Loyalty is immoral ? Color me skeptical. Without further ado, here’s the avalanche of questions that come to mind upon reading Helen’s post:
First question:
Let’s not confuse universal with unqualfiable. Surely any given moral precept need not apply to all people at all times in their relations with all other people currently existing. That’s awfully . . . Kantian. Can we get on board with "Thou shalt not marry." being a good rule for priests and a bad rule for other people? Why, yes of course. Different people have different roles. This, among many other reasons, is why I vastly prefer virtue ethics to Lists of Do’s and Dont’s. There are reasons to believe that such lists can never properly seperate the set of all moral acts from the set of all immoral acts.
"Loyalty is immoral—I won’t bother trying to deny it. Morality is universal and objective; loyalties are particular and arbitrary, mere accidents of birth. (James talks about Christian uneasiness over Christ’s identity as a Jew; same concept— particularity is somehow morally wrong —in different terms.)"
Ultimately, my above objection is a rather stupid and quibbling one. I only raise it because I think it helps us get at something a little deeper, namely that loyalty only conflicts with morality if we presume that our moral system demands that we owe each and every human being the exact same set of obligations. Perhaps this is a sign that I’ve fallen farther from Grace than most, but I tend to interpret "Love your neighbor" rather literally . . .
Okay, now suppose that I try to get a little bit less heretical. Since the Fall of Man, Love and Reason have been deformed to the point where trying to show the kind of universal love to which Christ calls us has more often than not resulted in atrocities. Sure, this is largely due to that perversion of logic whereby we substituted love for an abstraction named "humanity" for love of all human beings as individuals (a perversion which likely happened because the latter is rather difficult to do); but the fact remains that it isn’t at all unreasonable to contend that the extremely difficult kind of love we are called to exhibit for strangers finds its foundation in more familiar sources of familial love. Thus, things like loyalty to family and tribe can be a sort of "contingent meta-good" due to the fallenness of the world, despite the fact that there is no marriage in Heaven.
Second question:
Yeah, those are pretty scary extremes. Tell me if this third-way works. I promise that I’ll take it gracefully if you call me a Unitarian after reading this:
"This tension has pushed postmodern people towards two extremes: at one end there’s ecumenism-on-steroids, which insists that all cultures and religions are simply different lamps for the same light, so one’s only real loyalties are to humanity, truth, and goodness; at the other end there’s radical multiculturalism, which says that I can never hope to understand your radically different culture, neither can you hope to understand mine, so no one can pass judgment on the morality or wisdom of anyone else’s tradition."
"There exist certain goods which are goods for all people. After the radical epistemological event known as the Fall of Man, we no longer had direct access to those goods. All cultures are grasping like blind men towards a source of light. Some suceed to a greater extent than others. More importantly, different cultures articulate those goods in different ways. When we come across another culture doing something strange, we should first try to see if it is merely articulating a familiar good in a bizarre fashion. If we decide that it is not, we should try to be open minded about the possibility that they have indentified a good with which we are unfamiliar while remaining cautious about the possibility that they are merely engaged in a repugnant activity."
Okay, I’ll admit that I feel pretty darn Unitarian after writing that, but hear me out. The thing that irks me about both of the extreme positions that Helen has outlined is that they collapse True Repugnance and Mere Provincialism. I want to keep those two things very, very distinct. Consider the above a first-pass at doing just that.
