Survey Results: The Professions of Good and Evil

Let's hear it for the firefighters!

Thank you to the 232 people who completed the Professions of Good and Evil survey - and particularly to all of you who shared it so that it got picked up outside of the core readership.

The - fascinating - results are now in. I’ll be presenting these, along with a little sub-group analysis, pointing out the more salient or surprising features, while relentlessly mocking those results I disagree with,¹ before briefly setting out my own views.

Whose in the sample?

232 people answered the sample. Within this there was:

• A 2:1 male:female split.

• A reasonable balance between sectors, with 43% public sector, 35% private sector and 10% charitable sector (the remaining either having mainly not been in paid employment (3%) or preferring not to say).

• 63% of respondents identified as being on the political left, with 26% on the right.²

As the above shows, this was a fun survey, but not a representative sample of the population³ and should not be quoted or referenced as such.

So, which jobs are morally virtuous or reprehensible?

Google forms summarises its survey responses in pie charts. However, a good friend warned me that if I dared to use pie charts⁴ to display information about ordered categorical variables this would strain our friendship to near-breaking point, thereby stiffening my resolve to create the chart below.

There is perhaps no surprise at the top professions: firefighters, nurses and teachers⁵ - though firefighters, who topped the polls, are perhaps less represented in public discourse than the others.⁶ Nor is there huge surprise that tobacco marketing executives were at the bottom of the pile.

Others of the high-up category surprised me more. Vets (+59) show that our willingness to assign virtue to caring professions extends to animals, and librarians are clearly much loved.⁷ Police officers and soldiers did well too, with the small numbers who disapproved of these professions outweighed by the large number who found the risks they took in the service of others to be virtuous.

I was somewhat surprised to see undertakers so high⁸ and even more surprised to see maths lectures come in with +54 at number 9: there is clearly a lot of support out there for proving the Riemann Hypothesis. Their cousins, the social science lecturers (+25), do much less well.⁹ I was also pretty surprised to see both prosecuting and defence lawyers perform so strongly. I certainly agree these are worthwhile and important roles, but on the other hand, they are both reasonably well-paid, and not particularly unpleasant or hazardous, jobs, so it was unclear why they performed so much more strongly than jobs such as civil servant such as civil servant or architect.

At the other end, I was both surprised and encouraged to see the strong opposition to social media algorithm designers and instagram influencers - if I was a social media executive, I would not be happy about this, as it suggests the backlash to social media has set in pretty deeply. Strippers will perhaps be happy to be thought less reprehensible than investment bankers, and tax accountants and corporate lawyers both do poorly. Although considering soldiers virtuous, our survey respondents apparently do not believe they should have any weapons, with arms engineers coming in at a brutal -20.¹⁰

Similarly, while farmers are seen as very virtuous for growing our food, HGV drivers get much less credit for transporting it to us and retail managers almost none for selling it.¹¹ Someone suggested to me that this was because they thought farmers had a harder and less well paid job than the other two, which I guess could be driving some of the differential - but I’m still dubious.

Most of jobs which were neither particularly caring or with good or bad vibes scored in the +10 to +25 level, and I was reasonably encouraged to see a good split of both professional class (accountant, programmer, product designer) and working class (electrician, HGV, chef driver) in there.

Sort by controversial

We can see that a few professions had our respondents split, with some actively thinking them virtuous and others reprehensible. By far the greatest split was missionary (+17), with 46% thinking it virtuous, 28% unvirtuous¹² and only a third in the middle. Other jobs that significantly split our respondents were human rights lawyers, ministers of religion, environmental and animal rights campaigners, and soldiers, all of which is perhaps unsurprising.

If we look this this by political affiliation, can we explain this?¹³

Those on the right: What to the results say? (n=61)

We see some fascinating difference. Rightwingers still strongly support teachers, nurses and firefighters and they still think tobacco marketing executives and anyone to do with social media is reprehensible. But there are also some important differences.

First, physically dangerous jobs that potentially involve violence - police officers and soldiers - move up, to the very top tier, alongside teachers and nurses. Unlike our whole survey, right-wingers also recognise that soldiers need weapons, rather than believing that they should rush heroically at the enemy carrying pointed sticks to die virtuously under Russian drone attacks.¹⁴

Strippers fall to the second least virtuous place (-53) while a gap of 25 percentage points opens up between prosecutors (+52) and defence lawyers (-25). Interestingly, those on the right still aren’t big fans of investment bankers (+0).

The big change though is looking at the professions which dramatically fall - often into net negative territory. Human rights lawyers fall from +53 to -2; environmental campaigners from +41 to -15. Animal rights campaigners fall from +41 to +9, and social science lecturers from +27 to +2 - all significant falls. Now, I’d cautious that my survey respondents may well be more ‘online’ and politically engaged than the average Conservative/Reform voter, but this is still interesting to see the sharp divide in how some professions are seen - even if only by those who are politically engaged.

Those on the left: What to the results say? (n=146)¹⁵

In part because leftwingers accounted for 2/3 of the survey respondents, we see less difference here. The caring professions - nurses and teachers - take the top spot and human rights lawyers and environmental campaigners broadly swap places with police officers and soldiers: all seen as net virtuous, but the former now near the top of the table, and the latter falling, but still high.¹⁶ Strippers are still in net negative territory.¹⁷ Defence lawyers (just!) overtake prosecutors. The opposition to the high paid service professions - investment banking, tax accountant and corporate law - unsurprisingly becomes more pronounced.

What of the broader principles?

Looking at the above, we can see a strong relationship between the principles that people said they were using and the results. Public sector and charitable jobs were boosted somewhat¹⁸, as we saw, with the major virtue assigned to hazardous jobs explaining the consistently strong performance of firefighters, police officers and soldiers. What is perhaps missing here is the ‘vibes’ element: jobs that involved directly caring for others, or where people could visualise the contribution to society (such as farmers) consistently performing better than others where the contribution seems more remote.

58% of people thought that most jobs are neither morally virtuous and reprehensible - and, indeed, across all questions, the middle box of ‘neither virtuous nor reprehensible’ was ticked 54% of the time, showing a broad compatibility here.¹⁹

What do I think?

To put my cards on the table, I’m one of the 58% who thinks most jobs are neither morally virtuous or reprehensible, with a small number of exceptions. I put over 70% of the jobs in that category. Overall, I think that if a job contributes positively to society (which includes meeting the legitimate needs of others, not just for food and healthcare but for material goods, enjoyment and entertainment) then we should value it, and we should not be misled by thinking that those where the contribution is more obvious, or appear to be more caring, are more valuable - we live in a complex society and there are many different cogs involved in making it work for everyone, and meeting people’s wishes and desires.

Where I rated jobs as morally virtuous, it was typically either because I thought it was particularly hazardous (such as firefighter or soldier) or because I thought it was both particularly worthwhile had noticeably low pay and poor conditions for the skills involved (such as nursing), such that I felt people were making a level of sacrifice to do it. Where I rated jobs as morally reprehensible it was because I felt that - although the people who do them may be good people who mean well - that job as a whole is contributing to society today in a way that it is a significant net negative. This included the tobacco marketing executive and the social media algorithm designers, as well as some of the professions singled out by my fellow travellers on the right, such as human rights lawyers and social science lecturers.

It’s been fascinating to see the views of others - particularly those who disagree with me - as well as to see more broadly how people’s opinions lie, as well as the differences between right and left. Thank you to everyone who took part - and we’ll have another one in a couple of months!

1. I’m told relentlessly mocking your readership is the best way to build a loyal substack audience.

2. This kind of stuns me. On the one hand, it’s great I’m not just writing for a bubble and, to the extent that this blog is about setting out a right wing perspective on issues to those who may not share those views*, then I appear to be succeeding. On the other, I’m slightly stunned that a blog written by a former Conservative Spad, which takes explicitly right-wing views, is getting a more than 2:1 left:right readership. I assume this is because of educational polarisation.*

*As opposed to running silly surveys and gushing about JRR Tolkien.

*Unless this survey happened to be shared more amongst lefties.

3. For reasons we will see below, I suspect an overrepresentation of mathematicians.

4. Or ‘pi charts’, as she prefers to call them.

5. State school teachers. People still rated private school teachers as pretty virtuous (+40), but not nearly as much as the +84 for state school teachers.

6. I guess most of us encounter them less often.

7. Clearly a mistake, given that librarians are evil people who rule the Hushlands (i.e. here) through their total control of information while seeking to conquer the remaining free continents of Mokia, Nalhalla and elsewhere with their armies of giant robots.

8. I assume this is because people think this is a job they wouldn’t like to do. I can understand this, but I suspect that those who do it actually find it a really meaningful job.

9. Because of the WOKE!

10. Seriously, guys? I’d thought three years of war in Ukraine, with Russia managing to out-produce the whole of Europe on munitions might have started to drive through a recognition that - unless you’re a pacifist - we need to be able to manufacture our own arms. Particularly with the US now showing itself to be a less than wholly reliable ally. Over 100 Labour MPs and Peers wrote to banks and investors last month, urging them to stop using their ‘ethical investment’ rules to exclude the arms industry, but clearly there is still some way to go.

11. A retail manager friend of mine told me that in the Middle Ages, one reason for the low status of merchants was that no-one believed that moving a thing between a seller and a buyer could be worth anything, even though it obviously was - clearly some things don’t change.

12. Numbers do not sum properly due to rounding.

13. I asked respondents to give their political affiliation, asking them if they were ‘More on the right (tend to vote for / sympathise with any of Conservatives, Reform, US Republicans, German CDU, etc)’ or ‘More on the left (tend to vote for / sympathise with any of Labour, Liberal Democrats, Greens, US Democrats, German SDP, etc)’.

14. They rate soldiers much more virtuously than arms engineers, which seems fine to me: the first are risking their lives, the second are just doing a necessary job, like an HGV driver. It’s considering the soldiers virtuous and the arms engineers actively reprehensible that I object to.

15. Numbers of left and right do not sum to 232 because some people picked ‘don’t know/prefer not to say’.

16. Showing that sentiments such as ACAB and ‘defund the police’ really are minority views, even on the left.

17. Again, the pro-sex work strand on the left is perhaps more represented in activism than in reality.

18. As one might expect, those in the public sector boosted these even more.

19. Yes, I know there is no reason for the two numbers to match exactly.