ABSTRACT
This chapter aims to provide an overview of the background material necessary to make sense of Sellars’s claim that Roycean loyalty (which he presents as conceptually identical with Christian love of neighbor) is the only direct support for moral commitment. In the prior chapter, I showed that for Sellars, the commitments and operation of moral reasoning rely upon community membership, most generally a community of ideal reasoners. In order to make sense of Sellars’s invocation of Royce, I intend to work through what Royce meant by ‘loyalty’ and how this idea relates to the idea of community as well as communities themselves. As with Sellars, readers less familiar with the breadth of Royce’s intellectual output may assume that his continuous attention to issues in epistemology, metaphysics, and logic meant that social, political, and ethical topics are of secondary importance. As close readers of Royce know, however, these latter concerns are some of the most central to his understanding of and approach to all other philosophical topics. A single chapter on them will be necessarily sketchy and incomplete.
