Kinds of loyalty

• Loyalty to a person
  • To a friend
  • To a partner, a lover
  • To family
  • To yourself
• Loyalty to a cause
  • To orgs, companies
  • To countries
  • To movements, religions
  • To ideas

Examples of loyalty

• Publicly standing up for someone who did you a good turn
• Helping an old friend get through an alcohol addiction
• Retroactive funding to a writer who has taught you a lot
• Early Christian martyrdom was loyalty to Christ

Why is loyalty good?

• Allows for high commitment from both parties, and deepening of a relationship
  • Think of loyalty in a marriage
  • Relies on trust rather than legibility
• Loyalty is a force for justice and fairness, in a decentralized way
  • Rather than enforcing fairness through an impartial court, loyalty makes the world better through
• Useful heuristic when deciding who to work with, who to reward, who to believe
  • The world is full of people who want things from you, and loyalty helps you decide which ones to

Why might loyalty be bad?

• EA seems somewhat at odds with loyalty
  • EA-the-ideal stands for values of being utilitarian, selfless, caring about others regardless of how they care about you or what they can do for you
  • EA-the-movement practices some amount of loyalty (eg funding and invites for folks who are “aligned”)
  • Loyalty seems soldier-y, where EA/rats care about scout-ness
• In excess, blind loyalty is associated with authoritarianism, nationalism
  • Trump is famously loyalty-driven
  • Loyalty creates winners and losers; if you’re not in the circle of loyalty for someone powerful, it might seem (or be) unfair
  • Loyalty is meritocratic, only to the extent that the person you’re loyal to is actually good
• Loyalty and identity: Does loyalty make sense if somebody you loved has changed?
  • Can you be loyal to the older version of (a person, a movement, a country), while spurning the present version? Would it be virtuous, loyal to help that person stay true to their older self? Or to adapt with them?

Related virtues

• Sacrifice. Loyalty matters most — maybe only matters at all — when it’s put to the test, when you have to give up something (money, time, reputation, public standing, your life) in support of what you’re loyal to. When there’s no clear immediate personal benefit to being loyal.
• Empathy, “guess culture”, modeling others
• Faith, trust, belief