 Mon Sep 15, 2008 19:01 pm GRE Analytical Writing - Clueless about where I stand? |
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Hi,
Could someone give a quick evaluation for my essay below so I could get an idea where I stand? I'm rather clueless about it.
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"We venerate loyalty - to our schools, employers, institutions, friends - as a virtue. Loyalty, however, can be at least as detrimental an influence as it can be a beneficial one."
Loyalty is one of the many ethical concepts that are considered to be an unquestionable virtue in any society. However, is this truly the case, or is there more to be said about this particular term? I, for one, tend to be rather weary when the concept of loyalty is applied in conversations involving morality and ethics.
From an evolutionary point of view, loyalty has developed as a moral concept for obvious reasons: it is a way for a particular group to strengthen the psychological bonds that hold its members together, and to reap benefits from the individual strengths of the members. Humans, being social primates, have always been adept at forming groups; we would not have survived this far if we had not been able to form groups and reap the advantages of combined strength. Therefore it should be expected that any concept that strengthens this ability for the formation and preservation of groups would be registered in the human psyche as a moral trait.
Humans display many varieties of loyalty in everyday life. We display loyalty to our families, for instance. We display loyalty to schools, to employing organizations and to our countries. This kind of loyalty is necessary for the well-being of these groups. The loyalty to the school by its students and alumni help the school to spread its influence; a country cannot survive in the face of an enemy if its citizens are not loyal to the motherland.
However, given that we are no longer dependent on our evolutionary instincts for survival, it is quite necessary in our modern times to evaluate these moral concepts carefully.
Some careful observation will demonstrate that in many scenarios, the concept of loyalty is used for less than noble purposes. In particular, it can be used for emotional blackmail of a person. A person can be made to feel guilty for not being loyal to a particular group, even if that person feels that supporting this group is unjustified in this particular instance. For instance, a family member may be made to feel guilty about refusing to support another family member in a court-case; a citizen may be made to feel guilty and “unpatriotic” for criticizing particular actions or policies of the government.
Through these observations, it can be seen that loyalty can be both beneficial and detrimental to one who believes in it, depending on the circumstances. The solution to this particular matter is to understand that the concept of loyalty is truly redundant; any beneficial results of this moral principle can be derived by adhering to more straightforward moral axioms, and adhering to those same axioms will prevent one from falling into the trappings where loyalty is used for immoral means. Consider the scenario of criticizing your government, for example. Once you abandon the idea of loyalty, all it remains is to evaluate whether the actions or the policies of the government are harmful to others. If the government is supporting a war that you feel is unjustified, for example, it is clear that the ethical action here is to voice your objections, and to support the victims of the war.
As a second example, assume a friend of yours and another person are competing for a position – a competition whose outcome you may be able to influence. If you feel that the rival of your friend is more suitable for this position, then setting aside the notion of loyalty, the ethical action to do would be to either support the rival, or to support neither, depending on how much you feel indebted to your friend. However, If you feel your friend is more suitable, then the ethical step would be to support your friend, as a way of repaying the benefits you have reaped from his or her friendship.
Thus we see that once we abandon the rather outdated concept of loyalty, it clears our minds to evaluate scenarios with clarity and discover the truly ethical solutions to problems. Indeed, as the moral zeitgeist moves forwards, it may be that we may be arriving at a stage in humanity where we are ready to abandon yet more of our instinctual baggage and instead pursue more logical, rational methods of inquiry to the nature of ethics. |
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V789
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