Royce’s Other Ethics: Aspects of Royce’s Ethical Thought Unrelated to Loyalty
Royce’s Other Ethics: Aspects of Royce’s Ethical Thought Unrelated to Loyalty

Summary/Abstract: Josiah Royce’s 1908 work The Philosophy of Loyalty is often taken as the summit and major statement of his thoughts on ethics. However, this view is mistaken. Royce’s ethics is far broader. Not only did Royce have early “non-loyalty” insights into ethics, e.g., society studied as a pre-moral aggregate or mass, and scholarship as a development of moral selfhood, but he also provided alternatives to loyalty — love, work, and dissatisfaction with experience — as unifying themes in practical ethics. Moreover, he practised a mode of ethical modeling based upon analysing the lives of prominent people, and most importantly, he extensively worked out a Logic of Ethics. These advances are characterized here as Royce’s “Other than Loyalty Ethics,” a body of work which provides strong material to be built upon further by contemporary ethicists.

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