Is loyalty a virtue?
The MinefieldPlay episode
Show notes
It is surely one of the more perverse achievements of modern marketing to have taken words that have a certain moral valence — which is to say, words that connote intimacy or an interpersonal bond — and use them to describe purely commercial or easily exploitable forms of behaviour, thereby stripping those words of what made them valuable in the first place.
Consider what the word “share” meant before the advent of social media platforms: it encompassed such activities as partaking in a common meal, defusing interpersonal conflict by making a small sacrifice, and having a confiding, perhaps even intimate, conversation with another person. After the introduction of the “Share” button and its use as a way of measuring user “engagement”, the personal aspect that made the word appealing is lost within the sterility of forwarding a bit of content to somebody else. The same goes for the word “friend”.
In the modern era, the template for the misuse of morally laden words for commercial purposes was established by the decision of marketing agencies in the 1940s to adopt the term “loyalty” as a way of describing the kind of customer behaviour they wanted to cultivate — namely, an “attitudinal and affective attachment that keeps the customer coming back regardless of convenience or changes in features or price relative to the competition”.
But, of course, it could be argued that there is something about “loyalty” that lends itself to such use (in which case, can it really be called a perversion of the term?). Loyalty tends to be associated with two attributes: stickiness and solidarity. The former signals a determination to stand by a family member or acquaintance or organisation facing difficulties (this would represent the opposite of being a “fair weather friend”); the later suggests a desire to protect one’s “own” from either external attack or reputational damage. It is for this reason that hierarchical organisations and nations tend to prize loyalty above all else, and punish “disloyalty” accordingly. (Would it be too much to say that non-disclosure agreements are legally coercive means of achieving the protections loyalty is meant to afford?)
And yet loyalty — the unwillingness to weaken or bring one’s own side into disrepute — can often come at the expense of both truthfulness and self-criticism. For this reason, moral philosophers and virtue theorists have been reluctant to call loyalty a “virtue”, because its virtuousness does not reside in the action itself but in the integrity and underlying commitments of that to which one is loyal. Which means that one can be loyal to the founding principles of an organisation by criticising the failure of that organisation to live up to those principles. What is civil disobedience other than a form of loyal dissent?
If part of the power of the appeal to “loyalty” is the sense of morally that hangs around it — as Farid Zaid puts it, one of the things that “makes loyalty so dangerous is not only the hard that it does, but the goodness it mimics while doing it” — would it be better to use terms such as “fidelity” or “faithfulness” as a way of preserving what goodness we are hoping to preserve? To cite Zaid once again:
“Faithfulness is not simply standing by a person or group because they are ours. It is answerability to the truth and meaning of a relationship, a promise, a vocation, an ideal. A faithful spouse is not merely one who remains aligned with the marriage in some external sense, but one who remains answerable to what marriage actually asks. A faithful citizen is not one who shields the nation from criticism, but one who remains answerable to the ideals by which the nation claims it should live.”
Then, perhaps, we can leave talk of loyalty to insecure organisations and corporate rewards programs.
READING:
Farid Zaid, “What makes loyalty dangerous is not only the harm it does, but the goodness it mimics while doing it” (ABC Religion and Ethics, 20 April 2026)Alasdair MacIntyre, “Is Patriotism a Virtue?” (The Lindley Lecture, University of Kansas, 1984)Guest: Farid Zaid is a Senior Lecturer in Cognitive Psychology at Monash University.
