Given the violent and panicked tone, the curious focus of so much moral outrage following Tony Abbott's removal as Prime Minister last week, one can almost imagine many of the guests on the Titanic gathering at the railing and screaming at the women and the children in the lifeboats: "Where's the loyalty ya bastards?"
In terms of passionate public conversation, Loyalty, and its evil sisters Treachery and Betrayal, have out-shouted notions of responsibility, effective government, and the greater good. Is this evidence that the half-mythical, half-farcical notion that sticking by your mates at all costs is Australia's prime moral imperative? If so, is it healthy or even realistic?
Dr Linda Barclay is a political and ethics philosopher at Monash University. In an email responding to questions, she writes: "Loyalty" sounds like `compassion' or 'justice' in being a trait or choice that is always good. But it's not... No person with a strong moral compass can ever be 100 per cent loyal. A person with a strong moral compass will always make judgements about whether their current commitments (to a person, cause, group, employer) are compatible with their moral values. And sometimes they won't be, so commitments will be abandoned. I don't think we can really accept that abandoning your moral compass is always preferable."
Dr Barclay says the loyalty question is not just a moral one. "No person with a healthy sense of their own worth can ever be 100 per cent loyal either. Our commitments can be questioned when they start to run roughshod over our own needs and preferences. Again, it's hard to believe that ignoring one's own needs and preferences is always preferable to abandoning a commitment... We know that there are serious downsides to individualism. The threat to blind loyalty is not one of them."
From her own reading of the news, Barclay observes: "The person who seems to be wailing the loudest about disloyalty is (Senator Cory) Bernardi. He is an extreme individualist, so it's odd for him to suggest loyalty always trumps other values, and he has certainly not acted that way himself in the past."
Loyalty versus self-preservation
Dr Karen Jones is a University of Melbourne moral philosopher who writes on issues of trust. "The Abbott saga," she says, can be construed as loyalty versus self-preservation, or loyalty versus taking a principled stance and standing up for needed change. But a more nuanced reading, says Jones, can be found in the work of US philosopher Josiah Royce who claims that the moral life "is fundamentally about negotiating between potentially conflicting loyalties".
For Royce not all loyalties are on a par. "The highest ones are loyalties to ideals that support well-functioning communities that are knit together by bonds of loyalty." Given the divisive nature of Abbott's prime-ministership - not a well-functioning community - those MPs that Abbott charges with disloyalty "would be well entitled to respond that it was from a greater loyalty that they moved against him", says Jones.
Dr Simon Laham is a researcher at the University of Melbourne's Moral Psychology Lab. He says that what we judge to be right or wrong depends upon how we are feeling, what we are attending to, and who we are judging. In an email he writes: "Humans are motivated reasoners, rather than truth-seekers per se; they are often motivated to protect their (positive) views of themselves and of the groups to which they belong. Thus, it's probably not surprising that the moral standards we apply to ourselves and our in-groups (those groups to which we belong or identify with, including political parties) are different to those that we apply to out-groups. Just as we have a range of self-serving biases that protect our fragile egos, so too do we have group serving biases that protect our groups."
There's a growing body of research by psychologists that shows loyalty, along with obedience to authority, is more favoured by conservatives as a moral value than by progressives. This idea came about with "moral foundations theory", a social psychology theory that appears to have evolved over the past 25 years, largely through the work of New York psychologist and TED talk superstar Jonathan Haidt. His theory holds that moral decisions arise from intuition rather than moral reasoning - and that in fact the reasoning comes later to justify the positions we take. This may explain why the public response to Abbott's sacking is more emotional than rational.
Six foundations to moral life
Haidt also argues that there are six good/bad foundations to moral life: care/harm; fairness/rule-breaking; authority/subversion; loyalty/betrayal; purity/degradation (this apparently applies more to religious beliefs and practices); and a late addition liberty/oppression.
Where people of a more liberal or progressive persuasion give greater weight to care and fairness as moral values, conservatives tend to give a more equal weight to all six values.
Says Dr Brock Bastian, a University of NSW psychologist who researches motivated moral reasoning: "The foundations of loyalty, purity and respect for authority group together, and operate to provide some level of binding of the group. These are the sorts of morals that we use when we keep asylum seekers off our shores, and when we want to protect what is ours."
A recent US study found that whistleblowing brings fairness (seeing that something is wrong and wanting it fixed) and loyalty (to the company and your fellow employees) into conflict. In that light, is it worth considering thinking of the Abbott leadership crisis as a kind of whistleblowing event?
"In both cases there is a conflict between a certain kind of loyalty and other values," says Dr David Coady, senior lecturer in philosophy at the University of Tasmania. "In the case of the leadership challenge... I doubt if considerations of fairness played much of a role. I suspect that Turnbull and his supporters were motivated largely by ambition and fear."
Is that so wrong? "I certainly don't think ambition and self-preservation are bad things. They often lead to good results. As Adam Smith noted, self-interest can sometimes, by means of 'a hidden hand', promote collective well-being... Nonetheless I don't think that ambition and the desire for self-preservation are actually virtues. They're not vices either. They're morally neutral."
Dr Coady says some of his colleagues are sceptical of the idea that loyalty is a genuine virtue. "As a police officer once said to me, 'When they want you to do the right thing they appeal to your integrity; when they want you to do the wrong thing they appeal to your loyalty'... However I think this is wrong. I think loyalty is a genuine and important value, and I don't think whistleblowers necessarily discount it or devalue it."
Rather, whistleblowers put broader loyalties ahead of more narrow ones. "Edward Snowden, for example, seems to take his loyalty to the American people and the US constitution very seriously. His decision was difficult because he was confronted with a clash of loyalties."
Coady believes that conservatives tend to place too much value in loyalty to their colleagues and those in positions of authority. "This is why I think Abbott's talk of treachery was deeply misguided. A politician's primary loyalty should be to the public, not to his leader or to his party."
