Actually, that last one IS the answer. If you live in a society and reap the benefits from it. you have an obligation to take part in the running of that society. That means vote. Maybe it is for “the lesser of two evils” as someone else said, but no matter. If you don’t vote, then the greater evil stands a chance of winning. That’s how Clinton got elected.
“All that is necessary for the triumph of evil is that good men do nothing.” (Edmund Burke).
I am going to enjoy Wednesday, November 3rd, for many reasons, and not the least of them will be pointing at Equipoise and Nelson Muntzing.
Not emailing me an address for my check to be mailed to? I’m, sniff, hurt.
Spare a point for all those dead people too, willya?
See Complex Question, Fallacy Of.
Kind of reminds me of how my class kept talking about politics, oblivious to the fact that they couldn’t vote for years to come. We’d always have people making fun of others about who they are going to “vote” for. And I just sat in the corner in disbelief as to how they could carry on such a discussion for 30 minutes in the class. But hey, no work for me. Let them think they made a difference then.
See Iraqi Dead, Murder Of.
Uhm…Robert Fisk? People are still reading that guy? Yikes.
…and you might want to warn people about that picture. It’s not ‘obscene’, I guess, but should it be one click away?
At the risk of pissing people off . . .
It wouldn’t bother me one bit if roughly 50 percent of the country didn’t vote in this election.
Just so long as it’s the 50 percent that disagrees with me.
I’m voting for my candidate of choice because I think many people’s lives will be better if he wins than they will be if he loses. Whereas having a high voter turnout is nice and all, but whose life is actually improved by this? Having the world actually be a better place is so much more important to me.
And before someone says “What makes you think you know better than others who’s right to run the country?” please note that if you’re planning to vote you obviously think you know best too, unless you’re just going to vote for whoever is ahead in the polls. (You could argue you just think the correct decision will be made so long as everyone votes for who they think is best, but that’s a pretty tough claim to make unless you think that there’s never once in history been a time where the losing candidate would actually have done a better job running the country.) It’s not arrogance for me to think I’m right. We all think we’re right, otherwise we would change our minds.
Also, I’m not saying I would ever want to deny someone the right to vote. Every adult U.S. citizen should be able to vote if she or he so chooses. I’m just saying, I think some of them are making the right choice, and some of them are making the wrong one, and if a few of the ones making the wrong choice decided of there own accord to stay home, and as a result the right choice was made, I’m sure as hell not going to cry any tears about voter turnout.
I’d be interested in hearing from one of the mandatory-voting countries like Australia at this point. I wonder if they have roving bands of criminals flouting the laws and egregiously hanging out in front of polling places and obstinately not walking in.
More seriously, though, whether the argument of the OP is heard in these countries to strike down such laws.
Trunk
Others have noted the apparent irrationality of voting.
Of course, tipping a waitress in a town that you don’t plan on visiting again is irrational as well: what’s the benefit?
I suppose melondica has stumbled upon a better reason though: you vote (and learn, and fight ignorance) out of self-respect, because you choose to be one sort of person (eg an informed one) rather than another.
Are you assuming the only reason for tipping someone is so that they’ll give you good service the next time you eat at their restaurant? Personally, I always tip generously, but the thought that it affects the kind of service I receive seldom enters my head. My reasons for tipping well (in no particular order):
(1) I think restaurant servers are paid less than they deserve, and it’s an easy way for me to make up some of the difference. (In part, I only think this because it’s a job I know I’d hate, but still.)
(2) Believing that I’m being generous makes me feel better about myself.
(3) Part of me thinks that the server will notice my generous tip and think “What a nice guy,” which also makes me feel good about myself.
(4) Displaying generosity might cause the person I’m eating with to think more highly of me.
(5) By acting generously I think that in some small way I’m contributing to the happiness of the universe.
None of these have anything to do with whether or not I’ll ever set foot in the restaurant again.
I tip for the same reason that I vote: it’s the right thing to do.
Putting it simply.
Actually, one vote makes a helluva lot of difference. In the 2000 election, at least 600 people sat on their dead asses and didn’t vote. If they had, Gore might be in the White House now.
And if you really want to get down to brass tacks, call up the ghost of Andrew Johnson and ask him if one vote makes a difference.
Thanks. That first link is all I’m trying to say, and I really don’t feel like saying it again all day.
It’s basically irrational to vote.
People tend to vote because of social pressure.
I make my decisions based far more on rationality than social pressure.
Call it unethical in a Kantian framework. Just don’t call it ignorant or lazy.
Don’t really want to retread this, but voting is a PRIVILEDGE, not a DUTY. Jury duty is a a civic duty, and I do that. By stating “it’s a duty” you’re basically just stating the side you wish to argue as fact and leaving it at that. If it was a duty, I’d probably do it.
If it’s such a duty, why don’t we force felons to do it, instead of telling them they CAN’T do it. I just told ya why: because it’s a priviledge, not a duty, and they lost that priviledge.
The problem is that you’ve adopted a system that view acting in any way other than your immediate self-interest as the only “rational” one. You don’t see how voting immediately provides you with a benefit, so you don’t do it, and the fact that it bestows a collective benefit to society is lost on you. Acting in a way that bestows benefits on others rather than oneself may look irrational in a pure economic model, but humans do so regularly nonetheless because it’s the “right thing to do.”
If you understand that it’s important that other citizens do it but refuse to do it yourself, well, I don’t know what else to call it. I don’t mean you’re being ignorant in the sense that you’re a stupid or a bad person (you’re obviously neither), but just that you’re not seeing that there’s a broader concern than whether vour individual vote provides you with an immediate and concrete benefit.
We don’t force felons to sit on juries, either. In fact, commission of a felony results in the loss of the right and duty to both sit on a jury and vote in elections. It’s not just my opinion that each is both a right and a duty, either, that’s exactly how they are characterized in the law. For example, if a prosecutor in a criminal case deliberately excludes potential jurors from sitting on a jury on the basis of their race, the defendant can challenge their exclusion by making a third party assertion that the excluded jurors constitutionally guaranteed right to serve on a jury is being improperly denied for that reason.
You have the right to both serve on a jury and to vote, and the duty to do so in a responsible matter. Characterizing one as a right and the other as a duty really doesn’t say anything more than that the failure to do one is punishable and the other isn’t.
I do see what you’re getting at here, I just think it’s divorced from reality.
Being rational, I understand that my not voting is NOT having an effect on others not voting.
I know that my behavior won’t spread to society at large, even if I don’t think its good for society.
I know that my behavior doesn’t have the negative consequences it could because others will continue to vote.
I can’t get myself over these hurdles.
Here’s another way of putting it.
I know a lot of people who are pretty adamant about voting every year. Then, election day comes, and they had to pick their kid up. They had to work late. They had to go to the grocery store. And they end up not voting and realize, “eh, no big deal.”
They subconsciously know that the value of their vote is not worth the value of the other thing they had to do.
You all have a threshhold. If a loved one got hit by a car on election day, you’d sit by their bedside. If you came down with a debilitating flu, you might not vote. If your car broke down when you were going to vote, and you had to bring it to the mechanic and needed to walk through the rain to the poll, you might say “f— it”.
You do weigh the value of your vote against your comfort and you do have a line.
I feel the same way. We differ on two things:
My line is lower than yours.
I readily admit it.
Do you live in a very rural area where you have to drive everywhere? That might be the problem. Maybe the polling places are too spread out. We have people stopping in on their way to work since the busses are right there, and since we’re in a school moms can vote and then pick up their kids, and the older folks make a party out of it, coming in groups and then going to the bakery across the street afterwards. If people had to drive for an hour or so to get to a polling place, they might not try (not that there’s a parking lot or anything near the place!)
Otherwise, though, it’s no slower than stopping off at the drive-thru at McDonald’s. Not that we have one in our neighborhood either.
Eh, not really. The reason most people don’t vote is not anything ethical, it’s just plain apathy. The same kind of apathy that stops people from doing anything to stop mandatory voting.
Besides which, the fine is something like a whopping 20 bucks.
Kind of a hijack, but I really like mandatory voting. We can honestly say that whomever was elected was done so by a majority of the population.