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Eamonn Callan Love, Idolatry, and Patriotism Social Theory and Practice, 32.4 (2006): 525-546. Free
access to this article is provided by kind permission of the author and the editors
and publishers of Social Theory
and Practice.
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the article: http://international-political-theory.net/3/Callan.pdf Abstract A good human life will engage the capacity to love.
Two good questions in ethics are how we are to distinguish proper and
improper objects of love and how we can love well rather than badly those
things that we can properly love. I argue that countries are a proper object
of love, and I develop a secular analogue to the concept of idolatry to
explain a familiar and morally disastrous way in which they are often loved
badly. But countries can also be loved well, and loving them well is morally
wholesome. To bring that possibility into focus, I explore the latent role of
patriotism in stabilizing the well-ordered society depicted in Rawls's A
Theory of Justice. Then I consider what kind of argument might be needed to
show that under non-ideal conditions the cultivation of patriotism is
repugnant to the tenets of cosmopolitan morality. I argue that the necessary
argument is much more elusive than anti-patriotic cosmopolitans seem to
think. |