Loyalty: The Vexing Virtue

by Eric Felten

A witty, provocative, story-filled inquiry into the indispensible virtue of loyalty—a tricky item that gets tangled and compromised when loyalties collide (as they do), but a virtue the author, a prize-winning columnist for The Wall Street Journal , says is both essential and impossible.

A witty, provocative, story-filled inquiry into the indispensable virtue of loyalty—a tricky ideal that gets tangled and compromised when loyalties collide (as they inevitably do), but a virtue the author, a prizewinning columnist for The Wall Street Journal , says is as essential as it is impossible.

Loyalty is vexing. It forces us to choose who and what counts most in our lives. It forces us to confront the conflicting claims of fidelity to country, community, company, church, and even ourselves. Loyalty demands we make decisions that define who we are.

Genres: Philosophy

319 pages, Paperback

First published April 17, 2012

Reviews

[Pavel · Rating 3 out of 5]

The book contains a plethora of fine examples, anecdotes and images from different periods and genres, most of them shedding some light on loyalty. But there is little common thread, few attempts to say what loyalty IS and how it is related to other virtues. Felten does not seem to realize that loyalty is a second-order virtue, one which matters and counts as a vritue if and only if the object of loyalty (person, family, community, institution, country) satisfies a certain number of conditions, many of them definable in terms of virtues or virtue-relations. Treating loyalty as a first-order virtue is to annul its status as a virtue, possibly to make it a vice. Hence many of the conflicts that make it so "vexing".