John Kleinig - The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate

Series Editor: Ernest Sosa

Dialogue has always been a powerful means of philosophical exploration and exposition. By presenting important current issues in philosophy in the form of a debate, this series attempts to capture the flavor of philosophical argument and to convey the excitement generated by the exchange of ideas. Each author contributes a major, original essay. When these essays have been completed, the authors are each given the opportunity to respond to the opposing view.

Personal Identity
Sydney Shoemaker and Richard Swinburne

Consciousness and Causality
D. M. Armstrong and Norman Malcolm

Critical Theory
David Couzens Hoy and Thomas McCarthy

Moral Relativism and Moral Objectivity
Gilbert Harman and Judith Jarvis Thomson

Three Methods of Ethics
Marcia W. Baron, Philip Pettit, and Michael Slote

Atheism and Theism, Second Edition
J. J. C. Smart and J. J. Haldane

Epistemic Justification
Laurence BonJour and Ernest Sosa

Four Views on Free Will
John Martin Fischer, Robert Kane, Derk Pereboom, and Manuel Vargas

Knowledge of God
Alvin Plantinga and Michael J. Tooley

The Ethics of Patriotism: A Debate
John Kleinig, Simon Keller, and Igor Primoratz

John Kleinig,
Simon Keller,
and
Igor Primoratz

This edition first published 2015
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Kleinig, John, 1942
The ethics of patriotism : a debate / John Kleinig, Simon Keller, and Igor Primoratz.
pagescm

ISBN 978-0-470-65884-0 (cloth) ISBN 978-0-470-65885-7 (pbk.)
1.PatriotismMoral and ethical aspects.I.Keller, Simon.II.Primoratz, Igor.III.Title.
JC329.K542015
172.1dc23

2014030516

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

Cover image: Leonardo da Vinci, Study for an Equestrian Monument, c.1485-90, metalpoint on blue prepared paper. The Royal Collection 2014 Her Majesty Queen Elizabeth II / The Bridgeman Art Library

We began writing this book when all three of us were working at the Centre for Applied Philosophy and Public Ethics (CAPPE) in Australia. We are grateful to CAPPE for material support for the project and for its stimulating intellectual environment. Our friend Stephen Nathanson provided insightful feedback at several points in the process of writing the book, and we received helpful comments from three anonymous reviewers. Steven Riley and Adam Henschke provided valuable research assistance. We are also grateful to Liam Cooper and Allison Kostkaour editors at Wiley Blackwellfor their encouragement and forbearance.

Are you patriotic? Should you be patriotic? Should you encourage others to be patriotic? These questions provoke conflicting reactions among different people. For some, patriotism is unquestionably a high moral virtue, and to call a person a patriot better still, a true patriot is the greatest of compliments. For others, patriotism is an object of suspicion, derided as ignorant and feared as warlike. Any attempt to explain the morality of patriotism encounters several deeply contested problems, both theoretical and practical. The morality of patriotism is intimately connected with controversies concerning such topics as character and motivation, human nature, citizenship, the role of the state, political identity and obligation, and the basic structure of morality.

Disagreements about patriotism rest partly upon disagreements about how humans think and behave and about the reality of the conditions we face in the actual world. There is much to be learned about patriotism through empirical studies in history, psychology, sociology, and political science. But the question of whether we should be patriotic is an ethical question, requiring philosophical investigation. To evaluate patriotism, we need to achieve a better understanding of the concept of patriotism, so that we know what we are talking about; we need to discriminate between different possible kinds of patriotism; and we need to decide whether patriotism is a moral virtue or vice and whether it is morally required, morally optional, or morally prohibited. We need to decide what kinds of people we should want to be and in what kind of world we should want to live.

The ethical issues raised by patriotism are varied and far-reaching. Patriotism has ethically significant consequences: patriotism, or a lack of it, can explain why people support and fight in a war, why an election is won or lost, why people perform acts of generosity and self-sacrifice, and why a state has one character rather than another. Whether or not a person is patriotic can reveal much about her character: it can help determine her values, her patterns of loyalty, and her self-conception. Considerations of patriotism arise frequently in debates about politics and public policy: patriotic and antipatriotic sentiments influence debates about state boundaries, for example, and about education policy, immigration policy, language policy, and foreign policy.