Comment by lo_zamoyski
4 days ago
It's not about feelings. It's about making human life possible, as we are social animals. We develop through relationships.
Loyalty is a commitment to the objective good of the other, of skin in the game. Loyalty is hierarchical and the particular variety and its entailed commitments depends on the particular nature of the relationship.
In a hyperindividualist liberal society, the presumption is basically Hobbesian; life is taken to be intrinsically and thoroughly adversarial and exploitative, and relationships are taken to be basically instrumental and transactional. (This even informs scientific interpretation, as science is downstream of culture.) Society is taken to be intrinsically a matter of "contract" or a kind of Mexican standoff. Loyalty is a quaint and anachronistic notion, a passing emotion that expires the moment the landscape of opportunities shifts. Provisional and temporary.
Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.
There's no point in asking first, whether employers should be loyal to their employers or vice versa. The important question is whether they are good to one another. If they are, you might also find loyalty among them, but that's not where the focus should be.
Someone who gets obsessed with loyalty too much, I think, is likely to have sinister intentions. They probably want you to be loyal to them but don't plan on being good to you.
We must be more precise here. You should be wary of allowing a hermeneutic of suspicion to take you from naivete to outright cynicism. There is a middle path.
If we narrow the scope to employment, there is a variety of loyalty to the common good of the company at work, in due proportion and priority, when you join the company. Each employee is bound in this manner, including the guy deciding your salary or your termination. Otherwise, what are you doing there?
Now, loyalty isn't stupidity. Perhaps this is what people associate with the word when they hear it. They perhaps imagine some poor, gullible, childish pushover. It should be obvious that this is stupid. No, loyalty to a company is a commitment to the common good of the company within the scope of your responsibilities. That's it.
Now, given the nature of at-will employment, that commitment is contingent on actual employment. When you leave the company, your commitment ends. But while you work at that company, you must be committed to the common good of that company. Again, why else are you there? The nature of employment makes this a kind of elective loyalty of utility.
The fact that employers might try to manipulate employees emotionally by misusing and abusing words like "loyalty" in order to exploit them is a different matter. In that case, the employer is being disloyal to the company and its employees. How you should respond to that kind of disloyalty is contingent on the particulars of that disloyalty and the particulars of your personal circumstances.
We have got to get away from this relativist, subjectivist battle of wills. What matters is the objective good.
> Loyalty develops naturally in a good relationship. It's a fruit to be cherished, but it's not a goal that you should pursue for its own sake.
I'm not sure what to make of this. The scope is also too broad to say anything useful here. In friendship, loyalty is a prerequisite for it being a good relationship. Loyalty to a friend is commitment to their objective good. A disloyal friend harms the friendship. How can there be friendship without loyalty?
I suppose a good question to ask is: what does it mean to be disloyal? It is every okay to be disloyal? Disloyalty presumes loyalty is normative and owed. But loyalty is not always normative, because it would be a category mistake. If I work for Boeing, I am not being disloyal toward Airbus, because I have no commitments toward Airbus. But I would be disloyal to Boeing if I were to illicitly funnel work done at Boeing to Airbus, harming Boeing. In the context of friendship, loyalty may grow with the friendship, but being more loyal to friend A than to friend B doesn't mean I am disloyal to B. A smaller glass full of water simply holds less water, but it is no less full than a larger glass full of water. It is simply that there is an order and priority of loyalty in due proportion with the nature of the friendship. I owe more loyalty to my family than I do to my community, but it's not an either/or proposition. It simply means that my commitment to and prioritization of the good of my family is higher (this relates to the ordo amoris that made a splash in the news recently).