Our textbook, Logic and Contemporary Rhetoric, explains that two of the three conditions for cogent reasoning require us to examine our background beliefs (Cavender and Kahane 15). One of the places that we can develop these beliefs is from groups that we are loyal to. Therefore we must investigate how loyalty affects our reasoning if we want to reason cogently. But first we must understand what loyalty is. Loyalty is an idea that most of us know, but couldn’t define without saying the word loyal. So what does being loyal actually mean? Dictionary.com defines it as being “faithful to any leader, party, or cause, or person or thing conceived of deserving fidelity”. Loyalty is essential for groups to prosper and fulfills several psychological
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It is beneficial for a group to have loyal members for several reasons. It keeps members in a group and it keeps them doing their best to try to advance the group. When members are loyal they will work together for the good of the group which makes the group prosper. When the group prospers the people in it do too. If the group grows in popularity, then loyal members would as well. Or if a company prospers the loyal people who were with it since the beginning would increase both in position and financially because the company is prospering. Also in being loyal to a group you gain the support of other loyal members. And even just being a member of a group is beneficial. As Daniel Druckman explains, loyalty fulfills three major needs of humans; affective involvement, goal involvement, and ego involvement (Druckman 44-45). We all need to feel like we belong and have a purpose to work towards and have standing in society. Just being in a group gives you these things which is why everybody tends to associate themselves with one group or another and the only way to stay in the group is to be faithful. Loyalty is essential for both members and the …show more content…
Loyalty can come from faulty reasoning when we don’t look into the background beliefs of the group or the goals of the group. If you don’t evaluate the groups that you are a part of, or are thinking of joining, then you can become loyal to a bad cause or a group that looks trustworthy on the surface but actually goes against your beliefs. This can cause you to act in a way that goes against what you believe or it can cause you to change your beliefs altogether. I doubt everyone who joined or sponsored the Nazi party believed that killing Jews was the right thing to do at first, but in the end that’s what the Nazi party did. This is an example of the fact that loyalty can cause people to do almost anything in order to stay in a group. Another way that loyalty can be harmful is when a person is loyal to their own small group, like their town, to the detriment of their loyalty to a larger group, like a state or nation. The ancient Greeks are an example of the problems of being too loyal to your specific group at the expense of the larger group. Because each Greek city-state was loyal to their own people, more than to their country, the cities tended to fight each other. This made it easy for them to be conquered as Philip of Macedonia and then later the Romans did. They didn’t put up much of a defense in either of these cases because they were too busy fighting each other to see that there was a
It is beneficial for a group to have loyal members for several reasons. It keeps members in a group and it keeps them doing their best to try to advance the group. When members are loyal they will work together for the good of the group which makes the group prosper. When the group prospers the people in it do too. If the group grows in popularity, then loyal members would as well. Or if a company prospers the loyal people who were with it since the beginning would increase both in position and financially because the company is prospering. Also in being loyal to a group you gain the support of other loyal members. And even just being a member of a group is beneficial. As Daniel Druckman explains, loyalty fulfills three major needs of humans; affective involvement, goal involvement, and ego involvement (Druckman 44-45). We all need to feel like we belong and have a purpose to work towards and have standing in society. Just being in a group gives you these things which is why everybody tends to associate themselves with one group or another and the only way to stay in the group is to be faithful. Loyalty is essential for both members and the …show more content…
Loyalty can come from faulty reasoning when we don’t look into the background beliefs of the group or the goals of the group. If you don’t evaluate the groups that you are a part of, or are thinking of joining, then you can become loyal to a bad cause or a group that looks trustworthy on the surface but actually goes against your beliefs. This can cause you to act in a way that goes against what you believe or it can cause you to change your beliefs altogether. I doubt everyone who joined or sponsored the Nazi party believed that killing Jews was the right thing to do at first, but in the end that’s what the Nazi party did. This is an example of the fact that loyalty can cause people to do almost anything in order to stay in a group. Another way that loyalty can be harmful is when a person is loyal to their own small group, like their town, to the detriment of their loyalty to a larger group, like a state or nation. The ancient Greeks are an example of the problems of being too loyal to your specific group at the expense of the larger group. Because each Greek city-state was loyal to their own people, more than to their country, the cities tended to fight each other. This made it easy for them to be conquered as Philip of Macedonia and then later the Romans did. They didn’t put up much of a defense in either of these cases because they were too busy fighting each other to see that there was a