What’s Wrong with the World

Not caring for the wide application of double effect, this appeals to me. I don't think I ever explored it much further, but I brought up atomicity a while back, a programming concept. There seems to be Rube Goldberg mindset of cooperation except a designer has been removed.

In the specific case of legislation, one's cooperation is predominantly teleological. One doesn't grant a right to do something unless one believes others should be able to it. If that case in fact is that no one actually does exercise that right - an almost absurd construction since we don't create rights that won't be exercised - the damning intent has already been established. This is quite similar to the qualitative difference in the intent of the man who drives his girlfriend to the abortion clinic and the man who drives a bus route that happens to have an abortion clinic on his route.

And if the act is causally negligible with respect to the very outcomes which the person is analyzing under double effect in order to justify it, then a proportionate reason does not exist.

This is where my own analysis stumbles. Part of me is strongly inclined to agree here. But there is a counterargument, and I'm not sure it's wrong. The counterargument is that proximity conditions the "proportionate reasons" standard, and the very fact that this cooperation is so dramatically remote makes the standard much easier to meet.

[since you started a new thread I'm continuing my comment here]

Zippy--I think the problem is with your understanding of "deliberate" as describing the cooperation. It indicates that you are misunderstanding what material cooperation is.

You think that in (remote) material cooperation, even if the actor does not desire the sinful act, he desires to cooperate in the sinful act. Therefore voting for this bad guy carries with it a minimum level of evil that the benefit in a national election falls short of.

But in that vote, the voter does *not* desire to cooperate in the sinful act of the candidate. He foresees it, he permits it as an unintended effect, but he doesn't desire it.

Cooperation is when you assist someone else in committing an objectively evil act. Formal cooperation is choosing the act as an end *or means*. In material cooperation the actor neither desires the sinful act as an end nor as a means.

You seem to be saying that voting for an abortion supporter is choosing to help him support abortion as a means to achieve some other end. It isn't. If it was it would be formal cooperation. Material cooperation, by definition, means you do not desire the act, and you do not desire to assist in it.

Cardinal Ratzinger says you can vote for an abortion supporter and it may be material cooperation. That means the vote need not be a desire to assist in the sinful act. See also Bishop Myers. http://www.wf-f.org/Myers-90- coo...ooperation.html

In sum, if the vote is material cooperation, especially if it is remote, then we know from Cardinal Ratzinger that it is not a choice to assist in the evil end.

You may ask, how can you vote for an abortion supporter without desiring to his abortion support? Perhaps it is because the act of a man being elected to an office is not in itself, per se, inherently sinful. The object of your act, what you are choosing, is to elect that guy, and that in itself is morally neutral. The object is not to help him in his bad policy. Neither is your intention, in this hypothetical.

So that gets us back to the point about whether national elections make the vote un-proportionate. You seem to be saying that the bad effect in such a vote has a minimum quantum of evil, a glass floor, set by the basic fact that you are desiring to cooperate in evil. But you're not.

Instead, I propose that the bad effect is simply that your vote might help the guy you vote for win, and then he may do some bad things. But that effect goes up or down with the significance of your vote, national or local, swing state or not. If the benefit goes down, the bad effect goes down too, because they both flow from helping elect this guy, and your vote wasn't very effective in that regard.

To say that the low benefit falls below the proportionate evil effect, you must tell us some other evil in the act that doesn't go down with the benefit, something distinct from "my vote may help this guy win."

So I don't see how your national election theory holds water.

sorry, here's the link
http://www.wf-f.org/Myers-90-cooperation.html

I am a bit slow, so please correct me if I get it wrong.

The "Morality for Dummies" explanation of the Zippy position is that, when looking at remote material cooperation with evil, the fact that your vote may be negligible in deciding the outcome does not negate the fact that you are remotely materially cooperating with evil. To make matters worse, the fact that your vote is negligible with respect to the outcome does count against any proportionate reason you are relying upon. All the calories, none of the taste.

The anti-Zippy school says if the negligible effect of your vote reduces the proportionate reason, then it also reduces remote material cooperation. Less taste, but fewer calories. Is that close?

msb:

You keep trying to cast this as though I were confusing material and formal cooperation. I'm not. At all.

Deliberately choosing to materially cooperate with evil is not (necessarily) choosing evil; that is, it is not necessarily formal cooperation with evil. But it does require a proportionate reason in order to be morally licit, no matter how remote the deliberate material cooperation with evil happens to be.

And I understand that you view it as nothing but a good effect and a bad effect, both of which attenuate with remoteness at the same rate. That is precisely the view that I am criticizing.

Zippy--if you make a choice, which involves remote material cooperation (assistance) in evil, you do not choose to assist the evil. You choose something else, and your act assists the evil. You can't, by definition, be choosing to assist the evil, because if you were choosing to assist the evil, it would be formal cooperation, not material cooperation. You're just choosing something that you foresee will remotely assist the evil.

Your case rests on the premise that in voting for the bad candidate you are deliberately choosing the assistance in his evil end. Your premise is incorrect.

c matt,

The "Morality for Dummies" explanation of the Zippy position is that

Are you actually implying that those who disagree with Zippy's formulation here, let alone, his views are actually "dummies"?

The good doctors here (be it Beckwith, Bauman, Liccione, etc.) have always struck me as the epitome of stupidity and wonmug-ness.

As to mine own account in the matter, apologies; I serve One God & submit to One Pope, whose own authority, by the way, is not such that his opinions are binding on the Conscience of Catholics!

How could the opinion of one lay Catholic be held in such high esteem by its lackeys who have somehow regarded it as assuming the very nature of Infallibility itself!?

Prove to me that Zippy's opinion here is Infallible & binding on the Conscience of a Catholic, and I'll show you a heretic in the making!

I don't think that even Zippy himself has yet assumed such a stance; however, his cult following seem to have.

msb:

I think you are being sidetracked by a semantic irrelevance. We both agree that if you intend the evil act of another as either a means or an end, you are formally cooperating with evil. So by definition when I say 'material cooperation with evil' in this discussion it is implied that the acting subject does not intend the evil act of another. He intends his own act of knowing cooperation with the evil act of another.

And when we intend that kind of act - an act of material cooperation with evil - it is only morally licit when we have a proportionate reason to do it.

Are you actually implying that those who disagree with Zippy's formulation here, let alone, his views are actually "dummies"?

"For dummies" in popular parlance is like 'Cliff notes" or "executive summary" or whatever -- it is intended to refer to an easy to understand explanation of a complex topic.

Zippy,

Thanks for the clarification!

(Goes to show that, really, I'm not with it when it comes to pop culture, even in matters concerning faddish reference books.)

Personally, although we may differ on matters of principle here (argumentatively speaking, of course); ironically enough, I am however most appreciative of your stalwart stand.

As I've openly acknowledged before, somebody has to take it -- less the Darkness before us engulfs us further into that nebulous plasma of "Compromise" until, finally, we all fall into that Abyss from which there is No Return.

Zippy--OK, we both have said all along that remote material cooperation needs a proportionate reason. So we agree there in principle.

I do need a clarification, though. The RMcooperator does not intend the evil. So far we agree. He does intend his choice. Again we agree. But does he choose to assist the evil? Is *assisting* the evil part of *what he chooses to do*, or is it just an effect of his choice? I think we must distinguish between choosing to assist the evil, and making a choice that he foresees will assist the evil but which evil, *and* which assistance, he does not intend or choose. The end and the assistance is neither in his intention nor in his object.

Are we together on that so far? It is relevant to our previous comments but I'll lay that out again once we work on this.

And Aristocles, I too took c matt's question to be a benign one.

I think we must distinguish between choosing to assist the evil, and making a choice that he foresees will assist the evil but which evil, *and* which assistance, he does not intend or choose. The end and the assistance is neither in his intention nor in his object.

In my understanding, the licitly acting subject goes through a deliberation[*] before acting.

Once he has decided to base his decision on a weighing of the consequences of election outcomes, the genus of act we are dealing with is remote material cooperation with evil. So now he needs to go get himself a proportionate reason to perform the act, if it is to be licit. One of the things his proportionate reason must 'contain' is a reasonable capacity to actually achieve the good he seeks. But here his deliberation fails, in a mass-market election.

[*] In many cases, of course, particularly cases like self-defense, there really is not time for deliberation and the acting subject must simply act. Given the urgency of doing the right thing in these kinds of cases, we are faced with a bit of a puzzle. Thus we develop the virtues, which guide us to morally correct action without the stultifying need for careful plodding deliberation prior to every choice. If the kind of deliberation we are engaged in here is not a particular person's cup of tea, the far more universal method of prayer and fasting is capable of forming the conscience for right acts.

Zippy & msb,

Something in your current dialogue leads me to suspect that you two might perhaps be conflating the issue of culpability with that of cooperation. Could this be it?

Zippy--you can't freeze the character of the act as remote material cooperation, and then change the circumstances in this way, because it changes the character of the act.

If my vote has no reasonable capacity to achieve the good ends by electing this candidate, it also has the same lack of reasonable capacity to assist in the evil ends of the bad things he will do if elected. That is, my vote isn't assistance. So then, how is it cooperation anymore?

You can't impose a burden on the desired benefit, "reasonable capacity to achieve its end," without also imposing that same burden on the cooperation involved, because in this instance they both flow, in the same degree, from an *identical*, third, neutral act: voting that this guy get elected.

If you postulate that your vote has no reasonable capacity to get this guy elected, then you have changed the facts so much that it changes the character of the act. You aren't cooperating anymore, because you just told me you aren't helping him get elected.

When Cardinal Ratzinger talks about voting he is not talking about a vote that doesn't matter. If you change the situation and say, the vote doesn't matter anymore, you can't say it's still the same kind of cooperation he is talking about, and in your facts I guess it's not cooperation at all.

In contrast, if you insist that your vote is cooperating, even a little, then *by the same degree* you are also bringing about the benefit. They flow from the *same* vote-to-elect.

a--no I don't think so, but feel free to elaborate

If you postulate that your vote has no reasonable capacity to get this guy elected, then you have changed the facts so much that it changes the character of the act.

If you are going to hang the justification of your act on possible outcomes of the election, your act had better have a non-negligible effect on the outcome of the election. (And once again, the appeal to aggregation of votes is something I've addressed elsewhere). If you want to hang its justification on something else, fine -- then evaluation of the contemplated act starts over, but you can't appeal to possible election outcomes to justify it.

Zippy--you're just introducing all these other concepts and omitting the basic character of what we are talking about.

I'm not even rejecting you're reasonable chance of success idea, nor am I discussing only the physical order, whatever you mean by that. I am discussing intent (my purposes and goals), object (what I am doing, my vote to elect this guy), and circumstances (the context, his policies, everything else). It is you who are excluding the "physical" by saying the object doesn't matter.

But whatever. Both of those ideas are distractions, because first we have to identify basically what we are talking about in an act that may cooperate with evil. And that is: an act is not even cooperation in an evil, or in anything, if it doesn't assist it.

You have introduced circumstances in which the vote doesn't assist the election of the guy. You have done so to say the benefit isn't achieved. Fine.

But it's not cooperating either in your facts. It's not helping him get elected, by your own supposition.

How in the world can I do something to cooperate in the evil of a president who will fund embryo research if my act doesn't help him get elected? What significant meaning does it have that makes it cooperation in evil?

If you would be happier with the result that in an election of sufficient scale it is irrational (and therefore objectively wrong) to try to justify how one votes based on expected election outcomes, that is perhaps another way to look at it.

It appears this kind of difficult decision-making is occuring for Catholics across the United States:

Abortion issue again dividing Catholic votes

LINK:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26750675/

EXCERPT:

SCRANTON, Pa. - Until recently, Matthew Figured, a Sunday school teacher at the Holy Rosary Roman Catholic Church here, could not decide which candidate to vote for in the presidential election.

He had watched progressive Catholics work with the Democratic Party over the last four years to remind the faithful of the party’s support for Catholic teaching on the Iraq war, immigration , health care and even reducing abortion rates.

But then his local bishop plunged into the fray, barring Senator Joseph R. Biden Jr. of Delaware, the Democratic vice-presidential nominee, from receiving communion in the area because of his support for abortion rights.

Finally, bishops around the country scolded another prominent Catholic Democrat, House Speaker Nancy Pelosi of California, for publicly contradicting the church’s teachings on abortion, some discouraging parishioners from voting for politicians who hold such views.

Now Mr. Figured thinks he will vote for the Republican candidate, Senator John McCain of Arizona. "People should straighten out their religious beliefs before they start making political decisions," Mr. Figured, 22, said on his way into Sunday Mass.

A struggle within the church over how Catholic voters should think about abortion is once again flaring up just as political partisans prepare an all-out battle for the votes of Mass-going Catholics in swing-state towns like Scranton.

Zippy,

You might pay particular attention to the following:

Once a reliable Democratic voting bloc, Catholics have emerged as a pivotal swing vote in recent presidential races. Evenly divided in a New York Times-CBS News poll over the summer, Catholics make up about a quarter of the national electorate and about a third in the pivotal battleground states of Michigan, Missouri, Ohio and Pennsylvania . "Whoever wins the Catholic vote will generally win our state and, most of the time, the nation," said G. Terry Madonna, a political scientist at Franklin & Marshall College in Lancaster, Pa.

And Scranton, a city dominated by the kind of white working-class Catholics who have often defected from the Democrats in presidential elections, is a focus of special attention this year. (emphasis mine)

SOURCE: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/26750675/

I'm sorry, I don't understand your response

ZIPPY (elsewhere): "Voting is a human act, and it has a far, far greater impact on the people who do it than it has on election outcomes. An individual vote has a negligible effect on the election outcome and a significant effect on the person who does it. This disparity in effect scales as the population scales."

But that's not a correct argument. You keep underestimating how the small value of a vote actually scales. Let me give an example to illustrate the general idea: Suppose I'm in a population of a million people, and we get together to vote on a leader. As you say, my vote affects me directly, aside from anything it does in the election -- call that an effect of size one. In the election, I have about one millionth of a contribution to the election of the leader. You keep claiming that this is obviously negligible. BUT that leader can affect all million of the people (e.g. he can pass laws that affect everyone). So my effect on the choice of leader is about one millionth, but that has to be multiplied by the power of the leader, which is about a million (a million times greater than the typical person). Doing the multiplication, my effect on the population because of my vote is about one.

So, my overall effect on the population because of my vote is about in the same measure as I affect myself. And this remains the same no matter how much the population scales. (The point in this argument is not to give precise numbers, but to illustrate how the scaling actually goes.) Zippy keeps claiming that as the voting population gets bigger and bigger, the value of a vote becomes more and more negligible. But the value of the leader will ALSO go up, and so the share of my voting effect on the population will also keep going up.

Paul raises an interesting point, challenging the factual premise of whether a vote really is negligible.

My own point is that even granting that it is negligible, how then is my vote a cooperation in the evil of helping elect a president who will fund embryo research, if my vote doesn't actualy help him get elected?

I think both points are worth exploring distinctly.

Zippy's response is something about irrationality of speculation being objectively wrong, and I am not sure how that is responsive or relates to my question. It may be more of a response to the kind of point Paul is making than the kind of point I am making. I am not now judging the rationality of vote-weight prediction. I'm assuming the accuracy of Zippy's predicition and saying that if vote-weight is negligible, the vote doesn't assist the bad candidate or his goals, and if it is not negligible, it assists both the evil and the benefit to that same degree, because both flow from helping elect the guy.

I'm assuming the accuracy of Zippy's predicition and saying that if vote-weight is negligible, the vote doesn't assist the bad candidate or his goals, and if it is not negligible, it assists both the evil and the benefit to that same degree, because both flow from helping elect the guy.

Of course everyone thinks he is himself completely immune to the self-mutilation of the character which occurs in endorsing - and a vote is a form of (however reluctant) endorsement, despite protestations to the contrary - a candidate for high office who supports murdering the innocent. I don't buy it. I think even a walking saint cannot help but have his moral sense coarsened and his sense of the common good distorted, to however slight a degree, by voting for this kind of candidate, who holds a position so fundamentally in opposition to the common good which justifies the existence of government in the first place. And this bad effect does not attenuate alongside the attenuation of the voter's influence on the outcome.

Of course if one were capable of having a non-negligible effect on the outcome of the election, these non-outcome-related evil effects might well be proportionate to the good achieved. But one is not capable of having a non-negligible effect on the outcome.

Zippy--Thank you. I have asked you to identify an evil involved in this act of voting that is seperate from the help in electing the candidate, because you posited that the help was non-existent, and you have done so. I appreciate that.

I understand why you view this evil as all-pervasive. It has poisoned the pro-life movement for nearly 30 years. It led Bob Dole to be declared a pro-life champion. It led to ignoring the inaction of the Bushes. It led to dismissal of catastrophic Republican Supreme Coutr picks. It lowered the standard of what pro-life means in the Republican party, and ultimately led to the redefinition of the term pro-life itself to appease compromisers.

But it is a non-necessary condition. It doesn't have to accompany the vote. Someone can disagree with you about just how negligible their vote is or any vote is. This is especially true given the nearly unequivocal statement by bishops that free people have a duty to vote--which would make no sense if they thought there was such a thing as a negligible vote. And someone may disagree with you about the effect of their campaigning is in a particular election.

Once disagreeing with you on that point, they need not be soiled by their act that involves remote material cooperation. Their object and intent can actually be for electing this guy to aclieve other ends without wanting to achieve his policy goals. They can focus purely on the good ends sought. They need not defend McCain or even say nice things about him. I'm not saying it's easy or common. You may interpret my own statements as having defended McCain, but I think if you look at them you will see I have always maintained by view that he is intensely wrong.

And I didn't even then say we should *want him* over Obama. I said we can want other things, related though distinct and legitimate in themselves, includung Obama's defeat and Palin's election. Consider it this way: could you in good conscience run a website such as my own, or donate to the Gianna Jessen ad? These are anti-Omaba activities. But if they have a necessary connection to the fact that the only way he will lose is if McCain wins, then they are not purely anti-Omaba. I think we can make those fine distinctions.

I think there is even a little room here to admit that the principled side, too, has a risk of throwing out the baby with the bathwater, by offering knee-jerk condemnations of the only 100% pro-life politician we have ever had for VP or P. Maybe she will waver but maybe she won't. Maybe her presence is what we 100%ers have been waiting for all these years.

But it is a non-necessary condition.

My contention is that when the candidate one endorses with one's vote supports a policy of murdering the innocent - as Evangelium Vitae tells us, a position so radically opposed to the common good which justifies authority in the first place that it literally unmakes authority and turns it into a thing which must be disobeyed rather than obeyed - it becomes in effect a necessary condition.

Now it is possible, though far from obvious, that some very saintly person exists who will not corrupt himself and those immediately around him by making this endorsement. But asserting the relevance of that possibility is self-refuting, since a person so saintly would never be so presumptuous about his own holiness.

People do disagree with me that this is the case: a disagreement over what the facts of the matter actually are. Somebody is objectively wrong though, and obviously I don't think it is me.

Zippy--At the risk of making a point that may already be apparent, I think you are using endorse too strongly across the board. Casting a vote for someone might not be an endorsement of his policies (indeed it could not be if it were material cooperation), and in certain circumstances it may not even express an intent that this guy get elected. It at least includes the bare fact that you want your vote counted for this guy--it would also include and may even be more primarily targeted as a vote for the other person on the ticket.

As far as saintliness and the impossible burden of holiness needed to avoid contamination, you're asserting that but I don't think it is obvious. In these circumstances, with a focus only on the laudible goals (goals which I don't think you have criticized at all in themselves), and with the level of cooperation already material and remote, the "stain" involved may not be present and may not be much of a hurdle at all.

If the stain you describe really is that kind of self-mutilation and necessary scandal, I have to consider it as being sinful. But I don't think Cardinal Ratzinger could have said that people can sometimes vote for an abortion supporter, if doing so is obviously sinful and scandalous, for everyone but canonizable saints. I don't think he is so irresponsible.

By your standard I don't think there exists any election where one's vote counts enough to overcome this near-mortal sin. Abortion law worldwide is addressed at high governmental levels, even small countries have millions of voters, and Cardinal Ratzinger's letter was sent specifically to the abortion situation in the United States. He laid down a simple general rule and it's not an excruciating task to apply it. It's not reasonable to interpret his statement as one that applies to no US elections and can only be exercised, without sin, by Mother Teresa.

MSB:

Yes, people at least implicitly disagree with me about the nature of a vote as an act. I've been saying that from day one. I think they are wrong. It is a question of empirical fact: so if someone wants evidence to help discern the empirical facts of the matter, one can for example ask whether compromise has or has not been corrupting the pro-life movement, whether the pro-life movement's strategy of compromise has or has not resulted in a series of triumphs or a series of defeats, etc. Each person really has to form his own conclusions, though I think this is not that difficult to see once one steps outside of one's confirmation biases.

Cardinal Ratzinger's private letter doesn't address any of the issues I am addressing. It doesn't even address voting for candidates in elections at all: it addresses legislators voting on legislation, and whether they ought to be denied Communion. And Cardial McCarrick, the man to whom the private letter was addressed, is on public record saying that the leaked portion of the message is incomplete.

People keep acting as though they have a robust Magisterial refutation of my argument or its conclusion, even though they don't. I'd prefer that the substance of the argument be addressed rather than having this incessant and fallacious appeal to authority.

I wrote: "It doesn't even address voting for candidates in elections at all"

That isn't quite right.

The leaked private letter is about pro-abortion politicians and Communion but very briefly addresses voting for candidates who support intrinsic evil, saying that it is possible in theory to do so licitly in the presence of a proportionate reason. To invoke this against my argument - my argument that under certain conditions there is no proportionate reason - is obviously begging the question.

Zippy--"compromise" is too general an idea to use to sweep away this specific analysis, and citing Cardinal Ratzinger's statement is not begging the question. You appear to be saying that the statement has no application whatsover, or none that you have identified or that are readily apparent. It's not begging the question to say that Cardinal Ratzinger doesn't recite purposeless statements, and that he directed the statement specifically to the US abortion law situation in 2004. I have thought all along that your premises are really a rejection of his statement, and if so I would just like that point admitted. You claim you are using rather than rejecting his analysis, even while you render it utterly inapplicable in any conceivable circumstance.

Cardinal Ratzinger says that sometimes someone may vote for an abortion supporter. Can you give us a hypothetical example where you agree that it is permissible vote for an abortion supporter?

..."compromise" is too general an idea ...

I am, of course, using the term as shorthand for what I've been discussing using a great many words. I can't repeat everything I have already said every time I say something new.

...You appear to be saying that the statement has no application whatsover, or none that you have identified ...

What part of "when your vote has a non-negligible effect on the outcome" did you not understand?

I've always been a little intrigued, given your emphasis on the negligible effect of a vote, Zippy, on how a non-negligible vote would interact with a really bad candidate who was the lesser evil. You can make up the details of the scenario yourself but can see where I'm going--perhaps an election for a state representative for your district, two candidates both of whom vociferously support the legality of abortion, but one of whom supports some other atrocity as well. Given that your vote has a non-negligible effect in that election, is it plausible that you could feel compelled by the lesser-of-two-evils argument to vote for the less bad of the candidates?

What part of "when your vote has a non-negligible effect on the outcome" did you not understand?

What I don't understand is when, in these United States, a single vote might have a "non-negligible outcome" in your opinion? A single vote would seem to be negligible in all national elections, all state elections, and the vast majority of local elections except perhaps those in very small towns.

So is Cardinal Ratzinger really saying that one may vote for a pro-abortion candidate, with proportionate reasons, only if one is voting for an elected official in a very small town? (Nevermind that small-town officials almost never address the abortion issue anyway.)

In practical terms, when is a single vote ever non-negligible enough for the Vatican and the bishops to bother drafting and promulgating guidelines for Catholic voters? The underlying assumption of the Church's prudential teaching seems to be that every vote is non-negligible with respect to outcome.

I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that democracy is a sham and the Church is complicit in this sham. I just want to make sure that's what you're really saying.

Correction:

The first "non-negligible outcome", in quotes, should be "non-negligible effect on the outcome".

Jeff Culbreath Writes: "In practical terms, when is a single vote ever non-negligible enough for the Vatican and the bishops to bother drafting and promulgating guidelines for Catholic voters? The underlying assumption of the Church's prudential teaching seems to be that every vote is non-negligible with respect to outcome."

I believe that the very articulation of these comments take not what the Church teaches in this regard as its underlying assumption, but rather what Zippy has taught.

Suffice it to say, that if what the Church taught subscribed to the rigid terms Zippy has articulated his own teaching on the matter to the very extent of cooperation of evil, the USCCB would not have said thus:

"When all candidates hold a position in favor of an intrinsic evil, the conscientious voter faces a dilemma. The voter may decide to take the extraordinary step of not voting for any candidate or, after careful deliberation, may decide to vote for the candidate deemed less likely to advance such a morally flawed position and more likely to pursue other authentic human good."

Given the prudential nature of most of the Teachings of the Church I've come across, rather than expose the believer to moral hazard, they would not have included the latter option (i.e., "deemed less likely...) as an acceptable course of action for the believer; instead, in consideration of the believer's soul & its general welfare, the Church would have restricted it to complete abstention by the believer from the election as articulated in the former (i.e., "not voting for any candidate") had they thought along the same rigid lines as Zippy's own gloss.

I believe this is glaringly what Zippy has been neglecting: that his opinions is only that & may not actually reflect what the Church itself has been teaching on the matter.

yes thank you Jeff

What I don't understand is when, in these United States, a single vote might have a "non-negligible outcome" in your opinion?

In practical terms, when is a single vote ever non-negligible enough for the Vatican and the bishops to bother drafting and promulgating guidelines for Catholic voters?

To the question: not often, which is why I generally recommend that when people do choose to vote, they vote for a leader they would like to hold the office and not engage in nose-holding lesser-evil voting calculus. If I am convinced that my act of material cooperation with evil has a genuine chance to actually accomplish something good, then I'll try to figure out if I have a proportionate reason to do it. Otherwise, why bother? Make a morally clean decision rather than what amounts to a phyrric decision in favor of the lesser evil. (Hopefully that answers Lydia's question also).

I'm actually sympathetic to the idea that democracy is a sham and the Church is complicit in this sham. I just want to make sure that's what you're really saying.

Cardinal Ratzinger's private letter to Cardinal McCarrick, a fragment of which was leaked against his will and is now being used by Republican Catholics as if it were a Papal encyclical addressing the Church Universal (well, it is treated as more authoritative than some encyclicals, truth be told), addressed primarily the issue of a legislator in a legislative body voting on a law, though there is an offhand comment about electing candidates. In that context clearly one's vote has a pertinent enough impact that proportionate reasons are arguable.

I think this requires something of a retraction. I've posted that quote several places, and I think you take my point way beyond what's fair, at least insofar as I've been the one quoting it.

First, I am not now, nor have I ever been, a member of the Republican party. I do not describe myself as a Republican. I am a conservative, but there is a whopping big difference - especially these days. Slinging "Republican Catholics" in the general direction of this quote and its usage by me is simply false.

Second, I have not quoted that paragraph as a magesterial document, and I defy you to show me where I did. In fact, I use that paragraph as nothing more than a window into the Church's teaching on the subject. I've pointed out, each time I used it, that the object is the proportionate reasons, not the denial of the distant cooperation with the evil of ESCR.

Since I'm the only person I've seen quoting that paragraph verbatim - aside from you yourself here - I think this needs to be painted with a less broad brush. Sweeping generalizations like this aren't going to help your cause, Zip.

Zippy,

Has the Vatican issued any voter's guides? Amercian Bishops have said various things, yes, but the only document I am aware of that some peoples' wishful thinking might refer to as a "Vatican voter's guide" is the private letter of then-Cardinal Ratzinger which was leaked against his will. If there were anything authoritative I am certain folks would have been bludgeoning me over the head with it for years.

Does your statement here mean that you don't regard the bishops' statement in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship authoritative?

I really would like to know since it would clarify things not only with respect to your own views here as well as your understanding of what constitutes Church Teaching but also on how Catholics in general (at least, in our country) typically regard what they consider "authoritative".

Zippy,

Thanks for the reply. I guess I didn't phrase my question very carefully. Forget what I said about the Vatican. Maybe the Vatican has never addressed the principles of voting in a modern democracy, I really don't know. But I am still unclear on one aspect of your argument:

When, in your opinion, might a single vote have a "non-negligible effect" on the outcome of an election? Is this even possible in elections where there are more than a few hundred voters?

I think I know your answers, but I'd like to see them in print anyway. I suspect that most of us have not quite come to terms with what seems to be your underlying premise: that voting is a futile act, at least as far as outcomes are concerned.

You wrote:

Well, anyone who has read my posts here knows that I am unsympathetic to much of the underlying civic mythology of democracy. I think to some extent the Bishops are saying 'given the underlying civic mythology of democracy, here is how the principles of licit cooperation with evil would apply'.

But clearly, Zippy, the bishops themselves accept the "underlying civic mythology" of democracy as true and non-mythological, else they would warn their flocks of the dangers of material cooperation with evil without proportionate reason.

I haven't been reading carefully enough, but if your strongest argument against voting for McCain-Palin in this election comes down to accepting your premise that the "underlying civic mythology" of democracy is false, and that every vote in a national election has a negligible effect on the outcome, then it's going to be a very hard sell.

Elsewhere you have made another argument, derived from EV, saying that the line must be drawn at candidates who favor murdering the innocent. That seems to be a very different argument, and it is pretty close to something I can sign on to. I'm still not quite there, because I'm not sure I could have voted for any of our presidents by that standard. Maybe I'm wrong about that. I'd love to see you address the question.

Zippy--do you deny that cardinal ratzinger wrote it and thinks it?

Do you disagree with him or not?

If not, please give an example, don't just say "non-negligible"

Elsewhere you have made another argument, derived from EV, saying that the line must be drawn at candidates who favor murdering the innocent.

However, let it be noted: that line of argument does contradict the bishops who have stated that it is permissible to vote for pro-abortion candidates with proportionate reason.

msb,

Zippy--do you deny that cardinal ratzinger wrote it and thinks it?

To be fair, that part I can understand.

Apart from it being a private communication, it would seem as a personal opinion held by the Cardinal at the time rather than a matter of authoritative nature.

On the other hand, the bishops' statement in Forming Consciences for Faithful Citizenship authoritative is an entirely different matter altogether since it promulgates guidelines at a more official capacity.

Mark:

Since I'm the only person I've seen quoting that paragraph verbatim

Many people have referred to that document just in these last few days on several different comment threads. Over the past four years I couldn't begin to say how many people have referenced, quoted, and used that document as an authority on this subject.

FWIW, I did not have you specifically in mind - at all - when I characterized what Republican Catholics have done with the leaked Ratzinger letter. What I had in mind was the John Kerry communion hubbub of four years ago when it all took place. I do view it as gravely wrong that this letter was leaked and exploited for partisan purposes as if it were something officially issued by the Vatican. It continues to be treated as something other than a private letter about politicians and communion. Look at how Jeff (not to pick on him) was under the mistaken impression that the Vatican had addressed the issue in some official capacity. He is not alone. The people who have done this have engaged in a form of lie, and I hope they are repentant and penitent for having done so.

I certainly disavow and retract any perceived personal implications with respect to you.

When, in your opinion, might a single vote have a "non-negligible effect" on the outcome of an election? Is this even possible in elections where there are more than a few hundred voters?

The 1960 presidential election. An average difference of one voter per precint would have given Nixon the election.

The 1960 presidential election. Hawaii's electoral votes were decided by a difference of 115 votes in 240 precints, well under 1/2 vote per precinct. This out of a total of over 184,000 votes cast.

The 2000 presidential election. Florida's electoral votes were decided by a difference of about 500 votes - 0.0092% of the total cast.

The 2000 presidential election. New Mexico's electoral votes were decided by a difference of 366 votes.

The 1974 New Hampshire senate election was declared a draw after a lengthy court battle and several recounts. A special election was required to decide the matter.

The 2004 race for Washington state governor was decided by 129 votes of 2.9 million cast.

I can go on if you'd like...

The people who have done this have engaged in a form of lie, and I hope they are repentant and penitent for having done so.

Or maybe they were just mistaken or misinformed.

Jeff:

But clearly, Zippy, the bishops themselves accept the "underlying civic mythology" of democracy as true and non-mythological, else they would warn their flocks of the dangers of material cooperation with evil without proportionate reason.

I haven't been reading carefully enough, but if your strongest argument against voting for McCain-Palin in this election comes down to accepting your premise that the "underlying civic mythology" of democracy is false, and that every vote in a national election has a negligible effect on the outcome, then it's going to be a very hard sell.

As for whether it is a hard sell or not, that doesn't really concern me. What concerns me is whether it is true. If it is true, some few people will find it convincing now, more later, and so on. If it isn't true, it will not convince anyone and it will die on the vine as it should. Either way I am content.

Or maybe they were just mistaken or misinformed.

Elsewhere you have made another argument, derived from EV, saying that the line must be drawn at candidates who favor murdering the innocent. That seems to be a very different argument, and it is pretty close to something I can sign on to.

Zippy,

My argument here doesn't (as far as I can tell) depend on additional critiques I've made of various myths of modernity, such as my polemics against the dictatorship of consent and content-agnostic equality.

You claim that it does not depend on those critiques; however, on the other hand, they have formed the very basis of your arguments: that voting is a futile act and, as a result, fails a criteria of PDE that requires an act to be efficacious for even proportionate reason to apply.

Mark:
That is interesting data, and may count against my absolutist stance in swing states.

I'm not really sure that Mark's data is really all that relevant to an individual making a particular decision of which particular candidate to vote for in some particular election.

During the time in which I may cast my ballot, all such tallies exist only in potentiality, a potentiality that is in a constant state of flux until the polls are closed and no more ballots may be cast. I do not have at my fingertips access to such data, at least with any amount of accuracy, at the time I cast my ballot. The closest thing I have are exit polls, which can be inaccurate. If it is true that I have no way of knowing that situations like those given as examples will occur, and it is also true that such situations are rare, then it seems imprudent to base choice of who to vote for of the improbable possibility that the election will be decided by the smallest of margins.

Also, there is an assumption, to take the example of 2004 race for Washington state governor, that my ballot is one of the 129 ballots out of the 2.9 million cast that could have--perhaps should have--changed the election. But that is not necessarily so. For it to be the case my vote would have to be demonstrated to be an imprudent choice given the knowable circumstances at the time my ballot was cast. And the actual outcome of the election cannot be used to argue this because the actual outcome neither existed in actuality nor as fully knowable at the time I cast my ballot.

So it would seem to me that the fact that some elections are decided by a marrow margin of votes does nothing to render my vote as having greater worth than 1 out of all registered voters, since the situations used to argue this to be the case do not exist in actuality before the polls close and all ballots are cast, and because my knowledge of the changing flux of circumstances that could possibly alter the potential outcome of the election are not known to me at the time I cast my ballot with anywhere near the kind of clarity they are known with after all the votes are tallied and the winner decided.

Brendon,

...So it would seem to me that the fact that some elections are decided by a marrow margin of votes does nothing to render my vote as having greater worth than 1 out of all registered voters, since the situations used to argue this to be the case do not exist in actuality before the polls close and all ballots are cast, and because my knowledge of the changing flux of circumstances that could possibly alter the potential outcome of the election are not known to me at the time I cast my ballot with anywhere near the kind of clarity they are known with after all the votes are tallied and the winner decided.

Kindly explain this to me since:

1. The efficacious nature of a vote is determined by the aggregate of those votes for a particular candidate; therefore, one cannot assess the efficacy of a vote on a more instance on a vote (i.e., "1 vote").

2. It necessarily has to take into consideration the collection of votes, for which that "1 vote" will become a part thereof which fact, by the way, makes the one vote even more significant since it is the volume of votes for a particular candidate that determines the victor in an election race.

corrigendum:

...one cannot assess the efficacy of a vote on a more instance [of] a vote (i.e., "1 vote").

Aristocles,

It is certainly the aggregate of all votes for each particular candidate that win or loose elections. My point is that, until the polls close, such aggregates do not exist except in potentiality. Moreover, the potential aggregates are in a state of flux the entire time the polls are open, making any kind of assumed knowledge of the probable outcome hypothetical and subject to error. Thus I do not see the hypothetical knowledge of such aggregates as necessarily having great weight when one is deliberating over for which candidate one should cast one's ballot.

Brendon,

You seem to have caught yourself in a logical loop of "egg vs. chicken":

That is, you can't say the egg (i.e., vote) is meaningless when it grows up to be the chicken (i.e., the aggregate vote).

You can't have the "aggregate of votes" (the chicken) without a vote (egg) in the first place, brutha! ;^)

Brendon:

I agree but, credit where credit is due, Mark's approach is a refreshingly valid attack on the factual premises of the argument in the midst of a noisome storm of "the bishops! the bishops! the bishops!" and "Zippy is inventing a new heresy!" and "but Obama is worse!" and "stem cells -- so what?" and other less than helpful things. (Here I characterize ongoing discussions on several distributed blogs, not necessarily just here or here at all).

Given that a person will vote in presidential elections, say, 10 to 20 times in a lifetime, we might even be able to model the 'signal' of my vote in the 'noise' of all the presidential elections in my lifetime and actually calculate my vote's relevance. I don't have the time to build such a beast at present, and I expect I know what kind of result I would get if I did. But nevertheless attacking the factual premises of my argument is the right avenue of attack -- a point which motivated my post on swing states.

1) The worth of a vote is never negligible

The worth of a vote is independent of the size of the election. A vote in a local election is just as effective as a vote in a national election. As the voting population goes up, the voter forms a smaller and smaller fraction of the voting population, BUT the potential power of the candidate also goes linearly up, and the overall effect of a vote maintains its worth, independent of the size of the voting population.

2) Murdering the innocent is not a separate category of sin

The sin of murdering the innocent belongs in the category of intrinsic evils. Despite the great magnitude of that sin, the Church doesn't place it in a category of its own, so there's no justification for treating it differently. There's no justification for obeying any law that requires performing an intrinisc evil, and murdering the innocent is not different in that regard.

3) Voting for a lesser-evil candidate does not necessarily affect the voter for the worse

There's no teaching, and no proof (ambiguous anecdotes don't begin amount to proof) that voting for a lesser-evil candidate necessarily and inevitably affects the voter for the worse.

I think Paul's point 3 is especially weak. There are all sorts of things we would be highly unwise to do even if we cannot prove that they necessarily and inevitably affect us for the worse. These include both physical and moral dangers. Why have "prove," "necessarily," and "inevitably" as your standard?

The sin of murdering the innocent belongs in the category of intrinsic evils. Despite the great magnitude of that sin, the Church doesn't place it in a category of its own, so there's no justification for treating it differently.

"Why have "prove," "necessarily," and "inevitably" as your standard?"

If voting for the lesser-evil candidate only affects us for the worse sometimes, and leaves us unaffected sometimes, and leaves us better off at other times, then Zippy's arguments amount to no more than "take care to include the effect on yourself of voting", which is hard to object to. He relies on something more definite than that.

"Have you read Evangelium Vitae, by chance?"

Why, yes. What luck! Anything specific in mind?

1948 presidential election – pre-election polls showed Dewey with a lead ranging between 5 and 15 points. Truman won by 4.4%. This is where the “Dewey Defeats Truman” headline came from.

Pre-election polls for the 2006 Italian parliamentary elections indicated a center left victory of between 3 and 4%. The center left won, but only by 0.1%. This poll was the first in Europe using the newest polling methods from...the US.

2008 New Hampshire Democratic Primary – Pre-election polls indicate Obama would win by 8-9%. Hillary won by 2.5%.

2008 South Carolina Democratic Primary – Pre-election polls indicated Obama would win by 10%. He actually won by 29%.

I'll be back in a bit to explain what I'm talking about.

Paul:

Anything specific in mind?

The bit where it talks about murder of the innocent, and sets the taking of innocent life apart from other evils in its relation to the common good. Here, for example:

"Disregard for the right to life, precisely because it leads to the killing of the person whom society exists to serve, is what most directly conflicts with the possibility of achieving the common good."

(From Evangelium Vitae): "Disregard for the right to life, precisely because it leads to the killing of the person whom society exists to serve, is what most directly conflicts with the possibility of achieving the common good."

Sure, but nothing there indicates it's in a different category. "Most directly" does indicate its gravity. The next line from EV says: "Consequently, a civil law authorizing abortion or euthanasia ceases by that very fact to be a true, morally binding civil law." But that's the same for all laws that authorize intrinsic evils, so I'm not seeing anything that puts the right-to-life in some different category.

If you don't want to use the word 'category' to refer to what sets killing the innocent apart as what "most directly conflicts with the common good", it is no skin off my nose.

Given that a person will vote in presidential elections, say, 10 to 20 times in a lifetime, we might even be able to model the 'signal' of my vote in the 'noise' of all the presidential elections in my lifetime and actually calculate my vote's relevance.

Oh, good gravy – Zippy, are you an engineer?

Ok, so the evening got away from me. The baby wouldn't go to sleep no matter what. For a two and a half year old, she's pretty tough when she wants to be.

Ok, so what's the point of my previous two comments...

First, there are elections that are painfully close. So close that, in some extreme cases, one vote, or even half a vote, in any given precinct can change the outcome. This is true at least in terms of averages.

My second point comes with polling. Polling is an art form shrouded in science (my opinion). What are pollsters actually measuring? If I'm right, and Zippy is an engineer, then he'll have some perfectly acceptable explanation about changes over time or representative sample groups or...something. My degree is in history, so I look at the world through a different pair of glasses (and I freely admit the glasses). We live in a world that lives to predict. We can't stand the uncertainty of the future, so we try to predict everything. Polling is, really, little more than a modern oracle in this sense...we're still trying to do the same things today that they did in Delphi 2500 years ago. Our mechanisms are different, but the objective is the same. The polls are measuring ephemeral and mercurial things – peoples opinions. These can change rapidly and with little real reason. As a result, polls can be very accurate, or rather less so. How do you know you're in a swing state? Polls are historically more inaccurate as turnout increases. The polls are looking at “likely voters” amongst “registered voters” in a hypothetical situation of “if the election were held today.” All this sounds very imprecise.

Also, there is an assumption, to take the example of 2004 race for Washington state governor, that my ballot is one of the 129 ballots out of the 2.9 million cast that could have--perhaps should have--changed the election. But that is not necessarily so.

Brandon is onto something here, but he's slightly missed my point. I don't look at it in quite this way. I do not make the assumption that my ballot would be one of the 129. I look at it more like a spread of probability.

A hypothetical election – the last pre-election polls show candidate B winning by 4%, with a margin of error of 3%. According to the pollsters, the winner is known. Turnout is, however, unexpectedly high.
If I go to the polls at 7am and am first in line, my vote is the very first of the 2.9 million to be cast that day. At this point, Brandon is correct, all results are potentialities. Mine is just 1:2,900,000.

I were to go to the polls at 10am, with maybe 300,000 votes cast, and I cast my vote for candidate A and go off to work. My vote is 1:2,900,000. It doesn't matter whether the split is 45/55 for one candidate or another. My vote is still one in 2.9 million. I don't know the split or the probability that I'm voting for the winner or looser.

Next, what if I go at 3pm, when there are 1.5 million votes cast. I still don't know the split between the candidates. I still don't know if the polls were correct in predicting candidate A as the winner. I go in, do my civic duty, and cast one vote – which just happens to be 1:2,900,000. I might be the 1,500,000th voter in line, but it's still 1 in 2.9 million.

Now it's 7pm and I'm the last person to vote before the doors are shut tight. I am voter number 2,900,000. But the ratio is the same, just 1:2,900,000. I do not know the results yet. I do not know the exit poll results. Just out of shear spite, I tell the exit poller that I voted for candidate B.

Candidate A wins by a margin of 129 votes.

By Zippy's logic, those last 129 votes for A are the ones that matter, the ones that put A over the top. But in reality, you had to go through the other 2.9 million votes to get to those 129. Each vote cast is 1:2,900,000, regardless of the time of day, or the split in percentages between the candidates at that moment, or the number in line, or the yet unknown final outcome. At each point of the day, it's still 1:2,900,000. Each sample has the same ratio.

It is absolutely impossible to get to those 129 election-winning votes without slogging through the other 2.9 million votes in the first place. Each of those 2.9 million votes was absolutely necessary to reach this particular result.

This logic is true even if the election is a rout. The biggest clobberin' I personally remember was 1980, when Reagan made Carter look about as silly as anybody ever has. Reagan got about 8.5 million votes more than Carter. But you have to slog through all 80 million votes to get to those 8.5 million, and each time someone votes it was a 1:80,000,000 ratio that was represented. And, keep in mind, the networks didn't restrain themselves in 1980. People who voted late on the west coast left the line when Reagan was declared the winner...hours before the polls closed in California, much less Alaska and Hawaii. It would have been a closer total if that hadn't happened, but you didn't know that going in. The polls all showed a rout, and there really weren't ANY swing states, but you still can't get the result without going through those 75 million votes, and tossing many of Carters supporters in the western time zones. Regardless of whether Carter or Reagan would ultimately win, you still have to go through those 75 million votes to get ANY margin of victory.

Polls can, sometimes, be wrong. What might seem like an easy win for one candidate can and does turn out to be completely different than what the pollsters predict (see above where Hillary won New Hampshire when the polls said Obama would). It may not happen often, but it does happen. What might seem like a non-swing state could just turn out to be a whopping example of the 2008 Dem primary in New Hampshire. It might not. But you don't know that in advance. Modern oracles aren't any better than ancient ones.

Gotta run. No time to proof. Eyes closing without permission. Sorry for typos and logical errors. I'm sure this sounds goofy, so I reserve the right to make sense of myself in the morning.

Aristocles,

That is, you can't say the egg (i.e., vote) is meaningless when it grows up to be the chicken (i.e., the aggregate vote).

You can say that a remote cause lacks any value practically speaking when said remote cause is neither necessary nor sufficient for the existence of the considered effect.

Barring a miracle, if there is a chicken, then there was an egg. This is necessarily true. If there was no egg, then there is no chicken.

But neither of the following propositions are necessarily true according to the order of causality: 1) If candidate A wins the election, then I voted for candidate A, and 2) If I vote for candidate A, then candidate A will win the election. Thus my vote is neither necessary nor sufficient for the victory of candidate A.

Now, though generally speaking it is true that my vote is neither necessary or sufficient to bringing about a certain state of affairs in which one candidate wins over another, one might see scenarios in which the specifics of an election cause my vote to have such necessity or sufficiency, or at least to have a greater effective power than it normally would. Some might believe that this conclusion is demonstrated by Mark's first set of data. If, in one of the examples cited, 65 people had switched their vote from one candidate to another, or 130 more people had gone to the polls to vote for the defeated candidate, those few votes would have had enormous power to change the course of the election.

But this is only true in an ex post facto examination. It is only when we can see the actual aggregate totals, totals which only exist after the polls have closed, that we can make such a statement definitively. During the actual time that we can go to the polls and cast our ballots we do not have access to such information. At best we have access to information that comes from our own personal experience and polling date.

But in such cases our own experience of how people are voting is limited, especially in a national election. And, as Mark's second set of data demonstrates, polls do not necessarily accurately predict the outcome of elections. The polls themselves may provide bad data due either to errors in the process of data collection or to chance. And even if the polls are relatively accurate when reported, there are any number of factors that could change the actual circumstances after they are reported, including the information provided by the polls themselves.

Given the fact that our ability to know the likely potential value of the aggregate vote totals, as well as the circumstances that surround and affect them, is only hypothetical, i.e. it only holds if we assume the incomplete and time sensitive data we have was and still is accurate, it seems to me that such considerations can, in some cases, have only a negligible effect on our evaluation of the morality of our votes.

Paul,

The worth of a vote is independent of the size of the election.

I think the problem here is that a number of us our equivocating over the definition of "value." Some of us our using it in a different sense than others.

$100 is equal to $100. This is tautologically true. Thus we can say that the value of $100 never changes, but rather that it is a constant. But this us only true if we are taking "value" to mean "the amount of some specific unit of measurement possessed by the thing we are valuing."

But one can also talk about the value of $100 as referring to the buying power of that amount of currency, how effective it is in achieving those ends of which currency is the principle, i.e. the buying of goods and services. Taken in this way, it is not true to say that $100 always has the same value. In a situation where the dollar is strong, $100 has more value than it does when the dollar is weak. If, say, more currency is made available, I do not lose my $100 but it does decrease in value.

The same is true with votes. One vote is always equivalent to one vote. In this sense, the vote I cast for mayor, for Congressman, for Senator and for President are all of equal value. Yet in the second sense of value I used, the sense in which we are speaking about the effectiveness of a vote to accomplish its ends, i.e. electing the candidate I want to be elected, the value of my vote is greater in those races closer to home because I represent a greater percentage of the total vote, while it is less in those races further removed from my home because I represent a lesser percentage of the total vote.

brendon: "...the sense in which we are speaking about the effectiveness of a vote to accomplish its ends, i.e. electing the candidate I want to be elected"

That's an insufficient idea for the worth of a vote, because a vote has a further end, and a more important end, than merely electing a candidate. It's what the candidate is going to do that is the reason we vote.

I am using the idea that the worth of an election is measured by how much will get accomplished by the candidate after he is elected. And in that case, though my percentage contribution to the votes cast goes down as the voting population goes up, it is also true that the power of the elected candidate goes up as the voting population goes up (e.g. a national office typically has greater power than a state office). And so the worth of the vote -- in terms of what can get accomplished per vote -- is maintained, independent of the size of the voting population.

That's an insufficient idea for the worth of a vote, because a vote has a further end, and a more important end, than merely electing a candidate. It's what the candidate is going to do that is the reason we vote.

But this is only true in an ex post facto examination. It is only when we can see the actual aggregate totals, totals which only exist after the polls have closed, that we can make such a statement definitively. During the actual time that we can go to the polls and cast our ballots we do not have access to such information.

But is this really so? If you roll a single six-sided die a million times, each roll still has a 1:6 chance of any single result. This is rather what I’m getting at with the “value” of a vote. When a vote is cast, each and every one is at the same ratio, say, 1:2,900,000. True, the 2.9 million part can only be known after the fact, but does that really matter when you’re actually going in to cast your vote?

In fact, if you fail to cast your vote, you are not part of the 2.9 million. That fact does not change the ratio for those votes that really are cast. But the single vote still has value unto itself.

Given the fact that our ability to know the likely potential value of the aggregate vote totals, as well as the circumstances that surround and affect them, is only hypothetical, i.e. it only holds if we assume the incomplete and time sensitive data we have was and still is accurate, it seems to me that such considerations can, in some cases, have only a negligible effect on our evaluation of the morality of our votes.

GIVE THIS MAN A CHEROOT!!!

$100 is equal to $100. This is tautologically true.

Here’s another variation on the value of a $100 that you left out. {Leave it to the humanities guy to show the engineers how the world really works...and I mean that with all love and respect :~) } – psychological. To me, today, $100 would be a lot of money. The guy up stairs from me at work, sitting directly above me one floor, to him $100 is a tip for a fancy meal in LA – it’s “chump change”. How does this play into voting? If someone sees their vote as being of value, then they will be more likely to cast it. If they see it as negligible or of no value at all, they will be more likely not to bother. Zippy is less likely to vote as he sees his vote as negligible in value. I see my vote as one building block in the 2.9 million necessary to achieve some as-yet-unknown margin of victory. By my perception, a vote is of greater value than it is to Zippy's perception, even if we were both in the same precinct voting in the same election. If 3 million people turn out to vote (instead of 2.9 million), Zippy’s vote is still negligible to him, but my vote is still a building block. Neither of us perceive a reduction in value specific to our own point of view.

That's an insufficient idea for the worth of a vote, because a vote has a further end, and a more important end, than merely electing a candidate. It's what the candidate is going to do that is the reason we vote.

Is it really? Ever heard of a yellow-dog democrat? I know a few. They’d vote for a yellow dog before they vote for anyone but a democrat. One guy I know will vote straight party for democrats, regardless of who’s on the ticket. He’s said so point blank. My grandparents voted straight party line GOP their entire lives, regardless of who was running. True, some of us will vote based on what a candidate says they will do, but not every single voter.

Another thing to consider is the fact that you’re voting on what you think they will do, not what they actually will do. The democrats won congress two years ago based upon what they would do when they got control of congress. What have they done?

You can't dismiss the moral relevance of the vote's negligibility/non-negligibility simply by appealing to further effects which occur past the election outcome.

Agreed.

But it can only actually accomplish that end to the extent that it can change the outcome of the election from what it would otherwise be if I did not vote. Any double-effect justification of an act predicated on those further ends does have to rest on them, of course, but it also has to take into consideration whether the means are proportionate to the end, given all of the effects of the act - both those which proceed only through any potency in altering the election outcome, and those which do not.

Maybe I begin to see one of the problems. A vote does not have to be seen as an action/opposite reaction transaction. It is absolutely not necessary that your personal vote have “potency in altering the election outcome”. The key word there is “outcome”. Your one vote in 2.9 million does have potency in altering the election, even if you are one of the first to vote for modern equivalent of Jimmy Carter in 1980. Your guy is gonna get clobbered, and you may not directly impact the outcome of that clobberin’. However, your vote is one necessary to reach the final aggregate total. You are impacting the election, regardless of whether it impacts the victory or defeat of any given candidate.

What you seem to insist on, Zippy (correct me if I’m wrong), is that yours be the deciding vote that influences the election – or at least one of a few that decide an election. Why is this necessary when every one of those 2.9 million votes is necessary so that SOMEONE ELSE may be the one vote that puts candidate A over the top?

Does any of this make any sense at all? I’m doing way too many things at once, and again don’t have time to proof. Sorry.

Brendon,

It appears your thoughts on the matter seem to have been clouded by the heresy ;^) of the Zippy-nian Doctrine of Electoral Futility; a doctrine formulated by Zippy that draws a parallel between our elections and that sham of the former Soviet Union.

However, as I have attempted to lay out here:

2. It necessarily has to take into consideration the collection of votes, for which that "1 vote" will become a part thereof which fact, by the way, makes the one vote even more significant since it is the volume of votes for a particular candidate that determines the victor in an election race.

Since the effect of the 1 vote lies in the aggregate, its significance lies in the cumulative effect that comes as a result of a collection of like votes.

Like I said:

You can't have the "aggregate of votes" (the chicken) without a vote (egg) in the first place, brutha! ;^)

...And it may very well be that just a few more individual like votes is all that is needed for a particular candidate of choice to win.

Yet, how can that ever happen if some folks end up not voting to begin with?

What you seem to insist on, Zippy (correct me if I’m wrong), is that yours be the deciding vote that influences the election – or at least one of a few that decide an election.

Almost, but not quite. What I insist on is that if one justifies one's act of voting based on a double-effect analysis of this outcome over that outcome, the justification is only valid to the extent one in fact is causing this outcome to occur rather than that outcome.

But one is not causing that to occur in any meaningful sense.

Now, the result is more limited than perhaps I have made clear, so let me attempt to clarify it further.

Many people take as given that because either M or O is going to win, one can justify voting for M based on double effect comparison of M winning versus O, without any further thought. In other words, all other possibilities - third party, abstention, etc - are ruled out ahead of time based on deciding between these two. If that is the premise of one's justification, then a valid double-effect analysis depends on actual capacity to cause M to win versus O.

If we push the reset button and justify our vote in some other way, that is a different story.

In your previous posts you talk about other effects of a vote -- adding one to the total, contributing to a mandate, etc. That is all well and good; but if that is the basis on which I justify my act of voting, those are the effects I have to analyze. I can't compare the effect of M being elected versus O being elected; I have to compare the actual effects of my act, which is M getting one more or less vote.

So again, a double-effect analysis based on a comparison of outcomes requires that my act actually have some reasonable efficacy in actually deciding the outcome, not any of those other things.

But it doesn't.

Ok, I think we need to separate a couple of issues here. Once upon a time, on someone elses blog, on a long dead thread, the discussion was about the value of a single vote.

Do you agree or disagree that your vote (or mine) has value in the aggregate? Doesn’t have to be considered negligible, just does it have any value at all?

Almost, but not quite. What I insist on is that if one justifies one's act of voting based on a double-effect analysis of this outcome over that outcome, the justification is only valid to the extent one in fact is causing this outcome to occur rather than that outcome.
But one is not causing that to occur in any meaningful sense.

This strikes me as straining mightily at gnat-iness? Not straining at gnats, but the gant-iness of gnats. Let me ask you something, has there ever been a theological paper written about the extent to which an individual can impact an event that is, by definition, an aggregate creating thing? I doubt it, but I honestly don’t know. Voting is an aggregate creating event, but you’re insisting that you have direct ability to influence the outcome of that event. You might have encountered the electoral equivalent of a divide by zero error.

Let me ask you this hypothetical, just to see if I’ve got my head around it. Let’s say that you’re involved in a county election where double-effect is logical to use, and the polls are split 50/50. The eventual margin of error is 1 vote. You cannot know, going into the election, that your one vote is the over-the-top vote that gets your candidate elected. If I understand you correctly, you would not even be able to vote in such an election early in the day, as you don’t know that your vote will be the influential one…even though you have to reach the aggregate to make that 1 vote margin work. If you vote, you don’t know that you are specifically the one that impacts the election. If you don’t vote, you do most certainly impact the election (in this limited case). Did I get that right?

Sorry. That should be margin of victory is 1, not margin of error.

...you don’t know that your vote will be the influential one…even though you have to reach the aggregate to make that 1 vote margin work.

This takes for granted that it was the individual votes themselves that helped build up the aggregate; therefore, every one of those votes, I would argue, are influential since it would be on the basis of each of those votes accumulating into the aggregate that will make a particular candidate the winner of an election on the basis that a greater volume of such individual votes determine the victor.

Aristocles - I agree completely, but my agreement isn't what's at issue here.

Mark:

First, I want to thank you again for addressing the substance of the argument.

I'm not constructing a comprehensive theory of elections and votes in general which is capable of answering every question someone might think of. I don't have one, and I don't need one. In fact I'm pretty sure that one doesn't exist. (Though I've mentioned before that there is a whole field of study on the matter, which has produced some pretty counterintuitive results).

I should mention that because I am not a positivist, this does not bother me, and does not bring me crashing down into postmodernism. I can still work with individual truths.

And understanding that, I'm just requiring - well, really the principle of double effect is requiring - that the effects analyzed under double-effect in order to justify the act actually be non-negligible effects of the act. If I am validly justifying my act by appealing to this effect versus that, it has to be the case that my act actually causes this and precludes that.

Again: there may well be ways to justify voting in one way or another; but appeal to effects that the act of voting does not cause isn't one of them.

The way I see it, in terms of election outcomes, voting for M in a mass scale election has the effect of negligibly increasing the probability that M will win. So the effects I have to analyze under double effect are (1) the harm that throwing my support behind a candidate who supports murdering the innocent does to me and those around me, and (2) negligibly increasing M's chance of winning. In other words, does negligibly increasing M's chance of winning justify the harm I have done to myself? In a mass scale election, in my view, the answer is a straightforward 'no'.

As elections become smaller, the probability I am adding may increase to a level where it is no longer negligible, and I may be justified in sustaining self-inflicted damage in order to add it to the pile. I don't have a theory on exactly where that occurs, nor what factors influence it occurring. I'm just empirically sure - from history, introspection, the behavior of those around me, etc - that the harm is always non-negligible, and that the effect of casting a vote on the outcome is not always non-negligible.

Ok, sorry to be a stick, but one more time (what can once more hurt, right?).

For your vote to have a sufficient impact - in your view - it may well depend on the election in question. Got that.

My home owners association has an election each year. The president was elected by a margin of 1 vote. I think there were ten of us present. Pretend that double-effect is in effect here (it wasn’t, unless there’s a moral element to choosing a new landscaping company). But it seems pretty clear to me that you could influence this election and you would therefore vote in it. Am I right?

Now, let’s extrapolate a bit. Let’s say for instance that the 2.9 million number comes up again, and you are eligible to be one of those 2.9 million. The polls show a dead heat. But this time the eventual margin of victory is 1 vote. Double-effect is in play. Would you vote in this election? To make matters more interesting, let’s up the stakes a bit. This is a post-Roe world and the election is for governor. Candidate A is in favor of ESCR (family member with Alzhiemers), but very much in favor of the state banning all forms of abortion. Candidate B is in favor of both ESCR and abortion.

I think I know the answer based on your swing state comments, but I just want to make sure.

No ari, I am not implying any lesser intelligence of anyone other than my own - without any rigorous training in philosophy, logic, theology, etc. (other than the required college courses - and I snoozed through most of those, which I regret now), this stuff is a bit hard to follow at times. All I was asking for was an explanation in simple "layman" type terms of what each side claims - without judging who's right since I am having a difficult time even following along.

I take it you are not familiar with the "____ for Dummies" series of books that try to explain different subjects in "plain English" (e.g., "Shakespeare for Dummies", "Calculus for Dummies", etc.). It was an allusion to that series of books. Try not to take things so personally.

Zippy: "You can't dismiss the moral relevance of the vote's negligibility/non-negligibility simply by appealing to further effects which occur past the election outcome."

That's potentially quite misleading. People vote because of the anticipated affects on the world by the candidates after the election. That anticipation takes place prior to the vote, and what those anticipated effects are certainly has to be taken into account when determining the negligibility/non-negligibility of a vote.

So, one can't appeal to the actual effects past the election, but one can -- and must necessarily -- appeal to the anticipated effects.

And, to point it out again, a vote has an effect on the world which does not scale down to a negligible size as the size of the voting population scales up. (A conclusion which does not change even if we are only considering anticipated effects.)

Zippy:"So the effects I have to analyze under double effect are (1) the harm that throwing my support behind a candidate who supports murdering the innocent does to me and those around me, and (2) negligibly increasing M's chance of winning."

The second of those must be restated:
(2) how I anticipate my vote will affect the world.

I had said: "It's what the candidate is going to do that is the reason we vote."

Mark Windsor: "Is it really?"

I was not proposing an exceptionless truth, but rather proposing something going against Zippy's line of thinking.

Ok, sorry to be a stick, but one more time (what can once more hurt, right?).

See, once you understand that it is all about the pedantry you get along with me swimmingly.

I don't think there is a simple answer in general. I'm inclined to say that the probability-value added by my vote for the sake of material cooperation with killing the innocent becomes negligible at a pretty low number of voters. It is really a question of where the harm done to myself and those around me is outweighed by the actual impact I have in preventing the 'greater evil' outcome. This will no doubt vary from person to person: one man can look at prurient pictures with less of a problem than another, but nevertheless there are unambiguous cases of pornography. So I don't have hard and fast rules that cover all the ambiguous middle ground, but I am as comfortable saying that a man ought not vote for a presidential candidate who favors killing the innocent as I am saying that a man ought not subscribe to Penthouse for the articles.

Well, your lack of a specific answer to my specific questions has left me wondering how to further my pedantic inquiry. I'm off to the hammock, there to consider the afternoon breeze and and the joys of an early release from the week of Purgatory I've just endured.

More later...

...your lack of a specific answer to my specific questions has left me wondering how to further my pedantic inquiry

Have you considered the possibility that there might not be specific answers to your specific questions? Or the possibility that there might be, but I don't know them, and my argument doesn't depend on them?

Have I considered it? Sure...

And that comment wasn't intended to be taken seriously...

I probably shoulda put smileys on my own comment, but that might spoil the deadpan image I've so carefully cultivated.

Ah, a question for the ages: Do engineers use emoticons? When they do, do they mean them? :^P

Zippy, here's the deal relative to the political discussion:

I think you're wrong. You think I'm wrong. (Have I got the gist of it?)

We could go back and forth endlessly, and test Zippy's Theory of Pedantic Discourse till the cows literally come home. (At least, I assume there's a semi-formal theory there someplace, based loosely on the $100 bill game you posted up above, that deals with wearing your opponents down in a war of attrition...am I right? [insert smiley here])

I hereby disengage. I don't surrender...I still think there are flaws in your theory... but the real world demands my attention and I can't spare more time on this just now.

But I will take two parting shots as I cross your wake. Neither should be so harsh as to require a response.

First, don't think I don't understand. I've gone back and read some of your posts and comments in great detail. I even read a little on Arrow Theory, and the refutations that exist as well. I even agree with you to a point - but only to a point. It's pressing past that point that I think beyond my reach at the moment, and I think you have as much chance of pressing beyond it in the other direction.

Second, you have convinced me that there is a need to dust off a years-old project that I once upon a time worked on. The dusting will require several weeks worth of work, and some updates, but may prove interesting. It may be a point of reengagement - maybe after the first of the year. I reserve the right to hurl a 20+ page doc in your direction at some point in the future (assuming I can actually get it done). This country is worth saving. So far, I haven't seen too many people trying - and able - to do so. Maybe it's time to take matters into our own hands. Note the lack of smileys.

I wish you fair winds and a following sea....and I will be back....

Mark

Mark,

In fairness to engineers, I haven't been one for quite some time, so one shouldn't pin all of my vices on them.

I look forward to a future engagement.

In fairness to engineers, I haven't been one for quite some time, so one shouldn't pin all of my vices on them.

But it is far more entertaining this way...