Most of us sign up to 'package-deal ethics'. Credit: Win McNamee/Getty Images
Most of us want to be a ‘normal person’. In a recent blog post, the economist Bryan Caplan defines this, admittedly subjective, term as someone who “says what others say, but does what others do.” In other words, normal people are well-meaning hypocrites, whereas Caplan happily acknowledges that he is one of those weird people who is troubled by the gap between saying and doing, and so will think very hard about any contradictions in his own speech and behaviour — sometimes with eccentric results.
And so he has written several books that make very unusual arguments: for open borders, for radical cuts to education spending, and for parents expending less effort in raising their children. But then this is the risk — once you start gnawing away at ideological contradictions that most people don’t think twice about, you may find yourself adopting the kind of positions that ‘normal people’ find odd.
This kind of hard thinking is why I like reading Caplan, despite the fact that on most issues he takes a libertarian stance (meaning I usually disagree with his conclusions). I appreciate the fact that he is one of those unusual people who is very good at resisting what James Mumford describes in his most recent book Vexed as ‘package-deal ethics’ — that is, the assumed obligation to sign up to a pre-prepared set of political ideas, rather than select each idea on its own merits.
Mumford asks us to interrogate package-deal ethics, not because we must be entirely consistent on every point (“consistent worldviews can be wicked!”) but because sometimes the inconsistencies within package-deals can be too grievous to ignore, and may well be the result, not of careful evaluation, but of historical accident.
Mumford is British, but has spent a lot of time living in America, where a fashion for bumper stickers acts as a visible marker of package-deal ethics:
What is most revealing about these stickers is the company they keep on each individual car. You pull up at the traffic lights. On your right is a car juxtaposing ‘Liberals Take and Spend. Conservatives Protect and Serve’ with ‘Pro Guns. Pro God. Pro Life.’ On your left is a car displaying a rainbow flag alongside ‘Buy Fresh Local’, ‘No Nukes’ and ‘Co-Exist’.
Bumper stickers cluster by political tribe, just as politicised emojis and hashtags do in twitter bios. The division has historically been between Left and Right, but the two groups are perhaps more instructively described as ‘Blue Tribe’ and ‘Red Tribe’, given that they self-segregate by culture as much as by politics.
The evolving response to Covid-19 has been an example of tribalism in action. When the virus first emerged into public consciousness at the beginning of this year, there was no political script available to tell each tribe how to respond. Some members of the Blue Tribe took the view in February that an over-reaction to the threat should be interpreted as evidence of anti-Chinese racism, and Nancy Pelosi encouraged people to visit San Francisco’s Chinatown to show support for the Chinese-American community. Meanwhile, members of Red Tribe were urging border closures to halt the spread of the disease.
Nine months on, attitudes have had time to crystallise, and the two tribes have neatly swapped their views on the best response to the disease, with Blue Tribe favouring more lockdown, and Red Tribe favouring less. In the UK, if you know a person’s attitude towards Brexit, you can be fairly confident in predicting their attitude towards lockdown, despite the fact that the relationship between the two issues is not at all obvious.
In Vexed, Mumford tackles the blight of package-deal ethics by looking closely at six controversial issues that divide Blue Tribe from Red Tribe in both the UK and America: euthanasia, the benefits system, cultural sexualisation, gun rights, environmentalism, and the treatment of ex-offenders. Carefully alternating between pointing out inconsistencies on the Right and on the Left, Mumford persuasively argues that, on all of these issues, our assumptions are quite wrong.
Take the issue of euthanasia, which is usually taken to be a part of the Left’s package-deal: if you support abortion access, environmentalism, nuclear disarmament, and LGBT rights, then you must support legalised euthanasia, even though these issues don’t have any obvious connection to one another.
Mumford suggests that this knee-jerk support for legalised euthanasia is based on the Left’s “belief in inclusivity… the commitment to identify the marginalised and protect the vulnerable.” The problem is that such a policy is not necessarily inclusive at all, despite first appearances. It might be inclusive of one group in particular: the incurably ill who know their own minds and want to die in as painless and dignified a way as possible. But it is not inclusive of another, equally vulnerable group that is probably much larger: elderly or disabled people who are not economically active and might, in their darkest moments, understand themselves to be burdens on their families or on the state.
I confess that I once made the mistake of not thinking carefully about euthanasia, and so adopting the position that my package-deal presented to me at the time: uncritical acceptance of the case for legalisation. That is the risk of acting like a ‘normal person’ and going along with the group. It makes for an easy life, but it also makes for bad decision-making.
Vexed is an important book to read in any year, but in this coming year it is more important than ever. We’re at a moment when political tribes are in flux across the Western world. We’ve got record numbers of ethnic minority Americans voting Republican and Tories taking working class heartlands in the North of England. The old division between Right and Left is breaking apart, to be replaced by — what? Somewheres and anywheres? Globalists and populists? It remains to be seen.
For anyone drawn to the emerging political movement sometimes called post-liberalism it is particularly important to be cognisant of the dangers of package-deal ethics. Post-liberals are not (yet) cohesive enough to have formed an ideological package-deal — one bumper sticker does not (yet) predict the next.
And long may that remain true, because package-deal ethics is corrosive to good sense. Mumford reminds us that there are rarely simple answers to complex ethical questions, and obeying a tribe is rarely the best route. He asks us to continually ask “which aspect of the good is being obscured by this bundling of positions?” And I suspect that, in 2021, we will have to ask this question with even greater urgency.
Join the discussion
Join like minded readers that support our journalism by becoming a paid subscriber
To join the discussion in the comments, become a paid subscriber.
Join like minded readers that support our journalism, read unlimited articles and enjoy other subscriber-only benefits.
Subscribe“Most of us want to be a ‘normal person'”…and therein lies the problem.
The rise of social media has turned opinion into performance, an effortless way to signal our virtue on any and every subject without the inconvenience of morality, critical thinking or the development of judgment through experience.
My answer to most questions asked of me is “I don’t know”, followed by a search for information on that subject which I will then attempt to filter through my years of experience of human nature. I may still be wrong and willing to be persuaded otherwise in the future. What I attach no value to at all is the title of “normal person”.
Such herd mentality is perfectly illustrated in any Jordan Peterson interview where the questioner arrives “knowing” that he is an alt-right, misogynist, transphobic bigot but cannot fault the logic and evidence presented that demonstrate he is anything but.
Confusion will reign until critical thinking is taught in schools. I’m not holding my breath.
A teacher at Eton was just referred to the “Prevent” program for teaching critical thinking!
So, that’s one gaoled for ‘botty banditry’, another dismissed for for unacceptable views, and now your chap has had the temerity to teach critical thinking. Not a good month for Eton.
‘Sic Gloria Transit Mundi’ as we used to say.
Jordan Petersin seems to pop up here a lot. I was going to upvote you but I have not encountered the person you referenced so I maybe need to research him.
Re Jordan Peterson, you do. I don’t agree with him on everything, specifically his generalisations about women. But the sheer breadth and depth of his thinking are astonishing. He borders on madness, but all the best people do IMHO. And whether you agree with him or not, he makes you think. The interview with Cathy Newman made me ashamed of the paucity of intellect of our journalists.
I don’t agree with Jordan Peterson on everything and don’t regard him as particularly broad or deep, and certainly not as bordering on madness, just as an intelligent and well-educated person with a lot of common sense.
I agree. The three words which best signify intellectual rigour are, “I don’t know.” When I hear that response I realise I’m conversing with an intelligent person.
Long may those Jordan Peterson interviews continue. We have had so little fun this year, please don’t take away the most entertaining thing we have left.
I see myself as normal in the positive sense that I hate wokeness and communism.
If you start from a position of principles, you’ll find that you’re less all over the place, less random. Principles are not linked to political parties, they also aren’t necessarily linked to countries, many countries share some of the same principles. The five principles of US Constitution government are 1) consent of the governed 2) limited government 3) rule of law, 4) representative government and 5) democracy.
So if you take an issue like open borders, that requires the consent of the governed, it is not to be forced onto an unwilling public (in the UK, this is where the EU runs afoul of consent of the governed principle). The public signals willingness or unwillingness to submit to open borders through representative government. The issue doesn’t violate the principle of limited government because border security is the responsibility of the federal government. Representative government passes laws concerning border security.
First, as Carlin said (paraphrased), see how stupid the average person is, well half of the population are more stupid than them.
Leaders need to be wise, and exercise solemn duties of making the nation first. Who has the mental energy to self debate every stance? The luxury of the educated and under worked I suppose, but who else? That is why I would like to see voting made harder, because the people who know nothing and can not be bothered to get to a poling place do not need to be given mail in ballots as they will parrot whomever group has enrolled them.
And so politicians just work emotive issues, more money to the poor, more justice, more…. In the Deep South of the past the saying was someone after political office went on a platform of being ‘For Motherhood, and against the bole weevel’.
I disagree with pretty much all of this.
Mmm. I am still reeling from the whiplash of the left suddenly being in favour of global capitalism and American imperialism. I mean, I recognise the temptation of being in favour everything that Donald Trump is against, because God knows agreeing with him on anything makes me feel unclean, but honestly now!
And even that is after a long experience of shaking my head at the supposed need to persecute people in the name of tolerance and hate people in the name of love. Yes, I realise that we live in an imperfect world and you can’t follow every ideal to its logical conclusion, but if liberalism means anything it should mean being on the side of civilisation. Putting baying mobs in charge strikes me as less civilised than putting cabals of rich white guys in charge, no more.
It’s a really odd thing in the last few years that I’ve found my estimation of people’s intelligence has actually gone up if they have come right out and said that they agreed with something Donald Trump has said. Most of the time, such acquaintances have not been American and definitely weren’t “fans” of Trump as such – but they were brave, mature and independent-minded enough to say that, yes, in the specific case, they agreed. Writing off opinions just because of the identity of the person articulating them is a childish reflex that benefits no-one. And yet this is widespread: see the general reaction to Donald Trump withdrawing funding from WHO. In that case, WHO was deserving of criticism and could do with reform. It was the withdrawal of funds that was the silly bit. I saw one single journalist that was brave enough to point that out. One!
Writing off opinions just because of the identity of the person articulating them is a childish reflex that benefits no-one.
I’d say this is the defining feature of the left/right, blue/red divide. WHO says something is far more important than WHAT is said. And it reflects the great failing of journalism today.
An idea is good or bad on its own merits. It should be self-evident, but sadly, is not.
I would agree. He involved the US in no new wars. And he gave Israel the security of accords with Saudi and the Gulf States which IMHO was a huge achievement. That being said, IMHO he was unfit as a human being for high office and I am glad he didn’t get a second term.
Jonathan Haidt explains the moral and psychological basis of most people’s politics. Basically, intuition comes first and then a logical explanation is added. Intuitions are based on 6 different moral dimensions: care/harm, fairness/cheating, loyalty, authority, sanctity, liberty/oppression. Liberals and conservatives differ in their moral beliefs. e.g. liberals care more about care and fairness, conservatives want to maintain social structures through authority. Many intuitions are difficult to explain in terms of right or wrong, such as disgust, so may not come across as logical and consistent, but it is interesting to understand the underlying intuitions guiding people’s seemingly irrational politics. Obviously, this doesn’t account for herd mentality, which can shift individual beliefs towards those of the tribe.
“Liberals and conservatives differ in their moral beliefs. e.g. liberals care more about care and fairness, conservatives want to maintain social structures through authority.”
In the USA, Liberals commonly begin their thinking with, “I feel” this and “I feel that” (lots of squishy thinking!)….whereas, the thought of ‘Defunding the Police’ is just insanity to a Conservative, structure and order rule the day. One just has to listen, how people express themselves and ‘hate-to-say-it, you’ve practically got them pegged. Ergo, it’s also the reason why the Democrats are female-heavy, whereas the Republicans are male-heavy today. In this go-round, black women vote mostly Democrat, whereas a substantial number of black men voted Trump. The gender divide in the parties is ‘a thing’.
“intuition comes first and then a logical explanation is added.”
This is straight outta Hume
Reason is, and ought only to be the slave of the passions, and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them.
D.Hume (Treatise II.3.3 415)
I remember hearing about remote tribes somewhere in which an elderly person would “turn his face to the wall” and refuse contact with the world, and in a few days, die. We marveled that this could be possible. It now seems to me that an acceptance of the universal and inevitable fact of death should and could be a part of our culture, and that everyone should know from childhood that he would one day die and he could select that day when he felt like doing it. That is not the case now, but I can imagine it making a big difference to us.
Death on your choosing has always been problematic, and why suicide has always been shameful. In religion the issue is we have our karma to live through. The future may hold redemption, we may need to suffer for what he did to reflect and have absolution, Then the harm it can do to others. My best friend hanged himself at 20. I had left to USA and he had just been kicked out of university and hanged himself in loneliness and despair. I never got over that.
Others have thought differently. The Romans for example were quite keen on “falling on their swords” if there festering presence was thought likely to bring dishonour on the Republic, Empire or their own family.
The contemporary Netflix production entitled “Barbarian” shows this well with the death of Publius Quintilius Varus.
The Japanese likewise thought suicide was totally acceptable under certain conditions.
It could be argued this is the ultimate freedom, and as such is correctly tolerated in parts of Europe. Sadly, in the UK it still entails a one way ticket on EasyJet to Zurich.
I’m so sorry to hear that. So very sad. I’m not surprised it is still with you.
There is no mystery as to why ‘liberal’ people hold views that seem to Mumford and you to be contradictory. They are not motivated by ethnocentrism and the greater good of their tribe, they are obsessed with individualism. They can champion abortion without considering whether the world would have been a better place if they themselves had never been born, because the only individuals who should not be allowed to put themselves first are their own mothers. This is because such individualistic ‘liberals’ are genetic mutants who were only conceived by the tiniest chance and who would probably have been spontaneously aborted themselves in harsher, evolutionary times. This is why they are capable of thinking that Eugenics and ‘assisted dying’ are both excellent ideas. And they don’t believe in God, so they never think ‘there but for the grace of God go I’. It is also why they champion homosexuality and other non procreational forms of sex, and why it won’t be long before it becomes illegal to criticise child abusers. It is why they are against marriage and the nuclear family, why they worship the ‘other’ and go about screeching that ‘Black Lives Matter’ while refusing to acknowledge it is possible that the suffering of white homeless people could be greater than that of privately educated, black millionaires. It is why they want open borders, but at the same time wish the state to have detailed records of everyone living in the country so that immigrants can receive all the benefits of living in a settled community, paid for by the established population.
But the good news, for all those of us on the right, viewing the world from our own hypocritical stance and pretending to be full of Christian love, is that these, blasted lefties don’t breed and they will soon die out.
Yeah, genetic mutants conceived by the tiniest chance, but who somehow make up 50% of the population. Makes sense.
You’re wrong about at least one thing about at least one liberal, because I am perfectly comfortable with the idea of my mother aborting me. Hell, some days I feel like she should have – my parents weren’t particularly suited to parenthood and God knows their genes were nothing to write home about either. Anyway, dying before I knew I was alive seems like a non-issue. It’s when you’ve gotten used to being alive that death becomes an issue.
And can you name five prominent left-wingers who have made it into middle age without procreating? Because I can think of exactly one off the top of my head, and he’s a bit idiosyncratic in all sorts of other ways as well. Oh, liberals are all really, really supportive of other people living childfree lives, just ask them to do it themselves.
What’s wrong with your parents’ genes? Seeing as you can’t remember anything before you were about, I dunno, 2 years old and that vaguely how do you know how you felt before you were born? If the unborn didn’t have the strongest of instincts to survive how would they make it to birth? According to your logic it wouldn’t matter to you if you’d died as a baby; take that to its logical conclusion. No axe to grind here as such other than it’s easy to say things don’t matter long after they did. And many might say still do.
I am perfectly comfortable with the idea of my mother aborting me
Your mother needs to be worried about the idea of you eventually aborting her.
She gets to 75 or 80, she’s ill, and she’s taking up too much of your time – the moral thing to do, that just happens to coincide exactly with your own interests, is clearly to abort the old bed5hitter. Call it euthanasia if you feel better but it’s the same thing done for the same reason: someone else’s convenience.
Once it’s legal, it’s only the elderly parents of liberals who’ll be at risk of this, just like it’s only the unborn children of liberals who are at risk of abortion.
Mom, you know we all love you and all, but….I have left a couple brochures for you to look at when you get the chance.
Society has become very good at preserving those who would not survive a process of natural selection. We seem to have adopted a form of reverse Darwinism that donates advantage and power to those less likely to naturally acquire such, status to anomalies, and procreation most prolific at the lower ends of individual attainment. If it described a species I wouldn’t rate its chances of longevity.
I have always had trouble with that throwaway phrase “there but for the grace of God go I” – As a lifelong Christian – albeit one very imperfect one – I have always been taught that the grace of God falls on us all. I can’t believe that because I have had a more fortunate life than others, it is because God’s grace fell on me and not on others.
A professor I had once remarked that he was eating breakfast in a Southern USA restaurant and received unordered grits on his plate. When he advised the waitress of that fact, she remarked, “Oh, in the South, grits come with everything”
So I believe does grace.
Every issue double wrapped in red and blue agendas, packaged as a culture war in a tribal game of pass the parcel.
if you support abortion access…then you must support legalised euthanasia, even though these issues don’t have any obvious connection to one another.
Well, those two do. In each case, you are advocating the right of someone to take another’s life, quite frequently for the former’s convenience dressed virtuously up as vicarious concern for the latter. There is an obvious slippery slope here. If, as some argue, abortion should be allowed up to the eve of birth, why stop there? Why not allow it up to the age of, say, five, as it’s so convenient? The only issue would then be trying to decide whether to call it very late-term abortion or euthanasia.
What connects these is the widely held view among 20th century socialists such as H G Wells and George Bernard Shaw that you would have to have a programme of the state killing of the weak to make socialism work. One of the reasons some of us are so reflexively averse to both abortion and euthanasia is that they are opposite sides of the same nasty leftist coin.
I am not familiar with laws in the UK that permit or encourage “euthanasia” which allow someone to take anothers”s life for their convenience. Here in Oregon we have Death with Dignity which requires a doctor to issue a six month terminal illness diagnosis and which requires the patient him or herself to sign the appropriate papers: The drugs are not administered unless the patient is conscious and is able to take the drugs directly. Strangely enough, it is often the family, and not the suffering patient, that wants to keep then alive at all costs.
The law was passed by a statewide vote and I for one moved here in part because of it. Many religious folks find this kind of death abhorrent and they are entitled to their beliefs. But to call death with dignity euthanasia used to get rid of our aging relatives is , ir seems to me, a rather ignorant idea of what it is in practice.
“laws in the UK” – No, the Netherlands.
Thank you for this. My mother died a few years ago, after a final year of life that was, in her own words, not worth living, and she would very much have liked to have had the Death with Dignity option. I would never have been able to participate in that process, but I can now imagine myself looking for such an option when my time comes.
Thanks are due Perry for pointing out the cognitive dissonance in our political tribes, now made starkly obvious in the light of the Covid crisis. My father has been a lifetime Conservative voter and myself an NDP voter (Canadian party roughly equivalent to the Labour party in the UK), yet both of us are disgusted by the way our parties have over-reacted to a virus that the US CDC admits has an average recovery rate of 99.96%.
American cognitive linguist George Lakoff has written extensively about what he calls “biconceptualism”, i.e. the fact that very few people are either all conservative or all liberal in their views. Most are a blend of the two”a point Perry touches upon here. In his book Thinking Points he says: “It is hardly unnatural”or unusual”to be fiscally conservative and socially progressive, or to support a liberal domestic policy and a conservative foreign policy, or to have a conservative view of the market and a progressive view of civil liberties.”
In that respect the new PC elites, with their insistence on ideological purity bound to a prescribed set of moral or political values, are acting contrary to human nature. What results is inevitably”as history reports”a form of fanaticism that leads to atrocities such as the Salem Witch Trials or the regime of the Khmer Rouge.
A balance, intelligent person will examine each idea or value on its own merit, and not, as Perry says here, simply gulp down the whole package unexamined.
“
In the UK, if you know a person’s attitude towards Brexit, you can be
fairly confident in predicting their attitude towards lockdown,. . . . .”
Wow! That is just amazing!
I’m sure you must have a lot of data to support this belief. Care to point us all to your source(s)?
Is there anything worse than a “normal person”?
How would anyone know? Who has ever met one?
There’s a line from the Ken Burns doc on prohibition that I find very cogent: people don’t necessarily vote for what they believe, they vote for what they think they should believe
U.S. politics is totally corrupt. It is a one party state funded by corporations and the military/industrial complex that masquerades as two parties. To a much lesser extent that is true of the U.K. The crisis in Western democracy is that the people elected into a party system have no interest in the prosperity and well being of the people who elected them.
The U.S. deep state will say Joe Biden has devoted his life to public service. I’ll translate. He boarded the gravy train early in life and he’s never done an honest days work in his life.
What’s the difference between a 2 party state and a 1 party state with 2 factions who take turns in power? The UK system is rigged in such a way that 80-90% of voters can’t actually vote for the PM; our only power in safe seats lies in Voting Against The System #VATS
Sorry, Louise, I’m not sure a crusader for open borders is worth reading, even if you like his work. When I looked at the top rated American review for “Vexed”, Jeff and Tonya claimed that Mumford’s own prejudices and ignorance were glaringly obvious. In trying to get away from package deals, he created package deals of his own, “conflating anti-abortion beliefs with gun control beliefs, rather than their more natural anti-capital punishment and anti-war beliefs.” I watched an hour-long interview with Mumford where the interviewer was an American lady. I was surprised that he described himself as an “orthodox (Orthodox?) Christian”, so if he rejects tribalism, he obviously has a higher tolerance for sectarianism. He seems like a decent person, Louise, but I’m afraid I’m not going to put “Vexed” on my to-read list just yet. Thank you for your many fine reports this year, and all the best to you in 2021.