There will always be situations in which conflicts arise between individual and communal values - Catholic police officers deployed to enable women to enter abortion clinics without harassment and doctors who oppose performing abortions. No social role is free of such potential conflicts.

There will always be situations in which conflicts arise between individual and communal values - Catholic police officers deployed to enable women to enter abortion clinics without harassment and doctors who oppose performing abortions. No social role is free of such potential conflicts.

Whistleblowing constitutes a nice test case for the evaluation of loyalty. Loyalty also appears at the intersection of many major philosophical debates: general ones such as those between consequentialism and deontology, reason and feeling, virtue and principle, as well as more specific ones such as nationalism and patriotism, morality and obedience, particularism and universalism.

As for the ethics, law, and politics relationship, there has always been a tension for me as I try to keep them distinct while recognizing their interactions. A valuable contribution to my thinking there and elsewhere was Ellen Meiksins Wood's Mind and Politics, which reinforced for me the ways in which seemingly disparate philosophical endeavors were/are interconnected, and although I have tended to give a certain priority to ethical considerations as part of practical reasoning, I am reminded often enough that this position makes some contentious presumptions .

Police have both extra constraints and extra permissions - on the one hand, they can't dodge involvement in social disorder as the rest of us can and they may be required to conduct themselves privately in a way that does not undermine their public authority; on the other hand, they have permission to engage in deceptions, invasions of privacy and uses of force that are forbidden to the rest of us. But this does not put them beyond common morality.

One of the real dangers of loyalty is that it may become associated with certain types of group-think, chauvinism, jingoism, and thus become socially destructive in ways that many other virtues are not likely to be when they are corrupted. Nationalism and patriotism are especially prone to misguided excess.

It is odd that a value/virtue that plays such a central role in dramatic literature has played such a small role in philosophical writing. There are probably a number of reasons, but I think that a predilection for a certain kind of individualism is a major one. Others might include the fashionability of consequentialism, the idea that loyalty has more to do with sentiment than reason, as well as its proneness to corruption. The revival of interest in virtue/character as distinct from rules/principles has also created space for a renewed, if hesitant, interest in loyalty.