As algorithms divide us, who should we be loyal to?

An ethicist’s answer, shows we need courage and wisdom too.

Isaac Frisby

Isaac is a PhD candidate in Theology at Durham University and preparing for priesthood in the Church of England.

Three people sitting looking out over viewpoint are silhouetted against the sky.

Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

What is loyalty? As we plunge into this new year of 2025 it seems as pressing a question as ever. The war in Ukraine rumbles on, a fresh Labour government continues to struggle with public opinion, and America returns to the unpredictable rule of the first president in its history to be a convicted felon. The algorithms of social media continue to segregate and amplify different audiences into ever more closed feedback loops and echo chambers. This may bolster loyalty to a point of view, but estrange us further from our friends and neighbours whose loyalties lie elsewhere. All of these and many other cases highlight the conflict of loyalties in our society and wider world. What is even more obvious is that if we are to make peace, cultivate love for enemies, and pursue the common good, then perhaps the most in-demand virtue of 2025, at the top over every wish list, might just be loyalty.

But what really is loyalty?

I was struck by a persuasive answer given by Dr Tony Milligan, research fellow in philosophical ethics at King’s College London, during his appearance on a recent episode of The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4 that asked ‘is loyalty a virtue or a vice?’ He said loyalty is, “Sharing another person’s commitments and the willingness to go through various kinds of adversity in order to pursue those commitments and to further them.” Under cross examination and asked if loyalty is then an absolute virtue he responded, “I think that it’s absolute in the sense that we absolutely need to have it, that it’s basic to the human condition and not optional.” His second interrogator, Giles Fraser, then suggested a ‘high doctrine of mates’. In this doctrine you are loyal to your mates in all circumstances, even if they are ‘wrong-uns’. Dr Milligan’s response, when asked how he would characterise this ‘doctrine of mates’ position, was fascinating: “Addiction.” Fraser then asked if that addiction could be love. “It’s a case of love, and we don’t get to choose the people that we love. We find ourselves in the predicament and then try to make the best of it…I love my wife Susanne, I’ve been with her 31 years, and it’s love, and it’s also addiction. I just can’t envisage a world in which I would be without her.” This framed Dr Milligan’s final powerful point: love, and the loyalty which love entails, gives us our sense of value.

I can bear witness to the truth of Dr Milligan’s intertwining of love and loyalty. Last autumn I became a father for the second time. My love for my eldest is so great that there was a real question: ‘if my love for my eldest is so total, so all encompassing, how can I possibly love a second as much?’ This question melted away as I gazed into her screwed-up face, moments after she entered the world. I am completely dedicated to ensuring that she flourishes and I would “go through various kinds of adversity in order to pursue” her flourishing. As Dr Mulligan also said, loyalty “is basic to the human condition and not optional.” Of course, how this total and non-zero-sum loyalty of love to both of my children actually works in practice requires of me thoughtful negotiation. If one wants to go to the park and the other wants to go to the swimming pool I cannot split in two and do both things at once. Loyalty, as finite human beings, requires wisdom in living in the middle of a messy network of demands and desires, of the preferences and needs of others.

If loyalty is then one thing, it is the willingness to recognise that we are tied to other people, whether we like it or not. Cain’s question to God, when God came looking for Abel, is still pertinent: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Perhaps the greatest disloyalty is the implied ‘no’ in Cain’s rhetorical question. In denying that he is bound to his brother he is disloyal not only to Abel, but to himself because he denies his own humanity and isolates himself from the humanity of other people. If we isolate ourselves, having loyalty only to ourselves, we lose the joy of being fully human. If we simply kill those we dislike, whether literally (in war or murder) or metaphorically (‘unfriending’, cancelling, pretending they do not exist), then we follow Cain. Loyalty, as the tie that binds us to the messiness of the real world where people vehemently disagree all the time, requires not only wisdom then but courage also. It takes courage to commit to one person in marriage. It takes courage to raise a child. It takes courage to continue to talk with and to love those with whom you deeply disagree.

When practising our 2025 New Year’s resolutions let us make sure that amongst the commitments to get back to the gym and practice that new hobby that we remember to practice loyalty. Loyalty not only to those we love, but to those we might come to love. Let us be wise enough and brave enough to be fettered to those with whom we disagree, loyal to the humanity that binds us together.

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Article

Digital

Work

24 January 2025

4 min read

Back to the office! The suspect motives behind the bosses calling for it

Working From Home isn’t the end of the world.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

An office wall displays a huge motto reading 'punch today in the face'

Really?

Johnson Wang on Unsplash.

If we’d been working from home in 1980, I wouldn’t have met my wife (as she, of course, then wasn’t). The slow demise of the office romance may not exclusively be driven by WFH, when a clumsy or unwanted speculative pass will likely precipitate a visit from the HR police. But it’s sure harder (I’m told) to chat someone up over Zoom than a water-cooler.

There are some things you just, well, have to be there for. And it’s not just a matter of curating the gene pool for the future of the human race, which is hardly the top priority for most employers. Much more immediate commercial demands are served by employees being bodily present at work. They can check colleagues’ body language, be mentored more spontaneously, gossip about work, read the room and go outside for a fag with a friend. None of that works on a laptop at the kitchen table.

And yet these aren’t aspects of working life that are much, if ever, cited by opponents of WFH. Yup, for these bosses, it’s always about productivity, which allegedly slumps like the shoulders of a college-leaver told to re-write their CV, when staff work from home. So companies as diverse as Amazon, Boots and JP Morgan are demanding that their workers work five-day weeks at the office again.

Except, two things: One, that productivity point isn’t true. Professor Nicholas Bloom, an economist at Stanford University, has demonstrated empirically that a hybrid working model of three days at the office, plus two at home, is every bit as productive as fully office-based work overall. And, two, bosses may be shocked to learn that it’s their job to manage productivity, which is just as measurable at home as in the office. But then you don’t get to shout as much.

And there I think is the real point. Bosses might not be shouty, but their motives for office work are more than suspect. They may be obsessed with control. They need to see their staff working for them for proof of productivity. They want to sit in a big glass-walled office watching them. And, perhaps most of all, if staff aren’t in the office then what’s the point of being a boss? It might bring their own productivity management and role into sharper focus.

People who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not.

Furthermore, it’s been a long time, if ever, since some of those with the loudest voices calling for a return to the office have ever worked an ordinary job themselves. Lord Rose, formerly CEO of Marks & Spencer and chairman of Asda, told BBC’s Panorama that home working was part of the UK economy’s “general decline” (not true – see above).

And Sir Jacob Rees-Mogg, formerly business secretary (remind me, how did that go?), continues in opposition to fight the bad fight to get civil servants as well as the private sector permanently back at the office. Hilariously, he most recently did so in a video from the drawing room of his mansion in Somerset. Though, to be fair, having lost his seat at the last general election and seeing his investment company sliding down the pan, he’s not so much working from home as just... at home.

The serious point is that people who are privileged to manage their own time, or lack of it, in an office really shouldn’t be in the business of lecturing people who are not. They really don’t know – or have forgotten - what it is to have your life demanded of you from 9am-6pm from Monday to Friday in a location that is less than comfortable to work in. Is that so complicated to take aboard?

And there’s another very big thing here. To demand office slaves is to commoditise people, to make them chattels (and, if some of these bosses were honest with themselves, that’s what they want). Staff become just another asset, not unlike the freehold of the office building in which you put them and watch as they make you money every day.

To put it bluntly, that is a sin. To treat human beings as tradeable commodities is to debase their dignity. And for those of faith, that dignity is vested in each unique one of them bearing the image of God. As a good Catholic, Rees-Mogg should be familiar with the doctrine of Imago Dei.

So there’s a holy, as well as secular, work-ethic at play here. The worker is worthy of his/her wage. That scriptural phrase usually focuses on the material value of the wage. But it’s also worth registering that the worker is “worthy”.