Article

Character

Comment

Friendship

Virtues

22 January 2025

4 min read

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

Comment

Community

Freedom

Politics

5 May 2025

4 min read

From councils to conclaves, there's a vital common ingredient

Church and state alike need pluralism.

George Pitcher

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

A gate to a churchyard displays a sign saying polling station.

A polling station through a churchyard.

Southwark Diocese

Rumours that Donald Trump may suspend the US constitution in order to seek a third term as president and yet darker threats that his regime may even harbour autocratic ambitions have reminded the West that we should not take democracy for granted.

Parliamentary democracy, we have widely assumed, is A Good Thing. It’s so good that we not only want to share it but impose it on other populations. The Iraq war on which the UK and US embarked in 2003 was fought, we were told, for freedom and democracy, but it didn’t quite work out like that.

By democracy, we tend to mean political accountability, through which parties of government exercise power through the will of the people they serve, expressed in regular plebiscites which ensure that no one can cling unchallenged to power. The recent English council elections are a small example of what we mean by that.

The Trump phenomenon, though, begins to point towards the prospect of a popular will that is in favour of a form of government that doesn’t correspond to our usual liberal assumptions. There are voices, among them that of the writer Margaret Atwood, which anticipate a suspension of US democracy as a consequence of the President’s insanity.

Most of us in the UK might argue that democracy need to be more than a system in which majorities have their way. We want our governments to be under the law too. And then we have to decide not only what law, but whose law. For those of religious faith, that question will partly and significantly be answered by God’s law, on which arguably western civilisation is built.

This is where pluralism comes in, without which democracy can’t operate effectively. A state is a collection of political and civic communities, in which individuals have rights and duties, which are protected in law.

This model is based on Roman legislature, intensely centralised and systemically suspicious of private societies, which is why early Christians were persecuted under it. The collapse of that empire left a legalistic vacuum, into which stepped nation-state kingdoms and the early medieval Church.

Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

It was this latter organ of state that inherited the basic principles of Roman law, centralised, universal and sovereign, under the Pope. And it is that organ that will meet in conclave to elect a new Pope. To describe that election as democratic is more than a stretch, in that the demos, as in common people, are uninvolved and arguably unrepresented.

So the Church is not a democracy, any more than God is accountable to his creation. Rather the other way around – some denominations speak of God’s “elect”, those he chooses for salvation. In Christian thought, God is a servant king, but nonetheless an absolute and, some who oppose the divine might say, tyrannical authority.

How are we to respond to an undemocratic deity? One answer to that might be found in that pluralistic characteristic of democracy. We’re not good, frankly, as recognising pluralism in our faith systems. At best, we operate in a kind of absolute duopoly – you believe, or you don’t. A pluralistic model would be one in which we learn of the divine will through the entirety of creation, all manifestations of belief and unbelief, rather than simply our own.

Pluralism is healthy, in secular politics as well as in religious observance. It has been observed that the old UK political duopoly of Labour and Conservative has been broken in these local elections by Reform UK and resurgent Liberal Democrats and Greens. It’s the polar opposite of the gathering autocracy in the US and gives a voice to a range of worldviews.

This is not an argument for theocracy, but it is to claim that the Christian tradition rests on the principle that no political order can claim the authority of God other than the Body of Christ. And the Body of Christ incorporates all members of the human race. Unlike political parties, we don’t compete for control, but form a community that points towards a saved and healed world.

The choice here is between a kind of secular citizenship, a form of multi-culturism which strikes an accord between varied communities on universally enlightened principles. Or we can respond to the energy on which that secular utopia might be founded, in building communities of the willing towards global justice and peace. That is a diversity mission for the Church.

So, it’s less about democracy than pluralism. And that pluralism has to become a recognisable characteristic of the body of the faithful, which it all too often historically hasn’t been. One can only hope and pray that it might be a mission that is also at the heart of the deliberations that lead to a puff of white smoke from the Sistine Chapel in the coming days.

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