Community and Loyalty in American Philosophy by Steven A. Miller

Author:Steven A. Miller
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2018-03-29T00:00:00+00:00

So the duty of love comes about from recognition of the consequences of prior loving behavior, both to the individual and to a community, namely that it provides the unification that allows both individual flowering and the progress of possible loyalties.

When these insights are paired with Royce’s claim that “the loyal are, in ideal, essentially kin,”73 it is clear enough that the Christian sentiment that all people are ideally brothers and sisters rings true with the Roycean story. But of course what Royce wanted out of Christianity was its story and values in their most ideal formulation, not in its flawed, oftentimes exclusive historical implementation. And so, at this point, it seems appropriate to return to Sellars’s equivalence between Roycean loyalty and Christian love, which he reads as caritas, the love of neighbor. A likely assumption is that Sellars appreciated charity’s focus on individual persons rather than ideal community—individual persons instead of personhood in general. It appealed to Sellars, concerned as he was to focus on love of one’s fellows but not on love of God as a direct support for moral commitment. Of course Sellars had given attention to a universal community, the epistemic community. Without explicit focus on the material conditions of epistemic inquiry, which Sellars seems not to offer, love and loyalty take on broadly different significances. Royce demands that love or loyalty looks to the needs and character of individuals, which Sellars sometimes missed.

And with that, we are now in a position to understand what Sellars meant when he claimed, “The only frame of mind which can provide direct support for moral commitment is what Josiah Royce called Loyalty, and what Christians call Love (Charity).” My sense is that though Sellars did not indicate what of Royce’s works he had in mind while making this statement, he was more focused on the later rather than the earlier texts. This is because Sellars here linked loyalty to one specific cause, the well-being of one’s fellow people—one’s neighbors—rather than to causes generally. This is more consonant with Royce’s explicit position in The Problem than in Philosophy of Loyalty, and as Sellars did not have deep acquaintance with Roycean sources or the benefit of much subsequent scholarship, especially the argumentative back-and-forths of Smith and those challenging his view, it is likely he would have only a surface familiarity with earlier and later Roycean positions. On both of their considered views, loyal moral commitment is tied up with responding to the needs of a ‘we’, a community. This stands in distinction to other ways of understanding what loyalty might be, such as willing the independent good, calculating all possible harms and benefits, or acting in service of an abstract ideal. It is only in the 1913 text that Royce spells out this difference.

With this assumption, it is obvious why Sellars would read Roycean loyalty and Christian love as one in the same: Royce himself held that in their ideal forms, they are identical, though in their concrete realizations they rarely manifest such similarity.

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