Simon Keller
On my view, patriotism leads to bad faith and as a result is both an undesirable personal trait and a negative influence on political debate and civil society. My argument is supposed to apply to patriotism as such, not just to one kind of patriotism, and it is supposed to identify a problem with patriotism in particular, not with loyalty in general.
Kleinig and Primoratz offer arguments for thinking that patriotism can sometimes be unobjectionable and can sometimes be positively good. Kleinig’s conception of patriotism is similar to mine, but he gives an argument for thinking that patriotism so conceived is virtuous, and he gives reasons for thinking that it need not lead to bad faith. Primoratz’s conception of patriotism is more inclusive than Kleinig’s and mine, and his argument proceeds by drawing distinctions between varieties of patriotism. Primoratz argues that some kinds of patriotism should be rejected but also that one kind of patriotism (“moderate” or “liberal” patriotism) is unobjectionable and that another kind of patriotism (“ethical” patriotism) is good and under some circumstances obligatory.
My overall complaint about the arguments of Kleinig and Primoratz is that they move too quickly from claims about the ethical relationship between an individual and a country to a defense of patriotism. As far as possible, I will grant Kleinig and Primoratz their various claims about the significance of countries and our connections with them and then argue that these claims do not in fact yield good reasons to endorse patriotism. I will begin with Kleinig’s argument for patriotism, then I will look at Primoratz’s argument that moderate or liberal patriotism is permissible. Then I will look at Primoratz’s argument that ethical patriotism can be obligatory, and then I will finish with a brief response to Kleinig’s objections to my claim about patriotism and bad faith.
To be loyal, Kleinig says, is to stick with something because you value it in a particular way: you value it as something with which you share a certain relationship, and you value it intrinsically, not as a means to something else. To be patriotic, for Kleinig, is to identify with and want the best for your own country because you value your country, as your country, intrinsically.
Humans are social creatures, says Kleinig, and they can flourish only within healthy relationships with other humans. The country, on Kleinig’s view, has two crucial roles to play in allowing humans to flourish through their relationships. First, when constituted as a state, the country creates a social order within which various valuable personal and social relationships are attainable and secure. Second, the country sets the conditions that make possible particular kinds of good, social, human lives: Australian lives, American lives, and Ecuadorian lives. A human who flourishes in the modern world of states, on Kleinig’s view, is most likely to do so within her relationship with a particular country: to flourish as an Australian or as an American or as an Ecuadorian.
Kleinig’s initial argument accords instrumental value to the country and the relationship the individual shares with it. The country is good because (and to the extent to which) it makes a contribution to human flourishing. But on Kleinig’s argument, the significance of the country, understood as an associational object, permeates the character of the goods to which it contributes. The life of the individual is “framed,” as Kleinig puts it, by her relationship with her country, so that when she thinks of her social and personal relationships, her way of life, and her identity, her connection with her country is always present. It is then natural, on Kleinig’s view, for the individual to come to value her country as she values the goods whose character her association with the country permeates – to value her country intrinsically. Furthermore, Kleinig suggests, such valuing is not only natural but also correct and admirable. In valuing her country intrinsically, the individual shows an understanding of her identity and her way of life and a commitment to the distinctive social background that makes lives like hers possible. That, for Kleinig, is how patriotism comes to be virtuous.
Kleinig and I each take patriotism to involve attitudes of evaluation, among other things, but we tell different stories about what those attitudes are. On my view, the patriot takes her country to be a good country in some central and distinctive respect, and on Kleinig’s view, the patriot values her country, conceived as an associational object, intrinsically. While there is a difference between our respective depictions of the evaluative attitudes involved in patriotism, I do not think it important for our substantive disagreement, so I will adopt Kleinig’s way of speaking. For the purposes of engaging with Kleinig’s arguments, I can accept that “the ultimate question here is whether a person’s country or patria is the kind of associative arrangement that it would be good or even obligatory to value for its own sake, as one’s own, thus engendering loyal commitments and obligations to it” (this volume, 24).
Grant that a country characteristically makes significant contributions, of the kinds Kleinig describes, to human flourishing. I aim to show that it does not follow that the individual will naturally come to value her country intrinsically and that such valuing, in any case, would be neither right-minded nor desirable.
Imagine that you are a faculty member at a university, and think of the evaluative attitudes that you are likely to hold toward the university. You might think that the activities carried out within the university – developing knowledge, educating students, and enjoying collegial relationships – are very valuable and that they are essentially the activities of individuals working within a university; they can exist only within the institutional context the university provides. You may also think that your university provides a special kind of education and encourages a special way of doing research or that it provides education and research to a special group of individuals, so that the things you value about the university cannot be found in just any university. And your connection with the activities carried out within the university may play a significant role in your self-understanding. You may understand yourself essentially as a philosopher, academic, or teacher.
Consistently with all of these attitudes, you may value the university only instrumentally. You may think the university very valuable but not intrinsically valuable. In fact, this is the evaluative attitude toward your university that you are most likely to have and that most faculty members do have. If the university stopped supporting the teaching and research you value, or if it stopped providing services to the people you care about, then you would no longer value the university. If you became convinced that the education and research you value would more greatly flourish if the university were broken up into smaller universities, or if it were absorbed within a larger university, then you might think that the demise of the university as a distinct entity could be a good thing: good because it would best serve the things that really matter. You might value the university, that is to say, not intrinsically, but just for the good things it produces and makes possible.
You can take an institution to form the background to certain valuable, special, and distinctive activities, and you can take your association with that institution to be important for your identity, while still valuing the institution only instrumentally. As you can have such an attitude toward your university, you can have it toward your country. As a citizen of a country, you could value your country greatly and you could find it to protect and make possible a way of life that is crucial to your identity, without taking your country to be intrinsically valuable.
As an Australian, for example, you could value Australia and see yourself as someone who could come from nowhere but Australia, while recognizing that you would no longer value Australia if it were no longer to represent and nourish the things you value within Australia, and that you would support the demise of Australia as a distinct entity if you became convinced that the good things about Australia would more greatly flourish without Australia. Your primary evaluative concern, that is to say, could be for the valuable things that Australia produces and makes possible, not for Australia itself. This pattern of valuing is natural and attainable – it mirrors the evaluative attitudes we naturally hold toward many kinds of institutions – and it does not grant Australia intrinsic value.
If it is possible to value a country either intrinsically or instrumentally, all while understanding the country’s importance for human flourishing and for your identity, then which of these two ways of valuing a country is more desirable? Is the patriotic mode of valuing better or worse than the alternative?
There does not appear to be any mistake or inconsistency involved in valuing a country merely instrumentally. That something makes certain intrinsically valued things possible does not mean that it should be intrinsically valued itself. The faculty member who values his university only instrumentally is not making a mistake about the structure of value or the importance of his university. Someone who values a country just for its contribution to her identity and to other independent goods need not be seeing her country’s value inaccurately.
In contrast, there is reason to think it that is mistaken to value a country intrinsically. There are good countries and bad countries, and whether a country is a good or a bad country depends – surely – upon what the country does for individuals. The value of individual humans is more fundamental than the value of countries. The job of a country, so to speak, is to protect individuals’ rights and help them to live better lives. When a person values a country intrinsically, there is a danger that she will value it wrongly, taking the country to matter independently of, or over and above, the value of the rights and interests of individual humans.
Sometimes you hear people talk about the interests of a university in a way that seems detached from considerations of what really matters in a university. People worry about advancing the university’s reputation or standing or about whether the university is outperforming its rivals as though those things matter for their own sakes, not just because they might lead to better research and education. Similarly, in a country, you sometimes hear patriotic rhetoric about protecting or serving or bringing glory to a country, expressed in a tone that suggests that the country is an overarching valuable entity before which individual rights and interests must sometimes be laid down. Such talk about the value of a university or country is what you would expect to hear from people who value the university or country intrinsically.
Patriotism, understood in Kleinig’s terms, is likely to lead to distortions of judgment of much the same kind as those I describe in my argument about patriotism and bad faith. In valuing her country intrinsically, Kleinig’s patriot is likely to treat her country as a kind of grand presence, having a virtuous character and holding an irreducible value that is not to be questioned, and not as a sprawling and complex entity whose character and value are derived entirely from individuals and activities out of which it is comprised.
Kleinig asks whether your country is the kind of associative arrangement it would be good or even obligatory for you to value for its own sake. I have tried to give reasons why it is possible to value a country merely instrumentally without missing anything about its importance for human flourishing, and I have tried to give reasons why valuing a country intrinsically is likely to lead to mistaken and damaging evaluative judgments. So I do not think countries should be valued for their own sakes and I (still!) do not think that people should be patriotic.
Primoratz says of one kind of patriotism that it will be “judged morally unobjectionable by all except some adherents of a strict type of cosmopolitanism” (chap. 3, 17). This is the kind of patriotism that Baron calls “liberal patriotism” and Nathanson “moderate patriotism.” The liberal patriot (I shall use Baron’s term) is able to move judiciously between her embedded point of view as a partisan of a particular country and the wider point of view of impartial morality. She accepts constraints, derived from liberal morality, upon what she may do in service of her country. She meets her special concern for her own country with a general concern for the rights and interests of people everywhere, and she demands that her country uphold certain moral standards: standards derived, again, from an impartial, liberal moral viewpoint.
In his seminal defense of robust communitarian patriotism, Alasdair MacIntyre anticipates defenses of liberal patriotism and argues that “liberal patriotism” is not patriotism at all. Such so-called patriotism, he says, is emasculated (MacIntyre 1984, 6). The use of that term aside, I agree with MacIntyre.
Some patriotic activities are surely unobjectionable. If you wear national dress for national holidays, cook the national dish, sing the national anthem, and salute the national flag, then you perform acts of patriotism, and your acts may do no harm to anybody. The performance of such acts, however, is not enough to make you a patriot. Someone who dresses in national colors and cheers for the national football team, but who on reflection shows no pride in her country and is not prepared to make any sacrifices for her country, is not a patriot – not on anyone’s definition. That some expressions of patriotism are unobjectionable does not show that (some form of) patriotism itself is unobjectionable. The real question is whether a person can combine a liberal moral perspective with the perspective of patriotism.
MacIntyre says that liberal patriotism is unstable, because there are cases in which liberal morality and patriotism make incompatible demands: meet one demand and you are not a liberal; meet the opposing demand and you are not a patriot. He gives cases in which countries compete for scarce resources (perhaps if your country gets access to fresh water, then my country does not) and cases in which inhabitants of different countries follow essentially conflicting ways of life (perhaps the flourishing of my raiding community can come only at the expense of the flourishing of your farming community) (MacIntyre 1984, 6–7). These are cases in which basic human rights and interests are at stake, so they are cases in which the constraints of liberal morality are operative, but they are cases in which the way of life of a country is also at stake, so patriotism is called upon too. Any patriot worthy of the name, MacIntyre suggests, will think about such cases essentially from the point of view of her own country, but any liberal worthy of the name will not.
The point can be made using other, less schematic cases. Think about immigration policy. When an Australian thinks about Australia’s immigration policy, how does she respond to the various considerations raised by the rights of prospective immigrants, the needs of the world community, the preservation of Australia’s culture and way of life, and the distinctively Australian experience of immigration? It depends whether she takes the point of view of liberal morality or the point of view of an Australian patriot. It is difficult to imagine an Australian patriot – a genuine Australian patriot – whose patriotism does not influence her views about Australia’s immigration policy. No real patriot could say, “Sure, I am a patriot, but on the matter of how immigration may affect the character of my country my Australian patriotism is silent; at that point I become a universalist liberal.” But equally, it is difficult to see how a patriotic approach to immigration policy could be trusted to stay happily within the moral bounds set by the impartial point of view. Perhaps the patriotic approach to immigration into Australia will also evince equal respect for the rights of all people, but perhaps it will not. At the very least, in moving between the patriotic and impartial perspectives, the aspiring liberal patriot will come under considerable pressure to compromise either her patriotism or her liberalism.
Similar conflicts are likely to arise when we consider questions about education policy, linguistic policy, religious policy, and foreign policy. Should the country have a single national language? Should it raise children who will value a particular cultural, bicultural, or multicultural form of social life? Should it be secular? Should it be neutral? Whenever there is a matter of public policy that expresses or influences a country’s basic character but that also has consequences for basic human rights and interests, the patriotic perspective can differ sharply from the perspective of liberal morality, and it is not possible smoothly to hold both perspectives at once. The suggestion that patriotism can be kept within liberal constraints while still qualifying as genuine patriotism is doubtful. Perhaps only an adherent of a strict type of cosmopolitanism would disapprove of the thoughts and actions of the liberal patriot, but anyone can find reason to doubt that the liberal “patriot” really deserves the name.
My disagreement with Primoratz here may look as though it is merely verbal. There is something that we both find unobjectionable but to which he is prepared to extend the label “patriotism” and I am not. That is true, as far as it goes, but I do think that it is important to keep an eye on the ordinary notion of patriotism and to make sure that we do not just apply the term “patriotism” in whichever way we liberal philosophers find most convenient. If we allow ourselves to defend patriotism by defending attitudes to country that fail to meet the ordinary notion, then there is a danger that we will lose sight of the real ethical questions raised by patriotism and that we will fall into complacency. My hunch, for what it is worth, is that when people claim to be liberal patriots, they are either patriots trying to make their patriotism look less threatening than it really is or liberals trying to make their liberalism look less radical than it really is.1
On Primoratz’s definition, patriotism is “love of one’s country, identification with it, and special concern for its well-being and that of compatriots” (74). Ethical patriotism, Primoratz argues, is a genuine kind of patriotism that is good and can be mandatory. Primoratz’s ethical patriot has “a lively sense of collective responsibility,” seeing her own moral identity and her own moral record to be tied up in those of her country (94–99). Her patriotism, for Primoratz, is ethical in two senses: first, it is focused upon the ethical performance of the country, and second, it is ethically admirable. The ethical patriot is in some ways the opposite of a patriotic partisan. Her first concern is not with the advancement of her country over other countries or of her compatriots’ interests over others’ interests, but instead with the service her country renders to the rights and interests of all.
The immediate question raised by ethical patriotism is this: why be an ethical patriot when you could just be a good person? Why have special concern for the moral standing of your own country, when you could have a concern for morality generally? In support of the suggestion that it is good for the ethical patriot to have a special moral concern with her own country, Primoratz gives three arguments.
The first argument is that a person is best placed to make informed judgments about the moral record of her own country as compared with other countries and to do things that improve her own country’s moral performance as compared with the moral performance of other countries. It is more efficient, so to speak, to have a special ethical concern for what goes on around you, within your country. The second argument is that as a citizen of a country, a person is likely to enjoy many significant benefits, including benefits due to the wrongful acts of the country, and so there is a requirement that she take responsibility for the moral performance of the country from which those benefits are accepted. The third argument applies to citizens of democratic countries: it says that as a participant in a democratic process, a person becomes an author of the laws and policies of the country and hence accrues some moral responsibility for the country’s actions.
Primoratz’s three arguments are intended to show that there is something good about ethical patriotism. But his last two arguments seek to show, in addition, that for some people it would be wrong not to be an ethical patriot. If you accept the benefits of membership of a country, says Primoratz, then you are morally required to accept the responsibilities of membership too. And if you participate in a democratic process, says Primoratz, then you are morally responsible for its outcome and you fail in your responsibilities if you treat your country just as you would any other.
Grant Primoratz his claims about the virtues of taking collective responsibility. It does not follow, I shall argue, that there is any virtue in patriotism, because it is possible to have a lively sense of collective responsibility, of the kind described by Primoratz, without being patriotic. (I do not say this because I disagree with Primoratz about the nature of patriotism. I think that Primoratz’s arguments fall short of supporting patriotism even as he defines it.) We can accept most of what Primoratz has to say about the virtues of collective responsibility while still holding patriotism to be a vice.
Imagine that you decide to accept a job with a particular company because it is located in the city in which you want to live. You have no particular independent desire to work for this company: you accept the job because you want to live in this city. After working for the company for a short time, you discover that it is engaged in an unethical practice. Perhaps it is covertly disposing of waste in an unsafe manner. Having learned about the practice, you may well feel that you have a special responsibility to speak up and do something about it and that you would be failing morally if you were to ignore the unethical practice and treat it as though it has nothing to do with you.
Why would you be moved to take responsibility for the company’s moral performance? You may reason that as an employee of the company, you have a special ability to affect its practices, as compared with the practices of other companies, and hence a special responsibility to use that ability for good. You may think that as someone who receives benefits from the company, you should take the good with the bad; if you are to take a salary from the company, then you must accept the company as a whole package. And you may think that as someone who plays some role (however small) in determining what the company does, you should accept responsibility for the company’s actual acts, whatever they turn out to be.
You could be moved by these considerations without coming to identify with the company in any strong sense and without coming to love the company. After all, you have only just started work there, and you only chose the company because of its location. You would then take collective responsibility for the company’s actions and would do so for the kinds of reasons Primoratz offers in support of patriotic collective responsibility, without regarding the company as the patriot, on Primoratz’s definition, regards her country.
The example shows that there is some conceptual distance between having a sense of collective responsibility regarding some entity, on the one hand, and loving and identifying with that entity, on the other. You may come to have a sense of collective responsibility by coming to love and identify with a collective entity, but that is not the only way in which it can happen. So we can ask: when it comes to the individual’s attitudes to her country, what kinds of collective responsibility do Primoratz’s arguments support?
On Primoratz’s first argument, you should be an ethical patriot because you are better able to make a moral difference at home than overseas. This is a contingent claim, applying more to some people than to others. In thinking about where you personally can do the most good, you may find that your efforts would be most efficiently put toward your local community, your city or state government, an international professional organization, or an international charity, to give just a few examples. And there are surely many aspects of the moral performance of your own country about which you know very little and to which you are unable to make any difference. If you make a commitment to those things on whose moral performance you are best able to have a positive effect, then you are unlikely simply to make a commitment to your country.
That said, countries are the most significant political entities in the modern world, and many of the most ethically consequential acts are performed by, or in the name of, countries. Most of us will probably be best able to make a positive difference to the world partly by taking a special interest in the countries in which we live. That is not to say, however, that we best make a positive difference by being patriotic.
At the end of my initial contribution to this volume, I spoke of the patterns of attachment shown by people who move from one country to another. As an immigrant to a new country, you may come to have special knowledge of the new country and you may see that if you are to be politically involved and to make the world a better place, then you should do so by working within the structures your new country provides. You may then feel a responsibility to contribute to the moral performance of the new country. And you may do all of this without ever becoming a patriot. Your patriotic feelings, if any, may still be directed at the old country.
In the same way, if you are not an immigrant to a new country, you may recognize that you are best able to make a difference by acting within your own country while never feeling patriotic identification with the country. You can see that you are best placed to make a positive difference by working within your own company – or within your own university, your own school district, or your own profession – without any investment of love or identification. It is one thing to commit yourself to improving the world by improving your own country, another to think like a patriot.
There are advantages to being a citizen (or native or resident) of a particular country. Your status within the country may allow you to enjoy such things as the protection of the law and government-provided services and infrastructure. Among the benefits you receive are likely to be some that can be traced to acts of injustice on the part of the country. Such acts may bring benefits to all people within the country, including those who do not approve of those acts. Further among such benefits may be psychological goods arising directly from your special connection with the country: goods like a sense of belonging and a sense of identity. On Primoratz’s second argument, if you accept such benefits, then you become entwined with your country’s moral record and obliged to take responsibility for it.
It is very plausible to say that you should take some responsibility for wrongful acts and practices from which you benefit. If you buy clothes manufactured in sweatshops or take advantage of a tax haven provided by a country that does not meet the basic needs of its most impoverished citizens, then you cannot look at the wrongs perpetrated by those institutions and say that they have nothing to do with you. There is something disturbing about a person who shows no sense of personal concern for injustices committed by her country. But as the sweatshop and tax haven examples show, the plea that you take responsibility for the wrongful acts committed by entities from which you receive benefits is not a plea that you come to love and identify with those entities. You can put pressure on a clothing company to improve its employment practices, and you can use your influence to encourage the country with the tax haven to do more for its most impoverished citizens, without loving or identifying with the clothing company or the country with the tax haven. As a beneficiary of your country’s acts and policies, you should have a sense of collective responsibility regarding your country, but that does not mean that you should be patriotic.
The psychological goods of membership raise a different issue. Here, Primoratz’s argument applies to you if you already have a sense of identification with your country and already take some pride or comfort in your connection with it. If you take pride or comfort in the good things about your relationship with a country, then you should take some responsibility for the bad things too; you should take responsibility for the country’s moral performance.
This is a strong argument and it can have some power when wielded against people who proudly identify with their countries but deny any responsibility for their countries’ misdeeds. The argument does not show that patriotism is virtuous, however. It shows instead that if you are a patriot, then you are morally obliged to include within your patriotism a lively sense of collective responsibility. A similar argument, after all, could be applied to a person who takes pride and comfort in her identity as a member of a gang or her identity as a brunette. If you are going to take pride in the virtues of people who are in your gang or share your hair color, then you should show some shame for the vices of such people too. But that is not to suggest that you should be taking pride and comfort in those associations in the first place. Primoratz’s argument makes the fair point that it is wrong for patriots to be selective in deciding with which aspects of their countries to associate themselves, but whether we should be patriots at all is (still) another question.
As a citizen of a democratic country, Primoratz says, you partake in the country’s sovereignty. You have the right to play a part in determining the character of the country’s government but also the obligation to accept responsibility for the moral performance of that government, whether it is the government you wanted or not. So for citizens of democracies, Primoratz says, there is a special duty to regard the country with a sense of collective responsibility.
Supposing, once again, that Primoratz is right, we are still some way short of an argument for patriotism, because you do not need to love or identify with your country in order to take responsibility for its moral record by virtue of your involvement in its democratic process. People who emigrate from one country to another provide, again, a good illustration. Having committed to democratic participation in the new country, you may see that you cannot regard the acts of the new country as alien or distant or nothing to do with you. You may see that you have a responsibility to care about the moral performance of the new country. But you can do that without loving the new country and while still identifying with the old. And again, if you occupy a decision-making role within a company, a university, or another kind of organization, you may feel a strong sense of personal involvement in the acts of the organization, without loving or identifying with the organization.
You can dislike your country and feel alienated from your country – you can thoroughly disapprove of its choice of government and its acts and policies – while still accepting some responsibility for your country. You do not need to love or identify with your country in order to have a sense of authorship regarding your country’s actions and then to have a sense of collective responsibility.
Primoratz gives reasons why a person should regard her country with a lively sense of collective responsibility. This sense of collective responsibility is often found within the attitudes of patriots. I have tried to show, however, that it is not only by being a patriot that a person can come to have that sense of responsibility. There are other options available: options that involve seeing the country as an ethically important institution with special ethical salience for its own citizens (or residents or natives) but do not involve love for country or identification with country. If, as I argue, there are independent reasons to think that patriotism is a vice, then we should favor nonpatriotic over patriotic forms of collective responsibility for country and resist the move from Primoratz’s claims about collective responsibility to the conclusion that patriotism is a good thing.
Later in Kleinig’s chapter, he talks about some of my earlier work on patriotism and offers some doubts about my claim that patriotism leads to bad faith. Kleinig agrees that patriotism can involve bad faith, but he thinks, first, that this is not because of anything essential to patriotism and, second, that it is a danger associated with loyalty in general, not with patriotism in particular.
My argument rests upon my claims that the patriot is committed to a picture of her country – a picture on which the country has some significant specified valuable qualities at its heart – and that she has a desire to maintain that picture independently of the evidence. Kleinig takes issue with my story about how the patriot sees her country, saying that the patriot need not take her country to look valuable from a neutral point of view and that the patriot’s conception of her country may be more concerned with what the country aspires to be than with what it actually is. And Kleinig suggests that a patriot can take a determinedly clear-eyed view of her country without having her patriotism undermined.
I am convinced by Kleinig’s claims about the kind of picture a patriot can have of her country. The patriot’s attachment to country could be grounded in qualities that she does not expect to have any special appeal to outsiders, like a distinctive conception of mateship or a distinctive landscape. It could also be grounded in an understanding of the country as pursuing an unfinished project, like building a tolerant migrant society or combining the best of two cultures, rather than a view about what it has already achieved.
Even within these more nuanced and particularized patriotic pictures, however, lie ambitious descriptive claims that will inevitably come under some pressure. What exactly is this Australian conception of mateship, for example? Is it as readily available to women as to men? Do I fail to be a good Australian mate if I decline an invitation to go out drinking on my friend’s birthday or if I tell my mate’s wife that he is having an affair? Is there really anything so distinctive about Australian mateship anyway? Are Australian friendships really better than or different from friendships among Americans or Ecuadorians? These are contested questions, even among Australians, and the idea that Australia really is characterized by some distinctive phenomenon of mateship is one that comes into question as you learn more about Australia and the rest of the world. The same goes for beliefs that a country’s character is constituted by a certain aspiration or even a specific kind of landscape. What is the American national project, really? What aspects of the Ecuadorian landscape truly characterize Ecuador and distinguish it from other countries? To answer these questions requires a picture of the country. To that extent, my main point remains. To be patriot is to be committed to a particular, substantive picture of your country, which cannot be presumed immune from the evidence.
Kleinig and I agree that a patriot invests much of her identity in her country and her connection with it. When her very identity involves taking her country to have a certain character – whether that means taking it to be good in specified respects or to be appealing from one point of view or to have a particular aspiration at its heart – and when her loyalty to that country, so described, arises from her sense that the country simply is hers, she will have a motive to resist evidence that throws her picture of her country into question. That is my view, anyway. I think its plausibility survives Kleinig’s well-taken points about the nature of patriotic conceptions of country.
That point aside, much of my disagreement with Kleinig over patriotism and bad faith comes down to our different opinions about how patriotism compares with other kinds of loyalty. Kleinig builds his case for patriotism on his view that loyalty in general is a virtue. I build my case against patriotism on my view that there are different varieties of loyalty and they need to be assessed individually.
For me, patriotism is special because it combines a kind of brute identity-constituting attachment, of the kind you have with your mother, with a kind of substantive evaluative endorsement, of the kind you might have toward a political party. You can recognize that even if your mother has no special distinguishing virtues, even if you were to conclude that your mother is not a good person at all, she is still your mother and you still have all the same reasons to love and care for her. You can recognize that were your favored political party no longer to uphold the political principles you endorse, you would no longer have any reason to support the party. But as a patriot, you cannot regard your loyalty to country with either of these attitudes. You cannot see your patriotic loyalty to country as independent of your picture of the country or as strictly conditional upon your picture of the country. For me, again, that is why patriotism is unusual and why it leads to bad faith. It is why I see bad faith as an endemic feature of patriotism, though one that may sometimes be overcome or masked, and not – as Kleinig sees it – as a danger contingently associated with loyalty in general.
In the world as it is today, patriotism is very common, often deliberately cultivated, and widely regarded as a virtue. It is very natural for our thoughts about patriotism to be tied with our thoughts about some important personal and political virtues. It can be difficult to imagine someone who is a good citizen, who has a strong sense of collective responsibility and community, and who has a robust understanding of her own identity, but who is not patriotic. It can be easy to imagine that patriotism is the natural state of the good citizen.
In responding to the arguments of Kleinig and Primoratz, I have tried to show that patriotism is not as natural as our ordinary ways of thinking about patriotism often suggest. There is one sense in which patriotism is natural; people find it very easy to be patriotic, and patriotism can be cultivated on a large scale. But there are two crucial senses in which it is not.
First, patriotism is not inevitable. It is not the natural state of humans or of virtuous humans. There are many virtuous nonpatriotic modes through which a person can relate to a country. I have pointed repeatedly to the attitudes of immigrants to their new countries, but really, good nonpatriotic engagement with country is all around us, if only we look. Attractive alternatives to patriotism are available.
Second, when placed against the wider class of loyalties, patriotism is anomalous. Patriotism is so passionate, so deep-seated, so laden with evaluative commitments, and so intimately connected with personal identity. The objects of patriotism – countries – are so large, so difficult truly to know, and so overwhelmingly complicated.2 There is good reason to think that our evaluations of other forms of loyalty do not apply straightforwardly to patriotic loyalty and to suspect that patriotism may carry its own special ethical problems.
Once we see that patriotism is not so natural, in these senses, it becomes possible to detach patriotism from the virtues with which it is commonly associated and to detach it from wider questions about the ethical status of loyalty. It is only then that we can understand and evaluate patriotism in its own right. A proper understanding of patriotism shows it to be a distinctive, complex psychological state, and a right-minded evaluation of patriotism shows it to be a vice. Whatever our ultimate judgment about patriotism, however, we make progress by isolating patriotism and by bringing the alternatives to patriotism more clearly into view.