Justice_ What's the Right Thing to Do_ - Michael Sandel [113]
In most of the cases we’ve considered, the demands of solidarity seem to supplement rather than compete with natural duties or human rights. So it might be argued that these cases highlight a point that liberal philosophers are happy to concede: As long as we don’t violate anyone’s rights, we can fulfill the general duty to help others by helping those who are close at hand—such as family members or fellow citizens. There’s nothing wrong with a parent rescuing his own child rather than another, provided he doesn’t run over a stranger’s child on the way to the rescue. Similarly, there’s nothing wrong with a rich country setting up a generous welfare state for its own citizens, provided it respects the human rights of persons everywhere. Obligations of solidarity are objectionable only if they lead us to violate a natural duty.
If the narrative conception of the person is right, however, obligations of solidarity can be more demanding than the liberal account suggests—even to the point of competing with natural duties.
Robert E. Lee
Consider the case of Robert E. Lee, the commanding general of the Confederate army. Before the Civil War, Lee was an officer in the Union army. He opposed secession—in fact, he regarded it as treason. When war loomed, President Lincoln asked Lee to lead the Union forces. Lee refused. He concluded that his obligation to Virginia outweighed his obligation to the Union, and also his reported opposition to slavery. He explained his decision in a letter to his sons:
With all my devotion to the Union, I have not been able to make up my mind to raise my hand against my relatives, my children, my home… If the Union is dissolved, and the Government disrupted, I shall return to my native State and share the miseries of my people. Save in her defense, I will draw my sword no more.57
Like the French resistance pilot, Lee could not countenance a role that would require him to inflict harm on his relatives, his children, his home. But his loyalty went further, even to the point of leading his people in a cause he opposed.
Since the cause of the Confederacy included not only secession but slavery, it is hard to defend Lee’s choice. Still, it is hard not to admire the loyalty that gave rise to his dilemma. But why should we admire loyalty to an unjust cause? You might well wonder whether loyalty, under these circumstances, should carry any moral weight at all. Why, you might ask, is loyalty a virtue rather than just a sentiment, a feeling, an emotional tug that beclouds our moral judgment and makes it hard to do the right thing?
Here’s why: Unless we take loyalty seriously, as a claim with moral import, we can’t make sense of Lee’s dilemma as a moral dilemma at all. If loyalty is a sentiment with no genuine moral weight, then Lee’s predicament is simply a conflict between morality on the one hand and mere feeling or prejudice on the other. But by conceiving it that way, we misunderstand the moral stakes.58
The merely psychological reading of Lee’s predicament misses the fact that we not only sympathize with people like him but also admire them, not necessarily for the choices they make, but for the quality of character their deliberation reflects. What we admire is the disposition to see and bear one’s life circumstance as a reflectively situated being—claimed by the history that implicates me in a particular life, but self-conscious of its particularity, and so alive to competing claims and wider horizons. To have character is to live in recognition of one’s (sometime conflicting) encumbrances.
Brothers’ keepers I: The Bulger brothers
A more recent test of loyalty’s moral weight involves two brotherly tales: The first is the story of William and James (“Whitey”) Bulger. Bill and Whitey grew up together in a family of nine children in a South Boston housing project. Bill was a conscientious student who studied the classics and got a law degree at Boston College. His older brother, Whitey, was a high-school dropout who spent his time on the streets committing larceny and other crimes.