The killings of Trayvon Martin, Michael Brown, Eric Garner, Tamir Rice, Alton Sterling, Philando Castile, and others have instigated widespread debate concerning the ethics and politics of police behavior toward young black men in America. This article shows how Josiah Royce’s philosophy of loyalty provides a useful theoretical framework for diagnosing and working to overcome strained relations between police and black citizens in the United States. The author begins by establishing the relevance of Royce’s thought to the realm of police (...) ethics. Then, it is argued that Royce’s notion of loyalty to loyalty is a useful and powerful lens through which the practice of police discretion may be examined, particularly as it comes to bear on racial profiling and use of force. The author concludes by offering Roycean recommendations aimed at ameliorating the fractured relationship between police and blacks in America today. (shrink)

Tommy J. Curry’s Another white Man’s Burden presents a rigorous intellectual history of Josiah Royce’s essays on race. Curry explains the several arguments that Royce made on this topic between 1900 and 1908, and he situates these within Royce’s social philosophy and some contemporaneous literatures on racism. The result is a comprehensive theory of cultural assimilation informed by an idealist metaphysics. Royce, namely, disdained segregation and rejected biological accounts of racial difference. But Royce scholars have wrongly taken these observations, Curry (...) argues, as evidence that their hero held progressive views on race. Royce rather began from the premise of Anglo-American cultural superiority, and... (shrink)

Few American thinkers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries were acquainted with Eastern traditions of thought. Early Transcendentalists, including Ralph Waldo Emerson and Henry David Thoreau, were happy exceptions to this, with each showing passing familiarity of and an approving attitude toward the Bhagavad-Gita and other early Vedic texts. Other thinkers of the period, including Walt Whitman and Bronson Alcott, were influenced to varying degrees by Indian thought. Despite this limited fascination with the intellectual traditions of the East, rare (...) was the thinker who made an effort to encounter these texts on their own terms by learning the languages in which they were written. One notable exception .. (shrink)

This paper presents core features of the virtue ethics of American philosopher Ella Lyman Cabot. It offers an articulation of her position in Everyday Ethics (1906), and argues that Cabot's account has the resources to respond to a critique leveled against her mentor, Josiah Royce—namely, that a virtue ethics organized around loyalty is too easily corrupted by loyalty to bad causes. In addition to its importance to a full picture of the pragmatist tradition in moral philosophy, engagement with Cabot's work (...) is critical to an accurate grasp of the virtue ethics revival of the 20th century. (shrink)