Many people will say, one of the military virtues is loyalty. People in the military are loyal in a way that people outside of the military are not. Is this true? If so, what are the implications of its being so?

In fact, any hierarchical organization demands loyalty of its people: Recently we've seen political parties become more demanding on this score. People who work for major corporations have to work tirelessly to advance the interests of the corporations; servants of pop stars sign confidentiality agreements.

So maybe loyalty isn't particularly military; it's a virtue in any sub-world where we need people to act at the behest of other people. Moreover it's different from other virtues such as respect in that loyalty only goes in one direction with respect to the chain of command: up, not down. Respect is a virtue in both directions, both up and down the chain of command -- though it takes slightly different forms depending on which direction it's aimed in. Subordinates respect superiors; superiors respect subordinates.

Loyalty, by contrast, is a virtue only for subordinates. A superior isn't loyal to his subordinates; at most he can protect them, and is generally expected to do so. It's subordinates who are expected to be loyal, and for whom it's a virtue. The comparable virtue from superiors to subordinates is something closer to benevolence, which can be bestowed freely by the superior if s/he chooses to do so, but which is never owed. I'd argue that the bond between equals who defend each other to the death isn't “loyalty” either; it's something different, a kind of breaking down of the walls between units.

Loyalty is a magnetic force holding together the parts of the whole, but like a magnet it's polar: it only works in one direction. The superior isn't loyal to subordinates, and this is so for several reasons. The superior doesn't owe the subordinates the honesty and openness they must give the superior. Nor is s/he seeking to please subordinates, to read their wishes and carry them out before they're expressed, which is what many in the military understand loyalty to entail. The superior doesn't even guarantee that s/he will protect all subordinates; s/he can sacrifice some subordinates protect others (that's what the military requires all the time).

Virtues are the things that in a sense have no other rational justification: if it's to your benefit to do something, there's no societal pressure to insist on its being a virtue. You're probably going to do it anyway. Loyalty has to be more than the sum of the benefits the person showing it gets. Why do we so insist on the virtuous nature of Loyalty? Clearly loyalty is necessary to ensure the predictability of subordinates (namely to do what the superior says) in situations of action where predictability can't be otherwise ensured. If you have people go beyond calculating in each situation whether they choose to follow or not, you can predict their behavior and use it to repel a threat.

So loyalty is something that isn't re-negotiated at every turn, it's the “plus factor” that makes it possible to count on people. In this way it's similar to the way we insist that marital vows need to be kept “just because”: even if things are going badly in the marriage, they still need to be kept. Indeed, when things are going badly is precisely where the “vow” part kicks in that is more than the question of whether or not you want to keep it.

Loyalty is necessary for the superior to be able to crack a whip made of individual humans -- to evoke the childhood game, where children hold on to each other for dear life as the end of the whip fights centrifugal forces. If everybody isn't hanging on, the person at the “handle” end can't produce the crack. The military's objective is to produce groups of people with more power than any individual alone, facing outward to a common foe.

If you sign on to the military, or even if you're conscripted, you have to be clear about this: loyalty, which is what subordinates owe superiors, is more than self-interest, as marriage vows are more than “do I want to keep these?” The reason we glorify both loyalty and marriage vows is that there may be times when we want to break them. That's precisely when we shouldn't.