Loyalty to Loyalty: Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life by Matthew Foust (review)

In Loyalty to Loyalty: Josiah Royce and the Genuine Moral Life, Matthew Foust richly examines the nature of a controversial virtue: loyalty. It is well known that for Royce loyalty was not only a fundamental moral concept but an anthropological one since, in his view, loyalty to a cause allows individuals to become selves, creatures with unity of purpose in life. However, this ground level of loyalty is not the only one existing for him. Simultaneously to a particular cause one must adhere to loyalty to loyalty, a universal cause that is a moral obligation for each human being. Foust attempts to recover this dual aspect of the Roycean conception of loyalty with the purpose of defending his contemporary relevance and making a comparison between Royce’s philosophy and the traditional versions of ethics: deontological, consequentialist and virtue ethics.

Accordingly, the seven chapters of the book are grounded in the idea that Royce’s conception of loyalty is relevant to the present. Taking the words of McDermott’s introduction to Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty (McDermott conceives loyalty as a treacherous and ambivalent virtue) Foust sustains that “if treachery connotes a lack of security and ambivalence connotes a lack of clarity, we should indeed be impelled to pay close attention to this virtue.” (2) Thus, denying that treachery and ambivalence are vital features of loyalty is a necessary task for Foust’s project. To carry out this task, in Chapter 1 he focuses on loyalty in contemporary debates, particularly in the contraposition between loyalty as partial and justice as impartial. Chapters 2 and 3 refer to the nature of loyalty and to the Roycean idea of loyalty to loyalty respectively. Meanwhile, in chapter 4 Foust argues that learning loyalty, the psychological aspect of morals, is relevant to Royce’s philosophical conception against the recent statements of Dwayne Tunstall. After that, chapter 5 deals with the relationship between loyalty and community, emphasizing Royce’s idea of wise provincialism. Chapter 6 analyzes the vital conception of disloyalty and links it with the Roycean conceptions of grace and atonement. In chapter 7 Foust entertains the idea of contemporary applications of loyalty. Finally, he concludes with some pages dedicated to the need for loyalty.

There are several issues that are fundamental in order to analyze the importance of this book, namely an accurate reconstruction of Royce′s moral philosophy; the integration of Royce’s morals with other philosophical traditions; and the relevance of Royce’s moral psychology to moral philosophy, among others. In my view, however, there are two that are essential: first, the idea that loyalty to loyalty is a genuine way to make moral philosophy universalizable, entailing that this expression is not a vacuous one; second, the importance of the redemptive character of loyalty.

Regarding the first idea, chapters 2, 3, and the conclusion are crucial. Foust accurately analyzes Royce’s preliminary description of loyalty as “the willing and practical and thoroughgoing devotion of a person to a cause” (34). Royce’s The Philosophy of Loyalty deals with this notion of loyalty through the first eight chapters of the book until a comprehensive definition of loyalty is given: “loyalty is the will to manifest, so far as is possible, the Eternal, that is, the conscious and superhuman unity of life, in the form of the act of an individual Self.” (45) In chapter 3 Foust develops two arguments regarding the plausibility of the Roycean idea of loyalty to loyalty: first, that Royce’s loyalty to loyalty is right to the extent that it integrates the intuitions of what is currently called consequentialism, deontological and virtue ethics; second, that loyalty should occupy a central role since virtues are crucial to ethics. In his words: “Nonetheless, Royce insists, loyalty to loyalty is a guide in the face of such ignorance, for “it now becomes the principle, Have a cause; choose your cause; be decisive.” In other words: Decide, knowingly if you can...