As a matter of ethics - our broader social life needs to be constrained by law and other devices - resolving at the societal level matters that should not be left for individual ethical negotiation. What is important - in the end - is that we are enabled to flourish in ways that acknowledge our dignity.

In later years, when I started working in police ethics, I was professionally drawn back to the topic but as well was better able to see two sides to loyalty - its importance for certain central human relations such as friendships, but also its corruptibility in the sense that loyalty could be invoked against other moral constraints: it sometimes function as something of a moral Trojan horse, undermining other moral considerations.

My mother thought my inclinations would do well in Law, but I was too shy and deliberative - slowfooted - for that, so I determined to be an English and German high school teacher. In my first year of university I had one subject to "fill in" and chose philosophy against the advice of my counselor. My university teachers in English and German were totally uninspiring; philosophy was wonderful and my results showed it. I chose it and basically backed into a situation in which only a philosophy career seemed a viable option. I've never regretted it, but there was a lot of serendipity.

I grew up in a home in which loyalty to family was central to my father's outlook. Adolescent changes to my outlook (which set me against parental values) made me very critical of loyalty, reinforced by certain religious writers I found influential at that time. Harry Blamires, The Christian Mind. But I remained conflicted about loyalty.

I see loyalty - roughly perseverance in relational commitments despite the cost of such perseverance - as an important human value/virtue. Think of it as a kind of relational glue.

My view of ethics and of its priority is connected to my view that we are fundamentally relational beings - both the product of human interactions, as well as committed as part of the expression of our own humanity to various social involvements. I see ethics as having two places in the maintenance of these relational activities - first as providing the basic coinage of our interactions qua humans and second as mediating the various roles we assume as humans.

Structurally I don't see a fundamental difference between what we may reasonably expect of police and doctors - though obviously the fact that doctors are generally pursuing life-saving activities and police may be engaged in life-threatening activities may lead to differences in how we construe the moral limits to their roles.