A question of loyalty

Like George Fletcher,(1) my thinking about has been prompted by practical considerations. But whereas his focus was on patriotism and the grand themes of national identity, mine has been on the experience of serving police officers who, in the course of their work, find themselves in the grip of dilemmas about misplaced, misguided, divided, and conflicting loyalties. For better or worse, the character of contingent starting points often sets the direction for subsequent developments. Mine has led me to form a far less sanguine view of than Fletcher, who has both widened its scope and narrowed its application in ways that do little to make the difficult dilemmas which arise in the police context more tractable. should add that write as a European, and wonder whether George Fletcher would have arrived at the same conclusions had he pondered the world that his immigrant forbears left for what is, indeed, a brave new world, which long ago was inevitably set to tragically repeat many of the mistakes of the old. propose to consider some of the dilemmas which cluster around the notion of within the British police service, indicate why loyalty's inherent ambiguity causes difficulties, and why the perspective suggested by Fletcher, whatever its merits in a larger arena, provides no remedies. But first some groundwork is in order.(2) The Nature of Loyalty In common with such words as education, law, motivation, and rationality, loyalty is ambiguous. And ordinary usage merely points the way to getting clear the different senses in which it is used. By elaborating what believe to be a core, if not the core, meaning, hope to provide a foil with which to dispute the practical relevance of other meanings, not least Fletcher's. Let me, then, both contest Fletcher's explanation of and try to polish at least one of its surfaces to render it less obscure. Human relationships are human creations. Their requirements and conditions have been, and are being, contrived as the work of many hands in the process of human living, and they are the most significant of human achievements. Some relations, such as friendship, family, and marriage are of great antiquity, while others, like citizenship and professional association, are of relatively recent origin. Thus, there are many sorts of relationships, each specifiable in terms of its own conditions, and each promising to secure for those in the relationship all manner of wants, needs, interests, and satisfactions, most of which, it should be noted, are not intrinsically moral in character. Moreover, people engage in a multiplicity of such relationships. Indeed, most of a person's identity--the I is virtually transparent without the We--may be characterized in such terms as parent, child, lover, friend, worker, player, member, patriot, and so on. And it is in this manner that the language of roles gets its meaning. Each person plays many parts, relates to others in all sorts of ways (which includes relating to one person in all sorts of ways as well) usually moves between relations with practiced dexterity, and enters into each part aware of its scripted conditions. Roles in this sense may be accepted or rejected, and people are in roles rather than just having roles, valuable though this latter usage is for the social sciences. Hence, a person who is in a particular relationship with others is subject to distinct and exclusive conditions, and may be said to be in a role in respect of being related to others in terms of those conditions. Thus, two people might stand in relation to each other in the roles of lovers, friends, husband and wife, professional colleagues, soldiers and co-religionists, each with its own conditions of relationship. And each set of conditions, be it formal, informal, or a mixture of both, must be acknowledged, either implicitly or explicitly, each must be felt as mutual obligations, and generally upheld for the relationship, and hence for the corresponding role, to subsist. …