What We “Shouldn't” Love

SIMON Keller is a professor of philosophy at Victoria University of Wellington, working on ethics and political philosophy. He is the author of The Limits of Loyalty, which examines whether patriotism and other forms of loyalty can be rationally and morally justified. His research also covers wellbeing, partiality, and self-interest.

The Confluence: How did you first get drawn into questions about loyalty, partiality and self-interest as a philosophical starting point?

Dr. Keller: I wrote an essay on romantic love as an undergraduate. A few years later, I was doing graduate work in the US when the September 11 attacks occurred. In the aftermath, there was a lot of media discussion about patriotism and what it means to love your country.

I realised that the things I’d said about romantic love couldn’t possibly be applied to love for a country, so I gave a seminar presentation on why love for persons and love for country are very different, not just in object but in quality. That got a lot of good questions, and I went on from there.

The Confluence: Is it actually rational or moral to care more about your own family and friends than about strangers, or is that just a bias philosophy should be suspicious of?

Dr. Keller: In my opinion it is absolutely ethically required to care more about those you’re intimately acquainted with, in certain ways. The reason is that you have a different kind of knowledge of the value and significance of the people you love: it’s like the difference between knowing an artwork is beautiful because you’ve seen it and spent time with it, and knowing it’s beautiful because other people have told you so.

What is not rational, and not ethically acceptable, is to judge that your family and friends matter more than strangers. So the philosophical challenge is to explain how we can care more about certain people, and be required to give them special treatment, while understanding that they are no more important than anyone else.

The Confluence: Your book The Limits of Loyalty is about patriotism specifically. Can loving your own country be justified in a way that isn’t just tribalism dressed up in nicer language?

Dr. Keller: Patriotism is not just another form of love or loyalty. The patriot doesn’t care for her country just because it’s hers, but also feels pride in country, at least at some level. You can love your country without being a patriot: I could love Australia because it’s my country, while also judging that it’s a pretty awful country and wishing I’d been born somewhere else, but that wouldn’t be patriotic love. So there’s more to patriotism than simple tribalism.

Pride in country involves belief-like states: seeing your country as having certain distinguishing virtues that merit your allegiance. In my book, I ask what epistemic habits follow from those patriotic commitments, and argue, eventually, that patriotism leads to irrationality, because it leads to a failure to interpret new evidence about your own country in a rationally defensible way. So I think patriotism is ultimately unjustified, and ultimately irrational, but more because of its effects on our beliefs than anything else.

The Confluence: Where’s the line between healthy loyalty, to friends, family, country, and it becoming a moral problem, like covering for people or excusing bad behaviour?

Dr. Keller: Loyalty comes in different varieties, and it depends what kind we’re talking about. In my book I argue that the concept of “loyalty” is actually not very helpful when we’re thinking about morality, because it refers to too many disparate attitudes towards too many different things, which need different ethical treatments.

We’re better off talking about questions like “What makes someone a good friend?” and “What does it mean to be a good citizen?” To answer those, we need to understand the special goods that can arise from different sorts of special relationships, while also placing those goods in a wider context. So I’d tell different stories about where to draw the line for different kinds of relationships.

The Confluence: You’ve also written on wellbeing. What do you think actually makes someone’s life go well, and why do philosophers disagree so much about it?

Dr. Keller: The term “wellbeing” is fairly new, and people use it in different ways. Some use it as a substitute for “happiness” and assume that happiness is just a matter of how you feel. Some equate wellbeing with flourishing in the Aristotelian sense, meaning living a good human life, a life of rational excellence and virtue. Others use it as a kind of theoretical stand-in for the thing you care about when you care about someone else.

Right from the start, then, the debate about wellbeing is full of ambiguity, and it’s unfortunate that the term has been so widely taken up in non-philosophical literature, in positive psychology and public policy, without that ambiguity being resolved first.

The Confluence: Is complete impartiality – treating every person’s interests as equally important in every decision – actually achievable, or even desirable?

Dr. Keller: No, and I think it’s self-defeating to try. A person who genuinely tried to weigh every stranger’s interests exactly as heavily as their own would be a worse friend, a worse parent and, I’d argue, a worse person generally, because the special relationships that make a life go well depend on partiality.

Self-interest, pursued reasonably, is part of a good life, not a moral failure to be overcome. The interesting philosophical work is in explaining why that’s compatible with everyone mattering equally in the abstract, not in pretending impartiality is achievable.

The Confluence: What would you say to a teenager trying to work out how to balance loyalty to friends, family and national identity, especially with everything they see about this online?

Dr. Keller: Think about what makes someone a good friend, a good family member and a good citizen separately, rather than looking for one master concept called loyalty to govern all three. And be suspicious of anyone, online or in politics, who tells you that loving your country requires refusing to believe anything bad about it. That is exactly the epistemic trap I think patriotism sets, and it is worth naming it early rather than discovering it later.