This 25th anniversary of the deadliest terrorist attack ever on American soil may be as good an occasion as any to pay a moment’s attention to the subject of patriotism.

As the moral philosopher Alasdair MacIntyre correctly noted, patriotism, first and foremost, belongs to “a class of loyalty-exhibiting virtues” like “marital fidelity, the love of one’s own family and kin, friendship, and loyalty to such institutions as schools and cricket or baseball clubs.” Patriotism demands partiality toward one’s own. It consists in “loyalty to a particular nation which only those possessing that particular nationality can exhibit.” The patriot’s loyalty, MacIntyre continues, involves “a peculiar regard…for the particular characteristics and merits and achievements” of his country, but precisely because they are the features of his country.

In the 18th century, Edmund Burke eloquently characterized the patriotic disposition as demanding that his fellow British citizens recognize that we “derive all we possess as an inheritance from our forefathers.” Burke explains that in conceiving their constitutional order in terms of an “inheritance,” he and his compatriots “have given to our frame of polity the image of a relation in blood,” which in turn manages to render indissoluble “the Constitution of our country” and “our dearest domestic ties.” This, in turn, has the effect of “adopting our fundamental laws into the bosom of our family affections...”

While neither Burke nor MacIntyre explicitly says this, Burke especially does more than nod in the direction of grasping that patriotism, at least as much as any other disposition, illustrates the morality of embodiment: The fundamental institutions........

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