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Loving What Is Ours: Patriotism and the Desire for Human Flourishing
Paperback
ISBN13: 9781066906109
Publisher: Ian Watson
Published: Sep 24 2026
Pages: 172
Weight: 0.48
Height: 0.43 Width: 6.00 Depth: 9.00
Language: English
Patriotism has few friends among moral philosophers and rather too many among those who would put it to work against other people. Loving What Is Ours argues that both sides have misread it.
Drawing on the nineteenth-century Italian republican Giuseppe Mazzini, Ian Watson develops what he calls a Moral form of Partiality: the case that love of one's own country can be morally justified only when it remains answerable to the good of humanity as a whole. Particular attachments are not rivals to our universal obligations but, properly understood, the means by which we come to meet them. Mazzini called the country the fulcrum of the lever we have to wield for the common good.
The first part of the book builds the philosophical case, testing patriotic attachment against the demands of impartialist ethics and drawing on Kant, Korsgaard, Nussbaum, Williams and Taylor to show why particular loyalties belong among the sources of moral obligation rather than standing as an embarrassment to them.
The second part brings that argument into conversation with Catholic Social Teaching, where a position developed largely on philosophical grounds meets a tradition that reaches related conclusions by a different route. Chapters on Christian nationalism and on Pope Leo XIV's encyclical Magnifica Humanitas ask what happens when the cross is wrapped in the flag, and what the dignity of the human person requires of us in an age increasingly shaped by technological power.
This is a book for readers who feel the pull of home and see no reason to apologise for it, but who will not allow that attachment to diminish their obligations to everyone else.
Dr Ian Watson holds a doctorate in political and moral philosophy from the Open University.
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