It took me awhile to get my head around the decision of California Governor Newsom to respond to MAGA gerrymandering by overriding California’s independent commission seat maps and drawing ones that greatly increased the odds of electing five more state representatives from the Democratic party.
Fighting fire with fire? Sure, but my interest as an ethicist is not whether Shakespeare commends it or the ancients practiced it. Nor even if it feels good or voters like it.
Fire image by Max Kukurudziak
My concern is whether abandoning one of the core procedures required to ensure voting is fair, is the right thing to do. In the final analysis, I think it is. Here’s why.
Newsome’s claim
Last Tuesday, California voters were asked to authorise the governor to make temporary changes to the state voting maps. Newsome campaigned hard for Proposition 50. His arguments for why Californian voters should support it were:
- It was a response to Texas’s partisan redistricting, which aimed to, ‘rig the 2026 mid-term elections before voting even begins’.
- Such seat-stealing was a ‘democratic emergency’ depriving voters unhappy with the MAGA agenda the ability to throw Republicans out of office. As such, Proposition 50 represented California’s fulfilment of its duty to defend democracy.
- The maps are temporary; California remains committed to impartial redistricting in a context where all states make the same commitment and voters will continue to remain in charge of decisions like these.
Voters agreed. With only 80 per cent of votes counted from last Tuesday’s special elections in the United States, Newsome’s retaliatory redistricting was supported by 64 per cent of Californians, with only 36 per cent opposed.
What about ‘two wrongs don’t make a right?’
If ‘fighting fire with fire’ won the day in California, what does this say about other aphorisms, like, ‘two wrongs don’t make a right’? Not to mention the seeming inconsistency of a state that champions its record on ‘fair and impartial maps’ pursuing permission to make those maps unfair and partisan?
In fact, moral aphorisms contradict each other constantly. ‘Waste not, want not’ versus ‘you can’t take it with you.’ ‘Fools rush in where the wise fear to tread’ against, ‘fortune favors the bold.’
Does this make ancient wisdom idiotic or wise in ways that challenge more simplistic pedagogy that demands consistency as the only proof of rectitude? In fact, according to Aristotle, true ethical wisdom is about adapting the virtue to the context. The wisdom to know when frugality is prudent and when it makes you Scrooge McDuck; to discern in what situation boldness represents the virtue of courage and when it reveals you as a reckless fool.
Trust is a game of copycat
It’s both ethically correct and mathematically provable that the best way to rebuild trust, even in highly polarised societies like the United States and less polarised ones like Australia, is to fight fire with fire. When one side cheats, the cheated-on must absolutely and immediately respond by withdrawing their cooperation and trust and, where required to maintain their position in society, start cheating too.
That’s what Newsom is doing and this is absolutely the right thing to do to prevent the cheaters from prospering in ways that – aphorism not withstanding – they absolutely do if the cheated don’t fight back.
How must they fight back? In a copycat fashion, responding to every bad faith move with the same type and degree of bad-faith move themselves. Otherwise, they get treated like the chumps they are, losing so badly that they disappear from the game altogether.
To see exactly how this works, play the evolution of trust game, and deploy the tit-for-tat character and strategy. Then watch how trust and cooperation take over the world, even one with a number of really bad actors in it.
Copycat’s not tit-for-tat
What’s challenging about a copycat strategy is knowing how to stop. The copycat character in Case’s game carries no grudge, or even memory of past misbehaviour. The moment the cheating stops, the copycat responds with cooperation – and the trust required for it – once more.
In the real world, this is hard. Many of us do have hard feelings against those who have betrayed us in the past. We build ideas about moral character that one cooperative move by a past-wrongdoer may not dislodge. These grudges and expectations replace copycat behaviour with tit-for-tat retaliation that – because no one can remember who started it – goes on forever. Remember the Hatfields and McCoys? Arguably this explains the difficulty in restoring cooperation and trust between long-term adversaries in the Middle East and eastern Europe.
But it is the intractability of these disputes that should motivate Americans to treat the Newsome intervention in precisely the way he’s been careful to frame it: a proportionate response to the single act of wrong-doing it is trying to address.
One that would and should go away if and when Texas’s cheating comes to a halt, resetting the moral scorecard between both states to zero.
This opinion piece first appeared on Associate Professor Leslie Cannold’s Unreceived Wisdom column on Substack
IMAGE at top of story of Governor Gavin Newsom announcing redistricting laws: supplied
