From a consequentialist perspective, seems like the only relevant thing is whether withholding your vote - or voting for some third party - would actually stand to have an impact. Otherwise it's just a kind of virtue signaling, right?

The problem is do we have a choice? Lesser is still better than 3rd party or independents who will never win and we risk getting the bigger of two evils elected. lol

Its basically voter blackmail, they have zero choice in the matter.

Unless we could somehow change the constitution to allow direct voting on policies, laws, budgets and big projects. But this means the people have to be educated about these things, constantly, NOBODY has the time nor energy to learn all of these things to even make informed voting choices. lol

So in the end, we are stuck with the same lesser of two evils formula.

Oh, if only there is a non governmental organization that is funded by taxpayers but totally impartial and will simplify the facts about policies, laws, budgets, big projects for the voters and inform them better?

"That’s because you have a special proprietary responsibility for acts you perform. Those choices and acts are, in some special sense, yours, distinct from outcomes that result from combining your choices and acts with everyone else’s."

The above makes it seem like not voting for the lesser of two evils isn't itself a choice. That voting for the lesser of two evils would be a choice but that not voting so that you didn't help elected an evil even if it is lesser isn't still making a choice. All things are choices, even the choice not to engage. You ARE responsible for the outcomes of choices you refuse to engage with. Letting 5 people die because you don't want to personally be responsible by throwing the lever is still you being responsible for killing 5 people in the trolley problem. The reason it could even be framed differently is because the trolley problem is a hypothetical that can't be real. How did you get on the trolley to begin with? You have to take responsibility for getting into the problem in the first place when it comes to the real world.

> In their moral justification, the argument of the lesser evil has played a prominent role. If you are confronted with two evils, the argument runs, it is your duty to opt for the lesser one, whereas it is irresponsible to refuse to choose altogether. Its weakness has always been that those who choose the lesser evil forget quickly that they chose evil.

-Hannah Arendt

Voting lesser of two evils is a strategy induced by the voting system itself and the fact that you know something about how others will vote. That this article doesn't even talk about the system is silly. I don't know how anyone can expect to work out the ethics of actions within a system without considering the structure of the system.

Except for perhaps under virtue ethics. Maybe there you don't need to consider the structure of the system, and you can not vote for the lesser of two evils. But almost no one subscribes to virtue ethics cause it's dumb.

You will never encounter a situation where your ideals align directly with those you are voting for, unless you yourself are on the ballot. Challenges to your subjective values and integrity will always be inherent in this system.

You're not protecting your integrity, or furthering your own projects toward certain aims, by taking an anti-participatory stance in electoral systems. On the contrary, you are eliminating what little effect your actions do have on the system.

So, how does not voting result in the protection of your integrity while voting does not? If voting harms your personal aims and integrity, then clearly, not voting harms them both to a greater degree.

Honestly, what is the point of this paper?

To discourage voter participation. I sense a trend in the articles posted here lately.

Grown-ups understand that there are no perfect choices.

It's actually worse.

Since there is a finite pool of available voters, removing your vote from a viable candidate, either by not voting or voting third party, is basically a default vote for the candidate you would least want elected.

I think that the issue is deeper. If you are facing a vote of 2 candidates both of some evil, you should of course vote for the one of lesser evil, then you should run yourself the next election.

The vet should not euthanise animals, should quit, and start a ground-level campaign to create a shelter which does not euthanise.

How else will society change?

Nothing wrong with that. Shoot, we have had to do that for many elections....

This is a self defeating argument. No third party will ever gain traction if the argument against third party voting is that they won't gain traction.

> Letting 5 people die because you don't want to personally be responsible by throwing the lever is still you being responsible for killing 5 people in the trolley problem.

I don't think you can justify this conclusion.

Today you could have done at least one thing that would stop at least one person from dying. Are you responsible for their death because you didn't give to a charity, or stop eating meat, or failed to take the bus to work?

Your vote is part of a signal. It is unfortunate that one cannot simultaneously signal "I don't like the B option" without also signaling "I'm okay with the A option" when there are practically 2 options + abstaining.

Nevertheless, you should think on the margin - the people most likely to skip voting for B are the people who dislike B the most and are okay with A the most, and will probably not be swayed by the usual argumetns. If anything, they're part of the reason they'll skip.

[removed]

Many Aristoteleans (virtue ethics) I know of thought very systemically…

Not giving to charity so that the charity doesn't have enough money so that one person is ultimately bumped from their services so that they eventually go on to starve is such an insanely far cry from you could have thrown a lever that right then and there would have prevented 5 deaths that they are not equivalent, they aren't even in the same country. Unless there was a switch on the bus that says don't kill people and no one else was on that bus it isn't even close to a fair version of the trolley problem. There's nothing special about you or I that just us riding the bus is going to save someone's life, generally. Now, if I happen to be the only person who could have performed an emergency tracheotomy(thanks boy scouts) and I could have been on the bus when it was necessary to know how to do that and so someone died, no I wouldn't consider myself responsible because I wasn't literally in the room. If on the other hand I was on that bus and I can do what's needed and I don't, I would consider myself culpable in their death. I don't think that it is wrong to allow a death to happen but I do think I'd have some of the responsibility for their death.

If you are driving today and someone jumps out in front of you and you could swerve away but you don't are you responsible for that person's death? You didn't do anything to actively cause the death like steer towards them or accelerate as they tried to cross but you probably could have braked or swerved and not hit them. That's the real version of the trolley problem. The trolley problem can't exist because unless you know an evil demon bent on driving you crazy you don't just suddenly appear on a trolley a few seconds away from killing people. That can't happen. We don't spontaneously appear in locations. We choose where we go and what we do. We choose to put ourselves in situations or at least in the places that those situations can happen.

You aren't supposed to swerve away from an accident, did you know that? If you could avoid hitting another car by swerving away from it, generally, you are supposed to still hit the car because by swerving away you might hit something and then it would be your fault. If you, for instance, tried to avoid a deer in the road and thus ended up swinging your car and crossing the yellow line and hitting a car you are liable for the crash where before hitting the deer you might not have been liable and or even if you are liable for that crash you at least didn't hit another car.

The thing keeping third parties from being relevant is the voting system itself. One cannot sanely advocate for third parties without first advocating changing the voting system itself to something else that would allow for the relevance of third parties like some kind of ranked choice voting. The Nash Equilibrium for a first past the post, single vote system where voters have some information about past and current voting patterns is a two party/candidate hegemony.

>Not giving to charity so that the charity doesn't have enough money so that one person is ultimately bumped from their services so that they eventually go on to starve is such an insanely far cry from you could have thrown a lever that right then and there would have prevented 5 deaths that they are not equivalent, they aren't even in the same country

I reject this. It's even easier to give to a charity considering they can automatically charge your card on a regular basis.

Same goes for not eating meat. You could do that at any time.

>If you are driving today and someone jumps out in front of you and you could swerve away but you don't are you responsible for that person's death?

Yes. You directly killed somebody using your vehicle.

>That's the real version of the trolley problem.

No the real version of the trolley problem is that you could have voted for gun control but you loved your guns too much.

>You aren't supposed to swerve away from an accident, did you know that?

Who made this rule up?

>If you could avoid hitting another car by swerving away from it, generally, you are supposed to still hit the car because by swerving away you might hit something and then it would be your fault. I

the word "Might" is doing all the heavy lifting in that sentence. Might implies "might not".

>If you, for instance, tried to avoid a deer in the road and thus ended up swinging your car and crossing the yellow line and hitting a car you are liable for the crash where before hitting the deer you might not have been liable and or even if you are liable for that crash you at least didn't hit another car.

I don't think most people have a moral issue with killing a deer.

i hear that same phrase repeated endlessly by non-independent party voters like it's the hip new Tourette slang.

how easy something is and how culpable you are have nothing to do with each other. Beating someone to death with a hammer and shooting someone to death with a gun are very different in how much effort they require but you are just as morally wrong for either killing. At least in the context of killing or not and assuming no difference in extenuating circumstances. I don't even know why you would bring up how easy something is in a conversation about morality and culpability of action.

I'm not really sure what you are even trying to get at given these responses nor do I know what you expect responses to be about so I am just going to not really engage here but have a lovely day.

"lesser of two evils" is the glass half empty version of "most qualified for the job."

especially when you're talking politics. no politician is perfect. they don't make as much money as they would in the private sector. constituencies are going to have divergent needs.

so you take what you can get. no different than any other aspect of life.

>how easy something is and how culpable you are have nothing to do with each other

Then why did you bring it up?

>...voting third party, is basically a default vote for the candidate you would least want elected.

not if the third party candidate is the person you most want elected.

if you are only voting for the most viable candidate then you would only have voted for the winners regardless of their policy positions. and those politicians would never see the affect of changing their policies or reacting to new information because they'll be (irrationally) branded the most likely candidate to win.

I didn't. You did.

Just to not have to be ambiguous lets say you are left wing politically. If you choose to vote third party because the Democrat is okay but not good enough and a Republican wins your third party vote doesn't prove the democrats need to go even harder left. They are more likely to move to the right which will make them more competitive with the other major party, the Republicans. Third party voting in the US isn't even going to register as a protest vote but instead push the closer of the two party members farther away from you.

>not if the third party candidate is the person you most want elected.

I specified viable candidates. If your candidate has no chance of winning, it's the same as not voting.

Why not spend your whole life advocating for conservatives to consider developing a strong third party option? At least that way even if you don't succeed you will be doing some good.

Hey, be nice. There might be some libertarians able to read in this thread.

>If your candidate has no chance of winning, it's the same as not voting.

that means one would have been a fool to have voted for Hillary in 2016 or Trump in 2020 since they had no chance of winning.

all of those votes for the losers throughout history were the same as not voting?

how are people supposed to know in advance of the election that they are voting for losers?

sorry. i'm confused about what you are saying.

but most of these 3rd party scenario tropes tend to rely on the outcome to justify or un-justify the means. you won't know who will win in advance.

i.e. people voting for nader in 2000 had no way of knowing how many of their votes it would take away from gore. some of those people wouldn't have voted if it weren't for nader and many of them were the same that always vote for the green party anyway. if nader had won all of the gore voters would have been sneered-at as if they might've thrown the election. and in the next cycle, when people had the chance to toss out bush, they didn't. no split votes. bush served 8 years on his own political capital.

Biden, trump and bernie are running for office. If you vote Bernie instead of Biden on principle and trump wins the supposed lesson that Biden would learn is that he needs to be more leftist to get those bernie voters to back him next time (this doesn't really work for individuals but for parties at large. again I am simplifying) So the next election comes up and Biden is supposed to pitch more left to get the Bernie voters and the Biden voters. That is supposedly what happens when people make a third party protest vote.

But what I am suggesting is that there is just as much of a chance for Biden to try to be more centrist, thus lean to the right more, to steal votes away from Trump and allow him to win with or without the Bernie voters.

Yes you did bring it up.

Before I write you off as absolutely insane do you mind pointing out where you think I said anything about how easy something is being part of the equation?

When you talked about pushing a button in front of you vs giving to a charity.

that wasn't a vs thing. You read that comment wrong. That was me responding to some of your examples. You said "Are you responsible for their death because you didn't give to a charity, or stop eating meat, or failed to take the bus to work?" So I mentioned charity and bus in my response. Those were things you brought up. How easy they were was not in my comment and has nothing to do with culpability.

The point of my original comment has nothing to do with how easy an action is. Only that action and inaction are both still choices and the article makes a false distinction between them. It acts like not voting isn't an active choice but is a passive act. The reason I brought up the trolley problem is because some people argue that not throwing the lever on the trolley and allowing 5 people to die is the right thing to do because you aren't responsible for the trolley traveling down the tracks or the 5 people being on the tracks and so if you let it happen you didn't actively kill those people but if you throw the switch then you are actively doing something and so are responsible for the one person that does die. But this is a false distinction because in the trolley problem choosing to not throw the switch is still a choice. Plus in the real world you didn't just magically appear on the trolley you chose to get on it. To relate this to voting, what the article is about, voting third party is an active choice to not vote for the better of the two most likely to win candidates because you and I and everyone that votes or doesn't vote is part of the system that has taken us to the point where the lesser of two evils is the best choice. We are all responsible for it and so if we choose to vote third party and so a republican wins instead of the democrat that we would prefer over a third party candidate that we would like even better we helped put the republican in office. We cannot pretend that we are not involved in the whole system. We don't just show up on election day and vote as though the rest of the world doesn't exist and that we aren't responsible for parts of it.

>nly that action and inaction are both still choices and the article makes a false distinction between them.

You killed people today because you drove your car to work instead of taking the bus. You killed people today because you ate meat.

if not doing something causes a death and you are responsible for the action you never took then you are responsible for killing people every day.

No philosophical system worth it's salt should hold people responsible for things they are not responsible for.

Not an American but from an outside perspective it seems like the defacto two-party system is long term a bigger problem than any individual party. Unless people vote third party it will never ever change.

> That this article doesn't even talk about the system is silly. I don't know how anyone can expect to work out the ethics of actions within a system without considering the structure of the system.

It's like the giant elephant in the room that not only do people not see, but they are strongly averse to discussing.

Propaganda works.

> You're not protecting your integrity, or furthering your own projects toward certain aims, by taking an anti-participatory stance in electoral systems. On the contrary, you are eliminating what little effect your actions do have on the system.

If one's actions are limited to only not voting....but it can be one small piece of a much larger initiative to eventually overthrow the archaic system of "democracy" that has humanity locked in a local maxima.

> Oh, if only there is a non governmental organization that is funded by taxpayers but totally impartial and will simplify the facts about policies, laws, budgets, big projects for the voters and inform them better?

There are various organizations like this here and there:

https://www.democracy-international.org/direct-democracy

https://compdemocracy.org/about/

They haven't amounted to much so far, but who knows what the future holds.

No. You're speaking in absolutes when the person you replied to said "no chance", which means near zero probability. Because you don't know the outcome ahead of time, but you can still reasonably predict no third party candidate will win. Hillary did have a chance. Indeed, she won the popular vote.

You're trying to weirdly pretend like we both:

A) don't have any predictive power about the likelihood of a third party candidate winning.

B) Have complete predictive power about who will win between the two main candidates.

But we have neither of those. We do know that no third party candidate has any chance of winning. And we do know that both of the candidates from the main two parties have a reasonable shot at winning, but that it will be close, and therefore voting for one of the main two does stand a shot at affecting the outcome.

Voting third party only makes sense in a different voting system like ranked choice. The Nash Equillibrium for a first past the post, single vote system where we have access to limited information about voting patterns of others and engage in repeated elections is for two dominant groups/parties/candidates to emerge that vie for control. Go learn some game theory.

>how are people supposed to know in advance of the election that they are voting for losers?

Because we have past data on voting patterns. We have countless examples of third party candidates failing to get even a single electoral vote. We also have plenty of survey data and mountains of other evidence that points to the fact that many voters just vote for whoever has the R next their name every time or whoever has the D next to their name every time. We do have evidence that there are voters who aren't fixed in their voting patterns, and who sometimes vote R, sometimes vote D, and sometimes vote third party; but these non-fixed voters do not represent a large enough proportion of voters to be able to elect a third party on their own. So, we KNOW with very high certainty that in order to win, you MUST win either the voters that only vote D or the voters that only vote R, while also capturing some of the voters that aren't fixed. Therefore, we can rightly conclude that any non-R or non-D candidate has virtually zero chance of winning; more surely than one's chances of winning the powerball.

>Because we have past data on voting patterns.

that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?

based on past voting data no black person should ever be voted for because they've only won once in the history of the country.

that's ridiculous. things change. if you discard changes in favor of past mediocrity then you'll always have the same results you always had.

>that helped us figure out who would win in 2016?

Yes, it helped us know that no third party candidate had any chance of winning. And it helped us know that both the R and D candidate had a reasonable chance of winning.

a black man won in 2008. never happened before. it was unlikely at best.

but he won twice.

you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens. i'll live in the real world where it does.

>you'll live in a world where the unlikely never happens

No, I'm living in a world where there is a wide range of probabilities and where I'm taking into account all available data instead of just basing the probabilities on a single factor. We had mountains of polling data both before and after the democratic primaries on people's willingness to vote for Obama, and it was far from impossible. But after he won the democratic primary, the conditional probability for him winning shoots way up.

You're living in some weird world where there's only one degree of "unlikely". If something has less than a 50% chance of happening, it's "unlikely". Sure, maybe Obama had a less than 50% chance of winning. But any third party candidate has less than a 0.000000005% chance of winning. It's not just "unlikely" it's "implausible", it's "nearly impossible", or in colloquial terms it is impossible.

If you wanna bank of nearly impossible outcomes because they might happen, go buy lottery tickets.

Didn't say a virtue ethicist can't consider the system, just that only a virtue ethicist could get away with not considering the system and remain consistent.

I think this is an argument only considering the short-term impact. Withholding votes sends a signal that your vote is available, but no one has attracted it with their platform.

In the future, if the issues important to a vote witholder are common enough, it's reasonable to expect that a candidate will emerge from that population in the future, or recognize the niche and cater to it.

This might not be popular, but I think individuals have a right to refuse association, and divest responsibility to a broader group.

This line of thinking (admittedly extrapolated to the extreme) would make you responsible for any person who died from lack of access to a resource that you have, simply because you didn't seek them out to provide it to them. The level of effort involved is a fair qualifier to bring up, but I would still disagree that there is any scenario where someone is obligated to make a decision they feel is immoral to mitigate a worse outcome - especially if you allow for metaphysical beliefs that could be effected by these decisions.

"I bought an extra water bottle and now someone in Indonesia died because the relief effort was one water bottle short so I killed them" and "I personally chose not to use the epipen the person was begging me to stab them with while they were dying of anaphylaxis because I am morally opposed to stabbing people" are not the same. No reasonable person would be afraid of that slippery slope.

People have to make decisions that they feel are immoral to mitigate worse outcomes all the time. If cops are morally opposed to prostitution do they just not have to investigate the murder of a hooker? That awful woman who was the clerk for her town who was morally opposed to gay marriage should absolutely be legally forced to give out marriage licenses to gay people. If she didn't want to compromise her own personal morals she should have to leave her job.

I agree with you in your examples, but don't think any are a good example of what I was trying to express.

The waterbottle scenario isn't a zero-sum situation as if you had a choice to take someone's water, endangering them in the process, while you didn't need it. I think the best alternative I could give to this one is an interesting inverse of having one vote but no one you desire to use it on: if I made you aware of people who are in danger of thirst or starvation, and need donations or funding to survive. You presumably have limited funds, and cannot help everyone who needs it, so you would need to choose which people you will save. The others will continue to die. According to the WFP, about 9MM people annually starve to death.

In this scenario, do you accept moral responsibility over all of the people you are choosing not to help? Or do we acknowledge that we aren't super heroes, there are reasonable limits to our responsibility to others, and that the individual pursuit of comfort, sustainability, and pursuit of passions/meaning has its own value?

The Epipen dilemma is similar in that we can imagine it as an inverse scenario to not voting - you have the option to do good, and can choose not to. Or extrapolate to assume you have two people, and only one Epipen. And you must decide who will recieve it, knowing the other will die.

Abstaining from voting isn't quite the same. If you genuinely believe that either candidate will do harm, then I don't think you have any civic responsibility to support one over the other.

For the last example about the trash bag that wouldn't give marriage licenses to gay people? I think she was perfectly within her right to refuse to perform a function of her job. I also think she, and anyone else who refuses to perform a function of their job should be fired from that job. If she truly believes participating in gay marriage will in some way cause harm to her in a theoretical afterlife, then I believe it is immoral to try to force her to participate in it.

I think we all have to find a balance of pursuing meaning and comfort in our own lives, while helping (or at the very least not harming) others. But when being a part of a society is compulsory for most people, I think it is too much to expect them to carry some kind of moral responsibility to engage with it and choose between two choices that do they disapprove of.

The best topical analogy I can think of that helps represent my thoughts on voting is the stranded passengers scenario. You are stranded on a desert island with a group of people and have run out of food. The group has pushed it to the brink of starvation, and without securing something to eat, you will all die. The prevailing opinion of the group is that you must resort to cannibalism, and you must choose between the two most popular meal choices, where your vote may be the deciding factor, or a third person who is almost garunteed not to be selected by popular opinion.

To complicate this a little further and help make it a lesser of two evils situation: one of the meal-candidates is a violent criminal, and the other is the one who's body would provide the most sustenance.

In the desert island scenario, do you have a moral obligation to vote?

I think your desert island example is a very good use here because it exemplifies what my point was. In the desert island scenario no matter what you do at least one person will die. Because almost all people choose cannibalism over starving. So if you vote you can influence who dies but you can't prevent someone from dying. This is like you can vote but you can't control who gets into office. You don't have a moral obligation to vote as much as you have to recognize that you can only do so much to impact the results of the election and that not voting as a protest means that you still bear some of the responsibility of the outcome. You can frame voting on the island as voting for who gets eaten but also voting for who doesn't get eaten. That was my point. You can call voting for Biden a vote for biden to be in office or a vote for trump to not be in office. If you can't bring yourself to vote for biden to be in office you are also accepting that you are not voting against trump being in office, specifically because of the nature of the first past the post nature of our election system.

>Abstaining from voting isn't quite the same. If you genuinely believe that either candidate will do harm, then I don't think you have any civic responsibility to support one over the other.

If the harm were somehow equal then yes voting either way would be just as bad and so your best bet would be to not vote. But when a clear and obvious difference exists you can't pretend that you didn't play a part in the results. Mind you, in the Biden/Trump example everyone that didn't vote at all is more culpable than someone that voted but voted third party but anyone who could vote against trump and doesn't is partly responsible for him being elected. Unless you just swim away from the island or refuse to eat the meat and die of starvation you will reap the results of the vote whether you cast a vote or not.

This was well worded & good perspective for me, thanks!

I agree that it's clear our decisions or non-decisions have an impact on others, even if we resent it. I just disagree that we bear a moral responsibility for those (in)decisions.

Especially with how difficult it is to compare harm, and project the outcome of those decisions.

I'll vote for a Biden over a Trump. But I really resent being given that choice, and honestly feel like I have the right to disengage from a system that forces it on me. I didn't consent to this system. Enough people seem to like it enough that they maintain it, so I'm not sure it would be morally right for me to change it, even if I could. But I'd absolutely like to feel like I have the right to walk away from it if I get tired enough of feeling not represented.

On the desert island, I'd like to think I wouldn't eat the meat, or participate in the voting. That choice isn't for everyone, but feels like it's the right one to me.

Thank you for helping me figure out how to best frame what I meant. Because I feel like the article is trying to pretend like not deciding to vote isn't itself a decision. I actually think most people would prefer a different system as far as the voting goes but we don't all agree on what the best shape of the new system would be and much like a third party option none of us feels empowered to make the change because most of us agree that this is better than a lot of other worse options. I think that's part of the plan. I think they want us to feel divided and powerless. I don't know how to fix that.

Could be. I wonder how much our individualism plays into it. I always see governance as "they" and "them" too. And that may be where my defense of the non-voter comes from.

Many of us are so disconnected that we don't want to be associated with each other, or consider ourselves parts of their group. So when it comes time to organize, it's very difficult to go in and pick which team you want to pretend like you belong in.

It's hard to get engaged in these broad concepts when I'm most comfortable in my own private world, and I kind of just hope to be stay safe there with the occasional interaction of the small community I connect with.

I think that signal (that your vote is available, but no one has attracted it) only "fires," though, if there's evidence the two major parties care -- i.e., that they work hard to win back your vote. Not really sure that's the case (the Democrats could care less that they don't get the vote of many Marxists in blue states, say), but maybe there's some evidence I'm missing.

The only ethical way to vote is to "cancel" the 2 party system.

Washington said "no parties" all we have is the partisan elite with mindless followers vs the antipartisan free thinkers who understands there isn't a one size fits all approach. We need to be adaptable to each policy and vote based on policy, not a fake person