Loyalty
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This page is about the philosophical and semantic background of loyalty. For its use in business, see loyalty business model.
Loyalty, one can surmise, began with fellow-feeling for one's family, gene-group and friends. Loyalty comes most naturally amongst small groups or tribes where the prospect of the whole casting out the individual seems like the ultimate, unthinkable rejection.
In a feudal society, centered on personal bonds of mutual obligation, accounting for precise degrees of protection and fellowship can prove difficult. Loyalty in these circumstances can become a matter of extremes: alternative groups may exist, but lack of mobility will foster a personal sense of loyalty.
The rise of states (and later nation states) meant the harnessing of the "loyalty" concept to foster allegiance to the sovereign or established government of one’s country, also personal devotion and reverence to the sovereign and royal family.
Wars of religion and their interminglings with wars of states have seen loyalty used in religious senses too, involving faithful support of a chosen or traditional set of beliefs or of sports representatives. And in modern times marketing has postulated loyalties to abstract concepts such as the brand. Customer churn (http://wiktionary.org/wiki/Churn) has become the opposite of loyalty, just as high treason once stood as the opposite of the same idea. Compare loyalty card.
Loyalty is also used in context to employee satisfaction with their organization, and their propensity to exit or stay with the organization.
Etymology and semantics
The English word "loyalty" came into use in the early part of the 15th century in the sense of fidelity to one’s oath, or in service, love, etc; the later state-oriented sense appears in the 16th century. The Old French word loialté (modern French loyauté), comes from loial (loyal), Scots leal, Latin legalis (legal, from lex (law)). The word functioned in the special feudal sense of one who has full legal rights, a legalis homo being opposed to the "outlaw". Thence in the sense of "faithful", it meant one who kept faithful allegiance to his feudal lord, and so loyal to the ultimate temporal power.
Loyalty and ethics
Plato said that only a man who is just can be loyal, and that loyalty is a condition of genuine philosophy. The philosopher Josiah Royce said it was the supreme moral good, and that one's devoition to an object mattered more than the merits of the object itself. In contrast, philosopher Michael E. Berumen thinks Royce turns morality on its head, and, for example, that a Nazi is not made more moral because of his extreme devotion to Nazism. Berumen contends that loyalty and adherence to duty are often conflated, mistakenly, and that one always ought to perform one's duty, notwithstanding one's feelings of loyalty, which might be directed towards something that is contrary to duty. Berumen maintains that unconditional loyalty is morally forbidden, for it does not recognize moral limits.
Sources
Michael E. Berumen, Do No Evil: Ethics with Applications to Economic Theory and Business (iUniverse 2003)
Partly based on http://1911encyclopedia.org