Loyalty
Loyalty is faithfulness or a devotion to a person, country, group, or cause. There are many aspects to loyalty. John Kleinig, professor of Philosophy at City University of New York, observes that over the years the idea has been treated by writers from Aeschylus through John Galsworthy to Joseph Conrad, by psychologists, psychiatrists, sociologists, scholars of religion, political economists, scholars of business and marketing, and — most particularly — by political theorists, who deal with it in terms of loyalty oaths and patriotism. As a philosophical concept, loyalty was largely untreated by philosophers until the work of Josiah Royce, the "grand exception" in Kleinig's words. John Ladd, professor of Philosophy at Brown University writing in the Macmillan
Encyclopaedia of Philosophy in 1967, observes that by that time the subject had received "scant attention in philosophical literature". This he attributed to "odious" associations that the subject had with nationalism, including the nationalism of Nazism, and with the metaphysics of idealism, which he characterized as "obsolete".