We venerate loyalty to our schools employers institutions friends as a virtue Loyalty however can be at least as detrimental an influence as it can be a beneficial one

In a society where crime and murder occur more and more frequently, one might wonder who supports those ideas and individuals to let it come that far. As a consequence the virtue of loyalty might be questioned. Is it really a beneficial influence or might it also be a detrimental one?

On one hand, one may say that the argument contains some true value in it. If one is too loyal, it may influence both that person's life and the one of the person he/she is loyal to in a negative way.

Let us for example take a look at a case where loyalty is not beneficial for the supporting party. If one's friend is recently taking the wrong path and you stay loyal to him, you might end up on that same path. Loyalty (as a first step and afterwards peer pressure) is in my opinion one of the main reasons a lot of people start to smoke.

The second case can be illustrated by the same example. By staying loyal to your friend, you do not signal him that he is wrong. Therefore by staying at his side you give a message of encouragement for a bad habit to someone you love.

However, these negative points can be viewed just as well as positive ones. If you replace all negative valued words in the previous argument by positive ones, you get that loyalty might make a better person out of you and/or the person you are loyal to.

For this reason one can regard loyalty as a virtue and put the problem of it being detrimental or beneficial as a case of the personality of the persons involved. Especially the character of the the person who lends his/her loyalty is important. If that person has a spine and is able to stick up for him/herself, mostly good things will happen out of the loyalty virtue. One can for example take a distance from his friend when he starts smoking, thereby signalling him he is developing a bad habit. It is important to remark that one can stay loyal to a friend whilst taking some distance whitout breaking their friendship. With this means, he might reconsider what he is doing and get on the right track again.

Since however most of us regard their family and closely related friends as having a strong character, one might say that as a consequence of this, loyalty ist regarded as a virtue in our society. But in the wrong hands, this virtue might not be beneficial anymore, but be a detrimental influence leading to negative newsfacts we see almost daily in the news.