and thus not given rise to the deeds of atonement. Commenting on the function of grace in Royce’s theory of atonement, Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley writes: “One of the key aspects of the doctrine of grace is that sinful human persons are transformed into new creations by an act of grace. This is achieved neither by substitution nor by mere repentance but rather by being incorporated into a transformed way of life and becoming a member of a ‘beloved community.’ ”48 Indeed, Royce coins the term, “Beloved Community” to describe the Universal Community when, through grace, it is characterized by universal loyalty. In the Beloved Community, individuals such as Joseph and his brethren—or my nervous friend and I—“become instruments of good to each other rather than instruments of evil. Members are to be vessels of grace to each other and this grace helps each to live up to the moral demand.”49 Should one balk at the description of members of the Beloved Community as “vessels of grace,” one is reminded first of Royce’s description of the loyal as willing, devoted instruments of their cause and then of the contagious character of loyalty. The loyal are indeed vessels of grace to each other, both deliberately and uncontrollably:

Foust-Chap06.indd 150

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

disloyalt y

151

If the miracle [of grace] occurs, and then works according to the rules which, in fact, the contagion of love usually seem to follow, the one who effects the greatest transformation and initiates the high type of loyalty in the distracted social world must, it would seem, combine in himself, in some way, the nature which a highly trained social individual develops as he becomes self-conscious, with the nature which a community possesses when it becomes intimately united in the bonds of brotherly love, so that it is “one undivided soul of many a soul.”50

Thus, Royce claims that “atoning deeds express the most nearly absolute loyalty which human beings can show. The atoning deeds are the most creative of the expressions which the community gives through the deed of an individual, to its will that the unity of the spirit should triumph, not only despite, but through, the greatest tragedies,—the tragedies of deliberate sin.”51 Disloyalty as Atonement In chapter 5, I proposed a Roycean endorsement of a figure dubbed “the loyal traitor.” This traitor was false to her cause—her community—for the sake of bettering her community. The traitor profiled in this chapter is distinct from the so-called loyal traitor, for the loyal traitor does not feel as though she has committed her ultimate unpardonable sin. On the contrary, she may feel that complaisance or compliance would make her complicit in her own and her community’s undoing and that therefore to not betray her community would be to wreck what has made her life worthwhile. Thus, her treason produces the same effect as do the disloyal traitor’s deeds of atonement; each makes the community—and indeed, the world—better than it would have been if not for their betrayal. Perhaps, however, we should view the situation of the loyal traitor not as that of an individual who commits an act of disloyalty against her community for the sake of strengthening it but instead as an individual against whom her community has performed an act of disloyalty, and for whose disloyal actions she atones. In The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce suggests that “only a growth in knowledge which makes it evident that the special cause once chosen is an unworthy cause, disloyal to universal loyalty,— only such a growth in knowledge can absolve from fidelity to the cause once chosen.”52 Suppose, for instance, that one serves a leader, unaware that this leader is oppressing thousands of people. One’s service to that

Foust-Chap06.indd 151

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

152

disloyalt y

leader assists the leader in oppressing. Suppose, then, that the individual serving the leader comes to learn of this state of affairs. Finding that one’s cause is unworthy—that one’s loyalty is disloyal to loyalty—one is authorized to abandon this cause. Indeed, one is obligated to do so, for “when such reason for breaking ties exists, to break them becomes a duty, and then, indeed, a merely conventional persistence in what has become a false position, is itself a disloyal deed.”53 There is reason to believe that disloyalty of the sort that I am describing may be construed as atonement as Royce understands it. The “once awakened and so far loyal member of a robber band would be bound by his newly discovered loyalty to humanity in general, to break his oath to the band.” Beyond this, however, he “would still owe to his comrades of the former service a kind of fidelity which he would not have owed had he never been a member of the band. . . . He could never ignore his former loyalty, and would never be absolved from the peculiar obligation to his former comrades,—the obligation to help them all to a higher service of humanity than they had so far attained.”54 I regard Royce’s discussion of the formerly loyal robber as anticipatory of his discussion of the traitor in The Problem of Christianity. The robber, we can imagine, had thought, “The one unpardonable sin for which I could never forgive myself would be to undermine the efforts of my robber band.” He has, however, experienced a revelation, recognizing that this cause is not the sort to which he should give himself over. In whatever way it has occurred to him, we can imagine him realizing that service of this cause is disloyal to loyalty. Perhaps his robber band has held up several banks. The loyal service of bank employees has been thwarted. Perhaps these employees continue to serve their cause but now do so riddled with anxiety; the effectiveness of their loyal service has quite probably decreased and, fearing another encounter with this robber band or another, they find themselves unsure whether they are willing to continue to serve their cause actively and thoroughgoingly. The robber commits the treasonous act of announcing to his fellows that he will no longer support their efforts, knowing that his service has helped them, and without him their potential for successful robberies is impaired. At the same time, and indeed, in this very act, he expresses loyalty to his fellows. He knows that if asked, “Who are you?” they would be better off if for the answer “I am a member of a robber band” they substituted some identification with an occupation more clearly consonant with

Foust-Chap06.indd 152

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

disloyalt y

153

loyalty to loyalty. The disloyal robber has shattered his community. He has done so, however, as an act of atonement for the damage done by the robber band. The robber band has damaged his character and that of his fellows and, of course, brought great harm to those whom they have victimized, directly and indirectly. The disloyal robber’s disloyalty—his act of atonement for his robber band’s various acts of disloyalty—makes the world a better place than it would have been if not for his act of disloyalty. This is clearly so in the at least temporary inactivity of the robber band, in the event that his fellows must break from their robbing in order to find a suitable replacement. This is more clearly so if his services are so vital to the operation of the robber band that, without him, the robber band is resigned to dissolution. This is all the more clearly so, however, if the disloyal robber teaches his fellows the error of their ways and does what he is able to help them to find and serve honorable causes. If all goes well, the contagion of loyalty will infect his fellows as well as anyone who happens to be a witness to their conversion from a life of disloyalty to loyalty to a life of loyalty to loyalty. Disloyalty and Detachment John J. McDermott has detailed several of what he calls “dangers” in the making of relations. I will here consider what he terms “relation amputation.”55 We perform relation amputation when we desist, withdraw, or close down a relationship. The danger of relation amputation lies in our uncertainty of knowing if and when amputation is appropriate. We run the risks of refraining from amputating when it is necessary and of deeming amputation necessary when, in fact, it is unnecessary. “Persistence in following a relational possibility beyond its capacity to ameliorate and sustain the worth of the risk of the endeavor is foolhardy,” McDermott warns, and “premature amputation denies the long-standing historical message that taking a chance is usually fortuitous.” With these warnings in mind, McDermott advises, “Cut when necessary, but not out of fright or habit.”56 In another context, McDermott has said that “the most notorious single obstacle to the building of a great and beloved community, according to Royce, is the existence of the detached individual. That person who lacks loyalty and concern is fair game for seduction by those nefarious

Foust-Chap06.indd 153

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

154

disloyalt y

movements which seek to wreck the community.”57 I follow McDermott in quoting Royce’s The Hope of the Great Community: In case of human individuals, the sort of individualism which is opposed to the spirit of loyalty, is what I have already called the individualism of the detached individual, the individualism of the man who belongs to no community which he loves and to which he can devote himself with all his heart, and his soul, and his mind, and his strength. In so far as liberty and democracy, and independence of soul, mean that sort of individualism, they never have saved men and never can save men. For mere detachment, mere self-will, can never be satisfied with itself, can never win its goal. What saves us on any level of human social life is union.58

To this passage I conjoin the following, from The Problem of Christianity: The “morally detached” individual, who has not found the community to which to be loyal, or who, having first found that community, has lost his relation to it through an act of deliberate disloyalty, is . . . wholly unable, through any further individual deed of his own, to win or regain the true goal of life. The ideas of “grace” and of “atonement” have to do with the question regarding the way in which the individual, whom no deed of his own . . . can save or restore, can nevertheless, be saved through a deed “not his own”—a deed which the community or which a servant of the community in whom its Spirit “fully dwells,” may accomplish on behalf of the lost individual.59

It is evident that for Royce the individual is found or saved from his otherwise lost or wayward state via loyalty, which, as we have seen, is always social in nature. Without such loyal bonds—but with the instinct of imitation and plasticity of personality described in chapter 4—the individual is, as McDermott states, especially susceptible to influence from those who have loyal bonds to offer, including bonds that are nefarious (i.e., disloyal to loyalty). The disloyal person, who by his act of disloyalty has detached himself from a community to whom he was previously attached, also stands in need of being found and saved. This is at least the case for the traitor of Royce’s The Problem of Christianity. What of the robber who realizes the true nature of the cause shared by his robber band? Does his disloyalty to his robber band require that he be found? He has detached himself from his community through an act of disloyalty. Need he be saved? Must he now rely on the deeds of others in

Foust-Chap06.indd 154

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

disloyalt y

155

order to find meaning and fulfillment? I believe that the case of the robber—or anyone who finds that one’s loyalty is disloyal to loyalty—is such that his being found and saved is initiated by his abandonment of his cause. That is to say that service to the cause that was disloyal to loyalty was, unknown to them, leading them astray rather than homeward. Realization of this fact paired with the effort to do otherwise is to begin anew the process of finding oneself or saving oneself. Thus, the robber pursues another vocation. At the same time, this pursuit is not undergone in solitude. He has amputated one relation, but forges, strengthens, or renews other relations, animated by the grace of the larger community of the loyal. The robber is yet bound to show his former fellows why they ought to follow suit. Need he ensure their being found? Must he ensure that they be saved? I believe the answer must be that he is required to make an honest effort, and yet a time may come at which the effort is clearly so fruitless and so taxing that loyalty to loyalty demands that he abandon such a cause and amputate his relation with his former fellows, enabling him to give of himself to his other chosen causes. Remembering the importance of sustaining one’s health and energy so that one has the vigor to devote to loyal service, one should not underestimate the mental toll accompanying persistently futile efforts. “As I grow in knowledge,” Royce states, “I shall better learn how to be loyal. I shall learn to serve new causes, to recover from vain attempts at a service at which I was incapable, and in general to become a better servant of the cause.”60 Knowing that the activities of his former fellows are deleterious to humanity, the robber should of course attempt to show them that and convince them to cease their criminal activity. But he may come to recognize that his attempts at such service are vain and that he is altogether incapable of success. He should not make this judgment prematurely, as McDermott warns. But insofar as it lies in his power to judge responsibly that detaching himself from this community—amputating this relation—produces more loyalty than the alternative, it is not just permissible for him to do so; he must do so. Conclusion “How to treat the disloyal remains indeed a serious practical problem,” Royce writes. “But we shall never learn to deal with that problem if we

Foust-Chap06.indd 155

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

156

disloyalt y

suppose that the one cure for disloyalty, or the one revenge which we can take upon the disloyal, lies in a new act of disloyalty, that is, in the mere assertion of our individual freedom.”61 Crucial to this remark is the term “mere.” In this chapter I have described necessary and sufficient conditions for disloyalty as well as necessary and sufficient conditions for which disloyalty may be justified—namely, when disloyalty takes the form of loyalty to loyalty, as atonement for the disloyalty of others. As such, responding to disloyalty with disloyalty is not the mere assertion of our individual freedom. It is to combine self-assertion with self-sacrifice, precisely what it is to be loyal. Thus, some cases of disloyalty stand among the weakest and most wretched acts performed by humanity, while others, carried out in the spirit of loyalty to loyalty, stand among the boldest and brightest.

Foust-Chap06.indd 156

6/5/2012 10:41:30 AM

se v e n

l o y a l t y , di s a ste r , busi ne ss: c o n t e m p o r a r y appl ications



Loyalty and Disaster In the introduction, I described the terrorist attacks on America of September 11, 2001, as particularly illustrative of the ambivalence and treachery of loyalty and so particularly illustrative of the need for critical, sustained reflection on the meaning and value of loyalty. Perhaps what makes 9/11 so illustrative is its disastrous nature. Consisting of events far removed from the quotidian and quite calamitous in their detail, 9/11 stirred us to a collective acute alertness of the ambivalence and treachery of loyalty. Scant attention has been paid in philosophical literature to ethics in time of disaster, but in her recent book, Ethics for Disaster,1 Naomi Zack proposes an ethic that privileges the virtues of integrity and diligence as best suited to disaster. Importantly, Zack advertises as her “main thesis” that “if we have to live through disasters, we should not too easily give up our ordinary moral intuitions, before the fact, while there is still time to plan.”2 This thesis would entail that the centrality of integrity and diligence counts among our ordinary moral intuitions. I respond { 157 }

Foust-Chap07.indd 157

6/5/2012 10:43:44 AM

158

loyalt y, disaster, business

to Zack’s claim by holding that integrity and diligence, as she understands them, amount, in tandem, to loyalty. In other words, in suggesting that integrity and diligence are the virtues best suited to disaster, Zack unwittingly suggests that loyalty is the virtue best suited to disaster. Given the account of the moral life that I have put forth in the previous chapters, this is no surprise; the call to be loyal resonates with our ordinary moral intuitions, even those apparently in conflict. Because I have hoped, following Royce, to simplify and clarify the moral life, I suggest that Zack’s account of virtues for disaster may be restated as “Be loyal.” What Zack’s account of virtues for disaster lacks, however, is the requirement to be loyal to loyalty. First, we should be clear as to what a disaster is. Zack adopts the following definition: A disaster is an event (or series of events) that harms or kills a significant number of people or otherwise severely impairs or interrupts their daily lives in civil society. Disasters may be natural or the result of accidental or deliberate human action. Disasters include, but are not limited to, fires; floods; storms; earthquakes; chemical spills; leaks of, or infiltration by, toxic substances; terrorist attacks by conventional, nuclear, or biological weapons; epidemics; pandemics; mass failures in electronic communications; and other events that officials and experts designate “disasters.” Disasters always occasion surprise and shock; they are unwanted by those affected by them, although not always predictable. Disasters also generate narratives and media representations of the heroism, failures, and losses of those who are affected and respond.3

It is clear that, on this definition, 9/11 is an instance of a disaster. The attacks and their aftermath may be perceived as a series of deliberately initiated events that included the harming and killing of a significant number of people and that severely impaired and interrupted the daily lives of those in American civil society. This series of events clearly occasioned surprise and shock and was unwanted by those affected by them. Moreover, this series of events generated narratives and media representations of the heroism, failures, and losses of those who were affected and those who responded. As observed in the introduction, these narratives and media representations included those of ourselves as victims, the terrorists as perpetrators, and, in different ways, firefighters and the American government as those who responded.

Foust-Chap07.indd 158

6/5/2012 10:43:44 AM

loyalt y, disaster, business

159

Zack contrasts integrity and diligence with reckless bravery and ferocity, noticing that the latter pair of qualities is often associated with heroism, citing as illustrative three thousand years’ worth of adulation of Achilles in Homer’s Iliad. Integrity and diligence count among the “boring virtues,” which are “necessary for careful epistemology and due process,” while bravery and ferocity are among the “dramatic virtues,” which are “usually associated with military or police action and high politics in times of crisis.”4 Sharpening the contrast between these pairs of virtues, Zack notes that “integrity and diligence, unlike reckless bravery and ferocity, are not episodic virtues evident in isolated, glorious feats; they are daily traits of character, manifest in thousands of details of mundane activities. For prolonged conditions of deprivation and danger, integrity and diligence can provide a constant background support of life and its sustaining moral values.”5 Crucial to Zack’s position is the view that, while disaster presents an abrupt departure from the character of everyday life, disaster still occurs within everyday life, a fact that should give us pause before we abandon our ordinary moral intuitions when confronted by extraordinary circumstances. In other words, our daily cultivation of the virtues of integrity and diligence should not be all for naught when disaster strikes; in fact, these most dire of situations are the very kind for which we prepare when we cultivate these virtues. Brief consideration of one of Zack’s examples suggests that integrity and diligence may be viewed as loyalty. Zack discusses Cormac McCarthy’s 2006 novel The Road, about a father and young son who venture southward along a highway in a postapocalyptic world, fending off dangerous and cannibalistic fellow humans who serve as obstacles in their way of finding a more hospitable environment in which to reside.6 Of The Road, Zack offers the following commentary: The Road is a very grim story, dreadful to read, but with its own imperatives for the reader to press on. The critics praised it for its depiction of the love between a father and son. McCarthy dramatizes and develops this love both as a motive for the man and boy to keep going for each other’s sake and as a primary value that makes preserving their lives worth the physical hardships. Sustaining their lives requires the virtue of diligence because following the many rules for survival requires discipline. However, the principle [sic] virtue here is integrity. To preserve who they are, the man and boy’s major moral rule is to avoid cannibalism.7

Foust-Chap07.indd 159

6/5/2012 10:43:44 AM

160

loyalt y, disaster, business

Zack emphasizes that “the man and boy in The Road never waiver [sic] in their resolve not to eat human flesh.”8 Their upholding this resolve is noteworthy, for they live in permanently bleak survival conditions, in which cannibalism might easily be rationalized if not justified. “The man will not even practice cannibalism to keep the boy alive,” Zack tells us, “and he always does manage to find a fresh store of acceptable food that will keep them going. He doesn’t know that he will find it, but he uses his skills to look for it, hoping to find it.” Zack leaves us to infer that the man is effectively diligent and that his “integrity consists of this refusal to violate what he considers a core moral principle.”9 Zack considers the survivors in Alive,10 who, knowing that their situation is temporary if they can be rescued, resort to cannibalism. She judges the man and boy in The Road to be more morally praiseworthy “because they consistently remain loyal to their moral principles. They are diligent and have integrity.”11 With this closing remark about the man and boy in The Road, Zack’s comment on their diligence and integrity seems to function as elaboration on the point that the two are loyal. I submit that the described diligence and integrity of these two (though particularly the father) are clear instances of Roycean loyalty—the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion to a cause. In this case, the cause is unusually macabre—that of persevering in being while avoiding indulging in cannibalism. Moreover, loyalty to this cause is clearly served in a fashion compatible with loyalty to loyalty. Were the two to waver in their resolve to avoid cannibalism, whether in the form of diminished diligence in obtaining food by other means or by inhibited integrity with respect to upholding their selfimposed fundamental rule, they would act in a way that is disloyal to loyalty. While they would further their cause of persevering in being, they would undermine their own cause of doing so while avoiding cannibalism. Moreover, unless they resorted to eating only the flesh of corpses that they happen on, they would have to resort to harming or killing others, which would clearly undermine the ability of those others to develop and exercise their capacities for loyalty. Still further, whereas the example that these two set by upholding their refusal to cannibalize might catch on with their fellows, their participating in cannibalism would only further exacerbate an environment characterized by danger and paranoia. It is evident that what Zack sees and praises as diligence and

Foust-Chap07.indd 160

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

loyalt y, disaster, business

161

integrity in the man and the boy Royce would recognize and extol as not only loyalty but loyalty to loyalty. Of course, The Road is fiction. What of nonfictional disaster? What we lauded, in the wake of 9/11, as the loyalty of the firefighters and other heroic figures we might understand in Zack’s terms as diligence and integrity. We can say the same of myriad other figures in the wake of 9/11, insofar as diligence correlates with the willing and practical aspects of loyalty and integrity correlates with its thoroughgoing devotional aspect. Those Americans whom I described in the introduction as having reinvigorated loyalty to country serve as an example. In the wake of this national disaster, their steadfast private and public proclamations of loyalty could be viewed as diligence and integrity in service of the cause of promoting the flourishing of their country and/or preventing against its weakening. At the same time, the loyalty of at least some of these Americans was not loyal to loyalty. Those, for instance, who, in a pique of patriotism and ancillary Francophobia renamed French fries “Freedom fries,” as a way of disassociating themselves (as Americans who enjoy consumption of a food with the word “French” in its name) from the French (who openly criticized the American impulse to invade Iraq in 2003), may have been acting loyally to their community, but this loyalty—this provincialism—was not an enlightened one. By establishing the French (and all things “French”)12 as an enemy to antagonize and thereby express American loyalty, such loyal Americans were unwisely provincial (i.e., loyal to community in a way that was disloyal to loyalty). This practice engendered more conflict rather than less, removing humanity further from the harmony of the Beloved Community rather than bringing it closer to it. In short, such loyalty was disloyal to loyalty, for it enacted and encouraged aggression against a group that spoke out against violent conflict, thus amplifying an already acrimonious atmosphere and vitiating against the possibility of an environment conducive to the harmonious development and coexistence of various and even divergent loyalties. While I agree with Zack that diligence and integrity deserve emphasis in an ethics for disaster, I hold that this is just to say that loyalty deserves emphasis in an ethics for disaster. It is not enough, however, to say that diligence and integrity—loyalty—deserve emphasis. Loyalty to loyalty must also be emphasized. I fully endorse Zack’s view that we must cultivate

Foust-Chap07.indd 161

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

162

loyalt y, disaster, business

continuity between our ethics during normal states of affairs and our ethics during those of times of disaster. By insisting that loyalty to loyalty be cultivated and valorized I add to her picture of how this continuity ought to be characterized. Loyalty and Business In the introduction I cited, In addition to 9/11, the Enron scandal as a vivid example of an event in recent American history that brings the ambivalence and treachery of loyalty to the foreground. Discussion of the role of loyalty in the corporate world may have been reinvigorated by this scandal but by no means originated with it. In “Not By Loyalty Alone,” an article published in 1962, William R. Gall argues that “it would be a mistake to stress the need for loyalty without also advocating the necessity for integrity.”13 Gall actually alludes to Royce, though he relies on another scholar’s incomplete account of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty.14 With respect to Zack’s account of the need for diligence and integrity in times of disaster, I have argued that integrity comes in loyalty to loyalty. The case is no different in the business world. Gall worries that “loyalty to the firm can be rationalized to condone even illegal actions.”15 I take the substance of his concern to be that the action that loyalty to the firm might be rationalized to condone may be clearly and greatly immoral rather than necessarily an infraction of the law; a particularly draconian or arcane law might, for instance, clearly be unjust. Thus, I regard myself as sharing Gall’s concern and meeting that concern by maintaining that, if loyalty to the firm is loyal to loyalty, loyalty to the firm cannot be rationalized to condone clearly immoral actions. In the introduction, I articulated this problem in terms of the controversial nature of whistleblowing, the act of identifying and complaining about the unethical practices of the corporation to whom one is employed. Robert Larmer presents the problem clearly: “Traditionally, the employee has been viewed as an agent who acts on behalf of a principal, i.e., the employer, and as possessing duties of loyalty and confidentiality. Whistleblowing, at least at first blush, seems a violation of these duties.”16 Thus, employers and employees alike quite frequently hold that whistleblowing is disloyal and therefore immoral. I want to return to this issue by claiming that employees and employers alike must be loyal and must be loyal to loyalty and that sometimes, in order to achieve the latter,

Foust-Chap07.indd 162

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

loyalt y, disaster, business

163

whistleblowing must occur. Indeed, just as I endorsed the notion of a loyal traitor in chapter 5, and the apparently disloyal atoning community member in chapter 6, I hold that under particular circumstances the whistleblower should be viewed not as a transgressor of loyalty but as an exemplar of it. In what is considered the classical statement of the conditions for the permissibility of whistleblowing and the conditions for the obligation to blow the whistle, Richard De George lists the presence of 1–3 as making whistleblowing permissible and the presence of 1–5 as making whistleblowing obligatory: 1. “Serious and considerable harm to the public” is involved; 2. one reports the harm and expresses moral concern to one’s immediate superior; 3. one exhausts other channels within the corporation; 4. one has available “documented evidence that would convince a reasonable, impartial observer that one’s view of the situation is correct”; and 5. one has “good reasons to believe that by going public the necessary changes will be brought about” to prevent the harm.17 These sets of criteria have attracted a good deal of criticism. Summarizing the criticisms, Mike W. Martin notes that critics have pointed out that “conditions (4) and (5) seem far too strong” since grounds for hope for improvement and the presence of substantial but less than convincing evidence seem to be enough to warrant whistleblowing. Further, “De George’s sharp separation of requirements for permissibility and obligation begins to collapse,” as having a reasonable degree of documentation should be a requirement even for permissible whistleblowing, as should having a reasonable hope for success.18 Martin goes on to argue against the effort to offer a schema by which to judge whether whistleblowing is obligatory, claiming that the weighing of personal and professional obligations will vary among individual cases of would-be whistleblowers. Still, he is willing to assert that “whistleblowing done at enormous personal cost, motivated by moral concern for the public good, and exercising good moral judgment is both (a) supererogatory . . . and (b) appropriately motivated by a sense of responsibility.” Holding that those who blow the whistle at enormous personal cost “act from a sense that they must do what they are doing,” Martin explains that

Foust-Chap07.indd 163

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

164

loyalt y, disaster, business

for them “failure to act would constitute a betrayal of the ideal to which they are committed, and also a betrayal of their integrity as a person committed to that ideal.”19 Martin’s description of the supererogatory whistleblower should call to mind Zack’s description of the father and son of The Road. In each case, the moral agent(s) in question tread in dangerous waters—both morally and materially. The well-being of each is jeopardized however they choose to act, and yet all the more so if each chooses what is regarded as the moral high road. Still, an important difference must be noted. Whereas Zack sees the diligence and integrity of the father and son (which I have interpreted as loyalty) as obligatory, Martin views the same qualities (or quality) in the particularly self-sacrificial whistleblower as supererogatory. As Martin explains: “There is such a thing as voluntarily assuming a responsibility and doing so because of commitments to (valid) ideals, to a degree beyond what is required of everyone. Sometimes the commitment is shown in career choice and guided by religious ideals. . . . Sometimes it is shown in professional life in an unusual degree of pro bono publico work. . . . Sometimes it is shown in whistleblowing decisions.”20 Referring to two of the cases that Martin considers in support of his view will help in establishing my own position, which is that Martin is misguided in thinking these cases of whistleblowing to be supererogatory; as instances of loyalty to loyalty, they are morally required. The first case is that of Frank Camps, who was a design engineer for the Ford Pinto, which became notorious in the 1970s for its hazardous windshields and gas tanks. Camps facilitated the Pinto windshields’ passing government safety tests by reporting only rare successful tests. After growing reports of exploding gas tanks, in 1973, Camps wrote memos to Ford management, claiming that the company was in violation of federal safety standards. Soon after doing so, he received lowered performance evaluations and was demoted several times. In 1978, Camps resigned, believing his potential for advancement at Ford to be over. After nearly a million Pintos with unsafe windshields and gas tanks were on the road, Camps’s concerns were finally acted on and reflected in the 1979 Pinto model. The second case is that of Roger Boisjoly, who with other senior members at Morton Thiokol recommended that the space shuttle Challenger not be launched because the temperature at the launch site

Foust-Chap07.indd 164

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

loyalt y, disaster, business

165

was substantially below the known safety range for the O-ring seals in the joints of the solid rocket boosters. The Challenger boosters exploded early in the launch, killing seven crew members. To compound matters, the launch was televised and viewed by millions, many of whom watched captivated by the presence of schoolteacher Christa McAuliffe aboard the shuttle. When called to testify before the Rogers Commission, Boisjoly defied the wishes of management, offering documents supporting his view of the events occurring before the disaster. In the months that followed, Boisjoly was made to feel increasingly alienated from coworkers and eventually took an extended sick leave. When trying to find a new job, he found that companies were remiss to hire a known whistleblower. Martin rightly points out that, as these cases suggest, “there can be double horrors surrounding whistleblowing: the public horror of lost lives, and the personal horror of responsible whistleblowers who lose their careers.”21 We may amplify the personal horror of lost careers by adding mention of demotions and alienation at the workplace as well as any number of procedural or psychological punitive measures that might be taken against the whistleblower. The distinction between public and private horrors may very well blur, of course, particularly in cases of such notoriety as the two just discussed. Note that the whistleblower does indeed run the risk of incurring an enormous personal cost due to blowing the whistle, but at the same time the whistleblower runs the same risk if he withholds from whistleblowing. Which personal cost is more enormous? Boisjoly “has said that if he had it all to do over again he would make the same decisions because otherwise he ‘couldn’t live with any self respect.’ ”22 My suspicion is that the same would be said by the majority of whistleblowers. At least in their estimation, the more severe personal cost would be that suffered as a consequence of not blowing the whistle. Would this estimation be accurate? If the decision is between preserving several lives and preserving one’s own employment, the answer is obvious; the estimation of the whistleblower is accurate. Of course cases are seldom so cut-and-dried. There is, then, something to Martin’s inclination toward a case-by-case approach when analyzing the morality of whistleblowing. At the same time, however, it is quite typically perceived as more than supererogatory to choose preserving several lives ahead of preserving one’s employment. Most moral systems would obligate us to

Foust-Chap07.indd 165

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

166

loyalt y, disaster, business

preserve several lives in lieu of preserving our own employment. Even if we absorb an inordinate amount of distress as a result of our choice, such is a preferable fate to that of being responsible for the deaths of others (which will also likely burden us with an inordinate amount of distress). As employees, Camps and Boisjoly owed loyalty to their employers. This they gave, until they realized that their continued loyalty would endanger the lives of others—amounting, of course, to disloyalty to loyalty. As Royce would counsel, they then discontinued their loyal service, or at least the particular service constituting disloyalty to loyalty. In the case of neither Camps nor Boisjoly did he immediately leave the company or expose the faults of his company to the public. Rather, each attempted to rectify the issue internally. Again, as Royce would counsel, each attempted to show to the object of his loyalty the harms of the actions being carried out in the service of the cause. Their superiors ignored their remonstrations, and in each case tragedy soon followed. On the moral philosophy advocated in this book, the actions of Camps and Boisjoly were both loyal and loyal to loyalty, thus embodying each of the principles required of them. Therefore, they acted not supererogatorily but morally. Their employers, on the other hand, spurned their moral requirements, acting disloyally toward their employees and disloyally toward loyalty in general. Larmer points out that “blowing the whistle may demonstrate greater loyalty than not blowing the whistle,” for “loyalty involves acting in accordance with what one has good reason to believe to be in that person’s best interests.”23 Indeed, Camps and Boisjoly may have felt that blowing the whistle was an action for the best of all concerned parties. Thus, what Ford or Morton Thiokol perceived as disloyalty may be perceived otherwise. In addition to concerns for other parties, Camps and Boisjoly may have believed that it was disadvantageous for Ford and Morton Thiokol to carry on with their plans for the Pinto and the Challenger, respectively. Knowing that their companies ran the risk of cultivating habits of corrupt business practices or suffering public condemnation and subsequent loss of revenue, they may have blown the whistle as acts of loyalty to their employers. It is common for loyalty to involve defying what the person with whom we are in a loyal relation desires, for we know that this person is mistaken about what is in

Foust-Chap07.indd 166

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

loyalt y, disaster, business

167

his—or in the case of a corporation, its—self-interest. Moreover, such defiance is to be expected when loyalty to loyalty is observed, for, as we have seen, the projects of being loyal and being loyal to loyalty often conflict. I would be remiss to ignore that Camps and Boisjoly should not be seen only as “loyal traitors” in their acts of whistleblowing but also as suffering servants atoning for the disloyalty of their employers and coworkers (and in Camps’s case, as atoning for his own disloyalty). It is they who acknowledged the unpardonable sin performed by their corporation and they who took responsibility for the shattering of the community, the shattering that resulted from the sin. It is they who, in the whistleblowing act that never would have been possible if not for the original act of disloyalty, attempted to promote loyalty and prevent (further) disloyalty. It is they who acted so as to bring the community to a level higher than that at which it was before the sinful and atoning acts, even if they were the objects of the community’s persecution in the process. That the community—be it the corporation or the public—would treat whistleblowers in this way should give pause. If the whistleblower is, insofar as he is able, acting loyally to loyalty, there is no justification for such punitive measures. Recognizing that responsible whistleblowing is done with loyal intentions, corporations should maintain mechanisms for internal whistleblowing and should then give such complaints due consideration.24 In the event that due consideration is not given, however, the whistleblower is justified in whistleblowing externally, if so doing is consistent with loyalty to loyalty. Because employer and employee alike would surely prefer to avoid this scenario, corporations should proactively prevent it from occurring. To do this, corporations must be loyal to their employees, customers, shareholders, stockholders, et al., all the while, of course, being loyal to loyalty. Institutionalizing whistleblowing is but one way of so doing. Conclusion Many areas of difficult ethical terrain may be more adeptly navigated with the help of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. The areas discussed here, disaster and business, constitute only a small sample. Some scholars have

Foust-Chap07.indd 167

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

168

loyalt y, disaster, business

applied Royce’s philosophy of loyalty to questions in medical ethics, with respect to both physicians25 and patients,26 while other scholars have drawn on Royce as a resource in approaching questions in areas such as education27 and law.28 The need for loyalty in virtually all forms of community suggests that Royce’s philosophy of loyalty possesses great potential as a guide in the quest for a genuine moral life.

Foust-Chap07.indd 168

6/5/2012 10:43:45 AM

c o n c l u s i o n: t h e ne e d for l oyal ty



I

have just discussed, in the previous chapter, two contemporary applications of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty, as I have presented and advocated it in this book. The problems addressed by these applications were first introduced in the introduction, and following all that has transpired since, I felt it appropriate to address them anew. These are surely not the only problems in which loyalty figures prominently. My hope is that what I have done in the way of clarifying the nature of loyalty and its place in the moral life can help to guide us through myriad moral perplexities surrounding loyalty or other moral perplexities in which loyalty occupies a prominent place. I want to emphasize that adopting Royce’s philosophy of loyalty does not necessitate becoming an extraordinary moral hero, the likes of which I have perhaps described in the examples used in my discussions of loyalty for disaster and loyalty for business. Rather, Royce’s philosophy of loyalty simply necessitates that we be loyal and, insofar as it lies in our power, loyal to loyalty. We could stand more clarity, of course, with respect to “insofar as it lies in our power.” My plea to the reader is that { 169 }

Foust-Conclusion.indd 169

6/5/2012 10:44:30 AM

170

conclusion

this phrase not be abused, used to deceive oneself into thinking that one is acting well because one is just not able to act better. Camps, Boisjoly, and the father and son of The Road—each was, insofar as it lied in his power, loyal to loyalty. Undoubtedly, each endured moments, if not bouts, of doubt regarding his power to so act. But so act they did. Their examples are ours to imitate; their examples are ours against which to fashion our own self-will. On November 16, 1910, Royce answered a letter of his soon-to-be daughter-in-law, Elizabeth Randolph.1 Her letter is not extant, but Royce quotes her as having asked, “ ‘Why must we live?’ ” and wondering “whether there is some ‘definite purpose’ in life.” Royce responds: Well, first, take me just as I happen to be,—a mere creature who happens to have been born, and to want happiness, and who happens to breathe and to eat and to long vaguely for I know not what,—take me merely thus, as a creature of nature,—and the question has no particular answer. Any other creature might,—so far as the mere natural fact of existence goes,—any other creature might as well be living in my place. I shall die after a while,—and what will it all have meant? That, I say, is all that can be answered to your question, Why must we live? so long as you consider us merely as accidental creatures of nature. But let me look at my life otherwise. Suppose I come to see, or even just to imagine, that there is some good to be done in the world that nobody but myself can do. Suppose I learn that there is something or somebody who needs just me to give aid for worthy ends of some sort. Suppose that this world of people, all so needy, needs my help. Well then the question, Why must I live? begins to get its answer. I must live because my help is needed. There is something that I can do which nobody else can do. That is: I can be friend of my friends, faithful to my own cause, servant of my own chosen task, worker among my needy brethren. I can thus join with the world’s work of trying to make the whole situation better and not worse. And because I can live thus, I am more than a chance creature of nature. My life has sense and meaning.2

If there is no other message to be taken from my book, let it be this. Our lives have sense and meaning if and only if we are loyal,3 and our lives are genuinely moral if and only if our loyalty is loyal to loyalty. Such loyal living is what recognizes and strives to fulfill the universal need to be

Foust-Conclusion.indd 170

6/5/2012 10:44:30 AM

conclusion

171

helped, devoting our loyal service according to our unique capacities, aptitudes, relationships, interests, and talents.4 In our quest to live loyally, we will undoubtedly endure times of defeat. Such setbacks may be occasioned by causes failing to meet fruition, the suffering of betrayal at the hands of a fellow, or the unconscionable committing of disloyalty ourselves. But none of these setbacks is permanent, even when all indications seem to suggest so. Royce observes that “there are countless lights kept alive in homes where want or weariness or stormy sorrow have long since and often entered, and have again and again seemed about to overwhelm, but where, after many years, faithful souls . . . are, despite fortune, still at their post, with the light burning.”5 If loyalty is what makes life meaningful, then a defeat of one’s loyalty must never be taken as final. To do so is not merely to commit moral suicide, as Royce describes disloyalty, but to commit suicide without qualification! No loyalty, no meaning. No meaning, no me. I began by asking: Is there a more treacherous and ambivalent virtue than that of loyalty? I end by asking: Is there a virtue more vital?

Foust-Conclusion.indd 171

6/5/2012 10:44:30 AM

Foust-Conclusion.indd 172

6/5/2012 10:44:30 AM

Notes



introduction: the treachery and ambivalence of loyalt y 1. John J. McDermott, introduction to The Philosophy of Loyalty, by Josiah Royce (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), vii. 2. Ibid., vii. 3. Sissela Bok, “Whistleblowing and Professional Responsibility,” New York University Education Quarterly 11, no. 4 (1980): 2–7, 3. 4. Frederick F. Reichheld, The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 1996). 5. Reichheld has followed The Loyalty Effect with a sequel, Loyalty Rules! How Today’s Leaders Build Lasting Relationships (Boston: Harvard Business School Press, 2001). 6. For a collection of writings related to the connection of the 9/11 attacks to the ambivalence of loyalty for African Americans in particular, see Julianne Malveau and Reginna A. Green, eds., The Paradox of Loyalty: An African American Response to the War on Terrorism (Chicago: Third World Press, 2002). 1. loyalt y, justice, virtue: contemp orary debates 1. Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” The Lindley Lecture, Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, 1984, 6. 2. Samuel Scheffler, Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2001), 77. 3. Ibid. 4. Ibid., 78. 5. Yael Tamir, Liberal Nationalism (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993), 100–1 (emphases in original). 6. Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory, 3rd ed. (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007), 192. { 173 }

Foust-Notes.indd 173

6/5/2012 2:02:51 PM

174

notes to pages 11–16

7. See, for instance, John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971); Kai Nielsen, “Justice as a Kind of Impartiality,” Laval théologique et philosophique 50, no. 3 (1994): 511–29; Brian Barry, Justice as Impartiality (New York: Oxford University Press, 1995). 8. George P. Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 175. 9. See, for instance, Andrew Oldenquist, “Loyalties,” Journal of Philosophy 79, no. 4 (1982): 173–93; Philip Pettit, “The Paradox of Loyalty,” American Philosophical Quarterly 25, no. 2 (April 1988): 163–71; Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007). 10. Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities: A Roycean Public Philosophy (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 21. 11. Ibid. 12. Griffin Trotter, The Loyal Physician: Roycean Ethics and the Practice of Medicine (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997), 15. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid. 15. Ibid., 19. 16. Trotter, The Loyal Physician, 15. The other two similarities cited by Trotter are that “they both adhere to a nondogmatic, fallibilistic form of absolutism; and they both may be considered, in certain crucial respects, to be pragmatists, while diverging in similar ways from classical American pragmatism as it developed in the writings of Dewey and James.” Trotter’s sole support for the former similarity is the vantage point from which MacIntyre and Royce criticize Hegel. While this similarity may obtain, it is not crucial to our purposes, nor does it seem crucial to Trotter’s, for his elaboration on the point is decidedly brief. As for the latter similarity, it is rather unusual for MacIntyre to be considered a pragmatist—while not unusual for Royce to be—so I am hesitant to agree that this similarity obtains. Even if the similarity does obtain, the extent to which MacIntyre and Royce are pragmatists is not an issue requiring discussion here. 17. Ibid., 16. 18. See Charles S. Peirce, “The Fixation of Belief,” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1877): 1–15. 19. Ibid., 256. 20. Ibid., 118 (emphasis in original). 21. Ibid., 257, 129. 22. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), 4. 23. Ibid., 9 (emphasis in original). 24. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 144.

Foust-Notes.indd 174

6/5/2012 2:02:51 PM

notes to pages 16–18

175

25. Ibid., 219. 26. Ibid., 144. 27. Ibid. As we will see, MacIntyre elaborates on the nature of virtues and vices. 28. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 6. The Vanderbilt edition erroneously inserts the word “the” between “be” and “infinitely.” This word does not appear in the original pressing, and I have omitted it above. See Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 11. 29. While Royce does not explicitly conceive of life itself as a quest, he does explicitly invoke the term with some frequency. These two usages appear in consecutive paragraphs: “I indeed agree with the view that, in many ways, our traditional moral standards ought to be revised. We need a new heaven and a new earth. We do well to set out to seek for both, however doubtful may be the quest.” “ . . . I do not believe that unsettlement is finality. Nor to my mind is the last word of human wisdom this: that the truth is inaccessible. Nor yet is the last word of wisdom this: that the truth is merely fluent and transient. I believe in the eternal. I am in quest of the eternal.” Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 6 (emphasis added). In several texts, Royce invokes a related turn of phrase, speaking of “seeking a city out of sight,” a phrase derived from Hebrews 13:14. This phrase appears several times in The Philosophy of Loyalty. See also Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 16. This phrase is also invoked in “We’ve No Abiding City Here,” a hymn written by nineteenth-century hymnist Thomas Kelly. 30. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 221. 31. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 7. Royce clearly finds the tragedy undergone by Antigone highly illustrative. Royce was an undergraduate Classics major at the University of California, Berkeley, and delivered a commencement address, “On a Passage in Sophocles”—this passage in Sophocles—in 1875. Royce refers to Antigone several times throughout his corpus, fastening frequently on this particular line. Consider the following quote from his 1915–16 extension course on ethics: “To be sure, one of the greatest tragedies of literature, the tragedy of Antigone, is founded upon a sister’s consciousness of Loyalty towards the obligations which require her, despite the command of the king, to celebrate the rites of her slain brother. The majesty of the fraternal tie is nowhere more deeply felt and expressed than in Antigone’s famous words with regard to what the gods of the underworld have required of her as an expression, both of her duty and of her love, towards her brother. She goes willingly to death, because these commands of the gods of the underworld, as she says: ‘Are not an affair of today or of yesterday, and no man knows whence they came.’ ” Royce, “1915–1916 Extension Course on Ethics: Principles of the Art of Loyalty,” in Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, ed. Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J. (Bristol: Thoemmes Press, 2001), 2: 154.

Foust-Notes.indd 175

6/5/2012 2:02:51 PM

176

notes to pages 19–2 8

32. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 7. 33. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 187. 34. Ibid., 188. 35. Ibid., 190. 36. Ibid., 191 (emphasis in original). 37. Ibid., 194. 38. Trotter, The Loyal Physician, 19. 39. MacIntyre, After Virtue, 203 (emphasis in original). Quoted by Trotter in The Loyal Physician, 20. The sentence from this passage that Trotter omits: “ ‘Purity of heart,’ said Kierkegaard, is to will one thing.’ ” 40. Trotter, The Loyal Physician, 20 (emphasis in original). Trotter does not elaborate on how “natural communities” substitutes for “practices,” and I am not convinced that it does. This point is not significant toward my purposes, however, so I will not address it further. 41. Ibid., 242. 42. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 9. 43. Ibid., 22. 44. The first occurrence of this phrase in The Philosophy of Loyalty is in the following: “Our age, as I have said, is a good deal perplexed regarding its moral ideals and its standards of duty. It has doubts about what is really the best plan of human life” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 5 [emphasis added]). For a contemporary adaptation of Royce’s notion of a plan of life, see John Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 407–15. For an essay including commentary on Rawls’s use of Royce, see Jon Moran, “Mixed Loyalties: A Roycean Interpretation of Public Reason,” The Pluralist 2, no. 2 (2007): 63–70. 45. Ibid., 62. 2. the nature of loyalt y 1. McDermott, introduction to The Philosophy of Loyalty, by Josiah Royce (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995), xiii (emphasis in original). 2. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, xxiv. 3. Ibid., xxiv. The Vanderbilt edition erroneously prints the word “ides” instead of “idea,” which appears in the original pressing. I have made the appropriate emendation above. See Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908), viii. 4. John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, revised and expanded ed. (Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), 4. 5. Josiah Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 125. The quote appears in the chapter “Words of Professor Royce at the Walton Hotel at Philadelphia, December 29, 1915,” a summary of Royce’s statement following a dinner on the occasion of the celebration of his sixtieth birthday.

Foust-Notes.indd 176

6/5/2012 2:02:51 PM

notes to pages 2 8–32

177

A number of Royce’s colleagues and pupils had held paper sessions in Royce’s honor in association with the annual meeting of the American Philosophical Association. These papers and the autobiographical statement of Royce’s were collected and published as Papers in Honor of Josiah Royce on his Sixtieth Birthday (New York: Longman, Greens, 1916), also appearing as vol. 25, no. 3, of The Philosophical Review (May 1916). 6. Josiah Royce, “Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization” in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, ed. Scott L. Pratt and Shannon Sullivan (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 230. This essay was first given as an address to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in January 1900 and was published in Transactions of the Aberdeen Philosophical Society 3 (1900): 194–217. I quote from a reprinting of Royce’s Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (1908), which includes the republication of several additional essays that did not originally appear in that volume; this is one such essay. 7. Harper’s Weekly, June 6, 1863, 362–63. 8. Harold M. Hyman, To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959), 139. 9. Ibid., 143–44. One did not have to commit disloyalty directly in order to be guilty of disloyalty; among the offenses were those of “being an intimate friend and companion of one arrested for disloyalty” and “being a dangerous man.” 10. George M. Frederickson, The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union (New York: Harper and Row, 1965), 132. 11. Ibid., 131. 12. Ibid., 134. 13. Ibid., 135. Lieber’s reply to O’Sullivan appears in “The Arguments of Secessionists” in Loyal Publication Society Pamphlet No. 35 (1863). Thompson’s argument appears in Revolution Against Free Government Not a Right but a Crime: An Address by Joseph P. Thompson Delivered before the Union League Club [of New York] (New York: 1864). 14. Ibid., 136. 15. Ibid., 138. 16. Ibid., 139. 17. Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, 232–33. 18. Ibid., 233. 19. Clendenning, The Letters of Josiah Royce. (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 376. 20. Ibid. 21. Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, 234. 22. Clendenning, The Letters of Josiah Royce, 376.

Foust-Notes.indd 177

6/5/2012 2:02:51 PM

178

notes to pages 33–3 8

23. S. Rudolf Steinmetz, Philosophie des Krieges (Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1907). 24. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 7–8. 25. Royce describes War and Insurance (1914) as a “contribution to what has been called, by the Dutch Ethnologist Steinmetz, the ‘Philosophy of War,’ ” but again parts ways with Steinmetz. See Royce, War and Insurance. (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 2. Royce elaborates on the influence of Steinmetz’s views on his own in notes appended to this text (War and Insurance, 83). 26. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 7. The Vanderbilt edition erroneously prints the word “and” in front of “so far as I can”; this word does not appear in the original pressing. I have made the appropriate emendation above. See Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty (New York: Macmillan, 1908), 11–12. 27. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 100. 28. Ibid., 9. 29. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 30. Marcia Baron, The Moral Status of Loyalty (Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1984), 5. 31. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 9–10. 32. Ibid., 11. 33. Josiah Royce, “Loyalty and Insight” in William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life (New York: Macmillan, 1911), 55–56. 34. Ibid., 56. Later in this chapter we will consider another description of “cause,” given by Royce in The Sources of Religious Insight (1912). This description of “cause” is pertinent to Royce’s culminating definition of “loyalty” in The Philosophy of Loyalty. 35. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 10. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid., 11. 40. Baron, The Moral Status of Loyalty, 5. 41. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 118. This position appears at odds with Royce’s in “Self-Consciousness, Social Consciousness, and Nature”: “We have no sort of right to speak in any way as if the inner experience behind any fact of nature were of a grade lower than ours, or less conscious, or less rational, or more atomic. . . . A real being can only mean to me other experience than mine; and other experience does not mean deadness, unconsciousness, disorganization, but presence, life, inner light.” In the same essay, Royce concedes “interpretation” of consciousness in animals: “Consciousness, as we know it in man, and interpret its presence in animals, is an incident of an interrupted adjustment to our environment.” See Royce, Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays Upon

Foust-Notes.indd 178

6/5/2012 2:02:51 PM

notes to pages 3 8–45

179

Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1906), 230, 238. In The Philosophy of Loyalty, Royce refers to “world consciousness” and “the world’s conscious life.” See The Philosophy of Loyalty, 172–73. 42. Although, as we will see in chapter 4, Royce finds the rudiments of loyalty present in human infancy, as George P. Fletcher notes that human babies are, like dogs and other nonhuman animals, incapable of loyalty: “We need not isolate a single distinguishing characteristic to realize that animals and babies could not bear duties of loyalty. As a matter of social practice, we attribute obligations only to those beings that can understand that they are under an obligation.” George P. Fletcher, Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships (New York: Oxford University Press, 1993), 10–11. 43. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 48. 44. Ibid., 49. 45. Ibid. 46. Ibid., 50. 47. Ibid., 50–51. 48. Baron, The Moral Status of Loyalty, 8. 49. Ibid., 9 (emphasis in original). 50. Royce The Philosophy of Loyalty, 49. 51. Ibid., 50. 52. Ibid., 30–31. 53. Ibid., 31–32. 54. Ibid., 21. 55. Ibid., 45. 56. Ibid., 118. 57. Sophie Bryant, “Loyalty,” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings (Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark, 1916): 8: 183–188, 183. 58. Ibid. 59. Ibid., 184. Bryant dubs the whole of Psalm 119 “an expression of the loyalist spirit in application to the Divine Law.” 60. Bryant, “Loyalty,” 184. 61. Ibid. 62. Ibid. 63. Ibid. It seems that “But loyalty was neither of these” would be more clearly rendered as “But loyalty is neither of these.” 64. This elaboration on “loyalty,” particularly its remark concerning the Sermon on the Mount, is noteworthy. Royce explicitly connects his philosophy of loyalty to the Sermon on the Mount. This topic will be treated in chapter 3, “Loyalty to Loyalty.” 65. Ibid., 184. 66. Ibid., 188.

Foust-Notes.indd 179

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

180

notes to pages 45–46

67. Ibid., 187. 68. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 166 (emphasis in original). 69. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 70. Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 62. 71. These ideas are the Universal Community, the moral burden of the individual, and atonement. Each will be elaborated on shortly. 72. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 60. Royce is fond of certain features of Buddhism (e.g., it is a redemptive religion, it seeks to banish illusions which bind us to earth, it privileges purity of heart), but resists the renunciation of the self called for in Nirvana, wherein the Buddha “sees all, but is no longer an individual, and neither desires nor wills anything whatever.” Royce prefers Paul’s vision of beatitude, in which the “glorified and triumphant Church, fills all the scene” as an “activity of individuals who still will, and perform the deeds of love, and endlessly aim to renew what they possess,—the life of the perfected and perfectly lovable community, where all are one in Christ” (132). For more of Royce’s comparison of Buddhism and Christianity, see The Problem of Christianity, 189–95. 73. Ibid., 37. 74. It must be acknowledged that in between The Philosophy of Loyalty and The Problem of Christianity lies The Sources of Religious Insight (1912), in which one of the lectures, “The Religion of Loyalty,” quite clearly serves as a bridge between The Philosophy of Loyalty and The Problem of Christianity. Royce himself acknowledges that The Sources of Religious Insight contained the promise that he would, in a future discussion, if possible, attempt to “ ‘apply the principles’ there laid down to the special case of Christianity” and that The Problem of Christianity “redeems that promise according to the best of my ability.” See Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 37. 75. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 42. 76. For Royce, the “religion” of loyalty may indeed be endorsed, adopted, and pontificated secularly. Royce remarks on “those communities, secular or religious, which the noblest forms of loyalty have informed, and have redeemed, precisely in so far as men have yet learned to live the life of the universal brotherhood” (Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 366, emphasis added). 77. What Royce witnessed in the world was a good deal of divisiveness, most dramatically instantiated in war. As previously mentioned in this chapter, the Civil War (1861–65) occurred during his childhood, while the Spanish–American War (1898) occurred during his adult life. The coming of the First World War (1914–18) greatly bothered him, and the last book he published before his death, War and Insurance (1914), advanced further concrete applications of his philosophy of loyalty. The aspects of Christianity on which Royce fastens are fitting for

Foust-Notes.indd 180

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 4 7–56

181

someone who wished for the end of war. For more on this connection, see The Problem of Christianity on the “warfare of ideals” (78–79). 78. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 80. 79. Ibid., 81. 80. Ibid., 82. 81. Ibid., 139. 82. Ibid., 83. “Loyalty” is here cast as a spirit of active devotion (i.e., service) to the community as if it were friend or family (i.e., a person with whom one has a particularly meaningful relationship), manifesting a genuine love for that community. This conception of loyalty differs slightly from that of The Philosophy of Loyalty in its explicit emphasis on community as the object of loyalty, though, as we have seen, it is characteristic of Royce to insist on the social nature of loyalty. 83. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 174. 84. As we will see in chapter 3, “Loyalty to Loyalty,” another way that Royce puts this is that we are “loyal to loyalty.” Of course, some loyalties, such as that to an international terrorist network, seem directly counter to the cause of universal loyalty. Royce maintains that “imperfect” and “evil” causes are still indeed “fragmentary forms” of the service of the cause of universal loyalty, insofar as they are instantiations of loyalty to something, but it is clear that Royce would hold that these forms are the most fragmentary. 85. John Ladd, “Loyalty,” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy, ed. Paul Edwards (New York: Macmillan, 1967), 5: 97–98. 86. Ibid., 97. 87. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 25. 88. Ibid., 27. 89. John Dewey, “The Lost Individual,” in vol. 5 (1929–1930) of John Dewey: The Later Works, 1925–1953, ed. Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984): 5: 66–76. 90. Ibid., 66–67. 91. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 43. 3. loyalt y to loyalt y 1. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 56 (emphasis in original). 2. Ibid., 57. 3. Ibid., 50. 4. Ibid. 5. Royce refers to one’s being inspired by one’s fellow owing to the “very contagion of his loyalty” and remarks, “Loyalty, then, is contagious” (The Philosophy of Loyalty, 64, 65). 6. Ibid., 90.

Foust-Notes.indd 181

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

182

notes to pages 5 7–63

7. Ibid., 88. 8. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 9. Ibid., 89 (emphasis in original). 10. Ibid. (emphasis in original). James’s “The Will to Believe” (1896) pertains to the rationality of adoption of religious belief in the face of a lack of coercive evidence for or against the existence of God. James believes that all persons must believe in God or not, conceiving of agnosticism as amounting to deciding to not believe. 11. Ibid., 90. 12. Ibid. Adopting James’s terminology, both the marriage example and the example of the young woman involve options that are live, forced, and momentous—constituting what James refers to as “genuine” options—ones that not only may but must be decided via the passionate will or volition when the logical intellect cannot arrive at a determination of certitude. 13. I establish the dating and precise location of these lectures in “ ‘What Can I Do For the Cause Today Which I Never Did Before?’: Situating Josiah Royce’s Pittsburgh Lectures on Loyalty” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47, no. 1 (2011): 87–108. 14. In a letter to George Platt Brett of the Macmillan Company, Royce lists among his plans “a further book on ‘The Art of Loyalty.’ ” This book was not published, but one imagines that it would have featured material from the lecture sharing its title. See Royce, “To George Platt Brett, N.D. [August 1911?]” in Clendenning, The Letters of Josiah Royce, 558. 15. Royce, “The Art of Loyalty,” in “Pittsburgh Lectures,” Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, box 82, 6–7. 16. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 54. 17. Royce, “The Art of Loyalty,” 50–51. 18. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 62. 19. Ibid., 62–63. 20. Royce, “The Art of Loyalty,” 42. 21. Ibid. 22. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 88. 23. Ibid., 89 (emphasis in original). 24. W. R. Sorley, “The Philosophy of Loyalty by Josiah Royce,” The Hibbert Journal 7, no. 1 (1908): 207–10, 209. 25. Ibid., 58–59. 26. Ibid., 59. 27. Ibid. 28. Ibid., 62. 29. Ibid., 61–62. 30. Ibid., 63.

Foust-Notes.indd 182

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 63–72

183

31. Ibid., 65. 32. Ibid., 66 (emphasis in original). 33. Ibid., 67 (emphasis in original). 34. Ibid., 66. 35. Ibid., 67. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 68. 38. Ibid. 39. Ibid. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid., 69. 42. Ibid., 67. 43. The term “consequentialism” originates in “Modern Moral Philosophy,” by G. E. M. Anscombe, Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19. 44. Royce was well aware of the moral philosophies of Bentham and Mill. In addition to allusions to each in published works, in a lecture at Smith College in 1910, Royce names them among a list of philosophers who regarded philosophy as a guide to life, a conception of the task of philosophy that Royce shares. See Josiah Royce, “Smith Lectures on Present Problems of Philosophy,” Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, box 78. Many names are mentioned other than those of Bentham and Mill, including Shaftesbury (Anthony Ashley Cooper, third earl of Shaftesbury), a British philosopher of the late seventeenth to early eighteenth centuries, whose thought influenced that of the British moralists who followed him (e.g., Bentham and Mill). Shaftesbury held that “to love the public, to study universal good, and to promote the interest of the whole world, as far as lies within our power, is surely the height of goodness.” With the principle of loyalty to loyalty, Royce echoes this sentiment. See Shaftesbury, Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times, ed. Lawrence E. Klein (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 20. 45. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 177. 46. The use of the term “deontological” to describe moral theories such as Kant’s originates in Five Types of Ethical Theory, by C. D. Broad (New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930). 47. See Immanuel Kant, Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). 48. Frank Thilly, “The Philosophy of Loyalty by Josiah Royce,” Philosophical Review 17, no. 5 (September 1908): 541–48, 541. 49. Sorley, “The Philosophy of Loyalty by Josiah Royce,” 208. 50. A more recent comparison suggests a significant difference. “According to Kant’s concept of duty, if one acts rationally one can know, at least in principle, that one is acting dutifully; so conflict is eliminated. . . . This kind of

Foust-Notes.indd 183

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

184

notes to pages 72–7 5

privileged certainty is not assured by loyalty.” See J. E. Grady, “Royce and Kant: Loyalty and Duty,” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 6, no. 3 (1975): 186–93, 191. 51. Annie Lyman Sears, The Drama of the Spiritual Life: A Study of Religious Experience and Ideals (New York: Macmillan, 1915). 52. Ibid., 388 (emphasis in original). 53. Royce, introductory note to The Drama of the Spiritual Life, xvi. 54. Sears, preface to The Drama of the Spiritual Life, viii. 55. Ibid., 388. 56. Royce uses this exact set of examples in the undergraduate course in ethics that he teaches at Yale in 1907, to which he refers in the preface to The Philosophy of Loyalty. In that context, they are used merely as empirical examples of moral standards. See Josiah Royce, “Yale Course in Ethics, Lecture II, Oct. 5, 1907,” Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, box 78, 11–16. 57. Royce, “The Art of Loyalty,” 4. 58. Ibid., 5. 59. At least this is not obvious to me; I would be unsurprised and pleased to be shown otherwise. 60. Frank M. Oppenheim, S.J. states that in “The Idea of Duty,” the second lecture of Royce’s 1915–16 extension course on ethics, a main task of Royce’s is to show “how the idea of duty arises, not primarily from pure practical reason, but from concretely lived experiences of the past, once they are recognized as irrevocable.” Oppenheim’s reference to “pure practical reason” is clearly a reference to Kant. See Frank M. Oppenheim, Royce’s Mature Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1993), xiii. Quoting Oppenheim, Dwayne A. Tunstall infers that for Royce duty is “not an abstract, impartial sense of obligation to some moral categorical imperative.” See Dwayne A. Tunstall, Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 60. Tunstall is right that for Royce duty is not abstract and impartial, but he seems to infer from Oppenheim’s comment that Royce’s moral philosophy and Kant’s moral philosophy are mutually exclusive. In “The Idea of Duty,” Royce laments the unpopularity of the idea of duty in his day and explains this unpopularity as partly stemming from a confusion concerning the clearness of the place that duty occupies in life. He illustrates this with reference to Wordsworth’s and Kant’s imagery of duty occupying the heavens, while still calling these comparisons “enlightening.” Royce does not claim to abandon Kantian thinking about duty wholesale and even imagines Kant responding sympathetically to his point of resistance. See Josiah Royce, “The Idea of Duty,” in Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, ed. Frank M. Oppenheim (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2001), 2: 86.

Foust-Notes.indd 184

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

n ot e s to pag e s 7 6–84

185

61. See Aristotle, Nicomachean Ethics, trans. Terence Irwin (Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999). 62. See Confucius, Analects, trans. Edward Slingerland (Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003). According to Royce, “the beginnings of loyalty extend far back into the life of childhood,” with “affection, obedience, a gradually increasing persistence in wholesome activities, a growing patience and self-control, all these, in the natural growth of a human being . . . preliminaries to the more elaborate forms of loyalty.” Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 120–21. In the following chapter more will be said of the development of loyalty from childhood through adulthood. 63. Royce’s entries, “Error and Truth,” “Mind,” Monotheism,” “Negation,” and “Order,” are collected in Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, ed. Oppenheim, vol. 1. (Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2001). 64. Royce, “Order,” 533. 65. Ibid. 66. Royce, “To Warner Fite, July 20, [1913?],” in The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. Clendenning, 604 (emphasis in original). Royce is replying to Fite’s letter concerning The Problem of Christianity. Royce is impressed by Fite’s letter, calling it “one of the best which I have received from readers of my book” (604). 67. Royce, “Order,” 539. 68. Ibid. 69. Royce elaborates: “Paying one’s debts is a loyal act, as far as it goes. But it is an act which has no meaning for me unless I can recognize the relations of debtor and creditor. If I am not loyal, I say, in substance, ‘I will do this if I choose to do it.’ If I am loyal, I say, ‘I do this in case my relations to others in the community require me to do thus and thus’ ” (“Order,” 539). 70. Ibid., 540. 71. Royce, “To Warner Fite, July 20, [1913?],” 609 (emphasis in original). 4. learning loyalt y 1. Dwayne A. Tunstall, Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s EthicoReligious Insight (New York: Fordham University Press, 2009), 110. 2. Ibid., 129. 3. Ibid., 111. 4. Ibid., 126. 5. Ibid., 126–27. 6. Ibid., 129–10. 7. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays upon Problems of Philosophy and of Life (New York: D. Appleton, 1898); Royce, Outlines of

Foust-Notes.indd 185

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

186

notes to pages 85–94

Psychology: An Elementary Treatise with Some Practical Applications (New York: Macmillan, 1903); Peter Fuss, The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965). 8. John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1971), 408. 9. Josiah Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 16–17. 10. For a recent treatment of the connections between Royce’s more explicitly psychological writings and more explicitly philosophical writings on the self, see the second chapter (“The Self”) of Josiah Royce in Focus, by Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008), 21–43. 11. Josiah Royce, “Topics in Psychology of Interest to Teachers,” 1893, Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, boxes 63–66. 12. Quoted by Fuss, 63. 13. Quoted by Fuss, 69–70. 14. Quoted by Fuss, 64. 15. Ibid. 16. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 208. 17. Ibid. (emphasis in original). The word “an” is most likely intended between “as” and “child” in this passage. 18. Fuss, 69. 19. Ibid., 67. Fuss cites Royce’s “Preliminary Report on Imitation,” 223. 20. Ibid., 70 (emphasis in original). 21. Royce, Outlines of Psychology, 257 (emphasis in original). 22. Ibid. 23. Ibid., 277. 24. Ibid., 276. 25. Ibid., 277. 26. Ibid. 27. Ibid., 279 (emphasis in original). 28. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 16. 29. Ibid. 30. Ibid., 18. 31. Ibid., 18–19. 32. Ibid., 19. 33. Ibid. 34. Ibid., 120–21. 35. Ibid., 121. 36. Ibid. 37. Ibid., 122. 38. Ibid.

Foust-Notes.indd 186

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 94–98

187

39. Ibid., 123. 40. Ibid. 41. Ibid. That Royce believes that loyalty must be allowed to grow in its various forms, in due time, is worth noting. This sentiment informs his response to a schoolmaster opposed to Royce’s emphasis on loyalty, explaining that among his young students, loyalty “is a cloak to cover a multitude of sins.” Royce states that the schoolmaster’s own loyalty to his students illustrates the value of what he is condemning in his students, asking, “Is there not some misunderstanding here?” (The Philosophy of Loyalty, 30, 31). The misunderstanding, one must infer, is that loyalty is not the problem; the chosen cause is. Eric Felten accuses Royce of “a fudge,” holding that Royce’s response “doesn’t come close to resolving the conflict identified by the schoolmaster—that loyal obligations to one’s friends can be at odds with one’s obligations to truth, duty, or the law.” See Eric Felten, Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011), 61. Felten misses, however, that Royce is at this point only defending loyalty as a good for the loyal agent. In the very next lecture, “Loyalty to Loyalty,” Royce clearly attempts to combat the problem of apparent conflicts among causes. One might view Royce as holding that the loyalty of the schoolchildren must be allowed to grow in its various forms; with the proper environment and nutrients—as the loyal schoolmaster can provide—their loyalty will grow to be loyal to loyalty. 42. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 83. 43. Josiah Royce, “Some Relations of Physical Training to the Present Problems of Moral Education in America,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 147. 44. Ibid. (emphasis in original). Again, contra the interpretation of Baron, we see Royce explicitly indicate that loyalty is a quality characterizing humans. 45. Royce, “Some Relations of Physical Training,” 150. 46. Ibid., 151. 47. Ibid., 150. 48. Ibid., 157. 49. Ibid., 157–58. 50. Ibid., 158–59. 51. Ibid., 160. 52. McDermott puts the point succinctly, with reference to The Philosophy of Loyalty: “Royce uses man, mankind, and he in descriptions of human activity. Written long before it became wise, equitable, and stylistically appropriate to use gender-free language, the text now sounds jarring relative to this issue. Nothing can be done to rewrite the text, but Royce, more than most thinkers, was free of sexist attitudes in both his personal and professional life” (xxi). 53. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 161.

Foust-Notes.indd 187

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

188

notes to pag es 98–103

54. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 124. 55. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 162. 56. Ibid., 163. 57. Ibid. 58. Ibid., 165. 59. Ibid., 165–66. 60. Ibid., 166. 61. Ibid., 167. This comment is consistent with Royce’s remark in The Philosophy of Loyalty that the proper function of athletic organizations is that of “training the muscles as well as the souls of our youth to loyalty” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 124). 62. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 170. 63. Ibid., 218 (emphasis in original). 64. Ibid. 65. Ibid., 219. 66. Ibid. 67. See Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 27, 138, 143, 159. 68. The remark was recorded in the notebook of Victor Lenzen, a student of Royce’s Seminary in Scientific Methodology, 1914–15. Quoted by Clendenning in The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, 365. In the third of his 1914 Berkeley Conferences, “The Social Character of Scientific Inquiry,” Royce asserts that “there is no more powerful teacher of Loyalty than the scientific spirit. And for that very reason there is no more significant mode of bringing about the world peace, concerning which we hear so much, than spreading not merely the scientific spirit but its application to human life.” See Oppenheim, ed., Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works, 2: 24. 69. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 135. 70. In “The Case of John Bunyan,” Royce estimates Bunyan as one “whose few highest flights of poetic imagination, such as the closing scenes of the first part of the Pilgrim’s Progress, belong without question in the really loftiest regions of art. Range of invention, self-control in production, perfect objectivity in the portrayal of human life—these are leading traits in the work of this man.” See Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 31. 71. Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 195. 72. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 216. 73. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 125. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 126. 76. Ibid., 127.

Foust-Notes.indd 188

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 104–109

189

77. Ibid., 129. 78. Ibid., 127. 79. Ibid. 80. Ibid., 128. 81. Ibid., 138. 82. Ibid., 138–39. 83. Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 202. For more of Royce’s references to Lee, see Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 86, 90, and The Sources of Religious Insight, 194, 196, 208. 84. Gary W. Gallagher, introduction to The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History, ed. Gary W. Gallagher and Alan T. Nolan (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2000), 1. 85. David W. Blight, Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory (Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001), 259. 86. Marilyn Fischer, “Locating Royce’s Reasoning on Race,” The Pluralist 7, no. 1 (2012): 104–32: 128. 87. Ibid. 88. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 131. 89. Ibid. In the last of a series of unpublished lectures entitled “Cambridge Conferences, 1898,” Royce invokes similar imagery: “Bunyan’s Pilgrims were always moving in one direction by virtue of the fact that they sought yonder shining light. Its very distance secured the straightness of their path.” Quoted by Cotton, 100. 90. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 133. 91. Ibid., 132. 92. Ibid. 93. Ibid., 129. 94. Ibid., 130–31. 95. Ibid. 96. Ibid., 133. 97. Ibid., 100. 98. Ibid., 131. 99. Ibid., 136. 100. Ibid., 137–38. 101. Ibid., 138. 102. Ibid., 132. 103. Ibid., 137. 104. According to Royce, “We call such a spirit that honours loyalty in the foe a spirit of chivalry” (The Sources of Religious Insight, 202). 105. Ibid., 203.

Foust-Notes.indd 189

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

190

notes to pages 110–113 5. loya lt y and communit y

1. Julia Driver gives such an account of loyalty: “Loyalty is a virtue because it binds people together more efficiently and reduces psychological stress in relationships. You can count on someone who is loyal. You can work more efficiently with someone who is loyal.” See Julia Driver, Uneasy Virtue (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 104–5. Rosalind Hursthouse offers a similar but nuanced account: “Loyal people do not stick by their friends, continue with the business that has treated them generously and has now fallen on hard times, and refuse to mock their partners behind their back because they think doing so fosters good relationships and the good functioning of a social group. They do so . . . ‘because they think it’s right.’ ” See Rosalind Hursthouse, On Virtue Ethics (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1999), 235 (emphasis in original). Thus, Hursthouse and Driver agree that loyalty fosters good relationships and efficient functioning of social groups and is therefore conducive to the well-being of the loyal agent, but Hursthouse stipulates that well-being is not the motive of the loyal agent. It is not clear, however, why these motives need be mutually exclusive. One may be loyal because one thinks loyalty fosters good relationships and the good functioning of a social group and that it is right to be loyal, or one may be loyal because one thinks it is right to foster good relationships and the good functioning of a social group. Clearly, Royce thinks that loyalty fosters numerous goods and that it is right to be loyal for numerous reasons. 2. Lisa Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggle (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2005), 9. 3. Ibid., 149. 4. Royce, The Problem of Christianity (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 248. 5. Griffin Trotter, “Royce, Community and Ethnicity,” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 231–69: 251. 6. For a perceptive treatment of this theme that focuses on Royce’s persistent attention to the problem of evil, see C. Hannah Schell, “Roycean Loyalty and the Struggle with Evil,” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 25, no. 1 (January 2004): 3–21. 7. Royce, The World and the Individual, second series (New York: Dover, 1959), 379. This remark opens the lecture titled “The Struggle with Evil,” which directly follows the lecture titled “The Moral Order.” That “The Struggle for Order” of California is explicitly devoted to delineating a struggle toward the realization of moral order is but one ground on which to suspect that Royce’s moral insights were nascent in his historical treatment of his native state. 8. Kara E. Barnette, “Communities, Traitors, and the Feminist Cause: Looking Toward Josiah Royce for Feminist Scholarship,” Pluralist 2, no. 2 (2007): 81–90, 85.

Foust-Notes.indd 190

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 113–117

191

9. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 114 (emphasis in original). With “selfestranged spirit,” Royce alludes to the title of section B of chapter 6 of Hegel’s Phenomenology of Spirit. The most revealing treatment of the influence of Hegel on Royce’s philosophy of loyalty is John Kaag, “American Interpretations of Hegel: Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty,” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26, no. 1 (January 2009): 83–101. 10. Ibid., 115. 11. Ibid. 12. Ibid., 116. 13. Ibid., (emphasis in original). 14. “Provincialism” was first delivered at the University of Iowa in 1902. It was published as part of Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems in 1908. 15. Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 70. 16. Ibid., 69. 17. Ibid. 18. Ibid., 70. 19. Ibid., 71. 20. Ibid., 70. 21. Ibid., 76. 22. Tommy J. Curry, “Royce, Racism, and the Colonial Ideal: White Supremacy and the Illusion of Civilization in Josiah Royce’s Account of the White Man’s Burden,” Pluralist 4, no. 3 (2009): 10–38, 30. 23. Curry, “Royce, Racism, and the Colonial Ideal,” 28. Curry quotes from The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce, vol. 2, ed. John J. McDermott (New York: Fordham University Press, 2005). There is no difference between the text as it appears there and as it appears in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, from which I cite. 24. Royce, “Provincialism,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 75–76. 25. Curry, 29. 26. The crisis Royce would have had in mind is that of the Second Boer War, 1899–1902. In “Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,” an address to the Aberdeen Philosophical Society in 1900, Royce continually alludes to the “crisis” that the British Empire is presently enduring. See “Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 223–48. 27. Curry, 35 28. Royce, “Provincialism,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 72–73. 29. Ibid.

Foust-Notes.indd 191

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

192

notes to pages 117–122

30. I believe that Fischer (as discussed in chapter 4, “Learning Loyalty”) and Curry are justifiably wary of Royce’s personal predilections, making strong cases for Royce’s having harboring racist and colonialist beliefs typical of his time. This does not mean that Royce’s thought—even those aspects of his philosophy of loyalty that may be borne of or reflect such beliefs—should be jettisoned. Royce’s philosophy of loyalty can and should be implemented in the service of antiracist and anticolonialist movements. Racism and colonialism engender loyalty, to be sure, but such loyalties are disloyal to loyalty. Loyalty to loyalty demands that we oppose such loyalties with loyalty to the causes of undermining racism and colonialism. 31. The crisis in Britain was the Second Boer War. In fact, Royce compares the situation of America during the Civil War to that of his British audience in 1900, urging that “when your skies are stormy, it is perhaps well to recall, not only your own more distant and glorious historic past, but also the crisis through which we, your brethren, were called to pass not many years since. For our problem was then not wholly unlike, in its deeper social motives, the one which your present destiny brings you to face. . . . May your wars end in liberty and in future brotherhood” (Royce, “Some Characteristic Tendencies of American Civilization,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 231). 32. Royce, “Provincialism,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 74–75. 33. Ibid., 76. 34. Trotter, “Royce, Community, and Ethnicity,” 252. 35. Royce, “Provincialism,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 77. 36. Ibid. Royce goes on to write: “Imitation is a good thing. All civilization depends on it. But there may be a limit to the number of people who ought to imitate precisely the same body of ideas and customs. For imitation is not man’s whole business. There ought to be some room left for variety” (78). 37. Trotter, “Royce, Community, and Ethnicity,” 252. 38. Royce, “Provincialism,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 80–81. 39. Ibid., 86–87. 40. Ibid., 86. 41. Trotter, “Royce, Community, and Ethnicity,” 254. 42. See Ronald A. Wells, foreword to California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco [1856]: A Study of American Character, by Josiah Royce (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2002), ix. 43. See Royce’s letter to Bernard Moses, September 7, 1883 (Royce, California, 128). Bernard Moses was a professor of history and a colleague of Royce’s at the University of California in Berkeley (1878–82).

Foust-Notes.indd 192

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 122–123

193

44. Josiah Royce to George Buchanan Coale, letter, January 14, 1884, in The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. John Clendenning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970), 129. George Buchanan Coale was a friend of Royce’s in Baltimore, whom Royce met during his graduate study at Johns Hopkins University (1876–78). John Clendenning describes Coale as “satisfying Josiah’s persistent need for a surrogate father.” See John Clendenning, The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce, rev. ed. (Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999), 71. Royce’s sentiments here echo those expressed in his letter to Moses (see previous note). 45. Few have considered seriously the connection between Royce’s history of California and his philosophy of loyalty, though, as the following paragraph suggests, the once typical view of the text as a digression seems to have fallen out of fashion. Of California and the text that followed it, The Feud at Oakfield Creek: A Novel of California Life, Robert V. Hine writes, “The two books . . . grew straight out of [Royce’s] California backgrounds and merely explored in other forms his life’s deepest preoccupations.” See Robert V. Hine, Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991), 165. 46. Clendenning, introduction to The Letters of Josiah Royce, 26. 47. Ibid. The Philosophy of Loyalty is published in 1908; The Problem of Christianity is published in 1913. 48. Kevin Starr, Americans and the California Dream 1850–1915 (New York: Oxford University Press, 1973), 168. 49. Josiah Royce, “Provincialism Based upon a Study of Conditions in California,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 252. This citation is derived from the expanded edition of this text, cited in previous chapters. “Provincialism: Based upon a Study of Early Conditions of California” was originally published in Putnam’s Magazine 7, November 1909, 232–40. 50. Ibid., 257. 51. Royce, Studies of Good and Evil, 298. 52. Ibid., 299. 53. In his Royce’s Mature Ethics (Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1993), Frank M. Oppenheim classifies Royce’s moral thought into early (to 1895), middle (1896–1911), and mature (1912–16) periods. While the delineation of these classifications may be debated, it is worth noting that each of these periods is represented by texts of Royce’s that are considered in this chapter. However we organize the development of Royce’s moral thought, preoccupation with the themes considered in this discussion persists throughout. 54. For Royce, insofar as humans are finite, there is a sense in which moral entanglements are never overcome. As Royce puts it in The World and the Individual, “Our finitude means, then, an actual inattention—a lack of successful interest, at this conscious instant, in more than a very few of the details of the universe,” with sin being “a free choosing of the sort of narrowness which” is

Foust-Notes.indd 193

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

194

notes to pages 123–127

“the natural fate of the human being.” The detail of the universe to which the sinner is deliberately inattentive is “an Ought already present to one’s finite consciousness.” See Josiah Royce, The World and the Individual, second series (New York: Dover, 1959), 59, 359, 360 (emphasis in original). 55. Josiah Royce, California: A Study of American Character from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco (Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2002), 216. Royce is referring to Jonah of the Bible’s book of Jonah. God had ordered Jonah to prophesy at Nineveh, but Jonah chose to flee by going to the port city of Jaffa and sailing to Tarshish. God creates a great storm to interfere with Jonah’s attempt to flee from his duty. The sea calms only when Jonah admits to his fellow sailors that he is to blame for the storm and convinces them to throw him overboard. God allows for Jonah to be saved by being swallowed by a large fish, in which Jonah lives for three days and three nights. On praying to God and promising to atone, the fish is commanded by God to release Jonah. Royce sees the travels and travails of those who abandoned their quiet paths at home for a westward voyage of uncertainty and unforeseen peril as analogous to the experience of Jonah. In describing the delivery of “Provincialism” at the University of Iowa, a community whose provincial spirit he admired, Royce deploys the same reference—with respect to himself: “Thus, then, I went to do my little bit of prophesying. But I found no Nineveh against which to prophesy. Wholesome provincialism was growing all about me, as the crops were growing under the sun and the rains of June” (Royce, “Provincialism Based upon a Study of Conditions in California,” in Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 259). 56. Royce, California, 216. 57. Ibid., 218. 58. Josiah Royce, “Provincialism Based upon a Study of Conditions in California,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 252. 59. Royce, California, 214. 60. Ibid., 219. 61. Ibid., 253. 62. Ibid., 221. 63. Ibid., 221. 64. Ibid., 250. 65. Ibid., 257. 66. Ibid., 258–59. 67. Ibid., 264. 68. Ibid., 265. 69. Ibid. 70. Ibid.

Foust-Notes.indd 194

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 127–133

195

71. Royce, Race Questions, “Provincialism Based upon a Study of Conditions in California,” Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 254. 72. Royce, California, 295. 73. Ibid. 74. Ibid. 75. Ibid., 296. 76. Ibid. 77. Royce, “Provincialism Based upon a Study of Conditions in California,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 256. 78. Royce, California, 296. 79. Royce, “Provincialism Based upon a Study of Conditions in California,” Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, 258. 80. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 98. 81. Ibid., 73. 82. Ibid., 115. 83. Ibid. 84. This is precisely the problem that Royce in The Philosophy of Loyalty refers to as the “paradoxical . . . moral situation of all us”—the “seemingly endless play of inner and outer” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 16, 18). 85. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 119. In his parenthetical remark, Royce explicitly identifies loyalty as the love of a community conceived as a person on a level superior to that of any human individual. Royce in The Philosophy of Loyalty explicitly distinguishes between love and loyalty, so this may seem a shift in Royce’s thought about the nature of loyalty. I contend, however, that for Royce love is a necessary (though insufficient) condition for loyalty. Love is a feeling that, when embodied in willing, practical, and thoroughgoing service, instantiates loyalty. One cannot choose to love, but one can choose to be loyal. 86. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 73. 87. Ibid., 166. 88. Ibid., 168. 89. Ibid. 90. Ibid., 169 (emphasis in original). 91. Ibid., 176. 92. Ibid., 178, 180, 181. 93. Ibid., 180 (emphasis in original). 94. Ibid., 185. 95. Ibid., 186 (emphasis in original). 96. Schell, “Roycean Loyalty and the Struggle with Evil,” 16. 97. Tessman, Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggle, 156.

Foust-Notes.indd 195

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

196

notes to pages 13 4 –1 4 2

98. Barnette, “Communities, Traitors, and the Feminist Cause: Looking Toward Josiah Royce for Feminist Scholarship,” 81. 99. Ibid., 88. 100. Barnette considers only women in her discussion. While patriarchy, by definition, renders women inferior to men, I maintain that patriarchy is harmful to men in encouraging and shaping men to regard and treat women as inferior to them. While women might more readily recognize patriarchy as disloyal to loyalty, men ought to recognize it as such too. 101. Barnette, 88. 102. Ibid. 6. disloyalt y 1. Simon Keller, The Limits of Loyalty (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 217. 2. Ibid., 211. 3. Ibid. 4. This position is well captured in the following remarks: “A person, an individual self, may be defined as a human life lived according to a plan. If a man could live with no plan at all, purposelessly and quite passively, he would in so far be an organism, and also, if you choose, he would be a psychological specimen, but he would be no personality”; “To have a conscience, then, is to have a cause. . . . Apart from [your conscience] you are a mere pretence of moral personality, a manifold fermentation of desires” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 79, 82–83). 5. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 98. 6. Keller, The Limits of Loyalty, 205. 7. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 73–74. 8. Matthew 13: 45–46 (King James Version). Royce makes references to “the kingdom of heaven” at other points in The Philosophy of Loyalty: “Can we see how personally so to act that we can bring loyalty on earth to a fuller fruition, to a wider range of efficacy, to a more effective sovereignty over the lives of men? If so, then indeed we can see how to work for the cause of the genuine kingdom of heaven” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 60). 9. Perhaps Royce here echoes the sentiment of Baruch de Spinoza in The Ethics, book 5, proposition 42: “But all things excellent are as difficult as they are rare.” This line of Spinoza’s appears in the exact passage from which Royce quotes earlier in The Philosophy of Loyalty: “To adapt other words of Spinoza, ‘when such a seeker after power ceases to suffer, he ceases also to be’ ” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 42). I thank Michael LeBuffe for noting a possible point of divergence between Spinoza’s and Royce’s views: “Probably, because Spinoza thinks that this excellence is difficult, he would not recommend that just

Foust-Notes.indd 196

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 1 4 2–1 4 7

197

anyone trade the rest of his pearls for it: those who cannot attain the highest measure of virtue would be better served to get what happiness they can elsewhere. If Spinoza is elitist in this way, then perhaps he differs from Royce there. It looks as though Royce is recommending that everyone trade their pearls in for loyalty. . . . However, it is certainly right that Spinoza thinks that the highest virtue (self-knowledge and the knowledge of God) is worth the sacrifice of lesser goods for those who can attain it” (Michael LeBuffe, e-mail to author, February 19, 2010). 10. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 105. Gabriel Marcel uses the negation of Royce’s term in describing Royce’s conception of loyalty: “We cannot see loyalty as the equivalent of moral suicide. It is not servitude. It is an advent. It is the only means of self-realization which can be granted the individual” (Gabriel Marcel, Royce’s Metaphysics, trans. Virginia and Gordon Ringer [Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956], 112). 11. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 154. 12. Keller, The Limits of Loyalty, 206. 13. Ibid. 14. Ibid., 207. 15. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 105. 16. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 154. 17. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 95. 18. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 153–154. 19. Ibid., 154–55. 20. Royce, The World and the Individual, 2: 58. 21. Ibid., 59 (emphasis in original). 22. Ibid., 360 (emphasis in original). 23. Ibid. 24. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 157 (emphasis in original). 25. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 22–23. 26. Ibid., 62. 27. Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight (Washington, D.C.: Catholic University of America Press, 2001), 206. 28. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 125. 29. Ibid. Royce goes on to call the community to which the convert becomes loyal “the Beloved Community,” stating that “the realm of this Beloved Community, whose relations Christianity conceives, for the most part, in supernatural terms, will constitute what, in our discussion, shall be meant by the term ‘The Realm of Grace.’ ” 30. Ibid., 158. 31. I have elsewhere described the situation of the traitor as being, for Royce, symptomatic of the tragic character of human finitude. See my “Tragedy and the

Foust-Notes.indd 197

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

198

notes to pages 1 4 7–153

Sorrow of Finitude: Reflections on Sin and Death in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce,” Pluralist 2, no. 2 (Summer 2007): 106–14. This section and the section to follow are to some degree repetitive of claims made in that article. 32. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 186 (emphasis in original). 33. Ibid., 166. 34. Ibid., 162. 35. Ibid., 169 (emphasis in original). 36. John E. Smith, Royce’s Social Infinite: The Community of Interpretation (New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1950), 153. 37. Ibid., 154. 38. Ibid. (emphasis in original). 39. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 175. 40. Royce, The World and the Individual, 2: 349. 41. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 180. 42. Ibid., 179. This sentence is nearly echoed as the opening sentence of War and Insurance, published one year after The Problem of Christianity: “Great tragedies are great opportunities.” See Josiah Royce, War and Insurance: An Address Delivered Before the Philosophical Union of the University of California at Its Twenty-Fifth Anniversary at Berkeley California, August 27, 1914 (New York: Macmillan, 1914), 1. 43. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 180 (emphasis in original). 44. Ibid., 180. 45. Ibid., 181. 46. James Harry Cotton, Royce on the Human Self (Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954), 277–278. 47. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 205. 48. Jacquelyn Ann K. Kegley, “Grace, the Moral Gap, and Royce’s Beloved Community,” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2004): 171–83, 181. 49. Ibid. 50. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 130. 51. Ibid., 209 (emphasis in original). 52. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 89. 53. Ibid., 105. See also 97: “Since fidelity and loyalty are indeed inseparable, the breaking of the once plighted faith is always a disloyal act, unless the discovery that the original undertaking involves one in disloyalty to the general cause of loyalty requires the change.” 54. Ibid., 97. 55. The dangers, in the order in which McDermott presents them, are relation saturation, relation amputation, relation saturation, relation seduction, and relation repression. See John J. McDermott, “Experience Grows by Its Edges: A Phenomenology of Relations in an American Philosophical Vein” in The Drama

Foust-Notes.indd 198

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to pages 153–162

199

of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture (New York, Fordham University Press, 2007), 372–89. The dangers are discussed at 384–88. 56. Ibid., 386. 57. John J. McDermott, “Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of the Community: Danger of the Detached Individual” in The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture (New York, Fordham University Press, 2007), 118. 58. Royce, The Hope of the Great Community (New York: Macmillan, 1916), 51–52. Royce likely intends “the” between “In” and “case” in this passage. 59. Royce, The Problem of Christianity, 50 (emphasis in original). 60. Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 97. 61. Ibid., 106. 7. loya lt y, disaster, business: contemp orary applications 1. Naomi Zack, Ethics for Disaster (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009). 2. Ibid., xiii. 3. Ibid., 7 (emphasis in original). The only emendation that I would make to this definition is to note that disasters may enter the private life of an individual or community and that, because such disasters are private, media representations would not enter the equation. 4. Ibid., 56. 5. Ibid., 64. 6. Cormac McCarthy, The Road (New York: Vintage Books, Random House), 2006. 7. Zack, Ethics for Disaster, 59. 8. Ibid. 9. Ibid., 60. 10. Alive is a book and movie based on the true experiences of the Uruguayan rugby team whose plane crashed in the Andes Mountains in 1972. 11. Zack, Ethics for Disaster, 60–61. 12. French fries are not actually French but Belgian. French toast was also renamed “Freedom toast.” The practice of renaming foods in such a manner is not new to America. During the First World War, anti-German sentiment led to sauerkraut being dubbed “liberty cabbage.” See America at War: World War I / Over Here: World War I on the Home Front / Digital History, http://www .digitalhistory.uh.edu/database/article_display.cfm?HHID=531. 13. William R. Gall, “Not By Loyalty Alone,” Journal of the Academy of Management 5, no. 2 (August 1962): 117–123, 122. 14. Gall duplicates the account given by James F. Bender in his The Technique of Executive Leadership (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1950), 103–5.

Foust-Notes.indd 199

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

200

notes to pages 162–170

15. Gall, 122 (emphasis in original). 16. Robert A. Larmer, “Whistleblowing and Employee Loyalty,” Journal of Business Ethics 11, no. 2 (1992): 125–28, 125. 17. Quoted by Mike W. Martin in “Whistleblowing: Professionalism, Personal Life and Shared Responsibility for Safety in Engineering,” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 11, no. 2 (1992): 21–40, 26–27. 18. Ibid., 27. 19. Ibid., 36 (emphasis in original). 20. Ibid., 35–36 (emphasis in original). 21. Ibid., 24. 22. Ibid., 35. 23. Larmer, 127. 24. For a more elaborate argument in support of institutionalized whistleblowing, see Wim Vandekerckhove and M. S. Ronald Commers, “Whistle Blowing and Rational Loyalty,” Journal of Business Ethics 53, no. 2 (2004): 225–33. 25. The most thorough discussion is by Trotter, The Loyal Physician: Roycean Ethics and the Practice of Medicine. For treatments anticipating Trotter’s, see Mary B. Mahowald, “A Roycean Pragmatic: Insights for Applied Ethics,” in Frontiers in American Philosophy, ed. Robert W. Burch and Herman J. Saatkamp Jr. (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1992), 2: 267–76; Kegley, Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities: A Roycean Public Philosophy, 158–205. 26. See Kimberly Garchar, “The Loyal Patient at the End of Life: A Roycean Argument for Assisted Suicide,” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 14 (2005): 147–55. 27. See Kegley, Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities: A Roycean Public Philosophy, 129–57; Sean Riley, “Moral Identity and Moral Education: A Roycean Proposal For School Choice,” Pluralist 2, no. 2 (2007): 91–105. 28. See Michael K. McChrystal, “Lawyers and Loyalty,” William and Mary Law Review 33, no. 2 (1992): 367–427; Michael L. Rich, “Lessons of Disloyalty in the World of Criminal Informants,” The Selected Works of Michael L. Rich (2010), http://works.bepress.com/michael_rich/1/. conclusion: the need for loyalt y 1. Elizabeth Randolph married Edward Royce on December 29, 1910. 2. Josiah Royce, “To Elizabeth Randolph, November 16, 1910,” The Letters of Josiah Royce, ed. John Clendenning (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1980), 548 (emphases in the original). 3. “The answer to the question, ‘Who are you?’ really begins in earnest when a man mentions his calling, and so actually sets out upon the definition of his

Foust-Notes.indd 200

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

notes to page 17 1

201

purposes and of the way in which these purposes get expressed in his life. And when a man goes on to say, ‘I am the doer of these and these deeds, the friend of these friends, the enemy of these opposing purposes, the member of this family, the one whose ideals are such and such, and are so and so expressed in my life,” the man expresses to you at length whatever is most expressible and worth knowing in answer to the question, ‘Who are you?’ ” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 78–79). 4. These sentiments find additional expression in the following passages: “In a Moral Order, any ethical agent can say, ‘It is not yet foreordained what I shall accomplish. I must find that out by my own work.’ The ethical agent must also be able to say, ‘I am needed. Even God needs my help. Without my doing of the right, something would remain undone.’ . . . Above all it is essential, for every moral view of the universe, to conceive that the world can be made better than it is. There is thus an essential opposition, for the moral, even if not for the metaphysical consciousness, between the predicate ought to be and the predicate is. Perfection, in the moral sense, is something still to be sought, it cannot be merely found. The best world for a moral agent is one that needs him to make it better” (Royce, The World and the Individual, 2:339–340 [emphases in original]). “If my deed were not done, the world-life would miss my deed. Each of us can say that” (Royce, The Philosophy of Loyalty, 183). 5. Royce, The Sources of Religious Insight, 192.

Foust-Notes.indd 201

6/5/2012 2:02:52 PM

Foust-Notes.indd 202

6/5/2012 2:02:53 PM

Bibliography



Anscombe, G. E. M. “Modern Moral Philosophy.” Philosophy 33, no. 124 (1958): 1–19. Aristotle. Nicomachean Ethics. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1999. Baron, Marcia. The Moral Status of Loyalty. Dubuque, IA: Kendall/Hunt, 1984. Barnette, Kara E. “Communities, Traitors, and the Feminist Cause: Looking Toward Josiah Royce for Feminist Scholarship.” Pluralist 2, no. 2 (2007): 81–90. Barry, Brian. Justice as Impartiality. Oxford: Clarendon Press; New York: Oxford University Press, 1995. Bender, James F. The Technique of Executive Leadership. New York: McGrawHill, 1950. Blight, David W. Race and Reunion: The Civil War in American Memory. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2001. Bok, Sissela. “Whistleblowing and Professional Responsibility.” New York University Education Quarterly 11, 4 (1980): 2–7. Broad, C. D. Five Types of Ethical Theory. New York: Harcourt, Brace, 1930. Bryant, Sophie. “Loyalty” in Encyclopaedia of Religion and Ethics, edited by James Hastings. Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark, 1916, 8: 183–88. Clendenning, John. The Life and Thought of Josiah Royce. Revised and expanded edition. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1999. ———. ed. The Letters of Josiah Royce. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970. Confucius. Analects. Translated by Edward Slingerland. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. Cotton, James Harry. Royce on the Human Self. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1954. Curry, Tommy J. “Royce, Racism, and the Colonial Ideal: White Supremacy and the Illusion of Civilization in Josiah Royce’s Account of the White Man’s Burden.” Pluralist 4, no. 3 (2009): 10–38. { 203 }

Foust-Biblio.indd 203

6/5/2012 10:46:29 AM

204

biblio graphy

Dewey, John. “The Lost Individual.” Volume 5 (1929–1930) of The Later Works, 1925–1953, edited by Jo Ann Boydston (Carbondale and Edwardsville: Southern Illinois University Press, 1984), 66–76. Driver, Julia. Uneasy Virtue. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001. Felten, Eric. Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue. New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011. Fischer, Marilyn. “Locating Royce’s Reasoning on Race,” The Pluralist 7, no. 1 (2012): 104–32. Fletcher, George P. Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships. New York: Oxford University Press, 1993. Foust, Mathew A. “Tragedy and the Sorrow of Finitude: Reflections on Sin and Death in the Philosophy of Josiah Royce.” Pluralist 2, no. 2 (2007): 106–14. ———. “ ‘What Can I Do for the Cause Today Which I Never Did Before?’: Situating Josiah Royce’s Pittsburgh Lectures on Loyalty.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 47, no. 1 (2011): 87–108. Fredrickson, George M. The Inner Civil War: Northern Intellectuals and the Crisis of the Union. New York: Harper and Row, 1965. Fuss, Peter. The Moral Philosophy of Josiah Royce. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1965. Gall, William R. “Not By Loyalty Alone.” Journal of the Academy of Management 5, no. 2 (1962): 117–23. Gallagher, Gary W. and Alan T. Nolan, eds. The Myth of the Lost Cause and Civil War History. Bloomington and Indianapolis: Indiana University Press, 2000. Garchar, Kimberly. “The Loyal Patient at the End of Life: A Roycean Argument for Assisted Suicide.” Cambridge Quarterly of Healthcare Ethics 14 (2005): 147–55. Grady, J. E. “Royce and Kant: Loyalty and Duty.” Journal of the British Society for Phenomenology 6, no. 3 (1975): 186–93. Harper’s Weekly. June 6, 1863. Hine, Robert V. Josiah Royce: From Grass Valley to Harvard. Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1991. Hursthouse, Rosalind. On Virtue Ethics. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 1999. Hyman, Harold M. To Try Men’s Souls: Loyalty Tests in American History. Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1959. Kaag, John. “American Interpretations of Hegel: Josiah Royce’s Philosophy of Loyalty.” History of Philosophy Quarterly 26, no. 1 (2009): 83–101. Kant, Immanuel. Grounding for the Metaphysics of Morals. Indianapolis: Hackett, 2003. Kegley, Jacquelyn Ann K. Genuine Individuals and Genuine Communities: A Roycean Public Philosophy. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997.

Foust-Biblio.indd 204

6/5/2012 10:46:29 AM

biblio graphy

205

———. “Grace, the Moral Gap, and Royce’s Beloved Community.” Journal of Speculative Philosophy 18, no. 3 (2004): 171–83. ———. Josiah Royce in Focus. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2008. Keller, Simon. The Limits of Loyalty. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007. Ladd, John. “Loyalty.” The Encyclopedia of Philosophy. Edited Paul Edwards. New York: Macmillan, 1967, 1996, 5: 97–98. Larmer, Robert A. “Whistleblowing and Employee Loyalty.” Journal of Business Ethics 11, no. 2 (1992): 125–28. Lebuffe, Michael. E-mail correspondence, February 19, 2010. MacIntyre, Alasdair. After Virtue: A Study in Moral Theory. Third edition. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 2007. ———. “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” Lindey Lecture, Department of Philosophy, University of Kansas, 1984. Mahowald, Mary B. “A Roycean Pragmatic: Insights for Applied Ethics.” In Frontiers in American Philosophy, ed. Robert W. Burch and Herman J. Saatkamp. College Station, TX: Texas A&M University Press, 1992, 2: 267–76. Malveau, Julianne, and Reginna A. Green, eds. The Paradox of Loyalty: An African American Response to the War on Terrorism. Chicago: Third World Press, 2002. Marcel, Gabriel. Royce’s Metaphysics. Translated by Virginia and Gordon Ringer. Chicago: Henry Regnery, 1956. Martin, Mike W. “Whistleblowing: Professionalism, Personal Life, and Shared Responsibility for Safety in Engineering.” Business and Professional Ethics Journal 11, no. 2 (1992): 21–40. McCarthy, Cormac. The Road. New York: Vintage Books, Random House, 2006. McChrystal, Michael K. “Lawyers and Loyalty.” William and Mary Law Review 33, no. 2 (1992): 367–427. McDermott, John J. The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture. New York: Fordham University Press, 2007. ———. Introduction to The Philosophy of Loyalty, by Josiah Royce. Nashville: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995. Moran, Jon. “Mixed Loyalties: A Roycean Interpretation of Public Reason.” Pluralist 2, no. 2 (2007): 63–70. Nielsen, Kai. “Justice as a Kind of Impartiality.” Laval Théologique et Philosophique 50, no. 3 (1994): 511–29. Oldenquist, Andrew. “Loyalties.” Journal of Philosophy Vol. 79, no. 4 (1982): 173–93. Oppenheim, S.J., Frank M. Royce’s Mature Ethics. Notre Dame, IN: Notre Dame University Press, 1993.

Foust-Biblio.indd 205

6/5/2012 10:46:29 AM

206

biblio graphy

———. ed. Josiah Royce’s Late Writings: A Collection of Unpublished and Scattered Works. Vols. 1 and 2. Bristol, U.K.: Thoemmes Press, 2001. Peirce, Charles S. “The Fixation of Belief.” Popular Science Monthly 12 (1877): 1–15. Pettit, Philip. “The Paradox of Loyalty.” American Philosophical Quarterly 25, no. 2 (1988): 163–71. Rawls, John. A Theory of Justice. Cambridge, MA: Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 1971. Reichheld, Frederick F. The Loyalty Effect: The Hidden Force Behind Growth, Profits, and Lasting Value. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 1996. ———. Loyalty Rules! How Today’s Leaders Build Lasting Relationships. Boston, MA: Harvard Business School Press, 2001. Rich, Michael L. “Lessons of Disloyalty in the World of Criminal Informants.” The Selected Works of Michael L. Rich. 2010. http://works.bepress.com/ michael_rich/1/ Riley, Sean. “Moral Identity and Moral Education: A Roycean Proposal For School Choice.” The Pluralist 2, no. 2 (2007): 91–105. Royce, Josiah. California: A Study of American Character from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2002. ———. The Hope of the Great Community. New York: Macmillan, 1916. ———. Introductory note. The Drama of the Spiritual Life: A Study of Religious Experience and Ideals, by Annie Lyman Sears. New York: Macmillan, 1915. ———. “Order” in Encyclopædia of Religion and Ethics, ed. James Hastings. Edinburgh, Scotland: T&T Clark, 1917, 9: 533–40. ———. Outlines of Psychology: An Elementary Treatise with Some Practical Applications. New York: Macmillan, 1903. ———. Papers in Honor of Josiah Royce on his Sixtieth Birthday. New York: Longman, Greens, 1916. ———. The Philosophy of Loyalty. New York: Macmillan, 1908. ———. The Philosophy of Loyalty. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1995. ———. “Pittsburgh Lectures.” 1909, Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, box 82. ———. The Problem of Christianity. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001. ———. Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems. Edited by Scott L. Pratt and Shannon Sullivan. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. ———. “Smith Lectures on Present Problems of Philosophy.” 1909–1910, Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, box 78.

Foust-Biblio.indd 206

6/5/2012 10:46:29 AM

biblio graphy

207

———. The Sources of Religious Insight. Washington, DC: Catholic University of America Press, 2001. ———. Studies of Good and Evil: A Series of Essays Upon Problems of Philosophy and of Life. New York: D. Appleton, 1898. ———. “Topics in Psychology of Interest to Teachers.” 1893, Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, boxes 63–66. ———. War and Insurance: An Address Delivered Before the Philosophical Union of the University of California at its Twenty-Fifth Anniversary at Berkeley California, August 27, 1914. New York: Macmillan, 1914. ———. William James and Other Essays on the Philosophy of Life. New York: Macmillan, 1911. ———. The World and the Individual. 2 vols. New York: Dover, 1959. ———. “Yale Course in Ethics, Lecture II, Oct. 5, 1907.” Josiah Royce Papers, Harvard University Archives, HUG 1755, box 78. Scheffler, Samuel. Boundaries and Allegiances: Problems of Justice and Responsibility in Liberal Thought. Oxford; New York: Oxford University Press, 2001. Schell, C. Hannah. “Roycean Loyalty and the Struggle with Evil.” American Journal of Theology and Philosophy 25, no. 1 (2004): 3–21. Sears, Annie Lyman. The Drama of the Spiritual Life: A Study of Religious Experience and Ideals. New York: Macmillan, 1915. Shaftesbury. Characteristics of Men, Manners, Opinions, Times. Lawrence E. Klein (ed.), Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999. Smith, John E. Royce’s Social Infinite: The Community of Interpretation. New York: Liberal Arts Press, 1950. Sorley, W. R. “The Philosophy of Loyalty by Josiah Royce.” The Hibbert Journal 7, no. 1 (1908): 207–10. Starr, Kevin. Americans and the California Dream, 1850–1915. New York: Oxford University Press, 1973. Steinmetz, S. Rudolf. Philosophie des Krieges. Leipzig: Johann Ambrosius Barth, 1907. Tamir, Yael. Liberal Nationalism. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1993. Tessman, Lisa. Burdened Virtues: Virtue Ethics for Liberatory Struggle. New York: Oxford University Press, 2005. Thilly, Frank. “The Philosophy of Loyalty by Josiah Royce.” The Philosophical Review, Vol. 17, no. 5 (1908): 541–48. Trotter, Griffin. The Loyal Physician: Roycean Ethics and the Practice of Medicine. Nashville, TN: Vanderbilt University Press, 1997. ———. “Royce, Community and Ethnicity.” Transactions of the Charles S. Peirce Society 30, no. 2 (Spring 1994): 231–69.

Foust-Biblio.indd 207

6/5/2012 10:46:29 AM

208

biblio graphy

Tunstall, Dwayne A. Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s EthicoReligious Insight. New York: Fordham University Press, 2009. Vandekerckhove, Wim and M.S. Ronald Commers. “Whistle Blowing and Rational Loyalty.” Journal of Business Ethics 53, no. 2 (2004): 225–33. Wells, Ronald A. “Foreword.” Josiah Royce, California, from the Conquest in 1846 to the Second Vigilance Committee in San Francisco [1856]: A Study of American Character. Berkeley, CA: Heyday Books, 2002. Zack, Naomi. Ethics for Disaster. Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2009.

Foust-Biblio.indd 208

6/5/2012 10:46:29 AM

Index

 Abrahamic religions, 64 absorption, 42, 56 self–absorption, 141 Achilles, 159 After Virtue (MacIntyre), 11, 13, 14, 16 al Qaeda, 4–5 Antigone (Sophocles), 2–3, 175n31 arete¯, 76–77 Aristotle, 14, 15, 76 art(s), 58, 62, 74–75, 85–86, 102–3 “The Art of Loyalty” (Royce), 58–61, 74, 182n14 Arthur Andersen, 3 assimilation, 117–18 athletics, 94–103, 188n61 atonement, 8, 46, 129–31, 132, 137, 150, 151–54, 156, 163, 167, 180n71, 194n55 autonomy, 39–42, 61, 109, 134 Baldwin, James Mark, 87–88 Baron, Marcia, 35, 38, 39 Barnette, Kara E., 113, 133–34, 196n100 Bellows, Henry W., 30 benevolence, 65, 78–79, 138 Bentham, Jeremy, 67, 183n44 betrayal. See disloyalty Blight, David W., 105 Boer War, Second, 191n26, 192n31 Boisjoly, Roger, 164–65, 166–67, 170 Bok, Sissela, 3 Brett, George Platt, 182n14 Bryant, Sophie, 27–28, 42–45, 50, 77 Buddhism, 64, 180n72 Bunyan, John, 188n70, 189n89 Bushnell, Horace, 30 business, 3–4, 8, 162–167

California (Royce), 112, 190n7, 193n45 Camps, Frank, 164, 166–67, 170 Caritas, 74 categorical imperative, 69–75, 104, 184n60 cause(s), 5, 7, 23–24, 30, 34–49, 178n34 harmonization of, 59–60 Idealizing of the Cause, 103–4, 108 of a life of loyalty, 61–63 lost cause 7, 104, 105–8 as superpersonal, 48–49 Challenger disaster, 164–66 charity, 22 Charles I, 38 chivalry, 105, 189n104 Christianity, 46, 106–7, 145–46, 180n72, 180n77 Civil War, 28–31, 105, 117, 180n77, 192n31 Clendenning, John, 28, 31–32, 122, 123, 193n44 Coale, George Buchanan, 193n44 colonialism, 8, 115–16, 192n30 community, 7–8, 10, 11, 13, 47, 55–56, 61, 62, 77, 78–80, 90, 110–35, 146, 148–55, 161, 163, 167, 168, 180n72, 181n82, 185n69, 195n85, 197n29, 199n3 assimilation of newcomers to, 117–18 Beloved Community, 150, 161, 197n29 leaders of, 103–4, 107, 108, 121 leveling tendency of, 118–20 mob spirit of, 90, 120–21 Universal Community, 46, 47, 129–30, 132, 133, 150, 180n71 compassion, 65–66 Confucianism, 64 Confucius, 77, 185n62 conscience, 40, 91, 94–95, 127, 149, 196n4

{ 209 }

Foust-Index.indd 209

6/5/2012 10:48:37 AM

210

index

consequentialism, 7, 52, 66–68, 75, 76, 80, 183n43 constancy, 21–23 Corinthians, 74 Cotton, James Harry, 149–50 creativity, 40, 42, 89, 91 in atonement, 131, 149, 151 Curry, Tommy J., 8, 115–18, 192n30 Daoism, 64 De Forest, John, 30 De George, Richard, 163 death, 5, 53, 55, 107–8, 122, 126, 131, 141, 166, 175n31 decisiveness, 42, 56, 57–58, 60, 92–93 deontological ethics (deontology), 7, 52, 66, 68–75, 76, 80, 183n46 detachment, 8, 137, 153–55 Dewey, Admiral George, 31 Dewey, John, 49, 174n16 diligence, 8, 157–64 disaster, 8, 50, 157–64, 165, 169, 199n3 disloyalty, 8, 54, 56–57, 90, 94, 117, 133–35, 136–56, 166, 167, 171, 177n9 to loyalty, 75, 90, 99, 152–54, 166, 192n30, 198n53 as moral suicide, 8, 142, 144, 147, 171 disorder, 14–15, 80, 94, 125–29 Driver, Julia, 190n1 duty, 27, 37, 38, 39–42, 43, 58, 61, 63–65, 69–75, 80, 91, 93, 124, 152, 175n31, 176n44, 183–84n50, 184n60, 187n41, 194n55 imperfect duty, 70–75 perfect duty, 70–75 Enron Corporation, 3–4, 162 ethical altruism, 67 ethical egoism, 66–67 eudaimonia, 76–77 fair play, 20, 94, 98–99, 109 fairness, 20 faithfulness, 26, 42, 44–45, 57–58, 94, 171 family, 30, 55–57, 60, 62, 77, 139, 146, 149–50, 181n82, 200–201n3 fealty, 44 Felten, Eric, 187n41 feminism, 134 feminist traitor, 113, 134 fidelity, 42, 55–58, 60, 92–93, 144, 149, 198n53 Fischer, Marilyn, 105, 192n30

Foust-Index.indd 210

Fite, Warner, 78–80, 185n66 Fletcher, George P., 11–12, 179n42 “Football and Ideals” (Royce), 100 Ford Motor Company, 164, 166 Franklin, Benjamin, 64 Fredrickson, George M., 29 French, 161, 199n12 friendship, 6, 37, 47, 62, 63, 137–44, 150, 170, 177n9, 181n82, 187n41, 190n1, 200–201n3 Fuss, Peter, 84, 85–87, 108 Gall, William R., 162 Gallagher, Gary W., 105 Genesis, 131 German, 199n12 God, 29, 148, 150, 182n10, 194n55, 196–97n9, 201n4 grace, 47, 145–47, 148, 150–51, 154–55, 197n29 Grant, Ulysses S., 105 Greeks, 64 grief, 104, 106, 108 Harper’s Weekly, 29 Hebrews, 175n29 Hinduism, 64 Homer, 159 honesty, 20, 64 honor(able), 94, 99, 101, 104, 108, 109, 112, 113–14, 115, 119, 125, 141, 144, 153, 189n104 The Hope of the Great Community (Royce), 154 Hume, David, 14 Hursthouse, Rosalind, 190n1 Hyman, Harold M., 29 Idealizing of the cause. See cause(s), Idealizing of the cause Iliad (Homer), 159 imagination, 19, 46, 94, 106, 188n70 imitation, 61, 85–90, 94, 96, 103, 119, 154, 192n36 impartiality. See loyalty and (im)partiality individuality, 47, 49, 119 industry, 22 injustice (unjust), 111, 162 integrity, 8, 12, 21–22, 157–64 James, William, 57, 174n16, 182n10, 182n12 Japanese Samurai, 64 Jesus, 74 Jonah, 123, 194n55

6/5/2012 10:48:37 AM

index Joseph, 149–50 justice, 11–12, 22, 65–66, 125–27 Kant, Immanuel, 14, 69–75, 104, 183–84n50, 184n60 Kegley, Jacquelyn Ann K., 12, 13, 15, 21, 24, 150, 186n10 Keller, Simon, 137, 139, 140–41, 143–44 Kelly, Thomas, 175n29 Kierkegaard, Søren, 176n39 Ladd, John, 28, 48–49, 50 Larmer, Robert, 162, 166 LeBuffe, Michael, 196–97n9 Lee, Robert E., 105, 189n83 legalism, 43–44 Lenzen, Victor, 188n68 Levinas, Emmanuel, 83, 84 liberal morality, 10 Lieber, Francis, 30 Lincoln, Abraham, 29, 30 lost cause. See cause(s), lost cause love, 35, 37, 195n85 loyalty, ambivalence of, 1–5, 31, 157, 162 of animals, 37–38, 178–79n41, 179n42 the art of, 58–61, 74–75 contagion of, 54, 63, 101, 103, 150–51, 153, 181n5 etymology of, 42–45 and (im)partiality, 6, 10–12 learning of, 7, 93–108 nature of, 6–7, 26–50 principle of the prior loyalty, 59, 60–61 religion of, 46, 180n76 treachery of, 1–5, 157, 162 universal loyalty, 47, 56, 58, 62, 80, 109, 121, 150, 151, 181n84 as the will to manifest the Eternal, 45, 47 “Loyalty and Insight” (Royce), 35–36 loyalty oaths, 28–30 loyalty to loyalty, 5, 7, 8, 9, 49, 51–81, 84, 93, 96, 98, 102, 105, 107, 108, 109, 112, 114, 118, 119, 121, 134, 135, 136, 153, 155, 156, 158, 160, 161, 162, 164, 166, 167, 169, 170, 181n84, 183n44, 187n41, 192n30 as consequentialism, 66–68 as deontological ethics, 68–75 as virtue ethics, 75–77 MacIntyre, Alasdair, 6, 10–12, 12–25, 76, 174n16

Foust-Index.indd 211

211

Marcel, Gabriel, 197n10 Martin, Mike W., 163–65 Marx, Karl, 14, 15 Matthew13, 142, 196n8 McAuliffe, Christa, 165 McDermott, John J., 1–2, 5, 26, 42, 153–54, 187n52, 198–99n55 Mill, John Stuart, 67, 183n44 mob mentality (mob spirit), 90, 120–21 moral burden of the individual, 46, 130, 132, 180n71 moral development, 77, 84 morality, 5–6, 14–15, 18, 20, 67, 76, 84, 85–86, 92, 95, 100, 165 loyalty as fulfillment of the whole moral law, 15, 24, 34, 63 Morton Thiokol, 164, 166 Moses, Bernard, 192n43, 193n44 narcissism, 65, 99 narrative quest, 15, 16–19, 23, 175n29 The Nation, 31 Nietzsche, Friedrich, 14, 15 O’Sullivan, John L., 29–30 Oppenheim, Frank M., 184n60, 193n53 “Order” (Royce), 77–80 Outlines of Psychology (Royce), 84, 87, 88, 89 partiality. See loyalty and (im)partiality patience, 32, 101, 185n62 patriotism, 10, 29–31, 35, 36–37, 113, 161 Paul(ine), 74, 130, 132, 146, 180n72 Peirce, Charles S., 13, 17 personhood. See selfhood The Philosophy of Loyalty (Royce), 5, 13, 15, 16–17, 22, 24, 27, 31, 33, 35, 40, 42, 45, 46, 49–50, 58–60, 71, 78, 84, 85, 91, 92, 95, 98, 105, 113–14, 122, 144, 145, 151, 175n28, 175n29, 176n44, 178n26, 178–79n43, 185n62, 187n41, 188n61, 195n84, 196n4, 201n4 The Philosophy of War (Steinmetz), 33, 178n25 phronesis, 76–77 “Pittsburgh Lectures on Loyalty” (Royce), 58–61, 182n13 plan(s) of life, 23, 84, 85, 91–93, 144, 176n44 play, 19–21, 23–24, 87, 93–94 practice(s), 15, 19–24, 176n40 The Problem of Christianity (Royce), 45–47, 50, 129, 144, 145–47, 152, 154, 180n74, 185n66

6/5/2012 10:48:37 AM

212

index

provincialism, 7–8, 112, 113–22, 123, 126–129, 133, 161, 194n55 Psalm 119, 179n59 psychological, 7, 66, 83, 84, 85, 97, 108, 165, 186n10, 190n1, 196n4

struggle, 100, 111, 112, 123–24, 126, 129, 132, 190n7 liberatory struggle, 110–11, 113, 132, 133, 135 Studies of Good and Evil (Royce), 31, 84, 86, 123, 178n41, 188n70

Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems (Royce), 95, 123 racism, 8, 115–16, 192n30 Randolph, Elizabeth, 170, 200n1 Rawls, John, 84–85, 176n44 Reichheld, Frederick F., 4 religion, 15, 43 The Road (McCarthy), 159–61, 164, 170 Rogers Commission, 165 Romans, 64 Royce, Edward, 200n1

Tamir, Yael, 11 teleology, 14–15 Ten Commandments, 74 Tessman, Lisa, 110–11, 113, 132–35 Thilly, Frank, 71–72 Thompson, Joseph Parrish, 30 “Topics in Psychology of Interest to Teachers” (Royce), 85 tradition, 15, 17–19 traitor, 2, 98, 131, 133–36, 142, 144–52, 154, 197n31 loyal traitor, 134–36, 151, 163, 167 treason, 113, 131, 144, 147–53 Trotter, Griffin, 21–22, 24, 112, 118, 119, 121, 174n16, 176n40, 200n25 trust, 79 trustworthiness, 42 truth-telling. See honesty Tunstall, Dwayne, 7, 82–91, 108–9, 184n60

sacrifice, 32, 102, 103, 104, 108, 142, 156 salvation, 46, 79–80, 129–30, 134, 146, 148, 154–55 Scheffler, Samuel, 11, 12 Schell, C. Hannah, 132 science(s), 15, 85–86, 102–3, 188n68 Sears, Annie Lyman, 72–74 Self-control, 96–97, 185n62 Self-restraint, 32 selfhood, 13, 36, 59, 76, 85, 130, 139–40, 143–44, 148, 186n10 September 11, 2001 (9/11), 4–5, 36, 157, 158, 161, 173n6 Sermon on the Mount, 74 Shaftesbury, 183n44 sin(s), 8, 129–34, 145–52, 187n41, 193–94n54 slavery, 53, 149 Smith, John E., 148 Sophocles, 2, 175n31 Sorley, W. R., 60, 72 sorrow, 100, 107–8, 171 The Sources of Religious Insight (Royce), 146, 175n29, 178n34, 180n74, 189n83, 189n104 Spanish-American War, 31–32, 180n77 Speaker of the House of Commons, 38–40, 61–62 Spinoza, Baruch de, 196–97n9 spirituality, 22, 98 sport, 94–103 Starr, Kevin, 122 Steinmetz, Sebald Rudolph, 33, 104, 178n25

Foust-Index.indd 212

unfaithfulness, 58, 144 USS Maine, 31 utilitarianism, 67–69 virtue(s), 6, 13, 15, 20, 52, 93, 96, 110–11, 132–33, 157–59, 171, 190n1, 196–97n9 associated with war, 32, 93, 98 burdened virtue, 110–11, 132–33 loyalty as heart of all the virtues, 27 unifying virtue, 13, 21–24, 63–66, 84 virtue ethics, 7, 52, 66, 75–77, 80, 110 War and Insurance (Royce), 178n25, 180n77, 198n42 Westcott, Mary W., 30 whistleblowing, 3–4, 162–67, 200n24 Whitney, Anne, 31–33 “The Will to Believe” (James), 57, 182n10, 182n12 wisdom, 22, 76, 175n29 The World and the Individual (Royce), 88, 112, 145, 148, 193–94n54, 201n4 World War, First, 102, 180n77, 199n12 Zack, Naomi, 8, 157–64

6/5/2012 10:48:38 AM

american philosophy Douglas R. Anderson and Jude Jones, series editors



Kenneth Laine Ketner, ed., Peirce and Contemporary Thought: Philosophical Inquiries. Max H. Fisch, ed., Classic American Philosophers: Peirce, James, Royce, Santayana, Dewey, Whitehead, second edition. Introduction by Nathan Houser. John E. Smith, Experience and God, second edition. Vincent G. Potter, Peirce’s Philosophical Perspectives. Edited by Vincent Colapietro. Richard E. Hart and Douglas R. Anderson, eds., Philosophy in Experience: American Philosophy in Transition. Vincent G. Potter, Charles S. Peirce: On Norms and Ideals, second edition. Introduction by Stanley M. Harrison. Vincent M. Colapietro, ed., Reason, Experience, and God: John E. Smith in Dialogue. Introduction by Merold Westphal. Robert J. O’Connell, S.J., William James on the Courage to Believe, second edition. Elizabeth M. Kraus, The Metaphysics of Experience: A Companion to Whitehead’s “Process and Reality,” second edition. Introduction by Robert C. Neville. Kenneth Westphal, ed., Pragmatism, Reason, and Norms: A Realistic Assessment—Essays in Critical Appreciation of Frederick L. Will. Beth J. Singer, Pragmatism, Rights, and Democracy. Eugene Fontinell, Self, God, and Immorality: A Jamesian Investigation. Roger Ward, Conversion in American Philosophy: Exploring the Practice of Transformation. Michael Epperson, Quantum Mechanics and the Philosophy of Alfred North Whitehead. Kory Sorrell, Representative Practices: Peirce, Pragmatism, and Feminist Epistemology. Naoko Saito, The Gleam of Light: Moral Perfectionism and Education in Dewey and Emerson. Josiah Royce, The Basic Writings of Josiah Royce. Douglas R. Anderson, Philosophy Americana: Making Philosophy at Home in American Culture. James Campbell and Richard E. Hart, eds., Experience as Philosophy: On the World of John J. McDermott. John J. McDermott, The Drama of Possibility: Experience as Philosophy of Culture. Edited by Douglas R. Anderson. Larry A. Hickman, Pragmatism as Post-Postmodernism: Lessons from John Dewey. Larry A. Hickman, Stefan Neubert, and Kersten Reich, eds., John Dewey Between Pragmatism and Constructivism.

Foust-Series.indd 213

6/6/2012 12:25:45 PM

Dwayne A. Tunstall, Yes, But Not Quite: Encountering Josiah Royce’s Ethico-Religious Insight. Josiah Royce, Race Questions, Provincialism, and Other American Problems, expanded edition. Edited by Scott L. Pratt and Shannon Sullivan. Lara Trout, The Politics of Survival: Peirce, Affectivity, and Social Criticism. John R. Shook and James A. Good, John Dewey’s Philosophy of Spirit, with the 1897 Lecture on Hegel. Josiah Warren, The Practical Anarchist: Writings of Josiah Warren. Edited and with an Introduction by Crispin Sartwell. Douglas R. Anderson and Carl R. Hausman, Conversations on Peirce: Reals and Ideals. Rick Anthony Furtak, Jonathan Ellsworth, and James D. Reid, eds., Thoreau’s Importance for Philosophy. James M. Albrecht, Reconstructing Individualism: A Pragmatic Tradition from Emerson to Ellison. Mathew A. Foust, Loyalty to Loyalty: Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life. Cornelis de Waal and Krysztof Piotr Skowron´ski, eds., The Normative Thought of Charles S. Peirce.

Foust-Series.indd 214

6/6/2012 12:25:45 PM