Loyalty vis-a-vis Faithfulness

Courtesy: GreenPolicy360.net. The tinged blue layer is the earth’s atmosphere.

Loyalty is a quality that is proferred by one person to another. Loyalty does not concern itself with quality of actions of another, rather, regardless of quality of actions, pledges loyalty to another.

There exist contexts within which loyalty is appropriate. All of said contexts are, however, societal contexts, not personal contexts. In this respect, soldiers are expected to be loyal to their countries. So then, when the President of the United States of America declares war on Iraq, regardless of absence of any coinciding personal views, a professional soldier puts his or her battle gear on, and goes to war. The soldier is not responsible for rightness or wrongness of the decision to go to war, only is responsible for actions undertaken by himself or herself in course of the war. This dichotomy of principle is evident in trials of Germans after World War II, namely, only decision makers, and those soldiers who, on their own personal account went out of the way to commit atrocities were regarded as war criminals.

Another context within which loyalty is appropriate is context of the demand that citizens not commit treason against their own countries. The premise for loyalty is, of course rational, namely, no matter how bad things are, a citizen cannot by selling his or her country out to a foreign entity make things better. If a country is messed up, efforts at…