This loyalty is also the mechanism that gets some people to give up their lives in war. I reason that you have much more intimate knowledge of persons close to yourself, and therefore you need lean less on the general principle to supply wisdom as well as guidance about what best to do. But perhaps this is nothing more than my own preference, and I know that this preference is atypical. For example, I do not support any country right or wrong. On the other hand, my attitudes toward my close friends is affected much more by my feelings about them, and loyalty toward them, than it is by any views of them with respect to principles.
Loyalties involve emotions.
And certainly many of our decisions about loyal acts are made in an almost instinctive fashion, the way mothers belonging to many species instinctively protect their young from sudden danger without conscious deliberation. But most of us come to decision points where we deliberate about loyalties, and what we should do about them. This chapter is intended to apply to such decisions about which we find ourselves in doubt. Even if everyone in town gives their kid a bicycle, logic does not compel any parent to feel an obligation to do so. Nor does the fact that the human race could not continue if people did not have children constitute an ethical requirement for anyone to have children.