CHAPTER 6-6  
                   TO WHOM WILL YOU BE LOYAL?


     Each of us commands a variety of resources -- time, energy, 
imagination, knowledge, money, recommendations, influence and 
public manifestations of support.  How should you divide your 
resources among yourself, your immediate family, other close 
relatives, friends, ethnic kin, local community, work colleagues, 
voluntary organizations, citizens of your country, other humans?  
And what about allocations between today, next year, ten years 
from now, a hundred years from now?  
     This broad question encompasses such nitty-gritty questions 
as:  How much will my wife and I give to the United Fund?  At her 
place of work and at mine?  Whom should I recommend for the 
deanship at another university, my close friend or another person 
whom I believe would be better for that university?  How much 
should we save for our old age, versus spending the money now?  
How much attention should I have given to one of my kids at a 
school picnic I attended, and how much to my child's friends?  
Should I urge a larger immigration quota for Soviet Jews when it 
might cut into the quotas for other ethnic groups? 
     Here it is crucial to distinguish between our loyalties as 
private citizens and our obligations when we are acting on some 
official business.  As an official, one has a legal and ethical 
obligation as a public servant to treat all comers equally.  As a 
state-paid professor (or even if I worked for a private 
university, I believe) I have an obligation to deal with each 
student independently of whether the student is a relative or 
student of mine.  But I have no such obligation in my private 
behavior.  Not only is it appropriate for me to devote my private 
time to teaching my own kids squash or computers, but I even have 
a legal obligation to take care of my children and my parents 
that I do not have toward other people's children and parents.  
That is, on behalf of the public I must treat all comers equally, 
but as a private person I may and sometimes must treat my kin 
differently than other people.       
     Loyalty and principle are not the same, though the two 
concepts can have much in common.  Whereas a loyalty is an 
attachment to a particular person or group, a principle provides 
guidance and instruction derived from a general idea that is 
independent of any particular group of people.  Examples of 
principles include allegiance to the Ten Commandments, or to 
Kant's categorical imperative, or to the Golden Rule, or to the 
Constitution of the United States, or to personal liberty, or to 
truth.  
     A loyalty and a principle can conflict.  One can be so 
committed to a principle that one will put it before loyalty to 
any person, even one's children or spouse or self.  In one of the 
Bible's most troubling stories, Abraham was prepared to put his 
principle of obedience to the God he believed in before his 
loyalty to, and love of, his son Isaac. 
     "My country, right or wrong" is a statement of loyalty over 
principle.  Things can get confused here, because one could have 
a principle of being loyal to one's country right or right -- 
that is, a belief that a person ought to act in that fashion.  
Perhaps the only way to distinguish between loyalty and principle 
when acting to advance one's own country's interests, even though 
believing that the action is wrong, is by asking yourself:  Are 
you doing it because you feel you must do it, or because you 
reason that you should do it? 
      A country that is the object of such a loyalty can expect 
that the loyal person will use any means -- lying, spying, 
stealing, whatever -- to achieve what he/she considers to be the 
country's aims.  Inconsistency in the policy will not necessarily 
keep the loyalty from operating, e. g. U. S. and Russian 
communists followed after every twist and turn of Soviet policies 
in the 1930's.  This loyalty is also the mechanism that gets some 
people to give up their lives in war.      
     Should one be guided by loyalty or by principle when they 
conflict?  My answer is vague, and offered without confidence:  I 
suggest that with respect to persons close to one -- but not with 
respect to one's own interests -- the weight of loyalty should be 
relatively heavy, and vice versa for persons and groups far 
removed from oneself.  I reason that you have much more intimate 
knowledge of persons close to yourself, and therefore you need 
lean less on the general principle to supply wisdom as well as 
guidance about what best to do.  But perhaps this is nothing more 
than my own preference, and I know that this preference is 
atypical.  For example, I do not support any country right or 
wrong.  Some friends in Israel consider this to be 
"cosmopolitan", the next thing to being a traitor.  On the other 
hand, my attitudes toward my close friends is affected much more 
by my feelings about them, and loyalty toward them, than it is by 
any views of them with respect to principles. (I would not 
support ugly acts by them, but I would be likely to give them 
comfort when in trouble for committing ugly acts.) 
     Loyalties involve emotions.  One might therefore say that no 
decision-making is necessary because one should simply do what 
one "feels" is right.  And certainly many of our decisions about 
loyal acts are made in an almost instinctive fashion, the way 
mothers belonging to many species instinctively protect their 
young from sudden danger without conscious deliberation.  But 
most of us come to decision points where we deliberate about 
loyalties, and what we should do about them.  This chapter is 
intended to apply to such decisions about which we find ourselves 
in doubt. 
     Though people hanker to do so, one cannot deduce an "ought" 
from an "is".  Even if everyone in town gives their kid a 
bicycle, logic does not compel any parent to feel an obligation 
to do so.  Nor does the fact that the human race could not 
continue if people did not have children constitute an ethical 
requirement for anyone to have children.  Notwithstanding, human 
experience and the customs of the community often seem relevant 
to one's decisions about what one chooses to do, and what to 
consider an obligation.  Therefore, the patterns of human 
behavior with respect to loyalties are of interest to us.      
     Some people have an ethic that calls for them to treat all 
persons on the face of the earth equally.  The charity arm of one 
of the Baptist church organizations attempts to give to all 
humans equally on the basis of their need, rather than focusing 
on Baptists or Americans or whatever, a member of their board 
told me.  If the distinction made in the previous paragraph is 
understood, this ethic certainly is legitimate.  But people 
sometimes adopt this ethic because of a confusion between public 
and private obligations. 
     The strength of kinship feeling to other individuals is 
likely to be affected systematically by such connections as 
blood, geography, common views, caste, ethnicity, and religion.  
We can think of the strength of the feeling as represented by a 
weighting factor like the discount factor from one period to the 
next that is used in intra-personal allocations, as discussed in 
Chapter 1-3.  And we could estimate the weights for various 
people by examining such phenomena as the relationship of 
charitable giving to geographic distance (or the number of people 
living in between the donor and the donee), the closeness of 
blood relationship, and the number of newspaper stories about 
countries at different geographic distances and having different 
degrees of ethnic and religious kinship from the reference point.       
     Adam Smith described the characteristic set of loyalties as 
follows:      Every man...is first and principally recommended to 
his own care;     and every man is certainly, in every respect, 
fitter and abler to     take care of himself than of any other 
person.  Every man feels     his own pleasures and his own pains 
more sensibly than those of     other people.  The former are the 
original sensations--the latter     the reflected or sympathetic 
images of those sensations...
          After himself, the members of his own family, those who     
usually live in the same house with him, his parents, his     
children, his brothers and sisters, are naturally the objects of     
his warmest affections.  They are naturally and usually the     
persons upon whose happiness or misery his conduct must have the     
greatest influence.  He is more habituated to sympathize with     
them:  he knows better how every thing is likely to affect them,     
and his sympathy with them is more precise and determinate than 
it     can be with the greater part of other people.  It 
approaches     nearer, in short, to what he feels for himself.
          This sympathy, too, and the affections which are 
founded on     it, are by nature more strongly directed towards 
his children than     towards his parents...
          The earliest friendships, the friendships which are     
naturally contracted when the heart is most susceptible of that     
feeling, are those among brothers and sisters.  Their good     
agreement, while they remain in the same family, is necessary for     
its tranquillity and happiness.  They are capable of giving more     
pleasure or pain to one another than to the greater part of other     
people...
          The children of brothers and sisters are naturally 
connected     by the friendship which, after separating into 
different families,     continues to take place between their 
parents.  Their good     agreement improves the enjoyment of that 
friendship--their discord     would disturb it.  As they seldom 
live in the same family,     however, though of more importance 
to one another than to the     greater part of other people, they 
are of much less than brothers     and sisters.  As their mutual 
sympathy is less necessary, so it is     less habitual, and, 
therefore, proportionably weaker. 
          The children of cousins, being still less connected, 
are of     still less importance to one another; and the 
affection gradually     diminishes as the relation grows more and 
more remote...
          ...A father is apt to be less attached to a child who, 
by     some accident, has been separated from him in its infancy, 
and who     does not return to him till it is grown up to 
manhood.
          Among well-disposed people the necessity or conveniency 
of     mutual accommodation very frequently produces a friendship 
not     unlike that which takes place among those who are born to 
live in     the same family.  Colleagues in office, partners in 
trade, call     one another brothers, and frequently feel towards 
one another as     if they really were so...
          Even the trifling circumstance of living in the same     
neighbourhood has some effect of the same kind.  We respect the     
face of a man whom we see every day, provided he has never     
offended us...
          The same principles that direct the order in which     
individuals are recommended to our beneficence, direct that     
likewise in which societies are recommended to it...
          The state or sovereignty in which we have been born and     
educated, and under the protection of which we continue to live,     
is, in ordinary cases, the greatest society upon whose happiness     
or misery our good or bad conduct can have much influence.  It is     
accordingly by nature most strongly recommended to us... 
          Every independent state is divided into many different     
orders and societies, each of which has its own particular 
powers,     privileges, and immunities.  Every individual is 
naturally more     attached to his own particular order or 
society than to any other.      His own interest, his own vanity, 
the interest and vanity of many     of his friends and 
companions, are commonly a good deal connected     with it:  he 
is ambitious to extend its privileges and immunities-    -he is 
zealous to defend them against the encroachments of every     
other order or society (1759/1976, pp. 359, 360, 361, 362,     
366, 371, 372, 376).
Smith, Adam, The Theory of Moral Sentiments  (Indianapolis:  
Liberty, 1759/1976). 
     Smith, however, gives no inkling about how much stronger is  
a loyalty to a brother than to a cousin, or to yourself than to a 
brother.  And clearly there are enormous differences in the way 
we act -- ranging from the saint who gives away all possessions 
to the poor except enough to sustain the saint's life, to the 
miser who hoards everything for her/himself even if it is 
unusable by the miser. 
     Most certainly will I not offer any moral maxims about how 
to allocate among yourself and others.  Nor will I even say much 
about the benefits to you of giving to others, except to refer 
you to Chapter 5-4 on the well-known psychological advantages of 
thinking of others rather than yourself, as embodied in such 
sayings as Jesus' that you must lose yourself in order to find 
yourself1.  
     We may, however, note some advantages to the public at large 
of a policy of devoting your charity to those close to home 
rather than to those further from home.  More generally, I think 
that this is an application of the general idea of local action 
versus far away action.  Just as a decentralized economic system 
takes advantage of people's extensive knowledge of both resources 
and needs close to home, and their ability to monitor the 
workings of businesses that they observe firsthand either as 
owners or as consumers, charity close to home can be more 
efficient than charity farther away.  This efficiency stems from 
your ability to know which individuals and organizations have the 
need for more resources -- that is, which ones are suffering from 
lack of resources -- as well as which individuals and 
organizations make effective use of the resources which they 
receive, rather than wasting them.  You can know much more about 
a family that belongs to your church whose main breadwinner has 
just died and has a talented child that cannot afford violin 
lessons, than you can about a family 1000 or 10,000 miles away 
whom you have never met.  And you can know that the local family 
is not spending what they receive on expensive mail solicitations 
for even more money, with most of it going to the managers of the 
fundraising effort.  You cannot easily learn the same information 
about national and international organizations such as Greenpeace 
or the Hunger Project; even their annual reports are hard to 
interpret.  But you can be sure that many such charities transfer 
much less than half of what they receive to the supposed objects 
of charity; the occasional exposes of these frauds are sickening. 
     The fact that charity usually begins close to home does not 
constitute an externally-imposed obligation upon you to follow 
that pattern, however.  
     Does a close-to-home policy mean that richer communities 
would not aid poorer communities?  Yes, there is such a danger.  
But the improvement of communications all over the world means 
that it is easier to have firsthand or good secondhand knowledge 
of needs and capacities much farther away than in the past.  The 
key isssue is not geographic propinquity.  Closeness on other 
dimensions such as religious or ethnic fill the same role.  And 
it is easier to get good information about people related to you 
in such ways than it is about complete strangers. In this fashion 
it is possible to avoid confining your loyalties and resources to 
well-off people close to you.
     Thinking about loyalties becomes easier for me when I 
proceed as if there is not a hard-and-fast distinction between 
"me" and "others", but rather a continuum encompassing the 
individual known as J. Simon, my family, and others.  This 
construction is quite similar to the construction which sees a 
continuum between J. Simon now, J. Simon next year, J. Simon two 
years from now, and so on (as described in Chapter 1-2 on 
deciding between then and now) rather than a single indivisible 
individual who is the same person throughout the individual's 
life.  Certainly there is support for this view in our language.  
We talk about our children as being our own flesh, and we 
sometimes extend this thought to our spouses and parents.  And we 
act on is idea when we put their safety before our own. 
     This conceptual framework obviates the age-old question 
about whether an act of giving by one individual to another 
should properly be labeled "altruism", or whether instead one is 
"really" being "selfish" by making oneself feel good. An 
individual's discount weights vis a vis other individuals may be 
considered a full description of the individual in this 
connection, assuming that the individual's behavior corresponds 
to his/her stated weights vis a vis other individuals.  In this 
scheme, there is no place for intentions, and hence there are no 
false intentions.  Preferences, revealed and stated, comprise the 
entire system. 
     There seem to me to be different patterns of loyalties held 
by two general groups whom I identify as "nomads" and "burghers".  
The burghers are majority, establishment, settled people; the 
nomads are minority, outsider, and often mobile people.  Some 
entire groups are one or the other -- for example, gypsies 
clearly are nomads.  But some nomads are individuals from burgher 
groups, as is the case with many artists.  I have always felt 
like a nomad in my loyalties.  Burgher and nomad are ideal types, 
of course, and all of us are some of one and some of the other. 
     Nomads tend to be loyal to particular persons rather than to 
organized communities.  Burghers tend to be loyal to a place and 
to the institutions that go with it, including the people 
involved at a given time.  But when those individuals are no 
longer part of those institutions, the burgher's loyalty toward 
them declines.  Nomads' loyalties tends to be longer-term and 
less affected by circumstances. 
     Burghers are more likely to be attached to people as allies 
in temporary battles, whereas nomads tend less to shift 
allegiance on the basis of particular issues. 
     It makes sense that mobile people should have attachments 
that do not depend upon place and shift with circumstance.  
Outsider groups have greater need of strong personal loyalties 
because they cannot depend upon the sympathy and justice of the 
establishment's procedures.  
     Criminals have some of the nomad loyalty pattern, perhaps 
especially persisting criminal groups such as the Mafia, though 
within the group there may be shades of burgher behavior.  But 
criminals may lack strong loyalties of any kind. 
     Psychopaths do not seem to be loyal even to themselves, 
which makes them so difficult for normal people to understand. 
     The actions of people who spy for foreign powers against 
their homelands shock us and seem incomprehensible to us, because 
they run so counter to the normal pattern of human attachments.  
(The same acts committed by foreign nationals for their own 
homelands, acting as undercover agents, do not shock us because 
they do not violate patterns which are accepted as norms.)  Such 
traitors seem truly weird to us, even when we recognize the pulls 
upon them of such motivations as money and ideology.  They seem 
less weird when they are attached to the another country by 
ethnic background

                            FOOTNOTE
     1Elsewhere I suggest some intellectual machinery that may 
help you think about the matter, which I also touch on below. 


-------------------
Freddy Gottheil has strong loyalties, for example to Israel and 
to the Jews, that cause him to take strong actions in their 
behalf. I think that he will under at least some conditions put 
their welfare before his own, but I have never seen this tested. 
Page # thinking loyal66@ 3-3-4d