In his book Loyalty, The Vexing Virtue, Eric Felten observes that allegiance to many ideas, people, or purposes (country, god, family, etc.), will eventually and inevitably lead to conflict, either between the competing entities, or within one’s self as one struggles to maintain the integrity of “loyalty” as a practicable virtue without breaking faith with anyone.

Of course, this raises many important questions about many things. Without committing the sin of referencing quips written by long-dead philosophers to disguise my ignorance of their actual propositions, I’ll just state that terms such as deontology and utilitarianism come to mind. Among the aforementioned questions are “Is moral absolutism practicable, or sustainable?” and “Should I even try to be loyal at all? And then, to what should I be loyal?” and so on.

I am not a well-educated philosopher, or a well-educated anything for that matter. I am an amateur intellectual speculator and moral scientist, so I shouldn’t really be counted on to demonstrate with rigor why a particular spirit or approach should be endorsed or practiced. However, I do have what some might call standard moral equipment, and am thus fit to make such inquiries into the nature of right and wrong as this inheritance permits. Felten points out that, no matter what, if one pursues the perfect practice of loyalty, then one must inevitably make a choice among several loyalties (provided one lives long enough and through diverse enough circumstances) when one to whom one is loyal asks that we betray another, either by implication or directive.

If I am loyal to my wife, for example, and the practice of the humane treatment of animals, then I will have to choose which loyalty matters more to me if my wife asks me to drown a bag full of kittens in a river. “No one can serve two masters,” as the author of the Book of Mathew once wrote. So what’s the solution? Well, we could appeal to the genius of Victor Hugo, remembering his sentiment that to stand for something means you will likely make enemies along the way. Not for any fault of Hugo’s but this doesn’t really help us here; honestly I’m not in the mood to make an enemy out of my wife unless she really and truly turns into a kitten-murdering femme fatale. No, we need a more robust, reliable substrate from which we can make determinations about conflicting loyalties.

What about replacing our loyalty to people with a loyalty to principles? You know, that deontological thing I mentioned. Well, adherence to principle may get you out of thinking too hard in some situations, but it won’t save you from being victimized by fanatical attachment to…ideas. No, I rather think that case-by-case, critical analysis of each situation is preferable to paying deference to an idea. Anticlimactic, I know. But hear me out. The ability to reason, and soundly, leads to truth more often than a blind allegiance to any corporeal power; I mean, even a broken clock is right twice a day, and you, too, can get lucky enough to never contemplate the deeper implications of your loyalties if you try hard enough. But I submit that one should put that avoidant effort to better use by plunging into the depths of one’s own motivations, raising the wreck of reason which settled there after foundering on the rocks of complicity to explore the power of the critical-thinking faculty.

Stay tuned for Part II, and maybe we’ll make some headway…or maybe I’ll just keep pretending to be a poet.