Dilemmas of loyalty

        IS SOLIDARITY A PREJUDICE FOR OUR OWN KIND ?


   Not everyone agrees that we have special obligations to our family, comrades, or fellow citizens. Some argue that so-called obligations of solidarity are actually just instances of collective selfishness, a prejudice for our own kind. These critics concede that we typically care more for our family, friends, and comrades than we do for other people. But, they ask, isn't this heightened concern for one's own people a parochial, inward-looking tendency that we should overcome rather than valorize in the name of patriotism or fraternity. 
   No, not necessarily. Obligations of solidarity and membership point outward as well as inward. Some of the special responsibilities that flow from the particular communities I inhabit I may owe to fellow members. But others I may owe to those with whom my community has a morally burdened history, as in the relation of German to Jews, or American whites to African Americans . Collective apologies and reparations for historic injustices are good examples of the way solidarity can create moral responsibilities for communities other than my own. Making amends for my country's past wrongs is one way of affirming my allegiance to it.
   Sometimes solidarity can give us special reason to criticize our own people or the actions of our government. Patriotism can compel dissent. Take for example two different grounds that led people to oppose the Vietnam War and protest against it. One was the belief that the war was unjust ; the other was the belief that the       war was unworthy of us and at odds with who we are as a people. The first reason can be taken up by opponents of the war whoever they are or wherever they live. But the second reason can be felt and voiced only by citizens of the country responsible for the war. A Swede could oppose the Vietnam War and consider it unjust, but only an American could feel ashamed of it. 
   Pride and shame are moral sentiments that presuppose a shared identity. Americans traveling abroad can be embarrassed when they encounter boorish behavior by American tourists, even though they don't know them personally. Non-Americans might find the same  behavior disreputable but could not be embarrassed by it. 
   The capacity for pride and shame in the actions of family members and fellow citizens is related to the capacity for collective responsibility. Both require seeing ourselves as situated selves---claimed by moral ties we have not chosen and implicated in the narratives that shape our identity as moral agents.
   Given the close connection between an ethic of pride and shame and an ethic of collective responsibility, it is puzzling to find political conservatives rejecting collective apologies on individualist grounds (as did Henry Hyde, John Howard, and others mentioned earlier). To insist that we are, as individuals, responsible only for the choices we make and the acts we perform makes it difficult to take pride in the history and traditions of one's country. Anyone anywhere can admire the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, the fallen heroes in Arlington National Cemetery, and so on. But patriotic pride requires a sense of belonging to a community extended across time. 
   With belonging comes responsibility. You can't really take pride in your country and its past if you're unwilling to acknowledge any responsibility for carrying its story into the present, and discharging the moral burdens that may come with it. 

         Can Loyalty Override Universal Moral Principles ?

    In most of the cases we've considered, the demands of solidarity seem to supplement rather than compete with natural duties or human rights. So it might be argued that these cases highlight a point that liberal philosophers are happy to concede : As long as we don't violate anyone's rights, we can fulfill the general duty to help others by helping those who are close at hand---such as family members or fellow citizens. There's nothing wrong with a parent rescuing his own child rather than another, provided he doesn't run over a stranger's child on the way to the rescue. Similarly, there's nothing wrong with a rich country setting up a generous welfare state for its own citizens, provided it respects the human rights of persons everywhere. Obligations of solidarity are objectionable only if they lead us to violate a natural duty.
   If the narrative conception of the person is right, however, obligations of solidarity can be more demanding than the liberal account suggests --- even to the point of competing with natural duties. 

                                      ROBERT E. LEE

   Consider the case of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate army. Before the Civil War, Lee was an officer in the Union army. He opposed secession----in fact, he regarded it as treason. When war loomed, President Lincoln asked Lee to lead the Union forces. Lee refused. He concluded that his obligation to Virginia outweighed his obligation to the Union, and also his reported opposition to slavery. He explained his decision in a letter to his sons :

     With all my devotion to the Union, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home . . . If the Union is dissolved, and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people. Save in her defense, I will draw my sword no more.

   Like the French resistance pilot, Lee could not countenance a role that would require him to inflict harm on his relatives, his children, his home. But his loyalty net further, even to the point of leading his people in a cause he opposed.
   Since the cause of the Confederacy included not only secession but slavery, it is hard to defend Lee's choice. Still, it is hard not to admire the loyalty that gave rise to his dilemma. But why should we admire loyalty to an unjust cause ? You might well wonder whether loyalty, under these circumstances, should carry any moral weight at all. Why, you might ask, is loyalty a virtue rather than a sentiment, a feeling, an emotional tug that beclouds our moral judgment and makes it hard to do the right thing ? 
   Here's why : Unless we take loyalty seriously, as a claim with moral import, we can't make sense of Lee's dilemma as a moral dilemma at all. If loyalty is a sentiment with no genuine moral weight, then Lee's predicament is simply a conflict between morality on the one hand and mere feeling or prejudice on the other. But by conceiving it that way, we misunderstand the moral stakes.
   The merely psychological reading of Lee's predicament misses the fact that we not only sympathize with people like him but also admire them, not necessarily for the choices they make, but for the quality of character their deliberation reflects. What we admire is the disposition to see and bear one's life circumstance as a reflectively situated being --- claimed by the history that implicates me in a particular life, but self-conscious of its particularity, and so alive to competing claims and wider horizons. To have character is to live in recognition of one's (sometimes conflicting) encumbrances.