PHIL 235
Morality and Partiality: Loyalty, Friendship, Patriotism
Last Offered Fall 2008
Division II Writing Skills
This course is not offered in the current catalog

The aim of this tutorial is to critically examine the nature, importance, and ethical value of personal attachments and loyalties. Loyalty is frequently expected by family, friends and lovers, and demanded by institutions, religious and political communities, as well as by the state. A person incapable of loyalty is often characterized as fickle, cold, self-serving and sometimes even pathological. However, the status of loyalty as a virtue has always been suspect: it has been argued that it is incompatible with impartiality, fairness and equality, and claimed that it is always exclusionary. So, some relationships with other people–such as friendships, familial ties, love, patriotism–seem to be ethically desirable, central to the quality of our lives, and yet prima facie in tension with the widely held belief that morality requires impartiality and equal treatment of all human beings. Are we ever justified in having more concern, and doing more, for our friends, family, community or nation? Does morality require that we always subordinate our personal relationships to universal principles? Is patriotism incompatible with cosmopolitanism, and if so, which of the two should we value? If loyalty is a virtue, what are the proper limits of its cultivation and expression? Philosophical literature on this topic will include Plato and Aristotle on friendship and civic virtues (supplemented by secondary literature), contemporary discussion of the moral value of personal relationships (B. Williams, A. Rorty, D. Velleman, L.A. Bloom, P. Railton) as well as texts on nationalism, patriotism, cosmopolitanism and universal human rights written by contemporary philosophers, sociologists and political theorists (M. Nussbaum, R. Rorty, K.A. Appiah, S. Nathanson, I. Primoratz).