Stephen Nathanson

Fletcher on Loyalty and Universal Morality

George Fletchers Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships is a challenging, provocative essay on the moral status of loyalties and personal relationships. Fletcher tells us that this focus on loyalty grew out of a sense of dissatisfaction with the moral universalism of Kant, Bentham, and political liberalism. Like other personalists and communitarians, he seeks to raise the status of personal relationships and explore the implications of making them central. This leads him to interesting discussions of many issues: flag burning, the legitimacy of flag salutes and other rituals to inculcate patriotism, surrogate parenting, idolatry, and religious liberty. What ties these diverse discussions together is Fletchers desire to move away from a kind of knee jerk liberalism that always gives priority to individual rights over community needs and that stresses consent and voluntary action as the primary (or sole) sources of moral and political obligation. Flectcher emphasizes the involuntary nature of many obligations and the importance of personal and communal relations in our moral life. I have much sympathy with Fletchers desire to take loyalty seriously. Like him, I formed my initial views about loyalty during the years of the Vietnam war. Resistance to patriotism seemed the appropriate response at a time when loyalty seemed to mean no more than support for an unjustified war. Re-reflecting on these issues in the 1980s, it became apparent that unbridled forms of individualism need to be counterbalanced by a concern for the good of the community.(1) Patriotism may be something that we need, even if its traditional forms can be used to encourage uncritical support of unjust wars. I admire and support Fletchers desire to get beyond dogmatic reactions and rethink issues having to do with patriotism and community obligations. Nonetheless, I think that he goes badly astray in his criticisms of moral universalism and that his analysis of loyalty is mistaken in important ways. It is these weaknesses that I will focus on in this paper because they need to be remedied if we are to understand the issues that perplex Fletcher and to solve the problems that motivated his book. Loyalty While Fletchers title leads one to expect a systematic analysis of the nature of loyalty, much of his discussion focuses on particular situations involving loyalty. There are long discussions of Antigone, for example, and of Abrahams willingness to obey Gods command to sacrifice Isaac. In general, he does not attempt to articulate or defend a general theory of loyalty. Nonetheless, in various places, Fletcher makes a number of general claims about the nature of loyalty. I want to focus on three that I believe are both important and mistaken. The first involves the logical structure of loyalty. In Fletchers view, loyalty is always a relation among at least three parties. As he writes: There are always three parties, A, B, and C, in a matrix of loyalty. A can be loyal to B only if there is a third party C (another lover, an enemy nation, a hostile company) who stands as a potential competitor to B, the object of loyalty. [8](2) This is an interesting view of the structure of loyalty, but I do not believe it is correct. While it is certainly true that loyalty to a person or group can be threatened by the possibility of a shift of loyalty to some competitor, it is an important fact that loyalties can also be threatened by indifference and diminished concern. Both loyalty and disloyalty can exist in the absence of competitors. A parent can fail to be loyal to his children, for example, by neglecting the task of tending to their growth. He need not do this because he has found other more attractive children to care for. He might simply loses interest in his own. Or, a husband can fail to be loyal to his wife by being indifferent to her. If he fails to provide her support and affection when they are needed, this is a failure of loyalty, whether or not it is caused by his becoming involved in a competing relationship with another woman. …

Immigration, Citizenship, and the Clash Between Partiality and Impartiality

Do aspiring immigrants have a right to enter a new country? Do countries have a moral duty to allow people seeking refuge to enter? Or do countries have a moral right to deny entry?

Political Polarization and the Markets vs. Government Debate

In this chapter, I suggest that political disagreements in the United States have been exacerbated by the conceptual scheme that we use to categorize economic/political systems. Public discussion about the proper role of markets and governments often presupposes the view that there are only two possibilities: capitalism and socialism. Even if we include the often omitted welfare state, the resulting three-way conceptualization omits many other possible political/economic systems. I suggest that a richer conceptual framework could help to diminish the U.S.’s polarized politics by making clear that we face a spectrum of many different options rather than a stark choice between capitalism and socialism. In this chapter, I label and describe four types of capitalism (anarcho-capitalism, minimal state capitalism, umpire state capitalism, and pragmatic capitalism) and three types of welfare state (emergency relief, opportunity, and decent level). My hope is that a richer vocabulary could increase awareness of multiple possibilities, improve public discussion, and help to diminish polarization.

‘Partiality’, by Keller, Simon

interpretations, complicate the project of philosophical learning from such novels? If empirical facts are at stake, should we size up, say, Charlotte Lucas’s choice of Mr Collins in Pride and Prejudice quite positively, as the best-justified decision for a woman of that time, and Elizabeth Bennet’s rejection of him as a gesture of understandable but na€ıve fantasy? When I mentioned Goldman’s discussion of moral maturity in Pride and Prejudice to a devoted Austen reader, she said, ‘And I thought it was all about how hot Darcy is.’ Now, I think Goldman is right that we can learn about real moral maturity from this novel, but we do this while scratching what I feel is a deep and not morally mature itch for that kind of hero and for portrayal of overwhelming mutual attraction. How does a novelist like Austen pull off that combination? One final comment concerns the complex status of the truths investigated. Are they empirical? The claims about development and disintegration of the self seem to involve importantly mixed empirical and evaluative content. Ideals of psychological health and moral maturity are at stake—it is not just an empirical fact that X contributes to moral maturity. Novels allow ideals of personhood to reckon with what people in given conditions are able and likely to be. Goldman could usefully consider this mixed status as relevant to the distinctive philosophical value of the novel, in extending his already rich discussion.

The Plight of the Siamese Twin: Mind, Body, and Value in John Barth’s “Petition”

“Petition”, the sixth piece in John Barth’s Lost in the Fun House, is a letter from a Siamese twin to a visiting Siamese king, requesting financial support for an operation to separate the twin from his boorish and unpleasant brother.