Loyalty: An Essay on the Morality of Relationships.

• Author: Whitman, Christina B.

It is disconcerting to open a book subtitled An Essay on the Morality of Relationships and find that the two case studies that most interest the author are reciting the Pledge of Allegiance in public schools and the criminalization of flag burning. Although George Fletcher(1) begins to make his case for giving moral priority to loyalties by referring to the impulse to save one's mother from a burning house (p. 12), he is more concerned with the ties that bind individuals to groups than with the ethics of relationships between individuals. The loyalties to which Fletcher would give "moral importance" (p. ix) are those among people who share a common culture (p. xi). Yet, as is apparent in his opening reference to the imperiled mother, Fletcher wishes to ground those more far-reaching loyalties in the feelings inspired by family intimacy. The organization of the book assumes that the emotions felt in these two quite different contexts are analogous. In drawing out that analogy, Fletcher assumes that his own rather idiosyncratic views about family and state are widely shared. This results in a very confusing book, one that often leaves its conclusions obscure because it proceeds by assertion and assumption more than argument.

In the introduction, Fletcher states that Loyalty represents a new direction in his thinking. His previous philosophical work was concerned with "the Kantian theory of law and morality" (p. ix). Conversations during the mid-1980s with a friend who is a rabbi led Fletcher to believe that any ethical theory built upon impartiality is seriously limited. In this book he argues that the dominance of "impartial ethics," whether Kantian or utilitarian, has done great damage by undercutting the sense of obligation that individuals ought to feel toward groups. Our political life is impoverished, he claims, because impartial ethics encourage individuals to seek personal solutions, such as exiting a difficult situation, rather than to resolve problems through group action.(2)

Fletcher's main critique of impartial ethics, however, is that they are unsuited to the real world. His argument is not entirely clear. At one point he seems to claim that impartial ethics do not speak to the problems of human interaction. He argues, for example, that impartial ethics have the most "to teach the solitary individual, living in isolation from others" (p. 14). But he also seems to understand that the force of these ethical systems, their very impartiality, lies in the notion "that respecting the distinguishing feature of one's own existence . . . is no less important than respecting these qualities in others" (p. 14) - an odd ethical stance for someone who has no dealings with other human beings.

Fletcher offers a second, more coherent, critique: impartial ethical systems, by insisting on a disinterested perspective, require people to act like utopian figures in a perfect world, rather than historically situated human beings. Impartiality requires us to ignore the ties we inevitably have to other people. Fletcher proposes instead that ethics be rooted in the real affiliations people have with each other in the real world. Such an approach would, he claims, respect the "natural limits of sympathy" between people (p. 21). Although Fletcher repeatedly asserts, again somewhat incoherently, that "relationships [are] logically prior to the individual" (p. 15; emphasis added), what he apparently intends to stress is not logic, but the implications of the view that personal identity is socially constructed. Loyalty is defined as "an obligation implied in every person's sense of being historically rooted in a set of defining familial, institutional, and national relationships" (p. 21). Fletcher argues that our most powerful moral obligations are owed to those "groups and individuals that have entered into our sense of who we are" (p. 16). Responding to those obligations leads us to treat others appropriately and, even more importantly, becomes a matter of honoring ourselves by acknowledging the unique sources of our identity (pp. 16, 87).

In general outline, much in Fletcher's argument is attractive. But his challenge to impartial ethical theories benefits from his cursory treatment of the theories he rejects. Although he cites the works of other theorists such as Michael Walzer, Fletcher's treatment of their work is remarkably superficial.(3) Moreover, he fails to discuss the ways in which those systems that he categorizes as "impartial ethics" have been developed to respond to the claims of affiliation. In fact, he seems completely unaware of the existence of arguments that these systems can accommodate partiality.(4)

The core of Fletcher's work is not his critique of impartial alternatives, but his development of an explicitly and predominantly partial approach. The persuasiveness of this approach turns on whether his concept of loyalty helps us think fruitfully about moral questions. In what follows, I will explore that concept - first, in light of Fletcher's effort to distinguish between two sorts of personal loyalties; second, in the context of his extremely brief foray into the ethics of marriage and motherhood; and finally, in an extended discussion of his analysis of loyalty and the state. Fletcher turns out to have a peculiarly narrow view of which loyalties are worth protecting. The book's basic argument - that ethics ought to accommodate personal affiliations - is developed through examples that reflect the author's own biases in ways that he cannot have intended, for the end result is a powerful demonstration of the limitations of partial thinking.

To begin with, Fletcher's description of the "dimensions of loyalty" is deeply gendered. When he starts to explore the moral quality of loyalty, Fletcher begins with love. He draws examples from literature rather than life, and the choices he makes focus almost exclusively on the loyalty of women to men: the love of Cordelia for Lear, Solveig for Peer Gynt, Antigone for Polyneices, Penelope for Ulysses. With the exception of Antigone, who is motivated at least in part by principle, these women represent a loyalty that Fletcher describes as simple: "better suited for the theater than for subtle and intricate psychological novels" (p. 26); "an emotional, almost instinctive attachment, untempered by moral reflection about the right thing to do" (p. 31); "the nonrational embracing of the other" (p. 31) that takes the form of "selfless devotion to others" or "patient[ ] waiting" (p. 32). Such devotion gives significance to the lives of the women, though Fletcher sees in it no larger importance. Fletcher is not unselfconscious about this: he is aware that he is describing a selfless devotion attributed almost exclusively to women (p. 31). But he completely ignores that these are women...