Morality of Loyalty
Moral Maze
BBC
4.5 • 609 Ratings
🗓️ 2 March 2017
⏱️ 43 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
298 days after Leicester City manager Claudio Ranieri had done the seemingly impossible and helped his team win the Premiership league title, he's been sacked. Even by the standards of football it was a decision that shocked many. Gary Lineker, a former Leicester player, said he shed a tear. Leicester had never won a top-flight title but their improbable triumph rekindled some of the romance of the sport and Ranieri was made FIFA's Coach of the Year. This season has been a disaster. Leicester now face relegation - which will cost the club £70m. That might be a simple mathematical calculation, but this is a complex moral equation. Is loyalty a moral virtue? Isn't hard-head commercialism, loyal only to the bottom line, the only rational approach in a results-driven environment? As much as loyalty is a virtue, is blind loyalty a vice? Is loyalty owed to moral principles and objectives rather than to people, who can lead us badly astray? In an era when friendships and relationships have been reduced to the click of a mouse or a swipe to the right, should we value loyalty more highly? And then of course, there's the issue of loyalty to your leader and your political party... Witnesses are Rev. Rachel Mann, Dr Shahrar Ali, Jim White and Richard Bevan.
Transcript
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| 0:00.0 | You're listening to a programme from BBC Radio 4. |
| 0:03.6 | Good evening. Loyalty is still the defining virtue of dogs, but humans no longer seem so sure. |
| 0:08.9 | Loyalty seems at a discount this week as the sports world digest the startlingly ruthless defenestration of Leicester City's manager Claudio Ranieri. |
| 0:17.2 | Last year he made the Premier League's perpetual also rounds the most unlikely champions in living memory. |
| 0:22.3 | This year he's been fired after a string of bad results that many fans blame on the disloyalty of his players. |
| 0:28.4 | Relegation would cost the club 70 million pounds, which makes sentiment or morality even expensive. |
| 0:35.0 | Loyalty seems to have become the issue of the day. |
| 0:36.9 | It's a theme of a string of |
| 0:37.9 | new television dramas like SSGB, which wrestles with the conflict of loyalties for a Scotland Yard |
| 0:43.4 | detective in a Nazi-occupied Britain. It dominates politics, where loyalties over party leaders |
| 0:49.3 | and issues like Brexit seem particularly torn at the moment. Is it possible to be loyal to ideals, institutions, as well as people? |
| 0:57.7 | Is it an unambiguous good or even desirable? |
| 1:00.9 | There are many who would say it can be an abdication of critical judgment and moral autonomy |
| 1:04.6 | and point to examples in history of its malign consequences. |
| 1:08.8 | Loyalty, vice or virtue? |
| 1:11.4 | Moral maze tonight. |
| 1:12.9 | The panel, Claire Fox from the Institute of Ideas, |
| 1:15.3 | Anne McElvoy, senior editor at The Economist, |
| 1:17.2 | the former Conservative Cabinet Minister Michael Portillo, |
| 1:19.8 | and Matthew Taylor, chief executive at the RSA, |
| 1:23.5 | who I happen to know supports a football team called the Baggies, |
| 1:27.1 | best not to go there, but |
... |
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