Employee Loyalty: An Examination Mane Hajdin

ABSTRACT. This article presents and examines four

different reconstructions of Ronald Duska’s argument for

the thesis that employees’ loyalty to their employers is

misguided. One of them is the reconstruction presented

by John Corvino in this journal. The remaining three

revolve around, respectively, employers’ failure to recip-

rocate employees’ (attempts at) loyalty, the commercial

character of employment, and the instrumental character

of employment. The result of the examination is that the

argument does not withstand scrutiny in any of the four

reconstructions. The failure of Duska’s argument, how-

ever, does not mean that employee loyalty is justified,

because the burden of proof is on the defenders of the

loyalty. Moreover, a different argument, which is also

presented in the article, shows that the loyalty of most

present-day employees to their employers is bound to be

significantly limited, because of the radical changeability

of corporations with publicly traded stock.

KEY WORDS: loyalty, employment, corporations,

Commerce, Ronald Duska

The scope of the discussion

In 1985, Ronald Duska published the article

‘‘Whistleblowing and Employee Loyalty’’,1 which has

since then been reprinted several times, and in which

he argued that it is misguided for employees to be

loyal to their employers. The article is an important

challenge to the often made assumption that loyalty

to an employer is morally required or otherwise

morally valuable. Most people who read Duska’s

article will probably agree that it is insightful and

inspiring, and for many (including myself) its thesis

has considerable intuitive appeal. Upon careful reading

of the article, it, however, turns out to be rather elusive

what precisely its argument is. I therefore intend to

articulate and examine here a number of possible

reconstructions of the argument, and I shall do so in the

sections entitled ‘‘Loyalty and self-sacrifice’’, ‘‘Loyalty

and reciprocity’’, ‘‘Loyalty and commerce’’, ‘‘Loyalty

and instruments’’ and ‘‘Are employers interchangeable

ex post?’’. The result of that examination will be that

none of the reconstructions of the argument quite

establishes the thesis. In the first three sections of the

article, I shall, however, proceed to offer an argument

that can support a thesis that is more limited in scope

than that of Duska’s article, but accommodates many

of his insights. Before I embark on the articulation

and examination of these arguments, I shall, however,

need to deal with some preliminary matters that

will help to put the arguments that follow into per-

spective. ‘‘The sections of the article will be devoted to

these preliminary matters.

The word ‘‘loyalty’’ is sometimes used for formally

enforceable obligations created by the law and law-

like rules. There thus exists, for example, a body of

law about the duty of loyalty that one assumes by

becoming a director of a corporation. In the same

sense of ‘‘loyalty’’, lawyers may be said to have a duty

of loyalty to their clients. This article (and Duska’s) is,

however, not about the loyalty that is a subject-matter

of expressly promulgated rules, applied by formally

appointed adjudicators. It is about loyalty of the same

informal kind that, for example, one has to one’s

friends, or that a fan of a sports teams has to that team.

The sense in which loyalty is the subject-matter of

this discussion is also distinct from the sense in which

the word is sometimes used by businesspeople and

theoreticians of business. When they speak about,

for example, customers’ loyalty, they do not seem to

Mane Hajdin teaches philosophy at the Dominican University of

California. He is the author of The Boundaries of Moral

Discourse (1994) and The Law of Sexual Harassment:

A Critique (2002), co-author (with Linda LeMoncheck) of

Sexual Harassment: A Debate (1997), and the editor of

The Notion of Equality (2001).

Journal of Business Ethics (2005) 59: 259–280 � Springer 2005

DOI 10.1007/s10551-005-3438-4

mean anything more than the customers’ disposition

to repeatedly buy the products or services of a par-

ticular business. Somebody’s buying the same tooth-

paste every time out of a thoughtless habit thus counts

as loyalty in the jargon of business. That, however, is

not what we mean by ‘loyalty’ outside that special

jargon, and it is not what will be meant by ‘loyalty’

here. If somebody ‘hangs out’ with me regularly out

of nothing but a thoughtless habit, that certainly does

not make him a loyal friend. Loyalty, in the sense in

which the word will be used here (which is also its

principal everyday sense) is something that the person

who has it consciously recognizes as such.

Also, loyalty in this sense is something that involves

emotions: conduct that results from purely rational

deliberations, uncoloured by emotions, does not

count as a manifestation of loyalty in the sense that is

relevant here.2 Thus, an employee who continues

working for a particular employer for a long time

solely because his entitlements to retirement benefits

won’t be vested until so many years of service is not

loyal in the sense that is relevant here (although he,

again, may be said to be loyal in the sense in which the

word is sometimes used in the jargon of business).

Duska’s article is about the issue of whether

employees should have loyalty to their employers.

Given that my article takes Duska’s as its starting

point, it is written as an article on that specific issue.

However, Duska’s argument, if sound, would have

proven not only that it is misguided for employees to

be loyal to their employers, but also that loyalty in

business is out of place more generally. That is, most

of what he says about the relation between employers

and employees applies equally well to the relations

between consumers and businesses, and the relations

among businesspeople. The same is true of the dis-

cussion in this article: although the article is written as

one about the (putative) loyalty of employees to their

employers, the arguments made mutatis mutandis apply

to other business relations, and the article can thus be

read as an article about loyalty in business generally.

The inherently problematic character of

loyalty

Suppose that X says ‘‘I am loyal to my friend Y’’.

How would we find out whether X is telling the

truth or lying? It is probably uncontroversial that if

we noticed that X never, ever spends any time with

Y, never takes any interest in Y’s affairs, never helps

Y when Y needs help, and so forth, we would after a

while be entitled to conclude that X is not really

loyal to Y. We would be entitled to conclude that

even more readily if we discovered that X gossips

maliciously about Y, or plots against Y. But suppose

that nothing like that is the case. In fact, we observe

X spending time with Y and conversing at length

with Y, or helping Y in various ways, or defending

Y in conversations with third parties. Do such obser-

vations entitle us to conclude that X is loyal to Y?

Take first the observation of X spending time in a

lengthy, witty conversation with Y. That may be a

manifestation of X’s loyalty to Y, but it needn’t be.

It may be that X at that point simply wishes to be

engaged in as witty a conversation as possible, and Y

happens to be the wittiest conversationalist around.

If that is the case, then X’s being engaged in that

conversation with Y is not at all a sign of X’s loyalty

to Y: X is selecting Y as the conversation partner on

the basis of the criterion of maximizing wittiness,

and loyalty plays no role in that selection. Thus, in

order for the observation of this conversation to

count in support of X’s claim of loyalty to Y, we

need to know that X did not select Y as the con-

versation partner on the basis of that criterion. If

we, for example, discover that X could have been

engaged in a conversation with Z, and that X thinks

that a conversation with Z would have been more

witty, but he nevertheless chooses to converse with

Y, then we shall have a reason to regard this con-

versation as evidence of X’s loyalty to Y.

Similar reasoning applies to the observation of X

helping Y. X might be helping Y simply because X

is a generally charitable person and X thinks that Y is

the most in need of help, of all people that X could

help at that time. In such a case we may commend X

for being charitable, but we won’t count that as

evidence of X’s loyalty to Y. On the other hand, if

X would acknowledge that there are people who are

more in need of help than Y, but nevertheless

chooses to help Y, then X’s help will count as evi-

dence of loyalty.

X’s defending Y in front of third parties should be

analyzed in the same way. X may be defending Y

simply because X thinks that Y is right and that the

respect for truth or justice thus requires that Y be

defended. That may be a very good thing, but it

260 Mane Hajdin

would not be a manifestation of loyalty to Y. We

shall, however, find a manifestation of loyalty in X’s

defending Y if it turns out that X does not think that

Y is right (or, at least, that X is unsure whether Y is

right) and chooses to defend Y anyway.

Other kinds of loyalty are subject to analogous

analyses. Suppose that X regularly attends the games

of a particular sports team, takes interest in its affairs,

supports it, expresses admiration for the skills of its

players, and so forth. Such behaviour does not on

its own constitute evidence that X is a loyal fan of

that team. It may be that it is X’s considered opinion

that this is the best team in that particular sport, and

that X attends its games, and otherwise takes interest

in it, simply because X wants to see the sport in its

best form (with the corollary that if this team ceased

to be the best, X’s interest would turn to whichever

other team then became the best one). In that case, X

is not a loyal fan of the team. On the other hand, if X

behaves that way while acknowledging that another

team may be better, we have evidence of loyalty.

What emerges from these considerations is that

loyalty, by definition, overrides the criteria (norms,

standards, values, etc.) that would otherwise govern

one’s choices. The criteria that are overridden are

sometimes moral (as in the example of helping a

friend even though it is acknowledged somebody

else needs help more), and sometimes nonmoral (as in

the example of supporting a sports team even though

it is acknowledged that another team is better, in

which loyalty overrides some quasi-aesthetic criteria of

sporting excellence). Loyalty thus, by its nature, leads

us away from what should otherwise be done. Because

of that, loyalty is inherently in need of justification.

In that respect, loyalty is similar to punishment.

Punishment, by definition, involves doing something

that would otherwise be wrong. The very concept of

punishment thus creates a need for a theory of pun-

ishment, a theory that will explain how something

that is otherwise wrong is nevertheless right when

done by way of punishment. The concept of loyalty

analogously creates a need for a theory that will

explain how doing something other than what should

otherwise be done can be a good thing when it is a

manifestation of loyalty.

We can appreciate this inherently problematic

nature of loyalty even better if we notice that the

concept of loyalty is very close to the concept of

bias.3 Bias, just like loyalty, is an attitude that dif-

ferentiates among people, groups, institutions, etc.,

in a way that overrides the criteria that would other-

wise govern one’s choices. This creates a need for

an explanation of why we in some cases call such an

overriding attitude bias and regard it as bad, while in

others we call it loyalty and regard it as good.

This inherently problematic nature of loyalty is not

sufficiently appreciated in our thinking about it. All

too often it is taken for granted that loyalty is (at least

prima facie) a good thing and that it is just a result of

unfortunate contingent facts that we sometimes find

ourselves in the situations in which loyalty is at odds

with other normative considerations. The above dis-

cussion, however, shows that such conflicts are not

merely contingent and marginal to what loyalty is.

There is a conceptual connection between loyalty and

such overriding of other norms, standards, values, and

so forth: the very point of the concept of loyalty is to

label something that overrides the considerations that

would otherwise govern our choices. When loyalty

pushes us in the same direction as other criteria, loyalty

is idle, redundant.4 If loyalty were always in harmony

with other considerations, we would not have the

concept to loyalty.

Justifications of loyalty

In spite of its inherently problematic nature, loyalty

can be justified. The justifications, however, have to

be given separately for each kind of loyalty.5

Take first the loyalty to one’s friends, which is

probably the least controversial form of loyalty.

That loyalty can be justified by pointing out that

friendships are impossible without loyalty. If X

claimed to be Y’s friend, but showed no signs

whatsoever of loyalty to Y, we would probably

say that X is not really Y’s friend, in the narrow,

strong sense of the word ‘friend’, in which friends

are something distinct from mere acquaintances or

the people one ‘hangs out with’. Once it is agreed

that loyalty is necessary for friendships, in that

strong sense, the next step in the argument will be

to show that such friendships are valuable, and that

there is no substitute for their value that does not

involve loyalty. The way in which one would

develop that step in the argument would depend

Employee Loyalty 261

on one’s general theoretical commitments. Some

people may, for example, argue that friendships are

an irreplaceable component of a well-rounded

human life or an indispensable aspect of human

flourishing. Others would argue that friendships

are an important source of preference-satisfaction

and that human psychology is such that it is

extremely unlikely that a person would be able to

obtain the same amount of preference-satisfaction

from an alternative source. The details of these

arguments may be quite complex, but their outline

is fairly clear, and it is likely that almost everybody

will agree with some such argument.

On the other hand, if we attempt to construct a

similar argument about, say, racists’ bias in favour of

their race, it is unlikely that we shall be successful. It

may be true that racist biases are necessary for a

certain kind of communal life (e.g. the kind of life

that was widespread among white people in the

South of the United States until a few decades ago),

but it is difficult to see on what ground that precise

form of life would be regarded as more valuable than

its alternatives that do not involve racism. Because

the attempt at such a justification fails in his case, we

call the attitude that favours one’s race a bias, and not

loyalty.6

In between the examples of friendship and racism

are some controversial ones where the attempt at a

justification of loyalty neither clearly succeeds nor

clearly fails. For example, some people would argue

that loyalty to sports teams is necessary for appreci-

ating the sports in a particular way, i.e. to appreci-

ating them from the perspective of a fan, and that

appreciating them from such a perspective is superior

to the way in which a more neutral observer may

appreciate them.7 Others would disagree, and de-

fend the perspective of a neutral observer of sports

as superior to what they regard as the biased view

of team fans. Neither of these positions is obviously

mistaken; we have here an issue on which thoughtful

people can reasonably disagree. Thoughtful people can

similarly disagree on whether loyalty to one’s own

country (patriotism) is justified (e.g. on the ground that

attachment to a particular political community is

indispensable for human flourishing) or it is better that

we all support whichever countries’ institutions, laws,

policies, and so forth satisfy some neutral criteria.

Complex arguments can be (and, indeed, have

been) developed on many of these topics. The details

of these arguments are, however, not relevant to the

purposes of this article; what is relevant is to

appreciate that the arguments are specific to their

respective subject-matters. This means that one’s

agreeing that particular kinds of loyalty (e.g. loyalty

to friends) are justified does not provide any ground

whatsoever for thinking that another kind of puta-

tive loyalty (e.g. loyalty to sports teams) is also jus-

tified. Each possible subject-matter of loyalty needs

to be argued about separately.8

The general remarks about loyalty that have been

made so far should put into perspective any discussion

that people may have about loyalty to businesses. In

particular, they show that the burden of proof in such

discussions is on the defenders of loyalty. As loyalty

is inherently suspect, the defenders of loyalty in a

particular area have to show that there is something

about that particular area that overcomes the pre-

sumption against loyalty. The defenders of loyalty to

businesses thus have to prove that this particular kind

of loyalty enables us to achieve something valuable

that cannot be achieved without loyalty.

The opponents of employees’ loyalty to employers,

strictly speaking, do not initially owe anybody an

argument for their position. The baseline of discus-

sions about loyalty, that loyalty is inherently suspect,

counts in their favour. An opponent of loyalty to

employers, such as Duska, could, in principle, simply

sit back and wait for the defenders of loyalty to come

up with arguments for their position, and then refute

these arguments as they are made.

Duska, however, did not take that wait-and-see

strategy, but rather tried to affirmatively argue that

employees’ loyalty to businesses is unjustified. The

article in which he tried to do that, however, leaves

it somewhat unclear what precisely its crucial argu-

ment is. The text arguably allows at least four pos-

sible ways of reconstructing the argument:

(1) Loyalty is appropriate only in those relation-

ships that demand self-sacrifice without

expectation of reward; employee–employer

relationships are not of that nature.

(2) Loyalty requires reciprocity; employers will not

reciprocate employees’ (attempts at) loyalty.

(3) Loyalty is incompatible with the commercial

character of the employee–employer rela-

tionship, i.e. with the fact that both parties to

it are aiming at a monetary payoff.

262 Mane Hajdin

(4) Loyalty is incompatible with the fact that the

employee–employer relationship is, for both

parties, merely an instrument for accomplish-

ing something outside the relationship (i.e.

that the parties do not aim at the flourishing of

the relationship itself for its own sake).

I shall now proceed to discuss each of these four

possible reconstructions of the argument separately.

Loyalty and self-sacrifice

The first of the four reconstructions of the argument

was formulated and discussed by John Corvino.9 He

reached the conclusion that, so reconstructed, Dus-

ka’s argument is unsound. The gist of Corvino’s

criticism is that the claim that loyalty is appropriate

only in the relationships that demand self-sacrifice

without expectation of reward, will be true only if

one takes ‘‘self-sacrifice’’ in a relatively loose sense,

but that if one takes ‘‘self-sacrifice’’ in that loose

sense then it could be argued that (contrary to the

other premise of the reconstructed argument) the

employee–employer relationships also demand self-

sacrifice. On the other hand, if one takes ‘‘self-sac-

rifice’’ in a more stringent sense, then it will be true

that employment relationship does not demand self-

sacrifice, but false that loyalty is appropriate only to

the relationships that require self-sacrifice. There

thus isn’t a single interpretation of ‘‘self-sacrifice’’

that makes both premises of the reconstructed

argument true.

I shall, however, not focus here on Corvino’s

refutation of the argument. Rather, I want to raise

the more basic question of whether his reconstruc-

tion of Duska’s argument really captures what is

important about the argument. Consider the premise

that loyalty is appropriate only in the relationships

that demand self-sacrifice without expectation of

reward. ‘‘Self-sacrifice’’ appears to be in it simply a

dramatic term for anything that is at odds with

what one regards as one’s immediate self-interest.

‘‘Reward’’ presumably stands for a specific reward

that would be directly tied to a particular sacrifice.

In other words, the clause ‘‘without expectation of

reward’’ is presumably meant to rule out a certain

kind of self-interested accounting of costs and ben-

efits of the relationship, but is not meant to rule out

the expectations that the relationships of loyalty will

be, on the whole, fulfilling. (Without that qualifi-

cation, it would be difficult to ever come up with a

justification of any kind of loyalty, as even friend-

ships are normally expected to be, on the whole,

fulfilling.) What the premise thus amounts to is that

loyalty is appropriate only in the relationships that

demand that one sometimes go against what one

regards as one’s immediate self-interest without

expecting that one will be specifically rewarded for

doing so in that particular case. Now, we do not

normally use the word ‘‘demand’’ if what is

‘‘demanded’’ accords with what one regards as one’s

immediate self-interest or carries a specific reward.

Thus the words ‘self-sacrifice without expectation of

reward’ in Corvino’s reconstruction of Duska’s

argument merely spell out what is, if not implied,

then at least implicated (in the Gricean sense) by the

verb ‘‘demand’’.

The next step in analyzing this premise of the

reconstruction of the argument is to note that using

‘‘relationships’’ as the grammatical subject of ‘‘demand’’

obscures what precisely the ground of the demand-

ing is. Suppose that an evil emperor writes the rules

for service in his army in such a way that great

sacrifices are demanded of the soldiers. We could

then say that the relationship between the soldier

and the emperor demands that the soldiers make

the sacrifices. But that surely can’t be the kind of

demanding that Duska has in mind, otherwise it

would be all too easy for employers to defeat his

argument, by simply proclaiming that loyalty is

demanded of the employees (which many employ-

ers, in fact, do). So, ‘‘demand’’ in this premise must

mean something like justifiably demand or impose

justified demands.

What remains to be noted is that the word

‘‘appropriate’’ in this premise is not very different in

meaning from ‘‘justified’’ or perhaps ‘‘justified by the

nature of the relationship’’. When all these results of

analyzing the premise are combined, it turns out that

it says that loyalty is justified by the nature of the

relationship only if the relationship imposes justified

demands. That is, in turn, not significantly different

from saying that loyalty is justified when it is justified.

This means that one of the two premises of the

syllogism that Corvino presents as the reconstruction

of Duska’s argument is vacuous, and thus isn’t doing

any substantive work in the argument. So, if Corvino’s

Employee Loyalty 263

reconstruction of the argument were accurate, then

the argument would be trivial, and wouldn’t be able to

play any real role in a substantive discussion of loyalty.

Of course, it could still be that Duska has some

further argument in support of the other premise, and

Corvino’s article acknowledges that this is in fact the

case. What Corvino does not realize is that these

other arguments are the ones doing all the work, and

that the syllogism he has focused on in his recon-

struction is not doing any.

I shall thus set aside his reconstruction as not

capturing what is important about Duska’s article,

and proceed to discuss the other three reconstruc-

tions, which are more promising.

Loyalty and reciprocity

Duska observes at a couple of places in his article that

employers are generally not loyal to their employees.

He thus says that ‘‘[t]hroughout history companies in

a pinch feel no obligation of loyalty’’,10 and that

‘‘[t]here is nothing as pathetic as the story of the loyal

employee who, having given above and beyond the

call of duty, is let go in the restructuring of the

company’’.11 If this is at least a part of his argument

(and it appears to be), then the argument assumes

that loyalty requires reciprocity.12 When that

assumption is stated, we get what I have listed above

as the second reconstruction of the argument.

Is one warranted in assuming that loyalty requires

reciprocity? With respect to some kinds of loyalty,

such as the loyalty between friends, the assumption

certainly seems plausible. If X claims to be loyal to

Y, whom he calls a ‘‘friend’’, in spite of Y’s making

it abundantly clear that he has no loyalty whatsoever

to X, then we would probably say that X’s con-

tinuing feelings of loyalty to Y are out of place,

misguided, or, to use Duska’s word, ‘‘pathetic’’.13

Depending on the details of Y’s behaviour, we may,

in some such cases, not only decline to praise X for

loyalty, but also affirmatively criticize X for being a

human ‘‘doormat’’.

There seem to be, however, some other kinds of

loyalty in which it is not obvious that reciprocity

is required. Consider patriotism, the loyalty to a

country (or a nation, or a state), which many people

regard as justified. It is not at all clear whether the

belief that individuals are justified in being loyal to

their countries commits one to believing that the

countries are loyal to their citizens. Indeed, it is

debatable whether such a belief would be even

intelligible. As discussed above, being loyal implies

having a certain kind of an emotional attitude, and

countries are simply incapable of having such atti-

tudes. Moreover, even if we set the problem of

emotions aside and focus only on the acts, it is dif-

ficult to think of acts that could be performed by a

country (nation, state) and that would count as

manifestations of loyalty. To be sure, we do expect

that the political and legal systems of a country will

treat the citizens justly, and (depending on what

political theory we espouse) we may also expect

them to enhance the welfare of the citizens, or to

create the conditions conducive to the citizens’

virtue, and so forth. But, to the extent to which

these expectations are justified, what justifies them

are norms that do not involve the notion of loyalty.

We expect justice from our political and legal system

because justice is itself valuable; we do not expect it

as a favour that is dispensed to us as objects of loyalty.

Some countries do go to considerable lengths to

protect the interests of their citizens abroad, and to

some people such measures may appear to be man-

ifestations of loyalty. But, while that is true of some

countries, notably the United States, the expatriate

citizens of many other countries do not expect such

support, and yet it is not obvious that this fact, on its

own, makes it unjustified for them to be patriotic.

Of course, all of these considerations about

countries not being loyal to their citizens are directly

relevant only to those who think that the individ-

uals’ loyalty to their countries is justified. As has been

noted above, it is, in fact, controversial whether

this is so. Some people may thus take these consid-

erations as yet another reason for thinking that

patriotism is unjustified, rather than as proving that

loyalty does not require reciprocity.14

Let us then consider another example: loyalty to a

religion. While the matter is, again, not beyond

controversy, many people would argue that what

distinguishes a truly religious person from somebody

who accepts religious beliefs in a purely intellectual

manner is precisely that the truly religious person

has made a commitment to a particular religion, a

commitment that precludes continuous critical

reexamination of the religion. A person who made

such a commitment and lives accordingly can be

264 Mane Hajdin

aptly characterized as being loyal to the religion.

That loyalty may turn out to be unjustified for

various reasons, but it does not seem that among the

reasons that would make it unjustified is the reli-

gion’s failure to be loyal to its adherents. In the first

place, it is rather unclear what would count as the

religion’s being loyal to its adherents. Second, even if

we do envisage some acts of religious communities

or institutions, or perhaps of the God himself (or

gods themselves) that could arguably be regarded as

manifestations of loyalty to the faithful, it is not

obvious that they are necessary in order to justify the

loyalty of the faithful to the religion. There can be a

religion that requires that its adherents manifest their

loyalty by all manner of sacrifices, without that

loyalty being in any way reciprocated by the reli-

gion, its deities, communities or institutions. Such a

religion may strike the outsiders as rather unap-

pealing, but there doesn’t seem to be anything about

the concept of loyalty that would make a person’s

loyalty to it incomprehensible.15

Or consider loyalty to pet animals. Many people

claim to be loyal to their pets, and such claims are

perfectly intelligible and often believable. People

treat their pets in the ways characteristic of loyalty

(e.g. they spend time with their pets even though

there are other animals around that are otherwise

equally or more worthy of spending time with, they

use their resources to help their pets even though

other animals are more in need of help). People’s

emotional attitudes to their pets are also of the kind

typical for loyalty. All this is true even when the

animals in question do not reciprocate the loyalty,

and even when they are incapable of reciprocating it.

Admittedly, it is often claimed that dogs are loyal to

the humans they live with; indeed such attitudes of

dogs are sometimes referred to as the paradigm of

loyalty. But even if it is granted that this is so with

respect to dogs, the claims of loyalty would still be

quite implausible when made on behalf of the ani-

mals of various other species that can be pets. So the

loyalty to such pets appears to be a counterexample

to the thesis that loyalty requires reciprocity.

Considered on its own, none of these examples is

conclusive, because with respect to each of them it is

possible to argue that the loyalty I have invoked is

not justified after all, or that it is not genuine loyalty.

But the cumulative effect of all of them is that it

becomes quite difficult to sustain the thesis that

loyalty requires reciprocity. (The three counterex-

amples I have used here are probably not the only

ones that could be found). Somebody who wants

to insist that loyalty does require reciprocity has to

rule out all counterexamples to it, and that may be

difficult to do convincingly. Accepting only recip-

rocated loyalty as justified may end up narrowing

the scope of loyalty in a way that will be too much

at odds with how we normally use the concept of

loyalty.

Because what I have presented as the second

possible reconstruction of Duska’s argument has the

premise that loyalty requires reciprocity, the argu-

ment would not be very convincing, if that recon-

struction captured all there is to the argument. But

maybe it doesn’t; there are still two more recon-

structions to examine.

Loyalty and commerce

Duska writes:

The cold hard truth is that the goal of profit is what

gives birth to a company and forms that particular

group. Money is what ties the group together. But in

such a commercialized venture, with such a goal there is

no loyalty, or at least none need be expected. An

employer will release an employee and an employee

will walk away from an employer when it is profitable

to do so. That’s business. It is perfectly permissible.16

This passage and a number of related remarks else-

where in the article leave the impression that

Duska’s argument is that the commercial character of

business is incompatible with loyalty, and that that’s

why loyalty cannot be justified in business relation-

ships. That includes the relationship of employment,

which is commercial in that both parties enter it for

the sake of a monetary payoff: employees work in

order to get their wages, while employers hire them

in order to make a profit.

Before examining how convincing the argument,

in this reconstruction, is, it needs to be noted that

Duska’s views on the commercial character of busi-

ness have somewhat changed since the publication of

the article that is under discussion here. In this article

he writes of business as something ‘‘whose primary

reason for existence is the making of profit’’17 and also

says that ‘‘[t]he making of a profit … is the primary

function of a business as a business’’.18 In a later article

Employee Loyalty 265

he draws the distinction between the purpose of

business and the motivations that individuals have for

engaging in business. He argues there that the purpose

of business is not profit, but rather the provision of

goods and services, and that profit is only what

motivates individuals to engage in business.19 In that

later article he makes it clear that he now regards the

views expressed in the article on loyalty that I am

analyzing here as mistaken insofar as they failed to

distinguish the purpose of business from the motiva-

tion for engaging in it, and treated the latter as if it

were the former.20 While that change of mind on

Duska’s part is noteworthy, I take it that it was

intended to imply merely a refinement and not a

withdrawal of the idea, expressed in the earlier

article, that the commercial character of business is

incompatible with loyalty. That idea can seem

plausible to many people, even if they agree with

Duska’s later argument that what makes business

commercial are the motivations of participants and

not its purpose. We should, however, keep that later

argument in mind as we continue our discussion of

the earlier article.

The first objection that may occur to someone

when presented with this reconstruction of the

argument is that wages are generally not the only

thing that motivates people to take up jobs rather

than remain unemployed, even though they may be

the crucial one. A desire for, say, escaping boredom,

or for social interaction, or for learning something

about a particular subject-matter may also play a

role.21 More pertinently, wages are not the only

motivation, and are very often not even the crucial

motivation for taking up a particular job rather than

some other available job. If wages were the only

motivation guiding people’s choices of employment,

then everybody would take up the most highly paid

job of all the jobs that are available to him. That is

manifestly not what actually takes place. In choosing

between two jobs, one often takes up a less well paid

one, if it is less onerous, or less stressful, or more

interesting, or more challenging, or at a location that

provides for a shorter commute, or in more pleasant

surroundings, and so forth. The decision on what

job to take may be the result of a combination of a

large number of considerations of which the amount

of wages is only one.

All this is probably obvious, and I doubt that

anybody would want to deny it. It can, however, be

responded to these observations that although ben-

efits other than cash play a role in people’s decisions

about employment, many of these other benefits

have monetary equivalents. Suppose that you can

choose between two jobs that are identical in every

respect except that one of them requires you to

spend one hour per day commuting while the other

one is further away, and thus requires you to spend

two hours commuting, but is better paid. Which job

would you take? The answer is, obviously, that it

depends on how much more the second job is paid.

If the annual salary for it were only, say, $100 higher,

you would, without hesitation, take the job that is

closer by. If the salary difference were $100000 you

would probably eagerly accept the better paid job

even though it is further away. Somewhere in

between these amounts is the amount at which you

would be indifferent between the two jobs. Suppose

that in your case that amount is $5000, that is, that as

long as the salary difference is below $5000 you

would take the job that is closer by, as long as it is

greater than $5000 you would take the one that is

further away, and if it is exactly $5000 you would be

indifferent between the two. In that case, it can be

said that to you the value of saving one hour of

commute time per day is the equivalent of $5000

annually. The same reasoning can be applied to

various other features of jobs that can influence a

person’s decision as to what job to take. Because of

the availability of this kind of analysis, it can be said

that a rational person is, in choosing a job, seeking to

maximize the total payoff, which is in principle

expressible in monetary terms, even though some

components of that payoff are not actually paid in

cash. To the extent to which various aspects of a job

can be analyzed in this way, taking up a job is an

economic matter. If taking up a job involves quitting

a job that one already has, then the various incon-

veniences of changing jobs will also have to be taken

into account, but it can be argued that their presence

does not radically change the character of the

deliberation: the inconveniences can, in principle, be

given monetary values, which will then be sub-

tracted from whatever payoffs the new job promises.

Even if one agrees with that, one may still wonder

precisely why the commercial character of employ-

ment is incompatible with loyalty. Duska does not

spell that out, but a possible elaboration of the

argument could go like this. Money is, as a matter of

266 Mane Hajdin

conceptual necessity, fungible. This $100, viewed as

money, is interchangeable with any other $100.

Anybody who does not understand that, does not

understand what money is. Given that employees

view employers as sources of monetary payoffs, this

makes different employers, from the perspective of

the employees, interchangeable, as long as the pay-

offs are the same. For the same reason, employees are

interchangeable from the perspective of employers.

On the other hand, something one is loyal to is not

interchangeable with otherwise similar entities. That

too is a conceptual matter: the concept of loyalty

rules out such interchangeability.

Thus elaborated, the argument, in its third

reconstruction, may at first appear to be quite strong.

The problem with the argument is, however, that

there is no logical incompatibility between some-

thing being interchangeable on one ground and not

being interchangeable on another ground. Entities

that are interchangeable so far as one set of reasons

goes, may not be interchangeable after all, because of

another set of reasons. In such cases the reasons that

preclude interchangeability will simply trump the

others, without any logical inconsistency.22 There is

thus no logical inconsistency in saying that employers

are interchangeable so far as the commercial character

of employment goes, but that there could be some

other set of considerations that precludes them from

being interchangeable after all.

The argument, in its third reconstruction, could

avoid this problem only if it were assumed that the

commercial aspects of the employment relationship

make it unjustified for there to be any other aspects

to these relationships. In other words, the argument

works only if it is assumed that it being true that

many motivations that govern a rational person’s

decisions about taking up employment are analyz-

able in the commercial fashion that has been out-

lined above, somehow entails that all motivations

that lead a rational person to take up employment

must be so analyzed. Duska appears to endorse such

an assumption in saying that ‘‘[t]he commercializa-

tion of work dissolves the type of relationship that

requires loyalty’’.23 The assumption is, however,

unwarranted.

As a particularly vivid example of a relationship

that may have significant economic aspects, and

yet also have other aspects that make it a relation-

ship of strong loyalty, consider 1950s middle-class

marriage in the United States. A young woman

contemplating such a marriage in a way that was

typical at the time took it for granted that she would

stop working when she got married, and that she

would be supported by her husband for the rest of

her life. Her decision regarding whom to marry thus

had important economic ramifications. Whatever

else a husband might be to such a woman, he would

be an important source of a monetary payoff. It was

thus reasonable for the woman to consider how

good a ‘‘provider’’ a potential husband was likely to

be (i.e. the magnitude of the payoff). Her family and

peers probably expected and encouraged her to take

such matters into account in her decision regarding

whom to marry. Nevertheless, the woman (and

everybody else) also assumed that, once she got

married, her relationship to her chosen husband

would be one of utmost loyalty. Now, there may be

a great deal that is unattractive about this approach to

marriages, and we may all rejoice in the fact that it

has largely disappeared, but what is relevant to my

argument is that this approach to marriages did

manage to combine monetary considerations with

loyalty. We do not think that the fact that monetary

considerations played a role in a woman’s choice of a

husband somehow made it out of place for her to be

loyal to her chosen husband. The marriages of that

kind had economic aspects, but they also had other

aspects, and these other aspects made these marriages

relationships of loyalty. Many of the present-day,

more balanced marriages, in which both partners

have comparable jobs, can illustrate the same point,

albeit less vividly. As long as the spouses do not

maintain entirely separate finances, a marriage is

likely to have some economic aspects, and yet

nobody thinks that these economic aspects render

the loyalty in marriage unjustified.

The mere fact that employment is a commercial

relationship therefore does not entail that it cannot

have other, noncommercial aspects as well. Duska

himself, in a way, allows for that by saying that

the ‘‘primary reason for existence [of businesses] is

the making of profit’’:24 the word ‘‘primary’’ clearly

leaves open the possibility of there being other

aspects of businesses. But once that is acknowl-

edged, it follows that the argument, in its third

reconstruction, does not accomplish its purpose. If

there is going to be an argument that proves that

loyalty is out of place in employment, it has to do

Employee Loyalty 267

something other than just point out that employ-

ment is a commercial relationship.

Loyalty and instruments

The principal basis for the fourth reconstruction of

Duska’s argument is the following passage of his article:

A company is an instrument, and an instrument with a

specific purpose, the making of profit. To treat an

instrument as an end in itself, like a person, may not be

as bad as treating an end as an instrument, but it does

give the instrument a moral status it does not deserve,

and by elevating the instrument we lower the end.25

Insofar as this passage refers to the making of profit as

the purpose of a company, it can be treated as merely

another formulation of the idea that I have already

discussed in the preceding section. In this section,

however, I intend to set aside profit, and focus on

the claim that businesses, and thus employers, are

instruments leaving it open as to what precisely they

are instruments for.

The claim that employers are instruments can

accommodate much more comfortably the wide

range of motivations that people may have in taking

up jobs, than the claim about the commercial

character of business that was discussed in the pre-

ceding section. For example, a scientist’s taking up a

particular job because it provides good conditions

for the pursuit of (what the scientist regards as)

intrinsically valuable scientific research, or an artist’s

taking up a job because it provides good conditions

for the pursuit of (what the artist regards as) intrin-

sically valuable art, fit very well the claim that

employers are instruments, while considerable

argumentative manoeuvring would be necessary to

present these motivations as commercial in nature.26

How does the claim that employers are instruments

support the thesis that they are not proper objects of

loyalty? Duska, again, does not fully spell that out,27

but we can elaborate the argument as follows. First,

the very notion of an instrument implies that

instruments do not matter in themselves but only

insofar as they accomplish whatever they are

instruments for. This, in turn, implies that instru-

ments are interchangeable as long as they accomplish

equally well whatever they are instruments for. An

object of loyalty is, on the other hand, as has already

been observed above, not interchangeable with

similar entities. Therefore, an instrument cannot be

an object of loyalty.

It can thus be said that, even though an artist who

is looking for a job may be more interested in good

conditions for the pursuit of intrinsically valuable art

than in money, different employers are, from the

artist’s position still interchangeable: one employer

will do as well as another, as long as it provides

equally good conditions for artistic pursuits. The

aims that one has in taking up a job, be they wages

or good conditions for artistic creativity, are outside

the job itself, and that’s what makes employers

interchangeable. That is very different from what we

find in the relationships of loyalty. The aim of, say,

friendship is within the friendship itself, and that

precludes friends from being interchangeable with

similar persons. One interacts with a friend in a

friendly way in order that the friendship may

flourish, not for the sake of some output that is

external to the relationship itself.

This reconstruction of the argument, although

different in content, is similar in structure to the one

that was discussed in the preceding section, and one’s

first reaction to it may thus be to try to criticize it by

adapting to it the argument of the preceding section.

One may point out that something may be an

instrument in some respects and also intrinsically

valuable in other respects, and query whether the

employer’s being instruments implies that they are

nothing but instruments. I shall, however, not

pursue that line of criticism and shall grant, for the

sake of argument, that it is true that businesses (and

thus employers)28 are nothing but instruments.

In order to examine whether the argument, so

reconstructed, is convincing, let us take a more careful

look at the claim that an object of loyalty is not

interchangeable with otherwise similar entities. That

precise claim is indeed impossible to doubt, but it, as

stated, applies only if one takes it as given that the

relevant relationship of loyalty is already established. It

does not apply at the point at which one is deciding

whether to enter a relationship of loyalty. More

generally, it does not apply when we think of our

loyalties without taking it as given what specifically

the objects of the loyalties are. Let’s take as an example

loyalty to friends. If one is truly loyal to a particular

person as a friend, then nobody will do as a replace-

ment for that person, not even the person’s identical

268 Mane Hajdin

twin. In that respect, loyalty to friends rules out

interchangeability. But it is also true that, if one had

lived in different cities, went to different schools, at-

tended different social gatherings etc., one wouldn’t

have met the people who actually became one’s

friends. One would have met different people instead,

and some of these different people would have likely

become one’s friends. It is quite possible that these

alternative friendships would have been as fulfilling as

the friendships one actually established.29 When one

thinks of friendships from that perspective, one real-

izes that the people who actually became one’s friends

were, in a way, replaceable, before they became one’s

friends. In that respect, loyalty does not rule out

interchangeability. Let us call this kind of inter-

changeability, which is compatible with loyalty,

interchangeability ex ante (because it precedes the for-

mation of loyalty), to distinguish it from the inter-

changeability that loyalty does rule out, which we may

call interchangeability ex post.

It should be noted that this observation, that

friends are replaceable ex ante, does not imply the

much stronger, utilitarian idea that friendships can

be analyzed as simply sources of utility and that all

sources of utility are, in principle, interchangeable

as long as the amount of utility they generate is the

same.30 One can take the nonutilitarian view that

the fulfillment found in friendships is not, even in

principle, interchangeable with the joys, satisfac-

tions, pleasures, etc., that can be found in other

aspects of human life, and still accept the observa-

tion that the fulfillment one finds in the particular

friendships with one set of people was ex ante

replaceable with the fulfillment one could have

found in the friendships with another set of people.

The observation about interchangeability ex ante in

friendship is compatible with a wide range of dif-

ferent accounts of what makes friendships valuable.

A question may be raised whether the distinction

between interchangeability ex ante and ex post can

be applied to all relationships of loyalty. Some rela-

tionships that arguably involve loyalty are relation-

ships that one is born into. One, for example, starts

one’s life as a citizen of a particular country, or a

member of a particular family. Whether one can

meaningfully take the ex ante perspective to such

relationships would be an interesting question to

explore. I shall, however, not discuss that potentially

controversial question, because it is sufficient for my

purposes that there is one type of loyalty, namely

loyalty to friends, to which the distinction does apply

and of which we can say that it is compatible with

interchangeability ex ante. That establishes that the

concept of loyalty does not rule out such inter-

changeability.

This qualification of the relationship between

loyalty and interchangeability requires that we take a

closer look at the claim that the instrumental character

of employment implies interchangeability. Various

instruments are certainly interchangeable ex ante, but

are they all interchangeable ex post? Many examples

that may readily come to one’s mind suggest that the

answer is yes. If I am writing something with my ball-

point pen, and then mislay it somewhere, I can easily

pick up another ball-point pen of the same type and

continue writing: my switching between the two pens

will make no difference to anything. If I can’t find my

own can-opener, I can borrow somebody else’s can-

opener of the same type; my can-opening will be in no

way affected by the fact that it is carried out by a

borrowed instrument rather than my own (and the

same is true of my subsequent enjoyment of the food).

The instruments such as ball-point pens and can-

openers are thus obviously interchangeable ex post

(after one has had them for a while), just as they were

interchangeable ex ante (at the point of one’s deciding

to buy them).

This may not, however, be true of all instruments.

According to connoisseurs of fountain-pens, the nib

of each pen, over time, subtly adapts to the owner’s

way of writing, and the experience of writing with a

borrowed fountain-pen is therefore not at all the

same as the experience of writing with one’s own,

even if the two pens are of exactly the same model,

fitted with nibs of the same type. In fact, a fountain-

pen user may be reluctant to lend his pen to anyone,

for fear that the nib’s adjustment to his handwriting

will be destroyed by a different use of the pen. If one

accepts this way of thinking about fountain-pens,

one can say that fountain-pens are not inter-

changeable ex post (after a period of use), even

though they are nothing but writing instruments,

which were, as industrially produced objects, clearly

interchangeable ex ante (before anybody started

using them). The same can be said of many tools that

artists use. Musicians, for example, establish complex,

long-term relationships with their instruments, and

replace them very rarely, because the excellence in

Employee Loyalty 269

music performance depends on the subtle ways in

which the artist’s technique and the physical features

of the particular instrument adjust to each other. This

is true even if the instruments in question were readily

replaceable ex ante.

Because of the existence of such examples, we

cannot say that something’s being an instrument, on

its own, implies its being replaceable ex post. This

causes the argument, in its fourth reconstruction, to

fail. As loyalty rules out only interchangeability ex

post, the argument can be valid only if the instru-

mental character of employment also tells us some-

thing about interchangeability ex post. But, as we

have just seen, it doesn’t.

That may, however, not be the end of the

matter. One may agree that the mere fact that

employers are instruments does not on its own give

us interchangeability ex post, and still wonder

whether it might not be nevertheless true that

there is something else about employers that does

make them interchangeable ex post. One can ask:

are employers instruments of the ball-point-pen

kind or instruments of the fountain-pen kind? If

one were able to somehow show that they are the

former, one could hope to be able to repair the

fourth reconstruction so as to get a convincing

argument, after all.

Are employers interchangeable ex post?

One is likely to begin thinking about this question

by noting that a typical person does not change

employers very frequently, and does not make the

decision to do so lightly. An employed person’s

deliberations as to whether to quit his current job

and take up another one, tend to proceed very dif-

ferently than the deliberations of an unemployed

person as to which one of several available jobs to

take. In the terminology we have used before, we

can say that looking at a particular job ex post is

different from looking at it ex ante. This observation

is, however, not on its own sufficient to establish

anything definite as to whether employers are

interchangeable ex post.

First, somebody may argue that people don’t

change jobs often precisely because they have been

manipulated into having an unjustified sense of

loyalty to their employers, or because they are

otherwise irrational. The persuasiveness of that line

of reasoning is, however, limited, because the

reluctance to change jobs casually is far too wide-

spread to be entirely explainable as a manifestation of

irrationality.

Second, it can be argued that people’s reluctance

to change jobs casually can be analyzed in a way that

is compatible with employers’ being interchangeable

ex post. The most frequent reasons for a person’s

reluctance to quit the current job and take up an-

other one, even though the other one may appear

better, are: that there are information costs associated

with figuring out the precise costs and benefits of the

new job (while the costs and benefits of the current

one are already known), that even after one conducts

reasonable research about the new job, one will be

left with some uncertainties about it, and that the

process of ‘‘moving’’ between the jobs and getting

‘‘settled’’ into the new one may involve considerable

inconveniences. None of these reasons proves that

current and new employers are not interchangeable;

it’s just that in thinking about their interchange-

ability we need to take these considerations into

account. The information costs are, after all, just

that, costs, which means that they can be added to

the other costs associated with the new job, as it is

compared with the current one. The costs and

benefits of a potential new job can be discounted in

one’s rational deliberations in a way that will reflect

their uncertainty; such discounted payoffs of the new

job can then be compared with the known payoffs of

the current one. The inconveniences associated with

the change can also be added to the other costs of the

new job, before the comparison between the two is

carried out. All of these considerations favour one’s

existing job, but none of them is an insurmountable

obstacle to interchangeability. The benefits of the

new job may be able to counter all of these con-

siderations, if only they are sufficiently greater than

what the current job provides. This analysis thus fits

well the fact that one does not normally even think

about quitting one’s current job for the sake of an

only very slightly better one, but that people do

change jobs when the new ones are substantially

better than the old ones.

The reasoning outlined in the preceding para-

graph shows that many employers can be regarded as

interchangeable ex post (as well as ex ante) with

similar employers, notwithstanding the empirical fact

270 Mane Hajdin

that people do not change jobs very often. The

question, however, arises whether that reasoning can

be applied to all jobs. Take, for example, the job of a

musician in an orchestra. Performing in a particular

orchestra for a while is bound to colour one’s own

art in all manner of subtle ways. The artistic skills of

different members of an orchestra do not just

develop over time, they develop in the ways that fit

each other. If a musician recognizes the particular

kind of artistic excellence that he has achieved as

something intrinsically valuable, then he will not

regard his membership in a particular orchestra as

interchangeable ex post with membership in

another, similar orchestra. Switching to a different

orchestra is, for a serious musician, not merely an

inconvenience for which he could be readily com-

pensated, say by a higher salary. Serious musicians, of

course, do change their employers from time to

time, but they are likely to approach such changes as

changes in the direction of their development as

artists; they are unlikely to think of them in the way

that can be readily captured by the cost-benefit

analysis of the kind outlined in the preceding para-

graph. It can thus be said that the example of

musicians shows that not all employers are inter-

changeable ex post. If that is so, then the claim that

employers are interchangeable ex post cannot serve

as a premise of any sound argument about loyalty in

employment in general.

There are, however, two objections that can be

made to my argument about musicians, which need

to be examined. The first objection is to argue that

even though musicians themselves do not normally

deliberate whether to stay with a particular orchestra,

or move to a different one, in cost-benefit terms,

nothing prevents us, theoreticians examining this

issue, from reconstructing their deliberations in such

terms. If a musician is unwilling to leave the

orchestra in which he currently performs, even for a

much better pay (and other benefits) elsewhere, that

only shows, so the objection may go, that he hasn’t

been offered enough. There is always something, the

objection may continue, by which even a highly

devoted musician could be tempted to abandon his

current employment, and with it all the subtle

orchestra-specific skills that he has developed there

over time. It is thus, according to this objection, a

mistake to say that preservation and continuation of

the artistry associated with working in a particular

orchestra is beyond cost-benefit calculations. We

should say, instead, that the musician values

continuing to work in the orchestra very, very

highly, but that the valuation is still, in principle,

commensurable with his valuation of other costs and

benefits of working at different places. It is, conse-

quently, always in principle possible to compensate a

musician for abandoning a particular orchestra, even

though the compensation needed may be so high

that it is difficult to provide it in practice. According

to this objection, switching jobs presents a musician,

like everybody else, with certain inconveniences; it’s

just that in the case of a musician these inconve-

niences are much greater. But that’s a difference in

degree, not in kind. The objection thus concludes

that musicians are not a counterexample to the claim

that employers are interchangeable ex post.

The problem with the objection is not that any-

thing in it is erroneous in some definite way. It’s

rather that one has a sense that the objection has

squeezed musicians’ thinking about their employ-

ment very hard to make it fit the mould of

cost-benefit analysis. That is, however, not on its

own a decisive refutation of the objection: some-

times it can be an illuminating exercise to squeeze

the phaenomena into a theoretical framework that,

at first, does not seem to fit them. There may well be

some theoretical purposes for which it is worthwhile

to analyze artists’ approach to their art in cost-benefit

terms, in spite of the unintuitiveness of such analysis.

The problem, however, is that, if one is willing to

extend cost-benefit analysis that far, then the rela-

tionships that unquestionably involve loyalty, such as

friendship, can also be squeezed into its framework.

One can argue that the people who would, under

normal circumstances, never even think of aban-

doning their existing friends, could, under the

hypothetical circumstances that provide huge

temptations, still do so. Considerations of these

hypothetical scenarios can be taken to show that

friendships, in a sense, do have a ‘‘price’’. Moreover,

even under normal circumstances, people often

choose, for various mundane reasons, to move to

places where they will be far away from their

existing friends. While this is not quite the same

things as abandoning or betraying one’s friends, it is a

choice that is often made in full knowledge of the

fact that the distance may prevent the friendships

from being as rich as they would otherwise be, and

Employee Loyalty 271

that it may put some of the friendships at the risk of

‘fizzling out’. In such decisions, the full flourishing

of one’s existing friendships is, in a way, traded for

other benefits, which will typically include the

potential for forming new friendships. This, the

argument may go, shows that even existing friend-

ships are, after all, subject to cost-benefit weighing,

and thus replaceable ex post.

We thus have two possible ways of handling cost-

benefit analyses in this context. One is to keep these

analyses limited to the cases in which they fit well

the actual, conscious thinking of the people

involved. If we take that option, then it will turn out

that neither friends nor musicians’ employers are

interchangeable ex post. Alternatively, we can allow

ourselves to squeeze into the cost-benefit framework

the cases that do not intuitively fit it; under that

approach both friends and musicians’ employers will

turn out to be interchangeable ex post. Under no

approach, do we get the result that musicians’

employers are interchangeable ex post, while friends

are not, which is the result that we would need in

order to repair the fourth reconstruction of Duska’s

argument.

The second possible objection to my argument

about musicians involves distinguishing an orchestra-

qua-orchestra, from orchestra-qua-employer. According

to this objection, what my argument shows is merely

that, as an orchestra, i.e. a body of people unified in

the pursuit of a particular art, one orchestra is not ex

post interchangeable with others. But, the objection

goes, these people could be equally well unified

in the pursuit of art if none of them was paid any-

thing for his participation. Orchestra-qua-orchestra

and orchestra-qua-employer are thus two distinct

facets of a commercially organized orchestra. As an

employer, an orchestra is to its musicians merely a

source of a paycheque, and thus interchangeable

with any other source of a paycheque of equal value.

So analyzed, the objection concludes, my example

of a musician is not a counterexample to the claim

that all employers are interchangeable, both ex ante

and ex post. The objection thus revives the third

reconstruction of Duska’s argument.

The answer to the objection is going to be an

elaboration of what has already been said in dis-

cussing the third reconstruction. The objection

succeeds in defending the claim that employers are

interchangeable ex post, and thus one version of

the argument that they are not proper objects of

loyalty, but it does so at the price of making them

trivial. If one abstracts from everything about an

employer but the fact that it is a source of a pay-

cheque, and if one labels the result of that abstraction

employer-qua-employer, then, yes, it does follow that

employers-qua-employers are interchangeable, and that

they are not proper objects of loyalty. But that follows

only because an employer-qua-employer is a result

of a process of abstraction that has been rigged to

produce something that can’t possibly be an object

of loyalty. By focusing our attention on employers-

qua-employers, this objection evades, rather than

answers, the really important questions about loyalty

in employment. An employee needs to know whether

he should be loyal to his employer sans phrase; telling

him that he shouldn’t be loyal to the employer-qua-

employer does not answer that question. Managers are

going to be unaffected by being told that they cannot

legitimately expect that the employees be loyal to the

employer-qua-employer, as long as there is some other

facet of the employer that does make it a proper object

of loyalty (such as the orchestra-qua-orchestra).

Now that the two objections have been answered,

we can conclude that the case of musicians is a sound

counterexample to the claim that employers are

interchangeable ex post. But once that is accepted,

questions may still be raised as to how much force

should we give to that counterexample in the dis-

cussion about loyalty in employment. Somebody

may agree that the counterexample refutes the claim

that employers are interchangeable ex post, and still

wonder whether that claim could perhaps be quali-

fied in some way that would allow orchestras to be

an exception, while still remaining strong enough to

play a significant role in discussions about loyalty. In

other words, one may wonder whether the case of

musicians is a rare case that could be isolated by some

argumentative manoeuvre, or is representative of

something that could be found in other areas of

employment.

It is fairly certain that what we saw in the case of

musicians does not apply to very simple, routine,

mechanical work, which can be learnt quickly, and

which, once it is learnt, does not allow for significant

differences in degrees of skill. The case of musicians

also cannot be generalized to work that, even if

complex and sophisticated, does not involve signif-

icant interaction with one’s co-employees nor the

272 Mane Hajdin

physical features of the workplace. (The work of a

philosophy professor may be an example.) More-

over, the example of musicians depends on the

assumption that the excellence in musical perfor-

mance is intrinsically valuable; it, therefore, cannot

be representative of work that involves skills that are

not intrinsically valuable. Once all these kinds of

employment are ruled out, many people may be

tempted to conclude that not much is left, and that

the example of musicians is, therefore, an isolated

example.

We should, however, hesitate to draw that

conclusion too quickly. Many jobs that to an

outsider seem simple and easy, may, upon a closer

inspection turn out to be fairly complex and to

require many subtle skills to be done well.31 The

job of a secretary, for example, may seem to be

quite easy when it is described in general terms,

and yet many people (including both secretaries

and those who use secretarial services) would

readily testify that real excellence in secretarial

work is a complex and admirable achievement. All

too often one is, when looking at somebody else’s

work, inclined to say ‘‘that’s so easy; I could do it

myself ’’, and then, upon trying to actually do it,

discover that one, in fact, needs a lot of learning

and practice to do it well.

What kinds of skills are intrinsically valuable can

also be a matter of considerable controversy. For

example, legal work can be regarded as merely an

instrument, and legal skill can consequently be

regarded as of merely instrumental value. People

knowledgeable about law, however, often admire

well crafted legal arguments in a manner that is

not all that different from the manner in which

works of art may be admired, that is, as something

intrinsically valuable. That admiration may be

completely independent of any evaluation of the

ultimate purposes for which the argument is used.

Such people think of the skill of producing well

crafted legal arguments as intrinsically valuable, just

like the excellence in musical performance. Or, to

take another example, engineering skills are regarded

by many people as only instrumentally valuable, but

are not so regarded by all: it is possible to admire the

skill at solving engineering problems as something

intrinsically valuable, like artistic skills. For that matter,

it is possible to admire even the skills of highly expe-

riences secretaries in the same way.

Where such differences of opinion exist, ascer-

taining who is right is not an easy task. In particular,

it is a task that, in addition to philosophical tools,

requires a good understanding of the occupation in

question. Determining whether the argument about

musicians can be extended to another occupation

thus seems to require occupation-by-occupation

investigation. Because of that, one should not count

on there being some general philosophical argument

that will plausibly guarantee that the example of

musicians is an isolated one. Moreover, even if such

an argument could be made, producing it would be

a elaborate project that far exceeds the boundaries

of the specific topic of loyalty in employment. There

is, therefore, no easy way of repairing the fourth

reconstruction of Duska’s argument.

We are thus forced to conclude that Duska’s

argument does not survive scrutiny, in any of its four

reconstructions. As I have found Duska’s thesis

intuitively appealing, I reach this result only very

reluctantly. In thinking about this result, we should,

however, remember that, as shown above, the

burden of proof in discussions of loyalty is always on

its defenders. The failure of Duska’s argument,

therefore, does not mean that loyalty in employment

is justified. It only means that we are back at the

baseline position, which is that this form of loyalty,

like any other, is inherently suspect until a con-

vincing argument showing it to be justified is pro-

duced.

Loyalty and changeability

In this section I shall try to offer an argument against

strong loyalty in employment that is an alternative to

Duska’s. This one will be limited in its scope in

various ways, but it will still be relevant to most

people in the world as it presently is.

In order to develop that argument, we need to

first note that, although loyalty rules out inter-

changeability ex post, the implication in the opposite

direction does not hold: noninterchangeability ex

post is not sufficient for loyalty. Thus the musician

from the preceding section, who does not regard

orchestras as interchangeable ex post, may turn out

not to be loyal to his orchestra, after all. What may

be missing in his case is the emotional attitude that is,

as noted at the beginning, an essential aspect of

Employee Loyalty 273

loyalty (in the sense that is relevant here).32 If he

does not have to his orchestra the emotions that are

characteristic of loyalty (as may well be the case),

then we would not say that he is genuinely loyal to

it, no matter how persistently he continues to work

there.

Whether one has such emotions to a particular

entity is, of course, often a result of one’s own idi-

osyncrasies. The nature of these emotions may,

however, place certain general limitations on the

kind of entities to which one can have the emotions.

In order to see the relevant limitation, let us

consider a thought experiment, which is inspired by

the thought experiments that often appear in dis-

cussions of personal identity. Consider a world

similar to the actual one, in which human beings are

biologically the same as they actually are, and their

behaviour is generally similar to what it actually is,

except that they occasionally undergo very sudden

and radical changes in their personalities. For

example, a human being who went to bed as a soft-

spoken left-wing atheist heterosexual, who listened

to nothing but Bach, may wake up as a loud right-

wing religious homosexual, who is greatly interested

in jazz. Somebody who undergoes such a change

remembers the life that the occupant of his body33

led before the change only very vaguely: he may, for

example, recognize the people that the occupant of

his body interacted with before, but the recognition

will trigger few further associations, and definitely

no emotional associations. These changes are, let us

suppose, very sudden: they happen overnight, and

nobody can reliably predict them. (In such a society

many people would undoubtedly be working very

hard on trying to predict the changes, but let us

suppose that none of these attempts has produced

anything reliable.) Not everybody undergoes these

changes: some human beings go throughout their

lives without ever experiencing them, but the

changes happen in sufficiently large numbers that

they cannot be dismissed as mere pathology. In some

cases they happen only once or twice within the life

of the same biological body, in others they may be as

frequent as every couple of years or so (but in no

case is there a pattern that would be sufficiently

regular to allow for predictions). The legal system,

however, ignores these changes: all legal rights and

duties follow the body. After the change one thus

owns the same property that the occupant of one’s

body owned before, and is liable for the debts that he

has incurred.

In such a world, our approach to friendships

would be very different than it actually is. While we

would probably still form relationships that could be

called friendships, we would not expect these rela-

tionships to continue beyond the point at which

either of the parties undergoes a change of the kind

described. Our loyalty to our friends would thus be

qualified in the way in which it is not qualified in the

actual world.

Could somebody in the world that we are

imagining feel loyalty that goes beyond the point at

which his friend undergoes a radical change of

personality?34 In other words, could one think of

one’s loyalty to one’s friend as something that

extends to all occupants of the friend’s body? Such a

feeling of putative loyalty would be quite puzzling.

This putative loyalty, like any other, has to be pre-

sumed unjustified until somebody offers a justifica-

tion for it, and it is very hard to discern what could

possibly be the justification. It is hard even to discern

what a reasonable attempt at the justification would

look like. There does not appear to be any kind of

fulfillment that would be achieved by cultivating a

loyalty to all occupants of a given body in the world

in which the radical changes that we have described

occurred. Thus the only kind of loyalty to friends

that people in that world would justifiably feel

would be the limited loyalty that is meant to last only

until the point at which either of the friends

undergoes the radical transformation.

But that is not the only way in which friendships

in the imagined world would be different from those

in the actual world. The temporal limitation on

loyalty would give raise to another limitation, a

limitation on the intensity of the emotions of loyalty,

and of other experiences normally associated with

loyalty. The possibility of the radical transformations

would cast its shadow over friendships while they are

going on, and would thus affect even those friend-

ships in which neither party in fact undergoes a

change. Merely knowing that such a change is quite

possible and that it would end the friendship would

make a typical friendship in that world less intense,

less involved, and less fulfilling than a typical

friendship in the actual world. It is a fact of human

psychology that the intensity of the emotions of

loyalty, and the degree of fulfillment that one gets

274 Mane Hajdin

out of a relationship of loyalty, are ceteris paribus in-

versely correlated to the limitations on the intended

duration of the relation. (People seek ‘‘commit-

ment’’ in intimate relationships not just because the

duration of the relation matters to them in itself, but

also, and perhaps primarily, because that commit-

ment makes possible a greater intensity of the pres-

ently experienced emotions.) This psychological

fact, in turn, has evaluative implications. As it is,

generally, a part of the justification of any form of

loyalty that it makes possible some form of fulfill-

ment that wouldn’t be possible otherwise, the psy-

chological limitations on the fulfillment that

friendships would provide in the imagined world

would weaken any justification of loyalty to friends

that could be made in that world.

To take a different example, suppose that there is

a church whose leadership has all the power that the

Pope has in Catholicism, but that changes much

more frequently. Suppose, moreover, that, when the

new leadership takes over, it regards itself as free to

change the dogma in whatever way it sees fit,

without being in any way constrained by what the

dogma has been prior to the takeover. Thus, while

the dogma may at one point be that Jesus was the son

of God, that dogma may after a change in leadership

be replaced by the dogma that God has never had a

son, and that all references to Jesus need to be

reinterpreted as metaphors. After a couple of years,

another change in leadership may result in it being

the dogma that God had two sons. The rule that

only males may be priests may be replaced by a rule

permitting the ordination of women, which in turn

may be replaced by the rule that nobody, male or

female, may be a priest before the age of fifty (and

the consequent voiding of the ordination of all

priests below that age). The moral teaching that the

only legitimate purpose of sex is procreation, may be

replaced by the teaching that sex is a form of prayer,

only to be, at the next change of leadership, replaced

by the teaching that sex is permitted only on

Tuesdays and Thursdays, and so forth.

Now, even if we agree, for the sake of argument,

that loyalty to a religion is generally justified, it

would be hard to understand anybody who professed

to be loyal to this religion. The only aspect of this

religion that persists through the changes of leader-

ship is the bare institutional framework of the church,

and it is difficult to even begin to comprehend why

unqualified loyalty to anybody and anything that

happens to appear within that framework would be

valuable. The adherents of this religion would feel to

it, at most, only a very limited form of loyalty, which

would not extend beyond the next change of the

church leadership. As in the previous example, that

would make the loyalty not only shortlived, but also

far less intense than it may be in the actual world:

one’s knowledge that the religion could be changed

in such ways would likely colour one’s attitude

toward it even at the times when no change takes

place in fact.

As the reader has probably noticed, these examples,

fanciful as they are, have considerable similarities to

what actually goes on in the world of business. In the

industrialized countries, it has, over recent decades,

become quite common for corporations with publicly

traded stock to undergo sudden and drastic changes.

Such changes are sometimes a part of a hostile take-

over, but not always: a change in the upper-level

management may produce similar results, even when

no takeover of any kind is involved. From the view-

point of an ordinary employee, the changes are largely

unpredictable. (Business analysts may sometimes be

able to predict the character of the changes in general

terms, but even they are usually unable to predict them

with much specificity.) The frequency of such chan-

ges is boosted by the fact that the managers who make

them are generally praised and rewarded by those they

regard as their peers (similar businesspeople) for doing

so, and are well insulated from whatever other people

(including ordinary employees of these businesses)

may think about the changes. No aspect of a corpo-

ration with publicly traded stock is immune to such

changes. Something that thousands of people have

been labouring over years to develop may be scrapped

overnight or transformed into something completely

different. (A corporation that has been on the fore-

front of high technology may, for example, drastically

reduce its involvement in its development in order to

get into insurance business.)

The rhetoric that surrounds the present-day

business makes much of the existence of corporations’

‘‘mission statements’’ and similar documents. Such

documents, however, do not represent a genuine

constraint on the ways in which a corporation can be

transformed, because, first, they are written in such

vague terms that almost anything can be argued to be

consistent with them, and, second, they themselves

Employee Loyalty 275

can be changed if need be. The articles of incorpo-

ration could, in theory, limit the ways in which a

corporation could be changed, but they almost never

do, because it is an established practice to write them

so as to leave it entirely open what kind of business

the corporation will pursue.35 Various legal devices

that discourage hostile takeovers may prevent the

changes due to the takeovers, but they do not limit

the changes that can take place without such a take-

over, which can also be quite drastic.

Because drastic and unpredictable changes in the

corporations with publicly traded stock are com-

mon, any loyalty that one could have to such entities

is bound to be qualified, as in the above examples of

human beings who change their personalities and the

church that changes its dogma. There is nothing

about a corporation being that particular corporation

that gives us reasons to think that it will continue to

act in any specific way beyond the next change of

higher management. A corporation is, in other

words, nothing but a legal shell, that can be given

any content by the management of the day.36 It

would be difficult to comprehend anybody who

professed to be loyal to whatever happens to fill a

particular shell. Expressions of loyalty to a corporation

thus need to be interpreted either as manifestations of

ignorance of how changeable corporations are, or as

expressions of limited loyalty that is meant to hold for

only as long as the relevant policies, practices, and

overall character of the corporation remain the same.

Analogously to the previous examples, this qual-

ification on any loyalty that we may have to cor-

porations with publicly traded stock manifests itself

even when no changes of management actually take

place. The changeability of corporations casts its

shadow over all relationships we may have to them.

Knowing that a radical change in what a corporation

does is possible, colours one’s dealings with the

corporation at all times and makes any loyalty that

one may have to a corporation quite weak. It also

makes quite weak any loyalty that one may have to a

particular unit or department within a corporation,

because the character and, indeed, very existence of

such parts of a corporation depends on the decisions

of the upper management.37

To fully appreciate the impact of this argument,

one should contrast the radical changeability of cor-

porations with the much more limited changeability

of, say, nations. It is possible for a political and legal

system of a nation to change radically by, say, a rev-

olution or a coup d’tat. Such changes are, however,

quite infrequent and at least somewhat predictable.

People living in, say, the present-day North America

and Western Europe can be confident that the prob-

ability of such a change in their societies in the fore-

seeable future is so low that it can be for most ends and

purposes ignored. Their attitude to their respective

nations is thus not affected by that possibility. Second,

even when such a change takes place, it cannot affect

all aspects of the life of a nation, and this makes it

possible to remain patriotic through such changes. For

example, after his country was overtaken by com-

munists, a patriotic Hungarian could have said to

himself something like this: ‘‘Communism is merely a

tragic aberration in Hungarian history; it does not

reflect the real spirit of Hungarian people. I cannot be

loyal to the communist government of my country,

but I know that underneath communism there con-

tinues to exist genuine Hungarian culture, and it is

because of its continued existence that I can say that I

am even now loyal to Hungary’’. Nothing like that can

be said in the case of a corporation. After the man-

agement of, say, General Electric, implements

whatever changes it has decided upon, there is no

sense in which it can be said that these changes do not

reflect the real spirit of General Electric. It would be

tragicomic for an employee of General Electric to

believe that underneath the present operations of

General Electric, there continues to exist an entirely

different, genuineGeneral Electric culture, and to try to

be loyal to the corporation on the basis of that belief.

That’s because, after the changes are implemented,

there is nowhere for that culture to exist. The control

that managers have over a corporation is far more

thoroughgoing than the control that even the most

totalitarian regime can have over a nation.

It needs to be acknowledged, though, that the

scope of the argument that has just been made is

limited in various ways. First, it applies only to

corporations with publicly traded stock. Closely held

corporations and the businesses that are not incor-

porated, are not prone to the drastic and sudden

changes to which corporations with publicly traded

stock are, and the argument consequently does not

apply to them. Second, even to the corporations

with publicly traded stock, the argument applies

only against the background of a particular, contin-

gent business culture. A society could exist in which

276 Mane Hajdin

managers would be expected to be respectful of the

established traditions and customs of the corpora-

tions they manage and to operate within their con-

straints. In such a society a manager who made too

radical changes would be criticized rather than

praised by the business community. And not only is

such a society conceivable, but it is arguable that

most industrialized societies were like that until a

few decades ago. It is a contingent fact that the

present society is not like that, and that the argument

thus applies to it. A society is also possible in which it

would be customary for articles of incorporation of

every corporation to be written so as to limit its

activities with a great deal of specificity; it is again a

contingent fact that this is not usually done in the

present society, and that this argument about loyalty

thus applies to it. Finally, this argument does not rule

out loyalty altogether, it merely shows that it is

bound to be significantly qualified.

That the scope of the argument made here is

limited in these ways does not, of course, mean that

loyalty to employers is justified in all other cases.

This argument only supplements the argument made

before that the burden of proof is always on pro-

ponents of loyalty. Somebody who would want to

claim that loyalty to, say, a particular kind of a clo-

sely held corporation is called for would still have to

carry that burden, even though the argument made

in this section would not apply.

The position that has just been reached is different

from that taken in Duska’s article, but it accom-

modates many of the insights that motivated Duska.

Thus, even though I have argued that employers’

failure to reciprocate the employees’ (attempts at)

loyalty does not on its own render the latter mis-

guided, the most obvious manifestations of

employers’ not being loyal to employees, large-scale

layoffs, are at the same time manifestations of the

changeability of corporations,38 which is, according

to my argument, a good reason for employees not

feeling much loyalty to their employers. The com-

mercial and instrumental character of business,

according to the arguments I made earlier in this

article, do not on their own preclude loyalty, but the

contingent fact that managers of corporations with

publicly traded stock, in the present business culture,

think of their corporations as mere instruments for

commercial gain is a part of what makes them

uninhibited to make drastic changes, and that,

according to the argument of this section, does

count against employee loyalty.

An objection could be made that my argument, if

sound, paradoxically renders itself superfluous. That

is, it can be said that, if I am right, then it is to be

expected that employees won’t have more than a

very limited loyalty to their employers. If they, as a

matter of fact, do not have more than such limited

loyalty, then there does not seem to be any need for

philosophical articles trying to convince them that

any greater loyalty would be out of place.

Now, I do agree that quite a few, perhaps most,

people employed by corporations with publicly

traded stock nowadays do not feel much loyalty to

their employers, and are confident that this is as it

should be; so far as they are concerned, the argu-

ment of this section is preaching to the converted.

There are, however, two other kinds of audience

to which the argument is addressed. First, there are

business ethicists and other theoreticians of busi-

ness: it is important for their discussion of various

other issues (such as the issue of whistleblowing

that gave the impetus to Duska’s article) that the

relatively low level of employee loyalty be theo-

retically recognized as legitimate. Second, employ-

ees of a large corporation are typically exposed to a

great deal of internal propaganda that is trying to

create the illusion that the corporation is less

changeable than it is and to induce in them a

feeling of loyalty to it. While that propaganda may

roll off most people, chances are that it has some

influence on some, and that creates a need for

spelling out the argument of this section.

Notes

1 Duska (2000). The article originally appeared in the

first, 1985 edition of that anthology, but page references

will be made here to the fourth, 2000 edition.2 ‘‘Loyalty is, fundamentally, an emotional attachment

and an emotional reaction to its objects; insofar as one’s

actions are entirely explicable in terms of cool, clear

reason, one’s actions are not a display of loyalty’’ (Ewin,

1993, p. 389). See also Randels (2001), p. 29: ‘‘loyalty

necessarily involves passion and internal motivation.’’

Randels then proceeds to make a stronger and less plausible

claim that ‘‘[l]oyalty is a passion’’ (p. 31, emphasis added).3 Hume’s remark that loyalty is a virtue ‘‘that holds less

of reason, than of bigotry and superstition’’ (Hume, 1978,

Employee Loyalty 277

p. 562) is sometimes quoted out of context as if it

expressed a general skepticism about the justifiability of

loyalty; the context, however, makes it clear that Hume

has in mind only the loyalty to political rulers.4 ‘‘[L]oyalty at times when it is supportable by other

considerations is simply redundant and is thus usually not

evoked’’ (Agassi, 1974, p. 315).5 Cf. Ewin (1993), p. 389: ‘‘we need to think about

loyalties in the plural, with the different objects and

grounds those loyalties can have.’’6 Alternatively, we could say that such an attitude is a

bad, unjustified, loyalty. The word ‘‘loyalty’’ is sometimes

used in the broad sense that encompasses such unjustified

attitudes, and sometimes in a narrower one that implies

that the attitude is justified; nothing of substance hinges

on which terminology one chooses to follow.7 See Dixon (2001). (Dixon refers to a neutral observer

who supports whichever team is best at the time as a

‘‘purist fan’’, but acknowledges that he ‘barely qualifies as

a fan at all’’, p. 152.)8 What counts as a distinct subject-matter in this context

will itself depend on how the arguments are developed. It

may, for example, turn out that certain arguments in

favour of loyalty to sports teams apply to some kinds of

sports, but not others. Certain arguments in favour of

patriotism may apply to some countries (perhaps the

countries that have long history of existence as indepen-

dent countries), but not others (perhaps the countries that

came into existence recently as a result of some shaky

political compromise). It may also be argued that, in a

society that has a history of race-based oppression, loyalty

to the oppressed race is a very different phaenomenon

from bias in favour of the oppressing race, and that the

former is thus justified even though the latter is not. (I

owe the last example to an anonymous referee for this

journal.)9 Corvino (2002).

10 Duska (2000), p. 169.11 Duska (2000), p. 170.12 Cf. Schrag (2001), p. 46.13 It is important here that Y has made the lack of loyalty

to X abundantly clear, that is that Y’s acts that indicate

that there is no loyalty have been unambiguous and

performed over a significant period. We might not reach

the same conclusion if Y’s acts that suggest a lack of

loyalty were just a momentary lapse, or if the way in

which Y treats X were ambiguous as to whether there is

loyalty. Indeed, a willingness to forgive our friends such

momentary lapses, and to give them a benefit of doubt

when their behaviour is thus ambiguous, may well be an

integral part of a genuine friendship.14 Another way of responding to this argument may be to

reconceptualize patriotism as a loyalty to all of one’s

fellow-citizens who are as patriotic as oneself, rather than

to the country as such. Such a reconceptualization would,

of course, be controversial, but if it is accepted, patriotism

would be necessarily reciprocal. This argumentative

manoeuvre is, however, not available with respect to all

of the counterexamples that can be found to the thesis

that loyalty requires reciprocity.15 In thinking about this example it is important not to

get distracted by one’s substantive views on religious

matters. What is under discussion here is only the way in

which the concept of loyalty operates when applied to

religions. In order to focus on that issue, one should, for

the sake of argument, pretend that the tenets of the

relevant religion are true, and consider whether loyalty

would then be out of place.16 Duska (2000), p. 170, emphasis added.17 Duska (2000), p. 170, emphasis added.18 Duska (2000), p. 169, emphasis added.19 Duska (1997).20 Duska (1997), p. 1403. Corvino at one point criticizes

Duska for holding that the making of profit is the primary

function of business, without noting that his views on that

matter have changed (Corvino, 2002, p. 180).21 The existence of these other motivations is made

particularly vivid by the fact that it is nowadays quite

common for people to take up employment even if they

are so wealthy that they could live comfortably without

working, and by the fact that there is such a thing as

unpaid, volunteer work. If the motivations that lead people

to take up volunteer work are easily understood, then it

should be equally easy to understand that these motivations

can be combined with the desire for income and thus play

a role in one’s decision to take up paid work.22 This is analogous to the cases in which something is

permitted so far as one set of considerations goes, but

prohibited by another set of considerations. The prohi-

bition will trump the permission, but there is no logical

inconsistency between the two.23 Duska (2000), p. 170, emphasis added.24 Duska (2000), p. 170, emphasis added. As explained

above, Duska would now replace ‘‘reason for existence’’

with something like ‘‘motivation for engaging in’’, but

that does not affect the point I am making here.25 Duska (2000), p. 170.26 It is true that in these cases, the employer’s motivations

may well be purely commercial, but the commercial

character of the employer’s motivations does not on its

own imply anything about the way in which the employee

approaches the relationship.27 In the passage quoted above, Duska contrasts instru-

ments with persons, but the argument cannot convinc-

ingly hinge on that contrast, given that it is generally

thought that we can justifiably be loyal to at least some

278 Mane Hajdin

entities other than persons, such as countries, religions,

or sports teams. (The passage makes it clear that Duska

uses the word ‘person’ in the sense that does not cover

groups and organizations of human beings.) While each

such type of loyalty may be controversial, if Duska wanted

to rule out all of them as illegitimate, he would be

undertaking a task that is far broader and more challenging

than just showing that loyalty to businesses is unjustified.28 In saying this I am, of course, using the word ‘employer’

for an entity that is distinguishable from the human beings

who run it, own it, or are otherwise involved with it.29 Some people may feel awkward about saying openly

that this is so, and to some extent that feeling of

awkwardness is a wholesome aspect of their loyalty to

their actual friends. But if one thinks about the matter

dispassionately, one will have to acknowledge that what is

outlined here is true.30 A competent utilitarian (as distinct from crude carica-

tures of utilitarians that antiutilitarians sometimes like to

paint) will immediately proceed to add that this is so only

in principle, and that there are facts of human psychology

that make it practically impossible to replace friendships

with other sources of utility.31 Indeed, it is arguably a sign of a particularly high level

of skill in a complex and difficult activity that one is able

to make it seem easy. Virtuoso musicians often seem to be

performing effortlessly.32 One of the anonymous referees for this journal has

argued that the complex relationships between the

musician and the orchestra would become partially

constitutive of who the musician is, and that it is

therefore doubtful that the musician could lack an

emotional commitment to it. Assuming that the premise

of that argument is true, I am not convinced that the

conclusion follows. Realizing that one has been deeply

affected (constituted) by something does not automat-

ically lead to an emotional commitment to it. It may

also be perceived as a limitation and lead to a

resentment, or as simply a fact about oneself that is

emotionally neutral.33 The phrase ‘the occupant of his body’ is not here

meant to imply that the past occupant is an entity distinct

from the present one, but merely to leave it open whether

it is. The phrase is also not meant to imply a commitment

to dualism.34 The reader may be tempted to point out here that,

in the actual world, loyalty to a friend sometimes does

persist through radical changes in the friend’s personality.

The radical personality changes in the actual world are,

however, rare, gradual, and somewhat predicable. This

makes the actual world quite unlike the world we are

imagining, in which the changes are widespread, sudden,

and unpredictable.

35 R. E. Ewin writes that a corporation is usually not ‘‘set

up to make money just like that: it will be set up to make

money by selling ice-cream, or information, or whatever

else’’ (Ewin, 1993, p. 393) and he thus believes that one

can be loyal to a particular corporation as an entity with a

particular function (e.g. to provide consumers with ice-

cream). But even though the founders of a corpora-

tion may set it up with the initial function of selling ice-

cream, once the corporation is in existence, it will not be

committed to continuing to make money in that particular

way. Whether it will continue to sell ice-cream or do

something entirely different will depend on the decisions of

the management of the day, and these decisions will be

unconstrained by the ideas of the founders (unless the

corporation is closely held by the founders). The only thing

that one can count on is that throughout its existence the

corporation will do whatever the management chooses.

What Ewin calls the function of a corporation is thus far

too precarious to provide a ground for anything more

than the very limited loyalty of the kind I describe in this

section.36 Corporations, however, work hard to obscure that

fact. Advertising and public-relations materials thus often

make much of the fact that a particular corporation has

been in business for so many decades, in a way that creates

the illusion that it now has a corresponding amount of

accumulated expertise, and that its present operations are

coloured by long-standing traditions. In the history of a

corporation with publicly traded stock, the accumulated

expertise and traditions are, however, likely to have been

destroyed several times over by various drastic changes

imposed by the higher management. What has persisted

through the decades is probably nothing more the bare

legal shell.37 Exceptions to this last claim may occasionally be

found. A part of a corporation may sometimes be viable as

a separate business, and it does happen every once in a

while that the people working in a particular unit of a

large corporation, instead of going along with the changes

imposed by the upper management, leave and start a

business of their own in which they continue operating in

more or less the same way as before. Where there is a

genuine possibility of such separation, greater loyalty to

that part of a corporation is not ruled out by the argument

of this section. The vast majority of corporate employees,

however, do not have that option.38 It is important to note, though, that large-scale

layoffs are only one among many possible manifestations

of the changeability: a corporation can change its

character quite drastically while keeping almost all of

its employees. All drastic changes are relevant to the

argument of this section, regardless of whether layoffs

are involved.

Employee Loyalty 279

References

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Corvino, J.: 2002, ‘Loyalty in Business?’, Journal of Busi-

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Dixon, N.: 2001, ‘The Ethics of Supporting Sports

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Duska, R.: 2000, ‘Whistleblowing and Employee Loy-

alty’, in J. R. DesJardins and J. J. McCall (eds.),

Contemporary Issues in Business Ethics, Fourth Edition

(Wadsworth, Belmont, CA), pp. 167–172.

Duska, R. F.: 1997, ‘The Why’s of Business Revisited’,

Journal of Business Ethics 16, 1401–1409.

Ewin, R. E.: 1993, ‘Corporate Loyalty: Its Object and Its

Grounds’, Journal of Business Ethics 12, 387–396.

Hume, D.: 1978, A Treatise of Human Nature (ed. by I. A.

Selby-Bigge), (Clarendon Press, Oxford).

Randels, Jr., G. D.: 2001, ‘Loyalty, Corporations, and

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Schrag, B.: 2001, ‘The Moral Significance of Employee

Loyalty’, Business Ethics Quarterly 11, 41–66.

Dominican University of California,

San Rafael, CA 94901,

U.S.A.

E-mail: hajdin@earthlink.net

280 Mane Hajdin

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