Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton presented
very different visions of what the Democratic
Party would offer voters in the coming US
presidential election, and, at time of recording
it looks like Hillary's gonna get the nomination. Which poses a very interesting philosophical question
for Bernie fans, and indeed all of us who live in democracies: when nobody on the ballot
represents you, should you vote for the candidate you dislike the least, or just stay out of it altogether?
Some people say we should vote for "the lesser of two evils." If your candidate doesn't
get the nomination, well then you should still
vote for their party anyway because at least
they'll be better than the opposition, right? Assuming, perhaps simplistically, that Bernie
fans would rather Donald Trump not become President, the person who makes this argument says that
the best way to avoid that to vote Hillary.
This argument might also apply to voting for third party candidates, like the Greens, which is an option. The
Hilary fan would say that the Greens aren't likely to win, based on previous elections,
or at least not as likely to win as the Democrats are, so the best way to avoid the
Trump Presidency scenatio is to avoid splitting the left-wing vote, and go for Hillary.
This idea is very utilitarian. Utilitarianism
is the position that actions are good if they
maximise utility, where utility usually means
some form of well-being. In the no-win voting
scenario, the utilitarian says you
should choose the option that maximises utility
of the options available to you. Yes, you can be sad that there isn't another choice that would provide even greater
utility, but that doesn't mean that you can't or shouldn't do some small amount of good
with what you've got. Just to be clear, the question here is not, "Is Hillary the lesser of two evils?" The
question is "Should you vote for the lesser
of two evils?" Is that the principle that should
guide you?
Because there might be alternative principles. Utilitarianism is very concerned with consequences, but you could
take a different approach. Hillary does have a history of supporting aggressive imperialist foreign
policies - which is to say killing people, in Iraq, Libya, Syria, Yemen, among others. And her approach to economics has been criticised
by those left of her as well. Some people might say if that's what she's going to
do as president, they don't want to
be implicated in that.
In "The Ethics of Voting," philosopher Jason Brennan argues that you should be justified in believing
that your candidate will promote the common good. Voters might disagree on what the common
good is, and they might turn out to be wrong about which candidate will promote it, but if you're going to vote he thinks you have
a responsibility to make sure you vote for something.
The upshot for Bernie fans would be that if they really don't think Hillary will be a good
president, Brennan would say they should abstain.
18th Century Prussian philosopher Immanuel
Kant would agree, especially if Bernie
fans thought that Hillary might do morally
wicked things as President. Kant famously argued that if
a murderer came to your door and demanded to know where your children are in order to kill
them, it would actually be wrong to lie to
him. Kant thinks that if somebody else is going to do
something evil, the moral guilt for that is all on them. Better to just keep your hands clean.
If you'd like to know more about Kant, I've done a video on him before, you can see it by clicking that card that's just appeared in the top right.
And you can kind of see how Kant has a point, right? Is it Ok for me to play a role in killing
two innocent people if it'll prevent somebody else from killing five innocent people? At the very least the answer
to that question isn't clearly yes.
Ultimately though, Hillary fans are gonna
come back and say that you have to be "pragmatic"
in your political ambitions. This harkens back to a tradition called "realpolitik," or "real
politics" - an approach to political problems where you consider only what's on the table,
not what you'd like to be on the table.
Trouble is though, realpolitik is a darned convenient ideology for those who benefit from the status
quo. It would be nice if we could agree
that what is on the table politically is basically fine, but often radical political movements are
born out of a realisation that actually some things are really not fine and we might need to
change a lot of stuff.
Some people have suggested that going #BernieorBust
is quite a privileged position to take, given that many of
the people who might be harmed by a Trump Presidency are already members of oppressed minorities.
And yeah that might be true. On the other
hand though, it kinda silences the voices of those who are themselves
members of oppressed minorities and still saying #BernieorBust; it doesn't really touch the Kantian argument; and it
might be worth remembering that some oppressed
minorities might not do too well under a Clinton
presidency either.
You might be unsurprised to hear at this point that this question is very, very difficult to answer.
I don't really think it's my place to tell anyone what they should do here - it seems to me that everybody's
got decide for themselves how much skin they've got in the game and how much they wanna risk. And
anyway I'm English, and God knows we've got our own political problems to deal with right now!
But what I can do is tell you the list of
questions that you would need to tackle first in
order to attempt a solution at the no-win voting scenario.
Firstly, you're gonna have to decide on a
theory of ethics. Whether you're utilitarian,
Kantian, or something else, you're gonna
have to decide what is good, morally and practically.
Secondly, you're gonna have to decide whether doing harm is morally worse than
allowing harm to happen. That's gonna help you figure out whether abstaining and potentially
letting the opposition win who might harm people, is an Ok option.
Thirdly you're gonna have to make the very best attempt you
can to figure out which way of voting, or
not voting, will maximise whatever you've decided is good.
Finally, you're gonna have to check your
answers to see whether they might have been
affected by any kind of bias, mistakes, missing
information, political spin or the candidates
themselves trying to persuade you to answer Question Three in their favour.
Once you've done all that you can make your way freely to the polling station. And presumably collect your
philosophy prize along the way. And to all my American friends
and fans, and everybody around the globe who's likely to be affected by this coming election - Godspeed.
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