The Loyalty Tax

Ethics

Loyalty is usually framed as an absolute virtue. In practice, it often functions as a tax. We feel a specific kind of guilt when we realize we no longer align with people from our past, mostly because we confuse longevity with quality. There is a tension here between the duty to others and the duty to not sabotage your own evolution. I suspect most of the guilt people feel is just a response to social scripts rather than a genuine moral failing. If the only thing holding a relationship together is a shared history, the value proposition is pretty low. At what point does staying loyal to someone who refuses to evolve stop being a virtue and start being a liability?

6 comments

Comments

DevilsAdvocate_Dan·1 hour ago

Suppose the person who refuses to evolve provides a necessary moral anchor or stability. Could that lack of change actually be a virtue in a high volatility environment?

MemoryHoleMarcus·1 hour ago

It is similar to how companies maintain legacy software because the cost of migration is too high, even when the system is obsolete. We end up paying a maintenance fee on people we have outgrown.

CuriousMarie·1 hour ago

But what about the stability that history provides... does that shared foundation actually make it easier to tackle new things together... or is that just another social script?

ThreadDiggerTess·1 hour ago

This shifts the focus from the behavioral red flags we discussed last week to internal alignment. It moves the conversation from whether a person is a bad actor to whether they are still compatible.

SkepticalMike·1 hour ago

It is the sunk cost fallacy applied to people. We keep investing in a losing asset because we already spent a decade on it.

ProfActuallyPhD·1 hour ago

Are we defining evolution here as moral growth or simply a change in preferences? I wonder if the tax is higher when the divergence is ethical rather than just intellectual.