Vexed
Ethics Beyond Political Tribes
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- $15.99
Publisher Description
Across the democratic West, politics has become deeply polarised and profoundly personal. Challenge someone's political views and increasingly you challenge their very being.
And yet, do our political tribes even make sense? Look carefully, and on the most important ethical issues of the age – assisted dying, social welfare, sexual liberation, abortion, gun control, the environment, technology, justice – the instinctive positions of both the Left and the Right are riven with contradictions.
In this refreshing and eye-opening book, James Mumford, a public thinker and independent commentator, questions the basic assumptions of our political groups. His challenge is simple: 'Why should believing strongly about one topic mean the automatic adoption of so many others?'
Vexed is an essential and provocative account that will appeal to anyone of independent thought, and a welcome call for new reflection on the moral issues most relevant to our modern way of life.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Knotty partisan issues get an energetic rethink in this wide-ranging treatise in applied political ethics. Political philosopher Mumford (Ethics at the Beginning of Life) critiques ideological "package deals" conservatives are pro-guns and antiabortion, for example, while liberals are antigun and pro-choice by exposing the contradictions in a haphazard selection of policy stances. On the left, he argues, liberals' support for physician-assisted suicide contradicts their commitment to protecting marginalized groups (namely sick, lonely old people), while modern hookup culture is a form of soulless sexual consumerism that progressives should deplore instead of condone. ("I want her to get to a nunnery," he jokes of his own daughter.) On the right, he contends, conservatives' "family values" clash with their resistance to unions that stabilize working-class families by improving wages and working conditions, while their support for legal restrictions on ex-convicts in hiring, voting, and renting undermines their ethos of personal responsibility. Mumford's analyses are animated and fair-minded, but not always original; his claim that conservative pro-lifers should want to protect postpartum life through gun control, for example, is an old one that has persuaded few Second Amendment stalwarts. Mumford's thought-provoking argument for ethical consistency fails to knock loose the entrenched dogmas fueling today's political antagonisms.
