Is loyalty a virtue?

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