Happy 4th of July!
For Fourth of July several pundits at Bloggingheads TV debated the merits of patriotism. What a way to spend your holiday weekend, eh!
Attacking the notion of patriotism, Will Wilkinson of the Cato Institute argued that “loving liberty through ones country” is problematic because it leads to the assumption that America always acts in defense of these values. Wilkinson, a sharp critic of the wars in Afghanistan and Iraq, contends that Americans initially supported these conflicts so wholeheartedly in part because of a belief that our country “must be doing the right thing when it acts on the world stage.”
Wilkinson’s argument makes a lot of sense, but others thinkers would object to the length he goes to separate values from their social environment. Philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre, for instance, argues that we can only makes sense of our moral commitments through reference to our communal values:
if I do not understand the enacted narrative of my own individual life as embedded in the history of my country … I will not understand what I owe to others or what others owe to me, for what crimes of my nation I am bound to make reparation, for what benefits to my nation I am bound to feel gratitude. Understanding what is owed to and by me and understanding the history of the communities of which I am a part is … one and the same thing.
Another defense of patriotism is that it creates a bond between members of a community that is necessary for a society to function healthily. A state benefits when its citizens are willing to sacrifice on each others behalf and work towards a greater good.
However, creating this sense of community can be a double edged sword. Identifying so closely with ones fellow citizens might lead us to draw potentially arbitrary moral lines. For example, consider Peter Singer’s famous argument that we are obligated to do far more to fight famine in developing countries. Patriotism is certainly not incompatible with Singer’s logic, but it could lead us to overemphasis our commitments to our more immediate communities while ignoring our commitments to others around the world.
-Luke
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