Am
I My Brother's Keeper? Royce and Dewey on the Community's Responsibility
for the Lost Individual
Albert R. Spencer, Baylor
University
I wear the black for the
poor and the beaten down,
Livin' in the hopeless, hungry side of town,
I wear it for the prisoner who has long paid for his crime,
But is there because he's a victim of the times.
—Johnny Cash, Man In Black
In his introduction to Josiah Royce's The Philosophy of Loyalty,
John Mc- Dermott praises Royce for being the first philosopher to take seriously
the importance of loyalty as "an irreducibly crucial human virtue in our
daily lives and in our effort to sustain a polis worthy of our deepest needs
and yearnings." He also extols Royce as having a message that is "more viable,
more needed, and more demanding now" than it was at the beginning of the
twentieth century. McDermott insists that Royce's message of loyalty is
of vital importance to our contemporary world because the individual is
even more vulnerable to becoming disconnected from the objects of loyalty
that unite communities. The world has changed, and "detached individuals"
are prone to joining causes that are predatory instead of developing the
genuine loyalty Royce prescribes (McDermott xix-xxi). Only by becoming loyal
to a worthy cause and devoting one's energies to furthering the goals of
a community can the individual find fulfillment. While I agree with Royce's
prescription, I believe that more needs to be said about the community's
responsibility for these detached individuals.
|
|
