Yet at the same time, there’s still some part of me that hankers after integrity. That is, if I choose a particular value, I want to hold it across the board. I don’t want to affirm it in one place and deny it in another, recall it here and forget it there. That’s why I find myself also repelled by tribalism in politics.

For the bundling up of myriad moral issues into ideological “package deals” has meant that my coveted acceptance by one tribe has become conditional upon my automatically accepting all manner of other positions, positions I can’t reconcile with my deepest convictions, and even — when I really examine them — theirs.

For example, when I went off and tried to make friends with conservatives, I thought I would be an attractive, indeed ideal, candidate. When it comes to the family, I am prepared to bite the bullet and say that family structure is crucial and marriage does matter. I believe that while there are critical exceptions — cases of psychological and physical abuse, for example — when family breakdown is the norm, children fare worse than they do in home where parents struggle through.

Whether it is being subject to the merry-go-round of changing relationships, or being constantly on the move — not knowing how long their dresses and trousers will hang in the wardrobes, not knowing whether their suitcases will or will not gather dust under their new beds — I think the ideal of the married two-parent family is worth fighting for. That is a fairly standard, orthodox conservative position.

Yet when I divulged these convictions, to my surprise I found they weren’t sufficient. “Family Values” apparently stood for a wider bundle of beliefs, and there was other baggage I had to carry, other commitments I had to approve. If I believed that intact families to be a condition of flourishing, I had also to accept that family breakdown was a main cause of poverty.

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Now on one level it is obvious that there is some truth to this. When family breakdown entails the loss of a second income, and a previous partner’s alimony payments are insufficient, parent and child will be worse off. The question, however, is what is causing that family breakdown in the first place?

The conservatives whose company I craved explained it as “cultural trickle-down”. According to that story, it was the lamentable behavioural change resulting in the nosedive of marriage among the elite, the rise of “expressive divorce” as the chance to “make oneself from the inside out, to refurbish and express the inner self” (in the words of sociologist Barbara Whitehead). Their assumption was that the persistence of such behaviour explains the concentration of family breakdown in the poorest communities today.

But try as I did to absorb it, that conclusion grated with me. What it overlooked, I felt, was the profound effect of scarcity on “intellectual bandwidth”. As sociologists Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir posit in their book Scarcity: “When we function under scarcity, we represent, manage and deal with problems differently.” Not well, that is, since pressure does not focus the mind, as we might like to think. No, it affects people’s fundamental “orientations” — that is, their concern with the future as well as the present; it erodes their sense of agency — all crucial to sustaining a marriage.

The longer I cavorted with conservatives the more clearly I saw how the insistence on the “culture of poverty” thesis — the belief that family breakdown causes poverty, and not the other way round — sustains a larger package deal in which fidelity to the family is wrapped together with a commitment to unfettered capitalism fundamentally at variance with it. Bluntly, if it is not lack of financial resources that affects the stability of marriage, then fixing an economic system which punishes the working poor need not be a priority if you want to tackle family breakdown.

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And so, finally finding myself unable to make a home on the Right, I assessed my options. Maybe I’d been knocking on the wrong door, courting the wrong team? I started thinking seriously about the alternative tribe: the liberal-Left. But no sooner had I started to take soundings, then I found myself facing exactly the same problem: yet another package deal.

What I thought might endear me to the Left was the two years I spent leading a review into the conditions of life for the poorest older people. What had confronted me at every juncture was the depth of marginalisation, the realisation that despite the phenomenal rise in life expectancy, Britain is for many no country for old men.

I visited care homes where residents told me, “the outside world never comes in here”. I met carers in circumstances so isolated that they and the parent they were caring for had become “each the other’s world entire”. I conducted a telephone poll revealing that 40% of those older people who were going to be home alone for Christmas had children living in the same country. And I found that marginalisation expressed itself most frequently in older people’s fear of being a burden — upon the state, upon society and upon the family.

Inspired by the Left’s historic value of inclusion of the elderly — most notably, the campaign by the Fabians and Liberal Party to provide pensions to older people left high and dry by industrialisation — I assumed that I would feel at home with their attempts to transform the lives of the elderly. Instead, however, I found that for many the next great reform was assisted suicide.

Again, this grated with me. For in a society where older people increasingly fear becoming burdensome, it struck me that putting the assisted suicide option on the table would prove disastrous. Having learnt so much from the Left about power, and the way coercion can operate subtly beneath the cover of consent, I found questionable the assurances of assisted suicide advocates that no one would ever be pressured to die. How are doctors really going to know that, at the deepest level, a terminally-ill older person has not been put under pressure?

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Where, then, have I ended up? Have I found a home, an ideology to underwrite my existence? One towering temptation I’ve felt is to renounce the culture wars altogether and insist that ultimate ethical questions are kept out of political discourse. We should focus on building a common political life together, many contend, and for the sake of that we should set aside trying to resolve vexed moral quandaries.

The problem with this solution, however, is that there are actual lives at stake. Sexual consumerism, family breakdown and the mindlessness of marijuana are real threats to human flourishing. How we think of the beginning and end of life, about the entrances and exits of human beings in the world, has lasting consequences.

Instead, as I argue in my book Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes, an etch-a-sketch approach to ideology is called for. We need to start from first principles and decide, undetermined and undeterred by our historic political identifications, which positions on the weightiest moral questions align with the good.

We need to be prepared to concede that our historic ideological enemies, whichever tribe they come from, may have got it right when it comes to a particular controversy. This pick-n-mix approach is very different from carving out some amiable middle ground; it means taking substantive positions on specific issues, but from across the political spectrum. For difficult though this may be, failing to do so ensures a kind of moral stagnation we should all find unacceptable. The deals may give us mates, but they cannot deliver genuine progress.

There is something totalitarian about package deals, and having our thinking governed by the constellations of opinions which are but the product of historically contingent coalition-building. And because of this, I find inspiration in the Vaclav Havel  essay The Power of the Powerless and the Czech playwright’s exhortation that “the primary breeding ground for what might be understood as an opposition in the post-totalitarian system is living in the truth”. It is, he wrote, a drama “originally played out in the theatre of the spirit and the conscience of society”.

Deciding where we stand as individuals on moral questions, irrespective of political parties, may not be the terminus. But it is the place to begin.

James Mumford’s Vexed: Ethics Beyond Political Tribes is published by Bloomsbury on 5 March

But then, the Anschluss. And then, Hitler comes to power. With this, his perfect life is shattered. The new Nazi regime demands obeisance and upon conscription, Franz must swear an oath of allegiance to the Führer.

“What do you do when your leaders are evil?” asks Franz, a devout Catholic. He faces a dreadful dilemma. For while he cannot countenance endorsing the Nazi regime, he is not a single man with only his own future to think about. He knows the consequences of his defiance for his family: his wife, Franziska, and their three children would be ostracised by their village and his death would leave them in a dire situation.

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How Franz, a real-life conscientious objector in the Second World War, resolves the dilemma is what fascinates Terrence Malick in A Hidden Life — a film which sees the American director storming back to form. After a spate of what critics have dismissed as indulgent, sprawling cinematic offerings — too short on dialogue, too long on landscape — Malick has returned to plot. The film is still three hours long, and there’s plenty of wind rustling in trees, but this time the story is sufficiently compelling.

What makes the film a masterpiece, however, and not just another gripping Second World War yarn, is something else. The film affords Malick the opportunity to interrogate a philosophical choice that we all face all of the time. A Hidden Life is not just about a uniquely excruciating dilemma. No, Franz’s struggle is an extreme version of a fundamental option continually foisted upon us, in public and in private: do we work out what to do based solely on weighing up the consequences? Or are there times when we should pursue goodness regardless of the outcomes?

G.K. Chesterton said you haven’t understood a heresy until you’ve felt the pull of it. In A Hidden Life, Malick makes us feel the pull of the heresy of the former: making decisions based on consequences alone.

According to this heresy, called ‘consequentialism’ (its pernicious influence on late-modern life is greater than its obscure technical name might suggest), when you’re deciding what to do, all you should be thinking about are the outcomes. No act is right or wrong in itself. It all depends on the circumstances. Indeed, any act could, in a certain context, be considered legitimate.

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The consequentialist resolution of Franz’s dilemma would be easy: swear the oath. Malick makes us feel the pull of this option by convincing us of the futility of Franz’s defiance. Franz lives a hidden life. He is not a leader whose refusal to capitulate might catalyse a rebellion. His martyr’s blood will not be the beginning of a movement. Only a smattering of people will even hear of his death; his story will be consigned to the “short and simple annals of the poor”. From his jailer to his lawyer to his priest, Franz is bombarded with the same questions: “What good is your defiance doing anyone?” “Do you think it will change anything?” “What purpose does it serve?”

And, yet, Franz persists in his defiance, right through to its tragic conclusion. His morality is the opposite of the consequentialist: it is based on integrity alone. This might seem strange to a modern audience, but it was, in fact, the basis of Western understanding of morality until the Enlightenment. An understanding which started with the Greeks.

Malick’s debt in this film to ancient philosophy — before he became a film director, he was an academic philosopher — is undisguised. And in one of the film’s many eloquent and poignant interior monologues (a Malick trope) we hear Franz allude to Socrates’s dictum that “a good man cannot be harmed”. It’s what the Athenian philosopher told the jurors who had just convicted him on the trumped-up charges of corrupting the youth of the city and introducing new Gods.

Socrates refuses to “stoop to servility”, refuses to beg for a more lenient sentence than death. Why? Because he thinks he would lose his integrity. For integrity is the one thing his jurors can’t take from him. The idea is that only you can violate your dignity, harm your soul. Even if you’re persecuted you will not be harmed. This determination to live according to principle regardless of the costs — the opposite of consequentialism — is what I think intrigues Malick in the film.

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Malick is also that rare breed, a Christian filmmaker. From A Thin Red Line to The Tree of Life, his films show him haunted by the question of God’s existence and reconciling that with the reality of evil. And what we see in A Hidden Life is the Socratic determination to live according to principle rooted in Franz’s Catholic faith.

How exactly? In the Sermon on the Mount, Jesus of Nazareth paints a picture of the moral life as a hidden life. Warning against religious exhibitionism and ostentatious ritual, Christ says:

“When you pray, go into your room, close the door and pray to your Father, who is unseen. Then your Father, who sees what is done in secret, will reward you” (Matthew 6, 18).

He who is unseen sees… In Christian theology, living according to principle — the disavowal of consequentialism — is rooted in an assumption that although something may be hidden in human terms, in divine terms it is not. There is an audience for what you do, but it is an audience of one.

Today the consequentialist temptation faces us rather regularly in public life. The politicians for whom the ends justify the means; the radical reforms justifying the nature of the abusive campaign. The officials and generals for whom bombing innocent civilians to lower morale will end a war faster. But, in truth, consequentialism strikes closer to home. Your boss asks you to lie for them, and it seems that the consequences of refusing are worse for everyone. I shy away from confronting my friend’s marital infidelity because I fear the consequences will make things worse. What are we to do?

Live according to principle, and hang the consequences, seems to be Malick’s recommendation. And in saying this, Malick also offers a great encouragement, for he shows Franz experiencing an extraordinary peace when he comes to the decision that there are some things he simply cannot do, some actions he cannot perform.

“Right action,” wrote T.S. Eliot in The Dry Salvages, “is freedom from past / And future also.” I think he means that choosing to live according to principle is not only about defying the determinism which says your behaviour is governed by your past. Living according to principle is also about freeing yourself from the responsibility of the future consequences of your action.

To decide there are some convictions you simply won’t override, some things you simply won’t do, is ultimately to relinquish control. With self -limitation comes, paradoxically, a release. Almost an abandonment. Being true to yourself, a burden is lifted.

And what if the number of terminally ill people who sought recourse to assisted dying were to increase over time? Would that be a cause for concern? Or would it vindicate the legislation, simply showing that people were exercising rights previously denied to them?

These are the kind of critical questions MPs failed to ask in last week’s debate on assisted dying – the first in four years. Any serious consideration of the way legalisation could transform our whole culture in relation to ageing, chronic illness and dying was sorely missing.

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Instead, MPs lined up to explain why they had dropped their previous opposition to assisted dying. From Nick Boles to Sir Vince Cable, one by one they registered their volte-face on the subject. And by doing so they abdicated their responsibility as leaders: to paint a vivid picture of possible future scenarios. They repeatedly refused to accept the invitation – one offered by Lyn Brown for example – to foresee the difference such a monumental step could make; indeed, even to acknowledge it would be a monumental step.

Assisted dying is a highly emotive and deeply distressing issue. I cannot begin to imagine the acute pain, profound fear and bewildering loss of control that is said to come with motor-neurone disease or the late stages of cancer. That suffering, those stories, must not be left out of deliberation. Nor should we dismiss the strength of such unwell patients’ desire for control over the manner and timing of their deaths.

But nor should we ignore the wider effects that a change to the law might have on society; how it would transform the experience of ageing, the dynamics of the family and the practice of medicine.

In his revealing speech to the House, Crispin Blunt invoked what he clearly viewed as the spectre of an ageing society: “By 2040 nearly one in seven people will be 75 or over,” he said. “More of us will have to grapple with surviving with the pain and indignity of crippling progressive infirmity later in life.” The solution to this? Care will only ever be one part. Providing an “escape from pain and indignity” through assisted dying will be necessary, he said.

Blunt insisted the vast majority would not take this route. But if assisted dying were being sold as a viable alternative to social or hospital care, that would surely normalise it, making it par for the course for an ageing society. Premature death could well become a cultural expectation.

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True, many of the MPs involved in the debate emphasised the restrictive conditions under which euthanasia might be legalised. Only terminally ill patients with six months to live would be eligible.

But, again, the politicians’ unwillingness to consider the consequences was breath-taking in its naivety. The fundamental logic of assisted dying – that I should have control over my death as I have had over my life – fundamentally clashes with this restriction. If we enshrine in law the principle that I should have control over the manner and timing of my death, why should that not be extended to the terminally ill patient with seven months to live? Or the person suffering from devastating mental rather than physical ill-health? Or someone simply tired of life? Do they not have an equal right to autonomy?

Indeed, at one point Steve McCabe voiced this very challenge to the six-month criteria. “Life expectancy in itself,” he said, “does not tell us anything about suffering.” Rather, if someone is given the right to choose, that right should extend to “a stage where he has no quality of life”. The six-month restriction is wholly arbitrary, McCabe was rightly saying. Thus, within the course of the debate itself, a member of the house, unnoticed, was sliding down the slippery slope from tight to lax restrictions.

The second massive transformation the legalisation of assisted dying would enact would be on the dynamics of the family.

Nick Boles assured the House that any assistance would require an independent assessment of the state of mind of the patient. Doctors and a High Court Judge would have to be absolutely persuaded that the person wanting to die did not “show any signs of coming to a decision under pressure or because they felt they were a burden”.

Boles was confident abuse would show up this way, refusing to countenance a picture of the future informed by the real-life contexts in which end-of-life decisions occur today. When we look unflinchingly at what happens when life draws to a close, we see complexity, dilemma and sometimes even abuse. Wills, inheritances, care costs – arguing over these do not always bring the best out of us.

So let’s fast-forward to a world in which assisted dying is now an option. An 85-year-old grandmother, no longer able to look after herself, has received a diagnosis that she is terminally ill and has only a few months to live. Does she go into a fiendishly expensive nursing home which will exhaust her lifetime’s savings? Or does she bow out? No one in the family has said a word to her. Yet she feels a pressure – her decisions have been complicated by the possibility of assisted dying.

Eventually, she settles on assisted dying. She’s not escorted to the clinic with a son holding a gun to her head. No grandchild has attempted to manipulate her. No one has said anything to her, in fact, so no independent assessment panel will pick up on overt coercion.

And yet, who’s to say that what’s really going on is a grandmother choosing to die prematurely because she feels she has become a burden? Are we really okay with that?

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Finally, and most unsettling, is how the introduction of the law would transform medical practice. Again, no one in the debate mentioned this.

Answering the question of what had changed to justify reopening the assisted dying question, Nick Boles appealed to the Royal College of Physicians (RCP)’s decision in February to shift its stance from opposition to a neutral position on assisted dying.

Now, crucially, this only happened because a cabal at the top of the RCP changed their rules on how they determined their stance – as Fiona Bruce pointed out in the debate (another ignored intervention). Previously it was straightforward. The institution’s leadership adopted the most favoured option of their members – which is opposition to assisted dying. But this time it was decided that the College would default to neutral unless opposition secured a supermajority of 63%. So, extraordinarily, the leadership of the Institution no longer represents the dominant view of its members.

This move has masked the real attitude of most doctors, which is that getting into the business of assisting people’s deaths fundamentally changes the practice and also perception of the profession. According to the Hippocratic oath, the first duty of the doctor is not to harm (primum non nocere). And the distinction between intentional killing (administering barbiturates) versus letting die (turning off the life-support machine) protects doctors from becoming anything other than the helping profession.

If this distinction were to collapse, what would the country look like in 40 years time? Hospitals could be transformed from places of healing and care, to places of last resort, haunted by mistrust and fear.

The virtue of prudence involves making a good judgment about the present based on a sober assessment of the future. It is the virtue we expect from statesmen. Which is why we were let down last week. Instead of imagining future scenarios – not indulging in speculative fancy, but making predictions informed by a sense of history, by a sense of how things tend to go in the world – most MPs buried their heads in the sand. They should be ashamed of themselves.