Joe Lost His Job! Good.

Oh, good. Someone actually gets it.

I’ve been keen on delivering what amounts to a utilitarian defense of globalization in these pages and to my mind, it’s virtually unassailable.

Equally unassailable is the contention that globalization isn’t reversible. Neither is progressivism or the push towards multiculturalism.

Everyone understands utilitarian arguments on the micro level. Let me give you an example. Let’s say someone robs a bank (like old John Mogan). Unfortunately, one teller and one customer waiting in line are shot and killed in the process. Assuming the robber gets away and is never caught, and stripping out any emotional distress or guilt the robber might be saddled with, the robbery was almost unquestionably a good thing for the perpetrator. But no one would make the argument that the robbery was on balance a positive development. Why? Well because two people were killed, the rest of the bank employees are nervous at work, and if this was a small-ish community bank, the whole town’s probably terrified.

Flipping the argument around, imagine you and a group of five friends decide to take a trip to Mexico and unfortunately, you’re all kidnapped by a Mexican drug cartel. Turns out the kidnappers aren’t nice people and before long, the captors decide to play a game. You’re handed a pistol and told that if you don’t shoot one of your friends right now, then they’ll kill everyone. Including you. A brutally stringent form of utilitarianism says this is a no-brainer (no macabre pun intended). If you think these murderous people are serious, then you shoot one of your friends immediately to save yourself and the rest of the group. It’s just that simple.

In both stories the good of the collective comes before the good of any one individual and while the second story might seem more contentious, it’s really not. That is, if we assume that everyone who hears your story upon your escape believes 100% that the cartel members were serious when they said they’d kill everyone if you didn’t kill one person, then no one in their right mind is going to blame you. In fact, had you not chosen to be directly responsible for killing one person, you would have been indirectly responsible for killing six (although you’d have been spared the guilt because you’d be dead too).