Last week we reached the most serious answer the series had produced, and watched it fail — not by being wrong, but by reaching a limit it could not pass.
The reasonable middle told us something true, and it is worth keeping: a relationship generates its own reasons. The extra benefit of the doubt one gives a brother, the weight an oldest friend carries that a stranger does not — that is real, a genuine claim, and not a bias to be ashamed of. Keep it. But then we put to that answer the single question we had walked in with — which of my loyalties is the genuine kind, and which is a cover-up beginning to form, told apart before the damage is done — and it could not answer. It could draw a boundary, but only in one of two ways. Draw the line from outside the bond, by appeal to the impartial standard, and that standard turns out to be the real judge in every case that matters: we never left Godwin. Draw the line from inside the bond, and there is no line — only the willingness to believe past the evidence, which is at once the finest thing loyalty does and the mechanism of every cover-up, one and the same act either way. A real answer, then, that failed exactly where we needed it to hold.
But the failure pointed somewhere, and tonight we follow it. Consider everyone we have met so far. Josiah Royce, who called loyalty the supreme virtue. William Godwin, who called it a bias to be overruled. The contract picture, on which allegiance is granted for good behaviour and withdrawn for bad. The relationship that generates its own reasons. They disagreed sharply. But beneath the disagreement, every one of them assumed a single thing so completely that none of them ever stated it: that a person's loyalty is a reason that person has — one reason among others, something carried up to one's people and weighed, and limited, and spent. They argued about where the reason comes from and how far it reaches. They never asked whether it was a reason one holds at all.
Tonight we meet the philosophers who think that assumption was the whole mistake — not a wrong answer to the question, but the wrong picture of the question. They hold that a person's loyalty is not something that person has. It is part of what that person is.
This is Philosophy for Us — philosophy for everyone, no degree required.
This is the sixth of nine. Last week the reasonable middle gave us a real reason and still could not, from the inside and in time, tell the genuine loyalty from the cover-up. Tonight we stop asking what kind of reason loyalty is, because the philosophers we turn to deny that it was ever a reason we hold: they say it is part of what we are made of, part of what does the weighing. And out of that claim they open a third possibility we have not been shown in five episodes — neither standing by one's people nor cutting them off, but something else. And then, before we can rest on it, we find that the third possibility may be a trap.
So hold the picture as it changes. For five hours we have treated ourselves as people who hold a loyalty and turn it over, trying to read it. Tonight we consider whether loyalty is instead part of what we are.
Take the new picture seriously, because it is not an evasion. It is the most fundamental claim we have yet met, and it begins by questioning the very question we have been asking for five hours.
We have been asking: this attachment I feel to my people — what kind of reason is it, and how far does it reach? And every answer assumed a person occupying a neutral position, examining a reason and deciding what to do with it. The new picture says: question that assumption. Ask what the person doing the examining is made of.
Where do the people we are loyal to come from? We did not choose them. Those who raised us settled what we would come to want long before we could weigh anything. The earliest friendships gave us the capacity for loyalty itself — the capacity to feel its claim, to know what betrayal is, to have the word mean something. The community we grew up in handed us the very language we are now using to ask whether loyalty is good. We did not approach any of that as finished people and decide to take it on. It was there first. It formed the self that now does the deciding.
So consider where that leads, because it is sharper than it first sounds. When we sit down to weigh our loyalty to a father, or a country, or the people we came up with — who is doing the weighing? A self. And that self is partly made of the very people it is trying to weigh. One is not a neutral judge who happens to have a father; having a father is part of what built the judge. One cannot step wholly outside one's people to grade them from nowhere, because there is no self outside one's people to do it. The attachment was never a reason one picked up. It is closer to part of what one is while one reaches for reasons.
That is the answer to the question we ended on last week — where does the attachment come from? We looked in two places, in them and in us, and last week added a third, the relationship between us; all three fell short. This picture says the attachment was never in any of those places. It is part of what all three are made from.
Now consider the philosopher who carries this furthest, because he does not stop at the family. He takes it to the thing we have been most certain was solid: the impartial standard itself. He is Alasdair MacIntyre, and the book is After Virtue, published in 1981. His claim is large, and I want to give it its full weight, because it drives the whole episode.
There is no such thing, he argues, as morality-as-such. There is no view from nowhere, no neutral moral law hanging in the air that every reasonable person reads off in the same way. There never has been. What has actually existed, historically, is the morality of a particular community — this people's account of what a good life is, and that people's, carried in their practices, their stories, their idea of what a person is for. Morality always comes from somewhere. It is always learned in a particular place, from particular people, in a particular tradition. That is not a defect in it. That is what it is.
Now turn that on the thing we walked in trusting. The impartial standard — the one that says: step outside your loyalty and weigh it against the measure you would apply to anyone — where did we acquire it? We did not invent it in a vacuum. We learned it, somewhere, from someone, in a tradition that prizes it: a particular intellectual inheritance with a particular history, taught to us by particular people who were loyal to it and passed it on. The impartial standpoint did not descend from above the human situation. It was handed to us — by a community; which is to say, by a loyalty.
What does that do to the impartial standard? We came in believing we had a bias and a conscience: the partial attachment to one's own, which comes from somewhere particular, and the impartial standard, which seems to come from nowhere and to judge everything. MacIntyre's claim is that the impartial standard also comes from somewhere particular. It is not the absence of a loyalty; it is one more loyalty — to a tradition, to a school of thought, to an ideal one's people taught one to honour — that has forgotten its origin and begun calling itself neutral. Which means the sentence "loyalty is mere bias, and the mature course is to override it with the impartial standard" does something strange on inspection. It uses a loyalty to declare that loyalty is mere bias. It depends on the very thing it dismisses.
That is the deeper claim, and one can see why it goes further than anything so far. It does not merely defend the partial attachment. It goes after the neutral standpoint from which the impartial standard looked down on that attachment — and says there is no such standpoint, or at least that the impartial standard has no better claim to one than the attachment does. On this picture there was never a superior half that judged from above and an inferior half that pulled from below. There were two loyalties, and one of them was merely better disguised as neutrality.
Before we come to the possibility this picture opens, watch MacIntyre take the claim further still — past the family, to the largest loyalty most people carry, the loyalty to a country. He has a lecture from 1984 whose title is a question: Is Patriotism a Virtue? And his argument turns the impartial standard against itself.
Run patriotism through the impartial standard, he says. Take that standard seriously — that what is right cannot depend on whose face is before you, that every person must be weighed the same, that favouring one's own is precisely the failure morality exists to correct. Now ask it about love of country. The honest answer is that patriotism is not a virtue at all. It is a vice — favouritism toward the people who happen to share one's borders, a willingness to count one's own nation's children for more than a stranger's, which is the very partiality the impartial standard was built to eliminate. On the standard's own terms, the patriot is a moral failure.
The tempting response, having reached that conclusion, is to say: so much the worse for patriotism. MacIntyre says the reverse: so much the worse for the standard. Consider what has just happened. One took up a standpoint — the impartial one — and it declared that loyalty to the community that made you, fed you, and taught you the very language in which you now condemn it is a vice to be overcome. And MacIntyre's response is that a moral theory which makes the bonds that constitute people come out as vices has not exposed a flaw in those people. It has exposed a flaw in itself. He treats the result as a reductio — a refutation by absurd consequence — of the impartial morality, not of patriotism. If your theory says that being made of your people is a moral error, the fault is in the theory. We will meet this again at full size when a later series reaches the scale of a whole country and the question of who counts as one of "us." For tonight, hold it as MacIntyre's challenge and not yet as a verdict: the constitutive tie carried all the way up, and the impartial standard accused of failing the test rather than administering it.
So if the tie is part of what one is and not a reason one holds — if one's people are part of what one is, and not items one owns and assesses — then the two options we have been offered for five hours begin to look like a false pair. Option one: conceal. Stand by them, right or wrong; protect the wrong because they are yours. Option two: cut off. Apply the standard, withdraw, report, leave. We have felt, this whole time, that these were the only two, and that they were enemies. The constitutive picture says there has always been a third option, and it shows it through one of the oldest stories in moral philosophy.
It is in the Analects of Confucius, and it concerns a stolen sheep. A regional governor, the Duke of She, says to Confucius, in effect: in my part of the country we have upright men — when a man's father stole a sheep, his son reported him and testified against him. He says it with pride: this is what integrity looks like, the son who places truth above his father. And Confucius replies — and one can hear how strange it still sounds — "Among us, the upright are different. The father conceals for the son, and the son conceals for the father. And uprightness lies in this."
Uprightness — integrity itself — lies in the concealing. Not in spite of it. In it.
Now I must be careful and honest about that passage, because the reading I am about to give is not simply present on the surface of the text, and it matters to know exactly what is the text and what is the tradition built on it. What the Analects actually says, in that line, is only this: the father conceals for the son, the son for the father, and uprightness is found there. That is all. The text does not say the son then confronts his father. It does not contain the word "remonstrate." Reading verse thirteen-eighteen alone, one could come away thinking Confucius has simply endorsed helping one's father hide the sheep — which would be the first option, concealment, in an older form.
The richer reading — the one that makes this a genuine third option and not the first — comes from setting that verse beside another, verse four-eighteen, and from a long line of interpreters, in the tradition of modern Confucian role ethics — scholars such as Roger Ames and Henry Rosemont — who take the two together. Four-eighteen says: in serving his parents, a son may remonstrate with them — but gently; and if he sees they are not inclined to heed him, he does not therefore abandon them; he stays, and labours on without resentment. Put the two together and a different figure emerges from the text. The upright son is not the one who helps sell the stolen sheep. Nor is he the one who marches his father to the magistrate. He is the one who does not hand his father over to outsiders to be destroyed — and who stays close, and presses him, gently and without giving up, to make it right. He conceals from the authorities and he remonstrates with the father. I state it plainly: that synthesis is the reading, not the bare text. But it is a serious reading, held by serious scholars, and it opens the third option.
Consider what that option is. The son who runs to the authorities has done a clean thing and, in doing it, thrown something away: he has placed himself permanently outside his father, made himself an accuser — and from the position of accuser, this picture holds, no one can be reformed. One can correct only a person one still stands beside. The son who conceals and stays is the only one left who can actually work on the father — who has the standing, the closeness, and the years to say: you did a wrong thing, and you are going to put it right, and I am not leaving, and I am not pretending it did not happen. That is the third option. Not concealment, which protects the wrong by hiding it and never naming it. Not cutting off, which names the wrong and abandons the person. A loyalty that stays because there is a wrong, in order to correct it — one that holds the person and the truth about what they did at the same time, together.
We have met this shape before, more lightly, elsewhere. When this series treated forgiveness, the hard question was whether one can ever stop holding someone fully answerable for what they did without lying to oneself about its size — whether mercy required a kind of forgetting. The remonstrance answer is the loyalty-side counterpart. It holds that staying loyal need not mean pretending the sheep was not stolen. The most loyal course, on this view, is to stay, and to keep the wrong fully in view, and to put one's whole weight behind setting it right. Loyalty and truth-telling are not enemies here. The loyalty is what gives the truth-telling a place from which to work.
And there is real relief in it — the same relief the reasonable middle offered and then withdrew. For five episodes we have been caught between protecting a friend and turning on them, and every answer that promised a way through failed. Here is a way through that does not fail in the same manner: do not conceal, do not cut off — stay, and correct. Hold the person without holding their innocence. It is the most humane response we have met, and it is why people have lived by it for two and a half thousand years.
So let it stand in its full strength for a moment; it has earned that. And then, before we can settle into it, we must find out who is already living inside this exact option and cannot get out.
Consider who is already living inside the third option.
The woman whose husband hurts her, and whose family, whose church, and whose own idea of what a good wife is have all told her the same thing: you do not take this outside. You do not call the police on the father of your children. You stay, you pray, you work on him, you keep it in the house. The child being harmed by a parent, told by everyone who matters that blood is blood, that you do not betray your own, that a good son does not air the family's shame to strangers. The citizen of a country doing monstrous things, told that real patriots criticise their nation from within, quietly and loyally, and that to condemn it to outsiders, to leave, to refuse it, is treason dressed up as conscience.
What is each of them being told? To take the third option. Do not conceal — we admit there is a wrong. But do not cut off either: do not go to the authorities, do not leave, do not bring in outsiders. Stay close. Remonstrate. Gently. Without abandoning them. Work on it from within, because you are the only one positioned to, because you are one of us, because that closeness is your standing to put it right.
That is the remonstrance ideal, word for word — the third option offered a moment ago. And in the mouth of the person doing the harm, or the institution protecting them, it is among the most effective instruments of control ever devised, precisely because it does not feel like one. It feels like loyalty. It feels like maturity, like a refusal of the cheap clean exit. The wrongdoer's single most useful sentence is not "be quiet." It is "we handle our own." The very feature that made the third option humane — that one stays close enough to correct the person — is what holds the person in place. To stay close enough to remonstrate is to stay close enough to be controlled. The humane option and the means of control are one and the same.
And now the difficulty from last week returns, one level deeper — and it is the same difficulty. Last week the trouble was that believing a brother past the evidence is at once the finest thing loyalty does and the mechanism of every cover-up, and one could not tell, from the inside, which one was doing. Tonight it is this: staying to remonstrate is the most humane response to a wrong there is, and it is also exactly what a cover-up looks like from the inside while it is happening. Picture two sons. Both conceal the father from the authorities. Both tell themselves they are staying close in order to put it right. One of them, over the following year, actually moves the father — presses, refuses to let it go, gets the wrong undone. The other tells himself the same story, in the same words — patience, loyalty, working on it from within — and a year later nothing has changed, the wrong stands, and the staying turns out to have been the cover-up all along: only slower, and more dignified, describing itself nobly the whole way. Here is what one cannot get past: from the inside, in real time, the two sons are indistinguishable. They feel the same. They say the same sentences. The remonstrance that reforms and the remonstrance that enables are the same act, and one learns which one was doing only after it is too late to have chosen the other. The third option did not solve the problem we came in with. It gave the problem a more honourable place to hide.
So the humane third option does not get to be the answer. Hold that. But — and here I must be careful, because it would be easy to overcorrect and let the means of control discredit the whole thing — the fact that it can be used to trap does not show that the exit was right. What the cases of abuse have in common is this: the wrong is grave and ongoing, and the very closeness that was meant to permit correction has become the thing the harm depends on. That "stay and remonstrate" is a trap when one's husband is breaking one's arm does not make it a fraud when a friend has done a serious wrong, poses no danger, and the relationship is one of the things a life is genuinely built on. The trap is real. It is not everywhere. To treat its existence as proof that the clean exit — cut them off, owe them nothing, leave — is the mature course in general is to do the very thing this series keeps catching us in: seizing the comfortable answer because the other one has just become hard.
And there is one more thread I will deliberately leave unfinished tonight, because we have not earned its end. Return to MacIntyre's large claim from the first half — that the impartial standard is itself just one more loyalty, a tradition that has forgotten its origin. That claim is doing a great deal of work. If it is true, then the impartial standard has no special authority to judge the partial attachment; they are two loyalties, and the contest never had a referee. But notice that it does not quite prove itself. That we learned the impartial standard in a particular place, from particular people, is plainly true — and it does not yet follow that the standard is merely local. Where a thing was learned does not by itself settle whether it holds good beyond the place it was learned. So the impartialist has a reply here, and a serious one, and I am not going to give it tonight — because to offer it now, before the weight of what it answers has even landed, would settle the largest question we have in passing, and that question deserves more. For tonight, hold only this much: MacIntyre has shown that the impartial standard is not obviously the view from nowhere. He has not shown that there is no view from nowhere. Whether there is any standpoint outside all one's loyalties from which to judge them is now a live question on the table — unanswered, and not one we are meant to be able to answer yet. And that is exactly right.
So take stock of where we actually are. The constitutive picture gave us something real: the tie is part of what we think from, not merely a reason we hold, and once one has seen that, one cannot get back behind it — and it reopened an option we had stopped seeing. The remonstrance option is real: staying to correct, holding the person and the wrong together, is a genuine third course, and the most humane one available. And neither of them tells us the one thing we need: which staying is the reform and which is the means of control, told apart from the inside, before the year has passed and shown us. The most fundamental answer in the field turns out to have the same gap in it that the reasonable middle had — only now the gap is harder to look away from, because the answer was so much better.
Say plainly what tonight established, because it is real and it does not get taken back.
We came in still half-believing ourselves people who have loyalties — who occupy some neutral vantage point outside their attachments and hold them up and decide what they are worth. Tonight that picture lost its innocence, and lost it in the right way. We did not choose the people who made us capable of loyalty at all. We did not assemble our attachments from a standpoint outside them; the standpoint is built out of them. So the impartial standard — step outside your loyalty, weigh it on the neutral measure — lost something it had been relying on all along without admitting it: the right to assume there is an outside, a standpoint that owes nothing to any loyalty, from which one could stand and judge. Perhaps there is such a standpoint. We are not finished with that. But one can no longer simply help oneself to it, and that is a real loss of a comfort we walked in with, and we are right to count it as one.
And we gained a third option. After five hours of two courses set against each other — conceal, cut off — a third opened, and it is not a trick. Stay, and hold the person and the wrong together, and put one's weight behind setting it right. Neither pretend the sheep was not stolen nor discard the thief. That is a genuine human possibility, one of the most humane in the whole field, and people have built lives and traditions on it. Keep it. It is a real gain, and it is ours now.
Now say plainly what it could not establish, because that is just as real. It could not tell us which staying is which. The son who stays to correct his father and the son who stays because he cannot bear the rupture, and lets the wrong slide under the respectable name of patience — they are the same from the inside, in the moment, every moment, right up until the year has passed and the world shows which one he was. The most humane answer in the field has the same gap the reasonable middle had. It cannot, before the damage is done, separate the loyalty that is genuine from the loyalty that is hiding. It only makes the hiding look more like virtue while one does it.
So consider the position honestly, and do not flinch from it. We do not have nothing. We have more than ever: that loyalty can be a genuine virtue; that the impartial standard is a serious measure no one has refuted; that a relationship makes its own claims; and now that our ties are the very thing we think from, and that there is a third option between concealing and cutting off. Five real things. And not one of them, alone or combined, draws the line we actually need drawn: which of my loyalties is the one I would let myself be ruined before I betrayed, and which one am I using, right now, to avoid looking straight at what they did. The answers keep going deeper and the line keeps not being drawn. That is not a failure to follow. It is the actual shape of the thing.
What remains is harder. Tonight I would not let the possibility of control prove that the clean exit is the mature course in general — I held to that. Next time that restraint is lifted, and the people who draw the very conclusion I refused to draw get to make their case at full strength: those who look at every trap in this hour and regard it not as the exception to a loyal life but as the clue to it. They are not a passing fashion and they are not cowards, and they get everything Royce and MacIntyre got. The third option stays open going in: we meet the people who hold that sometimes the only honest remonstrance left is to leave — and we find out whether they can tell us, any better than tonight could, when.
The work for tonight is not the friend from the first episode, nor the brother from last week. Take the person, or the place, that made you — and did a real wrong. The parent in whose house you grew up, who you discovered had done something you cannot defend. The faith, or the town, or the country that shaped what you love and how you speak and what you count as betrayal — and that you have watched do harm, in your name, with your inheritance. That case. Not someone you have a relationship with. Someone you are partly made of.
Now run tonight's episode on it, and do not decide it. First, count what cutting them off would actually cost — why it is not like cancelling a subscription, why it costs in a way that leaving a mere acquaintance never could: to cut off the thing that made you is to destroy part of your own self. That is not a reason to stay. But it is the true price of leaving, and the clean exit never counts it as a cost. Then look hard at the third option: you could stay, and not conceal, and press — be the one close enough to correct what you are also formed by. And then turn the same hard look on that, because it gets no free pass: is your staying the remonstrance that will actually move them, or is it the means of control — are you working to set the wrong right, or have you merely found the most dignified available word for being unable to leave? You will not be able to tell. That is not a flaw in you. It is the thing itself — and no one has yet thought their way clear of it, because everyone who tries does so as a self made partly of the people they are trying to judge.
And beneath all of it, still unanswered, the question I left half-finished and would not settle: whether there is any standpoint outside your loyalties from which to judge them at all, or whether it is loyalties all the way down. Hold that one open. We have not earned its end.
For tonight, stay at the edge of what you actually know, and do not disguise the place where it gives out. You have a third option, and no way, from the inside, to tell the staying that reforms from the staying that only controls. Do not choose. Find the place where you cannot tell. That is where the next part of the enquiry begins.
Thanks for listening. I'll see you next time.