Loyalty to loyalty: Josiah Royce and the genuine moral life

Mathew A. Foust New York, Fordham University Press 2012, US$50.00 (hardback), 236 pp. ISBN 978-0-8232-4269-6

Russian artist Ivan Aivazovsky’s powerful oil painting, Moonlit Seascape with Shipwreck (1863), is reproduced for the cover of Mathew Foust’s book. It shows a storm-battered sailing ship that has just wrecked off the coast near a lighthouse. One can imagine that both the ship’s sailors and the lighthouse workers are potential exemplars of loyalty in the face of tragedy. The huddle of four onlookers, standing with their backs to the lighthouse and their faces to the sea, appear as loyal witnesses caught between dual lost causes. The seascape draws the reader into an ethic of loyalty before even opening Foust’s book.

Josiah Royce (1855–1916), long-neglected compared to his Harvard colleague and loyal rival William James, is making a comeback. Scholars have recently addressed his contributions to international relations, feminist epistemology, logic, educational theory, and philosophy of science. Here, Foust scrutinizes Royce’s pioneering work The Philosophy of Loyalty (1908) and also draws from the full range of Royce’s ethical writings, including his published ‘Gifford Lectures’ (1959) and unpublished ‘Pittsburgh Lectures’ (1909).

Foust begins by acknowledging what Royce knew well: loyalty is problematic as well as precious. The problems that loyalty can create are evident in recent moral tragedies—loyal Enron Corporation employees failed to ‘blow the whistle’ and loyal al-Qaeda terrorists willingly died to carry out their attacks on September 11, 2001. Nevertheless, the pricelessness of loyalty is also evident in our daily lived experience that ‘life has sense and meaning only when it is characterized by loyalty’ (p. 3). Between the brief introduction on the ‘ambivalence of loyalty’ and a concise conclusion on the ‘need for loyalty,’ Foust includes seven weighty chapters that flow logically from one to the other.

Is loyalty really a virtue? In Chapter 1, Foust places loyalty in the context of two ‘contemporary debates’—between partiality and impartiality, and between justice and virtue ethics. For instance, in professional roles such as scholar, judge, and referee, we are expected and needed to be impartial and fair, but in personal roles such as friend, spouse, and parent, we are expected and needed to be partial and caring. Foust suggests that Royce’s ethic of loyalty satisfies the need for both qualities, but he also whets the appetite for a clearer understanding of Royce’s defining term.

What is the nature of loyalty? Chapter 2 clarifies that, for Royce, ‘loyalty is the willing, practical, and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause. [It] involves conferring value on the cause beyond the benefit that the loyal [person] receives from it’ (p. 41). Although this chapter clarifies that the nature of loyalty unites duty and autonomy, it also highlights an unsettled question.

How does one adjudicate between competing loyalties? Chapter 3 focuses on Royce’s philosophical principle of ‘loyalty to loyalty,’ the ethical ideal he believed could resolve this question. Royce distinguishes between ‘true loyalty’ and ‘evil’ or ‘predatory loyalty’ as follows:

A cause is good, not only for me, but for mankind, in so far as it is essentially a loyalty to loyalty, that is, is an aid and a furtherance of loyalty in my fellows. It is an evil cause in so far as, despite the loyalty that it arouses in me, it is destructive of loyalty in the world of my fellows. (p. 51)

Therefore, ‘in choosing and in serving the cause to which you are to be loyal, be, in any case, loyal to loyalty’ (p. 53). Royce claims that ‘loyalty to loyalty’ encompasses what, today, would be called justice ethics and care ethics. Foust goes beyond this to argue persuasively that Royce’s ethic of loyalty encompasses elements of the three major traditional approaches to ethics—consequentialism (pp. 66–68), deontology (pp. 68–75), and virtue ethics (pp. 75–77).

How does such a robust ethic develop? Chapter 4 describes Royce’s view that loyalty, and loyalty to loyalty, develop in persons from infancy through adulthood. Here Foust explores Royce’s psychological writings, which tend to stress the dialectical nature of ‘imitation’—humans learn to imitate because they grow up in social environments, and humans are capable of life in a social environment because they are, by nature, imitative. His concept of imitation was explicitly developmental—human imitative processes begin in infancy but increase in complexity through childhood, adolescence, and adulthood. Foust also briefly addresses Royce’s idea of ‘lost causes,’ which may prompt further development during adolescence and adulthood. ‘When they are incurred in the service of a cause,’ Royce claimed, ‘defeat, disappointment, failure, and sorrow ought each to be seen as “a positive aid to loyalty”’ (p. 107).

What about the dilemma of disloyalty? In Chapter 5, Foust broadens the focus to loyalty in the context of community and considers how some acts of disobedience ‘that are apparently disloyal to one’s community’ are, ‘in fact…loyal to loyalty,’ such as acts of civil disobedience practiced by Martin Luther King, Jr. and other civil rights leaders. Notably, King adopted the phrase that Royce coined to refer to the ‘ideal’ community behind and beyond the real communities of everyday life—the ‘Beloved Community.’ Chapter 6 then hones in on genuine disloyalty. ‘To be disloyal is to choose to not be loyal’; it is to ‘turn away’ from self-sacrifice and self-fulfillment (pp. 140, 142). ‘Atonement’ cannot undo disloyal acts; they are irrevocable, but, as Foust summarized Royce’s view, ‘an imperfect reconciliation is possible’ (p. 147).

Finally, in Chapter 7, Foust applies Royce’s philosophy of loyalty to two contemporary moral arenas: times of national crisis (e.g. 9/11) and business scandals (e.g. Enron). The concluding chapter nicely parallels the structure and dilemmas of the first chapter and also demonstrates the versatility of Royce’s philosophy for navigating difficult ethical terrain.

In every chapter, Foust uses a common rhetorical method. He takes on and engages past and contemporary conversation partners with Royce’s ideas (e.g. Alasdair MacIntyre in Chapter 1, Sophie Bryant and John Ladd in Chapter 2, and so on). For many readers of the Journal of Moral Education, however, Foust missed at least one useful conversation partner—Lawrence Kohlberg. Early in his career, Kohlberg (1971) built on Royce’s ‘moral insight’ that ‘the recognition of the sense of relativity itself presupposes an implicit valid universal principle’ (p. 180). Subsequently Kohlberg (1985) credited Royce as one of the inspirations for his ‘Just Community’ approach to moral education and quotes extensively from The Philosophy of Loyalty to clarify Royce’s unique contribution. Kohlberg believed that Royce’s ‘philosophy and psychology of community,’ in comparison to those of Emile Durkheim and John Dewey, was more appealing to youth’s ‘aspiration for moral solidarity’ and thus more relevant to his Just Community method. Kohlberg noted that Royce ‘had a theory of the early origin of the self in a social community through processes of communication and imitation which led to development’ (p. 38). He also observed that Royce attended to the moral dilemmas of conflicting loyalties. While Royce’s solution was to invoke a second-order principle, ‘loyalty to loyalty,’ Kohlberg invoked a second-order principle of ‘loyalty to universal principles of justice and responsibility’ as his solution (p. 41).

Unlike Kohlberg and painter Ivan Aivazovsky whose works are renowned, Josiah Royce is often overlooked as one of the great American philosophers. There are signs, however, that their legacies are coming into better alignment. The most recent evidence of this change is Foust’s Loyalty to Loyalty, in which he provides a deep, contextualized understanding of Royce’s philosophy of loyalty. Foust, like Aivazovsky, paints a picture of ‘the need for loyalty’ and makes a provocative case that, perhaps, no virtue is more vital.

© 2013, John Snarey