By not voting, you are clearly saying you are fine with whoever wins. If you were not fine with whoever wins, you would have voted for someone, anyone else.
By not voting, you are clearly saying you are fine with whoever wins. If you were not fine with whoever wins, you would have voted for someone, anyone else.
There's a double standard that I see a lot here, where people want to vote for a party, denigrate those who chose not to participate as being morally culpable for the results of the election, but won't take moral culpability for what their team does when they're in power.
If you vote for team A and they win and then do something bad (inevitable), shouldn't you be morally responsible for that? After all, you seem fine claiming non-participants have moral culpability for whatever the winning team does.
Yes, you are, to the extent that "the other option" would have been better.
This seems incredibly obvious. If my options are "don't bomb children" and "bomb children", there's an obvious choice and obvious culpability. If my options are "bomb children" and "bomb way the fuck more children" the choice is also obvious.
You do not get to pretend a moral dilemna doesn't exist just because you're not a fan of the available choices. You are still culpable.
Consider this scenario:
You have a train hurtling down the track that forks into two groups of people, 10 in one and 5 in the other, some of the people go on to cure cancer and some are murderers and you don't know where they are. Also it's possible batman set up the scenario to kill the bad guys and by flipping the switch you kill the good guys. Or the Joker set it up and the reverse is true.
In this case, you could argue that you only have moral culpability by intervening. Unless you are absolutely sure you have full knowledge of the intended consequences by acting, you can absolve yourself of the moral culpability by non-intervention.
And since we don't know the long term consequences of political actions, there is at least an argument for non-intervention.
I also sat out one election here in CZ, but that does not mean that I was "fine with whoever wins". It was "I really cannot decide which of the two guys is worse and I need to survive either of them."
Fortunately the Czech president does not have that much power.
How about parliamentary election?
I have voted in all of them so far. Smaller parties = not much personal attachment + higher chance to find at least one that is, in that particular moment, more aligned to your interests.
In general, I believe that more choice is good and polarizing political systems are subpar.
Participation adds a moral dimension. It becomes a trolly problem — do you throw the switch and take culpability for the outcome?
Well yes, but you're completely misunderstanding how the trolley problem applies to voting, esp. in the USA. You're pretending that "Not Voting" and "Voting" are the switch options, but that's simply not true.
There are just two possible outcomes: Dems or Reps getting power. That's the switch options you have. "Not Voting" simply means letting the trolley take the Rep route and being JUST AS CULPABLE for the results as every single republican voter.
Your fantasy of "not voting" being an actual moral option is like arguing "I disagree with the concept of a trolley, so I'm just going to turn away from the switch". You're morally exactly as culpable, because you made a choice that is morally the equivalent of "not switching tracks".
There is a subtle difference though because a vote is supposed to be a act of support. With the trolley problem there is nothing to support.
Voting for party A/B is a reward that encourages party A/B to do more of what they're doing.
So let's say only 1000 people voted because everyone else hated both options. That would pave a path for party C that would not exist if everyone held their nose and voted for crap.
Not participating in the trolley problem does not remove questions of moral responsibility. You had the choice to throw the lever, you said "either outcome is fine".
That's your choice. "I don't participate at all" doesn't work unless it makes the whole trolley go poof.
>Not participating in the trolley problem does not remove questions of moral responsibility. You had the choice to throw the lever, you said "either outcome is fine".
As the eminent philosopher[0] opined:
[0] https://genius.com/Rush-freewill-lyricsThere are more moral frameworks out there than just utilitarianism.