Loyalty
This is meant to address three ideas:
- Don't blame the victim
- If you care for me, you'd support me unconditionally
- Safe zones
For those we care for, we desire them to be happy, to succeed, to grow as people, and various other things. To that end, we offer them our support in various realms of life. This is a great thing, even if we don't care for everyone equally and don't provide the same kinds of support to everyone. However, I think unless we establish some nuances, we run the risk of getting some things very wrong. Our support for others, if excessive in degree or scope, can be detrimental to us or even to them. I have previously written about reasonable degree of care ; helping people to the extent that we injure our own interests or dignity to an excessive degree. Here, we should begin to address scope of care.
I present a divide:
- Care-in-assistance
- Care-in-judgement
I argue that care-in-judgement is almost always harmful or inappropriate, and care-in-assistance is how we generally should care for people. People require criticism and constant exposure to other perspectives to remain sane; sterile groups of people who agree on philosophy or contested events offer a certain comfort, but it is a comfort that creates inappropriate certainty in life and diminishes the ability of the person to deal with mainstream society; this is the disvirtue of surrounding oneself with yes-men. Safe zones are particularly pernicious towards this end; they offer the unhealthy comfort of closer relationships with people who act as yes-men, curbing the ability of the mainstream to moderate excessive perspectives and offer correction. They diminish the ability of people so humoured to handle disagreement, and incubate unacceptable demands of fidelity-to-their-views that they may place on society.
Beyond these ties, they diminish the person who offers care-in-judgement; the person's judgement is hijacked by their social needs. If our judgement is to mean anything, it must be independent of the people we care for, both in topic and from need for their approval. We must be able to judge our family and our closest friends the same as the people we despise through the same lens, and even handle the nuances of when victims are not wholly innocent (or to a lesser degree, not wholly helpful) or when a victim turns into an abuser. Justice is impartial; in order for our judgement to be true, we must place these realms of life outside responsiveness to social reprecussion. This is very difficult, and many people cannot manage it, but for those that cannot do it much, we must write off entirely their thoughts on matters of justice. For others who can only do it somewhat, we must at least consider their conflicts-of-interest, and criticise or doubt them as necessary to help them grow as people). We also should ignore the politics of the situation when we're asked for (or when the situation calls for) an honest judgement; even if exposure to how we see things would be very unpleasant for the hearer, we owe it to ourselves not to be dishonest with our views; we either must explicitly note that we're withholding their expression, or to tell them, rather than pretend they are what they are not.
With this, we achieve some integrity; a kind of integrity that should be a basis for a kind of self-respect (and, for those virtuous enough to admire this trait, respect of others). We must grow enough as people to offer the reciprocal though; to handle disagreements in perspective and judgements from those around us. That kind of tolerance is just as important as the expressiveness. We should finally avoid the idea of only offering the first in exchange for the second with a particular person; we should strive for both as much as possible with everyone, particularly those that lack one or both virtues.