As algorithms divide us, who should we be loyal to?

An ethicist’s answer, shows we need courage and wisdom too.

Isaac Frisby

Isaac is a PhD candidate in Theology at Durham University and preparing for priesthood in the Church of England.

Three people sitting looking out over viewpoint are silhouetted against the sky.

Priscilla Du Preez on Unsplash.

What is loyalty? As we plunge into this new year of 2025 it seems as pressing a question as ever. The war in Ukraine rumbles on, a fresh Labour government continues to struggle with public opinion, and America returns to the unpredictable rule of the first president in its history to be a convicted felon. The algorithms of social media continue to segregate and amplify different audiences into ever more closed feedback loops and echo chambers. This may bolster loyalty to a point of view, but estrange us further from our friends and neighbours whose loyalties lie elsewhere. All of these and many other cases highlight the conflict of loyalties in our society and wider world. What is even more obvious is that if we are to make peace, cultivate love for enemies, and pursue the common good, then perhaps the most in-demand virtue of 2025, at the top over every wish list, might just be loyalty.

But what really is loyalty?

I was struck by a persuasive answer given by Dr Tony Milligan, research fellow in philosophical ethics at King’s College London, during his appearance on a recent episode of The Moral Maze on BBC Radio 4 that asked ‘is loyalty a virtue or a vice?’ He said loyalty is, “Sharing another person’s commitments and the willingness to go through various kinds of adversity in order to pursue those commitments and to further them.” Under cross examination and asked if loyalty is then an absolute virtue he responded, “I think that it’s absolute in the sense that we absolutely need to have it, that it’s basic to the human condition and not optional.” His second interrogator, Giles Fraser, then suggested a ‘high doctrine of mates’. In this doctrine you are loyal to your mates in all circumstances, even if they are ‘wrong-uns’. Dr Milligan’s response, when asked how he would characterise this ‘doctrine of mates’ position, was fascinating: “Addiction.” Fraser then asked if that addiction could be love. “It’s a case of love, and we don’t get to choose the people that we love. We find ourselves in the predicament and then try to make the best of it…I love my wife Susanne, I’ve been with her 31 years, and it’s love, and it’s also addiction. I just can’t envisage a world in which I would be without her.” This framed Dr Milligan’s final powerful point: love, and the loyalty which love entails, gives us our sense of value.

I can bear witness to the truth of Dr Milligan’s intertwining of love and loyalty. Last autumn I became a father for the second time. My love for my eldest is so great that there was a real question: ‘if my love for my eldest is so total, so all encompassing, how can I possibly love a second as much?’ This question melted away as I gazed into her screwed-up face, moments after she entered the world. I am completely dedicated to ensuring that she flourishes and I would “go through various kinds of adversity in order to pursue” her flourishing. As Dr Mulligan also said, loyalty “is basic to the human condition and not optional.” Of course, how this total and non-zero-sum loyalty of love to both of my children actually works in practice requires of me thoughtful negotiation. If one wants to go to the park and the other wants to go to the swimming pool I cannot split in two and do both things at once. Loyalty, as finite human beings, requires wisdom in living in the middle of a messy network of demands and desires, of the preferences and needs of others.

If loyalty is then one thing, it is the willingness to recognise that we are tied to other people, whether we like it or not. Cain’s question to God, when God came looking for Abel, is still pertinent: “Am I my brother’s keeper?” Perhaps the greatest disloyalty is the implied ‘no’ in Cain’s rhetorical question. In denying that he is bound to his brother he is disloyal not only to Abel, but to himself because he denies his own humanity and isolates himself from the humanity of other people. If we isolate ourselves, having loyalty only to ourselves, we lose the joy of being fully human. If we simply kill those we dislike, whether literally (in war or murder) or metaphorically (‘unfriending’, cancelling, pretending they do not exist), then we follow Cain. Loyalty, as the tie that binds us to the messiness of the real world where people vehemently disagree all the time, requires not only wisdom then but courage also. It takes courage to commit to one person in marriage. It takes courage to raise a child. It takes courage to continue to talk with and to love those with whom you deeply disagree.

When practising our 2025 New Year’s resolutions let us make sure that amongst the commitments to get back to the gym and practice that new hobby that we remember to practice loyalty. Loyalty not only to those we love, but to those we might come to love. Let us be wise enough and brave enough to be fettered to those with whom we disagree, loyal to the humanity that binds us together.

Join with us - Behind the Seen

Seen & Unseen is free for everyone and is made possible through the generosity of our amazing community of supporters.

If you’re enjoying Seen & Unseen, would you consider making a gift towards our work?

Alongside other benefits (book discounts etc.), you’ll receive an extra fortnightly email from me sharing what I’m reading and my reflections on the ideas that are shaping our times.

Graham Tomlin

Editor-in-Chief

Find out more and sign up

Article

Assisted dying

Comment

Politics

20 February 2025

4 min read

The assisted dying bill is an undignified mess

Literally life-changing legislation needs a parliament at its best not its worst.

George Pitcher

George is a visiting fellow at the London School of Economics and an Anglican priest.

A parliamentary committee meets, sitting at wooden raised desks in a wood panelled room.

The bill committee meets.

The first clue came when MP Kim Leadbeater’s private members’ bill passed in the House of Commons at the end of November. She came outside to greet pro-euthanasia campaigners like she was emerging as a winner from the Big Brother house, in tears of joy, whooping and hugging and high-fiving, with prime minister Keir Starmer gurning awkwardly in her wake.

For her and her supporters, this was indeed great news. But these optics were far from great. It was as though she was celebrating the consequence of the legislation she’d introduced: “Whoa! Wonderful news everybody! We’re going to be allowed to help people to kill themselves.”

It’s not a good look, even to those who may wish for such assistance. Where was the dignity, the key word that assisted-suicide lobbyists have appropriated for their cause? Not in this carefree triumphalism, this cork-popping celebration of the prospect of death-on-demand.

Since then, the bill’s faltering passage through parliament has been characterised by this absence of dignity, a kind of cowboy rustler pushing a herd of supporters in a single direction, towards statute. And this lack of dignity matters. Not just because it is, literally, the most life-changing legislation any of us will see in our lifetimes, but because the dignity of parliament matters very much indeed.

I don’t mean the ritual flummery, the state opening by the monarch, people marching about with wigs and sticks, Black Rod and all that. I mean dignity in the sense with which we honour our democracy, the way in which we frame our legislature seriously and with due process.

Leadbeater presents as a good person and there is no apparent evidence to the contrary. But she is an inexperienced parliamentarian. Her selection for the seat of Batley and Spen, now Spen Valley, was rushed through in 2021, memories remaining acutely sharp of the murder of her older sister, Jo Cox, in the constituency in 2016. And, naturally, she has sat on the Government’s backbenches for less than a year.

Her inexperience of parliamentary process and scrutiny has shown. Committee hearings have been rammed with those who support assisted suicide and held in unseemly haste, such is the rush to get it into law. Before her bill’s second reading, she described it as having the strongest safeguards in the world, each patient requiring a sign-off from a High Court judge. When this proved impractical, the judge was replaced with a social worker, which apparently was “even safer”. So, safer than even the strongest safeguards in the world?

But more worrying still is how the passage of the bill has been factionalised. Leadbeater has alienated the mild-mannered by calling opposing voices “noise”, which is a bit like lamenting that a debate should have two sides at all. And she’s called those who disagree with her “unconstructive” and complained that opponents have “mobilised”. Well, duh. That’s how parliament works. Indeed, it’s part of its dignity, rather than a simple inconvenience for an MP in a hurry.

The media have noticed this lack of respect for procedure. I’m not sure that there’s ever been such resistance to proposed assisted-suicide legislation in the public prints before. Even the Guardian, which might be relied upon to see it as a progressive cause, has turned more than ambivalent. Only columnist and assisted-suicide flagbearer Polly Toynbee is available for a piece that amounts to saying we should move along, there’s nothing to see here and Leadbeater’s bill is doing just fine.

She, too, claims absurdly that opposition is only coming from people who oppose assisted suicide. Well, blow me down. Try as I might, I can’t trace her complaining that Lord Falconer’s supposedly independent Commission on Assisted Dying of 2011 was both funded and packed with his cause’s supporters.

In passing, it should be noted what an underminer of parliamentary dignity is Falconer too. He has claimed that justice secretary Shabam Mahmood’s opposition to the bill should be discounted because of her “religious beliefs”. Mahmood is a Muslim. For a constitutional lawyer, Falconer shows scant regard for our constitution. We might as well say that his views should be discounted because he’s a progressive secularist.

One might expect PM Keir Starmer to bring some quality to this, as an alleged stickler for legal procedure. It remains a mystery, as a supporter of the principle, that he’s left assisted suicide to a private members’ bill. If he really wanted it, it should surely be a Government bill. Cynics among us wonder if he has honoured a promise given to the terminally ill Esther Rantzen with token support for a private members’ bill, but knows it will fail.