Hold Your Nose and Vote?: On the Wickedness of Voting for "The Lesser of Two Evils"

Most Americans are disgusted with the primary candidates this year. If you're a conservative like me, you've probably seen your fellow conservative Christian friends and relatives squirm while they tell you that we simply must "hold our nose" and vote for Donald Trump. They tell you, “Trump is awful, but I have to vote for him, I have to because the alternative is Hillary Clinton, and that's worse!” The fear is obvious, and understandable. Leaving aside issues of personal evil, Hillary Clinton supports values that stand at odds with the values of politically conservative Christians.

“Perhaps,” you suggest, “there’s another alternative. We could always vote for a third party.”

“No,” your friends and relatives tell you, “A vote for a third party is a vote for Clinton.”

The force of this argument, as far as I can tell, rests on two concerns. The one is pragmatic—a third party candidate eats into votes that might have gone to Trump and so means that Clinton is more likely to win the majority and therefore the presidency. The reasoning here is that Trump is bad, but if he wins our values might at least get a seat at the table. If Clinton wins we’re cut out from power. A particular crux of this fear rests in the appointment of Supreme Court justices. The other crux of the argument though, and the one I think really drives people, is its moral force. We are citizens in a democracy. We are morally responsible for the course of our society, and the fear is that if we vote for a third party candidate we are morally responsible for a Clinton presidency. I have even seen one extreme example of this in a Facebook comment (in response to this post on Vox) that argued that Christians who choose to not vote for Trump will have “the blood of all the abortions after this election” on their hands.

It’s undeniable that some who present themselves as social conservatives want power for its own sake. However, I believe that most want a seat at the table because they believe in their cause and they are convinced that they are morally on the line for the likely Clinton victory if they don’t vote for Trump. I should pause here to say that while I am focusing in this post on the conservative viewpoint, these same principles apply its liberal mirror. Even Michelle Obama has told liberal voters that if they vote for a third party liberal candidate they are voting for Trump, and as with the conservative side, I believe the force here is both pragmatic and moral. Michelle Obama is pointing to Trump and asking liberal voters, "Do you want to be responsible for that?"

However, the moral force of this argument does not hold up under closer scrutiny, and when that crumbles I believe that any case for voting for Donald Trump (or Hillary Clinton if you're a liberal who finds her reprehensible) crumbles with it.

Before I get to the reasoning behind this argument, however, I need to make a point of clarification. I am convinced that both Hillary Clinton and Donald Trump are evil candidates. There’s been plenty of ink spilled on why that’s the case. Matt Anderson has a great post arguing that point on Mere Orthodoxy. So, I’m taking the evil of Clinton and Trump as an assumption for the purposes of this post. I know there are plenty of people who disagree and think either Clinton or Trump admirable. I am not writing to them. I’m writing to those who want to “hold their nose” and vote for Trump.

Voting for the Lesser Evil to Save Your Soul

With that out of the way, let’s get to the idea that if you vote for a third party candidate you are morally culpable for the ultimate election of Hillary Clinton, and that we should therefore vote for Trump. Put formally, the argument looks like this:

1. A vote for Trump is a vote for an evil candidate.
2. A vote for Clinton is a vote for an evil candidate.
3. I am morally responsible for the evil of the candidate I vote for.
4. A vote for a 3rd party conservative candidate is a vote for Clinton for which I am morally responsible.
5. Clinton is more evil than Trump because her ends are more evil than his. ∴ I will vote for Trump.

I obviously agree with premises a) through c). I am convinced that we, as citizens in a democracy, have a duty to vote and share a responsibility in the direction of our society. I’ve already laid my cards on the table regarding how I feel about Trump and Clinton (personally, I think the premise that Clinton’s ends are more evil that Trump’s is debatable, but that isn’t my concern today). The real crux of the argument, I think, is the notion that if I vote for a candidate other than Trump, I am morally culpable for the evils of a Clinton presidency.

To understand the morality of this from a Christian perspective, we need to take a step back and consider the basic anatomy of a moral action. In the classical Christian tradition, moral action rests on the free human will working itself out in the world. An actions moral content rests both on the ends sought and the means taken to reach that end. Various Christian philosophers, from St. Maximus the Confessor to St. Thomas Aquinas, have broken up the process of willing in different ways, but the general principles remain the same. Human beings have wills. These wills are free, but not arbitrarily so. Rather, we see ends that we wish to bring about, contemplate some action to accomplish those ends, and then engage in that action. Moral goodness and moral evil are both possible at any point along this spectrum. If I plan to kill someone, think up the means, and try and implement those means, I have committed moral evil even if I fail to kill them. By the same token, if I will to bring about world peace but choose as my means the eradication of people who stand in the way, I have also committed moral evil.

At no stage in this process can I be morally culpable for things which happen outside of my will and the means I take to engage that will. To give an example, suppose one of my neighbors decides he very much wants my roommate’s television set. He has an end in mind (acquiring the TV), and has decided on means (burglary) which he engages in one night when no one is home. In this case, both the means decided on and the act actually engaged in are morally evil. That I happen to be out having dinner with my girlfriend when the crime occurs, (which makes it easier for him to commit the crime) in no way makes me culpable for his crime. I am not involved in the chain of cause and effect resulting from his will and ending in the burglary of a television.  In the case of the burglary, the person committing the crime is responsible for their own action. I am responsible for burglary only if I choose to burglar someone myself.  Even if a lot of people in my area decide to start burglarizing other people so that my area becomes an “unsafe neighborhood,” I am only morally responsible for the direct actions I take. Even the choice to go out for dinner with my girlfriend (despite the fact that I live in an unsafe neighborhood and there is a possibility my house will be burglarized) does not make me in any way morally complicit in the burglary.

So what about voting? Does my vote for someone like Evan McMullin count morally as a vote for Clinton if she wins? It should be fairly obvious that I am not  directly responsible for the votes other people cast. Imagine that my best friend loathes NAFTA and decides that the best way to get rid of it is to vote for Clinton, who he judges to have more political savvy. He has an end in mind (NAFTA getting abolished), means (the election of Clinton), and an act he engages in to bring about his end (voting for Clinton). At no point in this process is my will engaged, nor can I do anything directly (short of criminal interference) to prevent him from voting for Clinton.

The possibility remains, however, that by voting for someone other than Trump I could be engaging in a sin of omission. We can be responsible to act to stop a moral evil being committed, and if we don't act we are doing something wrong. For example, if I came home to find my neighbor stealing my roommate’s TV and fail to call the police or otherwise interrupt the burglary, I bear some responsibility for the evil that results. Yet, the reason I bear some guilt is that by coming home during the burglary I become directly involved in the cause and effect chain. As a witness to the crime, I therefore either engage my will to stop the crime or to consent to it.

I would argue that in the case of voting, no similar sin of omission is possible. When we vote, we engage in a very isolated moral scenario. We do not know for a fact how anyone else will vote. Individual voters decide indepently who they would like to represent them as the leader of their nation. When each individual voter has made their decision as to who to vote for, these votes are then added together state-by-state to determine who the States’ electoral votes go to. The electoral decision itself is thus not, strictly speaking, a moral one. No agent is, in and of themselves, choosing the state of affairs that come about. The electoral decision is like the case of the unsafe neighborhood. It is the result of many actions taken by individuals. As with the case of the neighborhood, I am responsible for the direct actions I choose to take. I am not morally responsible for the moral decision other voters make when they cast their vote, because there is no direct cause-effect relationship between my voting for, say Evan McMullin; three other people voting for Trump; and five more voting for Clinton. The fact that the outcome is an electorate that goes to Clinton is not a direct result of my vote, but of the combined results of our independent actions. As such, my action in that case can only rightly be construed as a vote for McMullin, not a vote for Clinton. Because the vote is blind, I act without direct knowledge of how anyone else is going to act. I can at best estimate based on past trends, but that’s not the same kind of moral action as directly intervening to stop a crime (the crime is an event occurring; the predicted statistical outcome of an election is a projection—a likely but still imaginary scenario). My action in voting for a third party candidate is more like that of the choice to go out to dinner with my girlfriend despite the possibility of a burglary. It is at worst imprudent. It is certainly not morally evil.

The Prudential Vote

The question of prudence, then, brings us to the possibility of voting for Trump for merely pragmatic reasons. I may not think I am morally responsible for the election of Clinton if I vote for someone other than Trump, but I may think that the ends I have (ending abortion, for example) are better served by a Trump presidency, and so the most pragmatic means to bring about my end is to vote for Trump. It is possible that some who argue that a vote for a third party is a vote for Clinton are simply saying so as shorthand for this kind of pragmatic reasoning and intend to imply no moral culpability in the election of  Clinton for those who vote for third party candidates. This pragmatic reasoning could be formalized as follows:

1. A vote for Trump is a vote for an evil candidate.
2. A vote for Clinton is a vote for an evil candidate.
3. Trump is more likely to support the causes I agree with.
4. It is pragmatic to vote for a candidate who will support the causes I agree with. ∴ I will vote for Trump.

Yet, this kind of reasoning runs afoul of the classical Christian understanding of moral action described above. Moral evil is not merely relative to the ends I have in mind. The plans I come up with to reach that end and the means by which I engage those plans in the real world also have moral content. Going back to our example of burglary—if I stumble upon the burglary in progress and decide to stop it by torturing the burglar, I am guilty of moral evil. Indeed, the bulk of the Christian tradition would say that if torturing the burglar were somehow my only way to stop the burglary, then it would be better for me to allow the crime to take place than engage in evil to stop evil. In the case of voting, if Trump is evil and I intend to use him to reach the end I desire, my means are evil. Even if my end is something laudable, such as ending abortion, I am culpable for moral evil if I choose evil means to bring it about.

Indeed, this ultimately makes the point that even if the information available to me, such as polling data, so involves me in the chain of cause and effect that a failure to stop the election of Clinton by voting for Trump is something I would be morally culpable for, I could still never be justified in choosing the evil means that a vote for Trump represents.

Conclusion

So, to summarize, you are responsible for the decision you make in voting, not the decisions others make, and choosing an evil candidate simply to stop a worse one is operating in a utilitarian mode that is at odds with Christian ethics. As such, the only real option for Christian voters is to vote for the candidate they consider to be the best potential leader for our country, not to vote for the lesser of two evils. As far as I’m concerned, that means voting for a third party candidate. This is true even though the moral decisions of others will probably mean a candidate. Which candidate is best, of course, still remains for you as the voter to judge.

Theology: Confessing the Creed with Wittgenstein

In the year 390, St. Augustine of Hippo wrote On True Religion. Thinking of the true beliefs of religion was a part of Christianity from the start. However, it was a new thing for the Roman world. For the Romans, and the Greeks who so strongly influenced them, religion was a matter of cult. That is, it was not so much what you believed about the god, but what you did in worship to that god which mattered. Bring your fire offerings to Zeus, it matters not what you say about him. But Christianity had grown out of Judaism. While orthopraxy mattered for the Jews, that praxis existed within a covenant built around affirmations about God ("The Lord our God, the Lord is One") and His holy word.

Thus, as Christianity spread to the Gentile world, it brought with it this notion of orthopraxy within a covenant that affirmed an orthodoxy. This orthodoxy would eventually develop into the words of the Christian creeds, such as the Nicene:

We believe in one God,
the Father, the Almighty,
maker of heaven and earth,
of all that is, seen and unseen.

We believe in one Lord, Jesus Christ,
the only Son of God,
eternally begotten of the Father,
God from God, Light from Light,
true God from true God,
begotten, not made,
of one Being with the Father.
Through him all things were made.
For us and for our salvation
he came down from heaven:
by the power of the Holy Spirit
he became incarnate from the Virgin Mary,
and was made man.
For our sake he was crucified under Pontius Pilate;
he suffered death and was buried.
On the third day he rose again
in accordance with the Scriptures;
he ascended into heaven
and is seated at the right hand of the Father.
He will come again in glory to judge the living and the dead,
and his kingdom will have no end.

We believe in the Holy Spirit, the Lord, the giver of life,
who proceeds from the Father and the Son.
With the Father and the Son he is worshiped and glorified.
He has spoken through the Prophets.
We believe in one holy catholic and apostolic Church.
We acknowledge one baptism for the forgiveness of sins.
We look for the resurrection of the dead,
and the life of the world to come. Amen.

This creed affirms the fundamentals of what it is to be a Christian. If you can say the words of this Creed, then you are a member of the covenant, if not, then you are a heretic. It is the words of this Creed that bind the catholic Church together, from the Roman Catholic Church to the emerging house church.

Very well, but what does that mean? How does this creed bind, and what exactly does it mean? Once you get past the stage of "I affirm these words" things get very muddled, both in their meaning and their practice.

Take "is seated at the right hand of the Father" for example. The Son, Jesus Christ, became flesh and was resurrected. He exists as a man eternally, and the Creed tells us He is in Heaven with the Father. Yet, the Father is Spirit. How does one sit at the right hand of one who does not haven a hand, who exists outside of time and space?

On the practice side, look at baptism. Surely, we affirm "one baptism for the forgiveness of sins," but is it infant baptism? adult? sprinkling? immersion?

Such examples make it clear how difficult it is to see how the Creed unites the Church.

I contend that it is the submission to the language of the creed that is this catholicity. At first, it might be puzzling how this is even an orthodoxy. If the language of the creed is left "blank" isn't it open to just any interpretation? This is where Wittgenstein comes in.

Wittgenstein was a philosopher of language, but he did not think language was simply a matter of conveyed definitions (at least in his later period). Language, Wittgenstein would say, is something like a tool. Just as I can take a hammer and drive in a nail, I can ask you to bring me the hammer and you will (if you are kind). Words have genuine meaning - that they can be used in this way shows this. Yet, defining words is extremely difficult, if not impossible. One of Wittgenstein's favorite examples was that of "game." We talk about games all the time, but try to come up with a definition and you will end up excluding things that are definitely games. By what definition are chess, soccer and solitaire all games? Yet, at the same time, there are definitely things that are not games. If you called napping a game (in anything but a metaphorical sense) people would simply not understand what you meant. Wittgenstein referred to that which bound the different uses of a term together a "family resemblance."

I find this understanding of language quite compelling, and I think it provides a good way of understanding the creed. Catholic Christianity affirms the words of the creed, yet we often have different content we lend to those words. At the same time, not just any content can be given to these words. The creed, in many ways, is not a fence, but a clearing. Those who submit to the creed enter into a common bond of language that allows them to be part of the same covenant, even as their praxis and their propositional beliefs differ widely. The creed creates a language and a place for orthodox theology to occur, and that space is the orthodox catholic Christian church.

Theology: The God Who Intervenes?

He is the image of the invisible God, the firstborn over all creation. For by Him all things were created that are in heaven and that are on earth, visible and invisible, whether thrones or dominions or principalities or powers. All things were created through Him and for Him.  And He is before all things, and in Him all things consist. (Colossians 1:15-17, New King James Version)

I take a kind of perverse pleasure in taking various sorts of personality quizzes on the internet. Some time ago, I took the "whats your spiritual-type" quiz over at Beliefnet. Leaving aside the nonsense "spiritual vs. religious" distinction the quiz rests on, it also starts with one of those terrible questions that has no correct answer, but it's useful because it serves to bring up a problem in much modern discussion of God. The question goes as follows:

Q1. I believe that God:

1. Exists and intervenes in daily events

2. Exists but does not intervene in daily events

3. Is a spiritual ideal, not an actual being

4. Does not exist

All of these answers are wrong, but the first is the one that's important for the purposes of this post, because it's the one I, as a believing Christian, am supposed to pick, but it's terribly wrong. 

You see, the god who intervenes is a fundamentally deist god. At first, this seems like an absurd statement. Afterall, the very definition of the deist god is one who does not intervene in creation. What is crucial, though, is that the deist's god is a thing like all the other things in creation, he just happens to have been first, and be more powerful than what he has made, but in roughly the same way. If you took some natural thing, and cranked it's power up to 11, it could match the deist god. It is because of this that the deist god can create the world and then leave it to run. 


The god who intervenes is merely a modification of that god, a being who made other beings which run on their own, and from time to time sticks his hand in to shuffle things around. But that isn't the Christian God. The Christian God is not merely the creator of the world, nor is He merely another agent intervening in that world - He is the creator and sustainer of all things. All things subsist in Him, He is the ground of being. This isn't to be a pantheist, God is separate from His creation, but His interaction with it is not like our interaction with it. To talk of God intervening implies that God could not intervene, or that anything which is could in some sense be without Him. 


Truly, in Him we live, and move, and have our being. 

Philosophy: The Insolubility of Moral Dilemmas

In the law department at UCLA, they have a saying that says "hard cases make bad law," or so I'm told.¹ The general idea, as I understand it, is that if you try and tailor-make laws to fit the bizarre borderline cases, you'll end up with laws that fit almost no one. This principle notwithstanding, modern moral philosophy seems to go straight to thorny cases² to test any moral theory. The thinking behind this seems to be based on the idea that a moral theory is higher than mere legal issues, and should be able to handle all problems.

However, while I am definitely a believer in the objectivity of morality, I'm not sure any good moral principle can handle any and all cases. The reason for this, I think, is the fallen nature of the world³. Specifically, the current world, the Old Creation, is broken. Things happen in the world that, if it were as it was meant to me, shouldn't happen. Morality, on the other hand, is in alignment with the New Creation, the world as-it-should-be. Since these two principles are in conflict, the fallen nature of the world simply will result in cases in which no moral decision can be made⁴.

This doesn't mean we shouldn't test moral theories at all, but it does mean we should not expect them to have definite answers to the tough questions - these aren't what they are built for.

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1. A lawyer friend of mine has assured me that no such thing was said at her law school.
2. An example case - you are in control of a train that is out of control. The only option open to you is to switch the train onto another track. On the track you're currently on, twenty people are tied down and will die if you continue. However, there is a single individual on the other track that you will kill if you switch over (who is often made into Gandhi, Einstein or your true love to make things interesting). Which action is right?
3. My reasoning here is intimately tied into a Christian world view, and also likely very influenced by an Aristotelian picture. However, I'm fairly certain this principle could at the very least be expanded to a materialist world view. i.e. since the world is not fundamentally a moral reality, any moral system will inevitably come into conflict with it at times.
4. This is where law becomes important. Societies built with good laws help to build an environment where such cases are less likely to arise (you're less likely to have to kill to protect yourself from a bully, or to get a meal, etc.) and people are then able to act more in accordance with the Good. 

Theology: Sola Scriptura?

There are groups of Christians who seem to believe that Christian doctrine emerges independently from the pages of Scripture. This emerges anew for each individual in an absolute way. Tradition and authority, and often reason, are obliterated. Often, these people refer back to the Reformers, particularly Luther, as the ones who broke us away from our slavery to these twin evils. Never mind that Luther would not have agreed with them (despite his famous statement about "sola scriptura.") Naturally, this radically modernist viewpoint leads to a thorough disdain for high churches that do venerate tradition and authority.

Taken to this extreme, "sola scriptura" becomes utterly absurd. Scripture, authority tradition and reason are all important parts of proper theology. Protestant tradition holds scripture to be primary, but it cannot logically be untangled from the other threads.

New Testament scripture was written by Apostles, or those who directly knew Apostles. In time, these works were taken up by the majority of the church, and eventually canonized. The canonizing of these works was not random, but based on certain criteria, namely, the aforementioned apostolic authorship, general acceptance by the church, and, additionally, consistency with the whole of scripture.

So what do we have here? Scripture is first written by foundational authorities (however inspired by the Holy Spirit), then enters into the church by tradition, and finally validated by further authorities on the basis of good reason.

Thus, though we should indeed hold tradition, authority and reason to be subservient to scripture, to reject them, one truly must reject scripture. The Bible is part of our world, part of our history, an incarnate presentation of the word of God, and it cannot be removed from that fact.
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1. This post is modified from a comment I made in a thread on Facebook.

Theology: Greed

Earlier, I posted on my Facebook a link to this blog post, and I shortly afterward received a message from a friend calling the contact of that blog as "junk". Now, let me first say that this friend of mine is an amazing Christian who has devoted his life to genuine service of God and others, but I don't agree that the above article is junk. Certainly, I don't agree with everything said therein (Bankers certainly shouldn't be shunned, for one), but I think it has a lot of points.

My friend suggested that I read Milton Friedman (which I'll hopefully have time to do some day). Since I respect this friend, I looked up Friedman and found the following video:




I fully, completely, totally agree with one thing Milton Friedman says - this world runs on greed.

This world runs on greed.

This world.


"And do not be conformed to this world..."(Romans 12:2)