Introduction

1 Patriotism and Morality

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

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

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

The debate about the ethics of patriotism is linked to some thorny puzzles in moral and political theory. The debate brings into sharp relief some foundational disagreements between liberals, communitarians, and others about the nature of justice and the relationship between the state and the individual. It is also a site at which liberals of different stripes uncover and play out their disagreements: disagreements, for example, over whether liberal principles hold between or only within states, whether liberalism must lead to cosmopolitanism, and whether liberal principles apply to personal as well as institutional actions.

Patriotism also offers a difficult case for views about the moral significance of special relationships. Does it really matter, morally, that someone is my parent, my child, my friend, or my compatriot? Is the perspective of morality essentially impartial? How can we justify special concern for our friends and family members – and does this justification extend to special concern for our countries? If we can give an ethical defense of patriotism, must we also defend nationalism? Is there an ethically relevant difference between patriotism and racism? All of these questions are tougher than first appearances suggest, and how we answer them reveals our views about our moral duties to each other, about what it means to be a moral agent, and about what things in life are ultimately of value.

2 Our Debate about Patriotism

This book presents a conversation between defenders of three different views about the ethics of patriotism. Each of the three authors of the book – that is “us”: Kleinig, Keller, and Primoratz – has developed a view about patriotism over several years, in several different publications (some relevant earlier work is Keller 2005, 2007a, chap. 3 and 4, 2007b, 2007c, 2013; Kleinig 2008; Primoratz 2000, 2002, 2006, 2009). Kleinig is an advocate of patriotism, believing that there is a central, characteristic form of patriotism that is ethically defensible and desirable. Keller is an opponent of patriotism, arguing that patriotism by its nature is unattractive and dangerous. Primoratz defends a moderate position, arguing that some forms of patriotism are morally impermissible, one form of patriotism is unobjectionable though not positively good, and one form of patriotism is good and sometimes morally required.

The goal of the book is to explain our different views in accessible and self-contained forms and then to see how they fare under criticism. The book begins with three longer essays, in which each of us in turn states his basic case. Then, we each give a reply to the other two authors, and we each have a brief piece in conclusion.

We want the book to serve as a helpful introduction to the debate about patriotism, identifying and testing the major positions and issues in the debate. But we also intend to take the debate forward. By exposing ourselves to sustained criticism from other perspectives, we each settle upon more developed and nuanced versions of our own views and of our complaints about others. The book also, we hope, demonstrates the importance of the debate about patriotism, showing that patriotism should be a central concern in moral and political philosophy. The topic of the ethics of patriotism brings together many different concerns that arise in other debates within philosophy, but it also raises its own distinctive set of questions and puzzles.

The remainder of this introduction sets up and summarizes our debate about patriotism. It gives an overview of the main positions and questions in the debate, and along the way, it explains how each of us fits in.

3 Defining Patriotism

Perhaps the most frustrating feature of everyday arguments about patriotism is that it is difficult to know whether everyone is talking about the same thing. When you offer an opinion about patriotism, the response you meet is often of the form, “Well, if that’s what you mean by ‘patriotism’ then I agree, but of course there are lots of other things that ‘patriotism’ could mean.” If you criticize patriotism, you may get the response, “Right, but you’re talking about jingoistic patriotism; for me, real patriotism is about caring for the people around you.” If you defend patriotism, you may be told, “Right, but you’re really just talking about being a good citizen; in the real world, patriotism means more than that – patriotic people will fight for their country even when it is in the wrong.” The same move is often made in the philosophical literature. It is common to find philosophers accusing each other of talking about only one kind of patriotism, or of failing to talk about genuine patriotism.1

It can be tempting, as a result, to think that the debate over patriotism is just a debate about how to use words. Everyone agrees that we should be good citizens and look after each other and care about our own countries, you might say, and everyone agrees that we should not be warlike or racist and should not seek to dominate others. So, you might conclude, the important questions are settled, and the only question remaining is whether we take our shared view to be an endorsement or a rejection of patriotism. There is something to this complaint. Debates about what does and does not count as patriotism or as genuine patriotism can be tiresome. Yet, there is much more to the debate than simply a dispute over how to use a word.

First, and less importantly, debates over how to use a word are often more substantial than they seem. When we argue about what truly counts as democracy, for example, or as freedom or equality or evil or courage, we often do more than simply offer competing suggestions about how to speak. We may offer different strategies for making more precise a vague but shared value, or we may offer different conceptions of a shared concept – in one way or another, we may play out substantial moral disagreements. The same, arguably, is sometimes true about disagreements over how to use the term “patriotism.” In the background, perhaps, is a shared but elusive sense of what relationship should hold between the individual and the state, and by offering different claims about the true meaning of “patriotism,” we offer competing ideals of that relationship. Or perhaps we have a shared but vague sense of how a person of a certain kind characteristically thinks and behaves, and in offering different definitions of “patriotism,” we make competing attempts to capture the mind-set of that kind of person. If that is what is going on when we offer competing stories about the meaning of “patriotism,” then we do more than just argue about how to apply a word.

Second, and more importantly, even when definitional issues are avoided, extensive substantive disagreement over the ethics of patriotism remains. As it turns out, there are certain ways of thinking about and acting toward a country that are well defined and widely recognized and...