The roles evolve over time: juries once made determinations about law; nowadays, they are supposedly limited to making factual determinations. A good move? All along, however, we will, be employing and refining "established" values in new contexts, with the possibility of restructuring them in some way.

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.

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.

I confess to being something of a philosophical butterfly. The world is full of so many interesting questions, and although my greatest passion is for some form of applied ethics, that leaves me with oodles of possibilities, many of which I have never had the time or opportunity to explore in great depth.

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.

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.

I remember Stanley Benn remarking that one needed to be a certain age to engage with problems in political philosophy - I think he had in mind a certain breadth of understanding and experience - and so my political interests developed more slowly than the others.