Who is a patriotic person

To be sure, a country is not a person, but it begs the question to say that love is properly directed only to persons. It abuses neither speech nor sense to say that I love my house and for that reason would feel sorrow and deprivation if disaster forced me to leave it.

I have had such an experience. Consider immigrants who arrive legally in the U. Their lives in their new country often are arduous, but they at least enjoy the protection of the laws, the opportunity to advance economically, and the right to participate in choosing their elected officials.

Is it unreasonable for them to experience gratitude, affection, and the desire to perform reciprocal service for the country that has given them refuge?

But here again, his conclusion does not follow from his premise. Surely we can love people who are not responsible for our existence: parents love their children, husbands their wives. Besides, refugees may literally owe their continuing existence to countries that offer them sanctuary from violence. Is it less reasonable and proper to love the institutions that save our life than the individuals who give us life? As another philosopher, Eamonn Callan, has suggested, if patriotism is love of country, then the general features of love are likely to illuminate this instance of it.

To do that would be to surrender both intellectual and moral integrity. But to say that parental love risks crossing the line in these ways is not to say that parents are required to turn their backs on criminals who happen to be their children, or to cease all efforts to reform them.

Nor is it to fault parents who have wrenchingly concluded that they must cut these ties. There is one more objection to my conception of reasonable patriotism: it is irrational to choose a life that puts you at heightened risk of dying for your country. The objector may say that there is nothing worth dying for, a proposition I reject. Must a political community be morally unblemished to be worth killing or dying for? The United States was a deeply flawed nation when it went to war after the attack on Pearl Harbor.

The servicemen on the Normandy beaches harbored none of the dulce et decorum est illusions that led young Englishmen to welcome the outbreak of the first world war; the GIs fought against pure evil in the name of a partial good. They were neither wrong nor deceived to do so, or so I believe. Is everything done in response an expression of delusion? Not at all: some reactions are necessary and justified; others are excessive and illegitimate.

I favored retaliation against the Taliban, which asked some Americans to kill and die for their country. Most Americans agreed, and I think we were right. Attacking those who did not attack us was—and is—another matter altogether. As long as we have multiple communities, and as long as evil endures, citizens will face choices they would rather avoid, and patriotism will be a necessary virtue.

Lurking behind the critique of patriotism is the longing for an unattainable moral purity in politics. I take my stand with Max Weber, with the ethic of responsibility that embraces the necessary moral costs of maintaining our collective existence—all the more so when our government rests on the consent of the governed.

It is only within decent political communities that citizens can hope to practice the ordinary morality we rightly cherish. Report Produced by Governance Studies. Viewed as a leading, independent voice in the domestic policymaking sphere, the Governance Studies program at Brookings is dedicated to analyzing policy issues, political institutions and processes, and contemporary governance challenges.

Our scholarship identifies areas in need of reform and proposes specific solutions to improve governance worldwide, but with a particular emphasis on the United States. I begin with some conceptual clarifications. Report Produced by Governance Studies Viewed as a leading, independent voice in the domestic policymaking sphere, the Governance Studies program at Brookings is dedicated to analyzing policy issues, political institutions and processes, and contemporary governance challenges.

More on U. The Mood of the Nation Poll is the only nationally representative poll that relies primarily on open-ended questions — allowing Americans to tell us, in their own words, about the issues of the day. Our summer poll added a special section on patriotism where we asked 1, online respondents,.

Patriotism means many things to many people. How about you? Can you tell us in your own words what being patriotic means to you? The answers were wide ranging and touched on many topics. The most common themes concerned love of country and demonstrating respect for its symbols, the Constitution, and the men and women who have served our country in uniform. For example, a 40 year-old woman from Maryland told us that patriotism means.

Many citizens went beyond personal feelings of pride and love, but also told us that patriotism also means the public display of loyalty. This may or may not be relevant to the question of patriotism, depending on just what we take the point of princely rule to be. This type of patriotism is extreme, but by no means extremely rare. Not much needs to be said about the moral standing of this type of patriotism, as it amounts to rejection of morality.

On the liberal view, where and from whom I learn the principles of morality is just as irrelevant to their contents and to my commitment to them, as where and from whom I learn the principles of mathematics is irrelevant to their contents and my adherence to them. For MacIntyre, where and from whom I learn my morality is of decisive importance both for my commitment to it and for its very contents.

There is no morality as such; morality is always the morality of a particular community. Moral rules are justified in terms of certain goods they express and promote; but these goods, too, are always given as part and parcel of the way of life of a community.

The individual becomes a moral agent only when informed as such by his community. He also lives and flourishes as one because he is sustained in his moral life by his community. If I can live and flourish as a moral agent only as a member of my community, while playing the role this membership involves, then my very identity is bound up with that of my community, its history, traditions, institutions, and aspirations. This leads MacIntyre to conclude that patriotism is not to be contrasted with morality; it is rather a central moral virtue, indeed the bedrock of morality.

To that extent, this type of patriotism is critical and rational. This account of patriotism is exposed to several objections. One might find fault with the step from communitarianism to patriotism:.

If so, this type of patriotism would seem to involve the rejection of such basic moral notions as universal justice and common human solidarity. This is not a fair objection to patriotism as such. But the objection is pertinent, and has considerable force, when brought up against the type of patriotism advocated by MacIntyre.

If justice is understood in universal, rather than parochial terms, if common human solidarity counts as a weighty moral consideration, and if peace is of paramount importance and war is morally permissible only when it is just, then this kind of patriotism must be rejected. There is considerable middle ground between these extremes.

Exploring this middle ground has led some philosophers to construct positions accommodating both the universal and the particular point of view — both the mandates of universal justice and claims of common humanity, and the concern for the patria and compatriots. Baron argues that the conflict between impartiality and partiality is not quite as deep as it may seem. Morality allows for both types of considerations, as they pertain to different levels of moral deliberation.

At one level, we are often justified in taking into account our particular commitments and attachments, including those to our country. At another level, we can and ought to reflect on such commitments and attachments from a universal, impartial point of view, to delineate their proper scope and determine their weight. In such a case, partiality and particular concerns are judged to be legitimate and indeed valuable from an impartial, universal point of view.

This means that with respect to those matters and within the same limits, it is also good for a Cuban to judge as a Cuban and to put Cuban interests first, etc. Actually, this is how we think of our special obligations to, and preferences for, our family, friends, or local community; this kind of partiality is legitimate, and indeed valuable, not only for us but for anyone. By doing so, she argues, our patriotism will leave room for serious, even radical criticism of our country, and will not be a force for dissension and conflict in the international arena.

A good example is provided by the Ten Commandments, a major document of Western morality. The kind of patriotism defended by Nathanson and Baron is moderate in several distinct, but related respects. It acknowledges the constraints morality imposes on the pursuit of our individual and collective goals. For instance, it may require the patriot to fight for his country, but only in so far as the war is, and remains, just.

Adherents of both extreme and robust patriotism will consider themselves bound to fight for their country whether its cause be just or not. Extreme patriots will also fight for it in whatever way it takes to win.

Moderate patriotism is not exclusive. Its adherent will show special concern for his country and compatriots, but that will not prevent him from showing concern for other countries and their inhabitants. Such patriotism is compatible with a decent degree of humanitarianism.

Finally, moderate patriotism is not uncritical, unconditional, or egocentric. For an adherent of this type of patriotism, it is not enough that the country is her country. She will also expect it to live up to certain standards and thereby deserve her support, devotion, and special concern for its well-being.

When it fails to do so, she will withhold support. The latter type of patriotism need not conflict with impartial justice or common human solidarity. It will therefore be judged morally unobjectionable by all except some adherents of a strict type of cosmopolitanism.

However, both Baron and Nathanson fail to distinguish clearly between showing that their preferred type of patriotism is morally unobjectionable and showing that it is morally required or virtuous, and sometimes seem to be assuming that by showing the former, they are also showing the latter. Yet there is a gap between the two claims, and the latter, stronger case for moderate patriotism still needs to be made.

What is the case for the claim that moderate patriotism is morally mandatory — that we have a duty of special concern for the well-being of our country and compatriots, similar to special duties to family or friends? Gratitude is probably the most popular among the grounds adduced for patriotic duty. We owe our country our life, our education, our language, and, in the most fortunate cases, our liberty. Both Socrates and Viroli are exaggerating the benefits bestowed on us by our country; surely any gratitude owed for being born or brought up is owed to parents, rather than patria.

But there are important benefits we have received from our country; the argument is that we are bound to show gratitude for them, and that the appropriate way to do so is to show special concern for the well-being of the country and compatriots. One worry here is that considerations of gratitude normally arise in interpersonal relations.

We also speak of gratitude to large and impersonal entities — our school, profession, or even our country — but that seems to be an abbreviated way of referring to gratitude to particular persons who have acted on behalf of these entities. A debt of gratitude is not incurred by any benefit received. If a benefit is conferred inadvertently, or advisedly but for the wrong reason e. And we cannot talk with confidence about the reasons a large and complex group or institution has for its actions.

Perhaps we can think of compatriots as an aggregate of individuals. Do we owe them a debt of gratitude for the benefits of life among them? Again, it depends on the reason for their law-abiding behavior and social cooperation generally. But there is no single reason common to all or even most of them.

Some do their part without giving much thought to the reasons for doing so; others believe that doing so is, in the long run, the most prudent policy; still others act out of altruistic motives. Only the last group — surely a tiny minority — would be a proper object of our gratitude. Moreover, gratitude is appropriate only for a benefit conferred freely, as a gift, and not as a quid pro quo.

But most of the benefits we receive from our country are of the latter sort: benefits we have paid for by our own law-abiding behavior in general, and through taxation in particular. The benefits one has received from her country might be considered relevant to the duty of patriotism in a different way: as raising the issue of fairness. It is rather a common enterprise that produces and distributes a wide range of benefits.

These benefits are made possible by cooperation of those who live in the country, participate in the enterprise, owe and render allegiance to the polity. He was a patriot of the noblest and most extensive views, and justly celebrated as a man of learning, eloquent and refined. Pierre Van Cortlandt, a distinguished revolutionary patriot , died at his seat at Croton river, aged He was afterwards a member of the Massachusetts senate, and much esteemed as a physician and a patriot. Posing as a patriot King and boasting of his love for his adopted country, he ever remained at heart a Frenchman.

And now, having attained all he could desire, Wilkes sank the patriot in the courtier. New Word List Word List.