Can arbitrary loyalties be morally defensible?

As a way of responding to Will's provocation on truth and particularity, I'll throw up bits from this paper I wrote for a Yale seminar on Edmund Burke. Excerpts chosen for relevance and readibility:

. . . The sketch of the accusation against Burke and his own defense against it are now both fairly clear: he believed fervently in objective ethical laws but allowed their abrogation and overrule for various aesthetic, circumstantial, and emotional reasons. Burke was a pragmatist, but not at the expense of certain overriding moral concerns. The question remains whether Burke’s compromises reveal a man trying to balance principle against pragmatism or whether his pragmatic concerns can be integrated with his moral ones in a unifying system.

. . . To accept Burke’s “sacred veil” is to conclude that a legend which breeds pride in one’s country is morally preferable to a factual story which breeds shame or humility. This preference for indirect truth may redeem Burke’s foppish ode to the age of chivalry from those of its faults that Philip Francis complained of. The drapery of legend distracts from the moral liberties taken by a country’s founders. The drapery of beauty distracts from the moral worth, good or bad, of a distressed lady. In neither case is the drapery simply a useful means to a preferable end. It is both principled and defensible to say that beauty and legend inspire feelings that are not merely useful in the way that resigning oneself to the quirks of the American spirit is useful but true in the way that compassion for one suffering is true.

. . . The moral law is one and the same for all, but just as moral duty varies from situation to situation, adherence to moral law may require vastly different actions from different men. That such differences should be based on arbitrary distinctions in no way undermines the universality of the rule. To say that a commandment is moral is to say that it is not arbitrary. However, this does not mean that arbitrariness cannot be a feature and component of a system of ethics. The political morality that can be extrapolated from Edmund Burke’s writings reveals the possibility of doing so by incorporating national loyalty, aesthetic chivalry, and family loyalty into divine moral law.

More, including a shout-out to Oscar Wilde. I think Eve will enjoy the sentence "Sublimity requires obscurity, and morality by its nature cannot be obscure."