I see ethical considerations as having a certain priority in our interactions - passing judgment on our political and legal processes.

Think of loyalty as a kind of relational glue.

Structurally I don't see a fundamental difference between what we may reasonably expect of police and doctors - though obviously the fact that doctors are generally pursuing life-saving activities and police may be engaged in life-threatening activities may lead to differences in how we construe the moral limits to their roles.

There will always be situations in which conflicts arise between individual and communal values - Catholic police officers deployed to enable women to enter abortion clinics without harassment and doctors who oppose performing abortions. No social role is free of such potential conflicts.

I confess to being something of a philosophical butterfly. The world is full of so many interesting questions, and although my greatest passion is for some form of applied ethics, that leaves me with oodles of possibilities, many of which I have never had the time or opportunity to explore in great depth.

I remember Stanley Benn remarking that one needed to be a certain age to engage with problems in political philosophy - I think he had in mind a certain breadth of understanding and experience - and so my political interests developed more slowly than the others.

One of the real dangers of loyalty is that it may become associated with certain types of group-think, chauvinism, jingoism, and thus become socially destructive in ways that many other virtues are not likely to be when they are corrupted. Nationalism and patriotism are especially prone to misguided excess.

The roles evolve over time: juries once made determinations about law nowadays, they are supposedly limited to making factual determinations. A good move? All along, however, we will, be employing and refining established values in new contexts, with the possibility of restructuring them in some way.

I see loyalty - roughly perseverance in relational commitments despite the cost of such perseverance - as an important human value/virtue. Think of it as a kind of relational glue.