Loyalty

Loyalty and Ethical Theory

In ethical analyses, loyalty has been characterized as a duty, a virtue, and a complex of virtues. Because it is recognized as devotion to some object, loyalty has also been characterized as a passion—even a type of love—often in combination with duty or virtue. While the designation of its theoretical home may be unsettled, loyalty is arguably linked to all these concepts in that it involves a complex of passions, and loyal persons will perform certain duties and possess certain virtues.

When understood as a duty, loyalty is conceived as an obligation that a person owes to another person, group, or cause. For example, loyalty might be reflected in an employee's duty to maintain trade secrets or a customer's duty to continue purchasing a certain brand. In the business context, the obligation is rooted in such things as reciprocity for pay and other benefits provided by an employer or supervisor; oaths, often in the form of written contracts, in which a person pledges fidelity to an organization; and expectations built over time based on a person's continuing service to an organization or a customer's continuing practice of purchases. For an apparently loyal action truly to be an act of loyalty, however, it must proceed from loyal motives. If loyalty itself is a duty, then it requires an obligation to act from feelings of devotion, not just an obligation to act in certain ways that serve the object of loyalty, and to avoid acting in other ways that fail to serve it. For example, honoring a nondisclosure agreement would not reflect loyalty if it was motivated by fear of reprisal rather than devotion to an organization or particular members of it, and continuing to purchase a particular brand would not reflect loyalty if the customer planned to change as soon as an alternative became available.

The importance of motive in discerning whether actions are truly loyal leads many scholars to view loyalty as a virtue rather than as a duty. Loyalty can be found in various contemporary catalogs of virtues, in which it is often described in Aristotelian fashion as the golden mean between the extremes of disloyalty and blind loyalty. Some virtue theorists, however, contend that loyalty is not a typical virtue, because it involves more than one character trait, unlike classic virtues such as courage or temperance. A loyal person would need to be courageous, trustworthy, and cooperative, among other things, and so need to possess several virtues. Thus, these scholars view loyalty as deserving special classification as a “super virtue”—distinct but necessarily working closely with several “standard” virtues.

...