“Voting Your Principles” is Self-Contradictory
Nov 10th, 2007 by Micah Tillman | 13 Comments |
I was reading a post yesterday about voting your principles rather than voting pragmatically (which reminds me of all that Clinton stuff). It was a fellow Christian who, unlike myself, is a Huckabee supporter in the mode of James Dobson. You’d be violating your principles if you, like Pat Robertson, went for Giuliani, said said blogger.
I happen to find principles very important when it comes to politics. But I wanted to leave a comment on that post to the effect that the blogger was seriously confused. The democratic method of selecting leaders is the biggest violation of principles ever to come down the pike. To “vote your principles,” rather than “pragmatically,” would be a self-contradiction.
Unfortunately, the site had some embedded video that crashed Firefox, so I couldn’t leave my helpful comment. That just means I’ll have to do it here:
Democracy is the system that claims the views of the fool should be given as much weight as the views of the wise. What kind of principle is that? You can’t participate — based on your principles — in that kind of a system because no sane person actually believes that the views of the fool should be given as much weight as the views of the wise.
So either we’re all already compromising our principles by voting (in that we’re acting as if our views are worth only as much the views of the people we consider to be completely wrong) or the democratic method of deciding issues is pragmatic, not principled. That is, we’re looking not to express our principles through our votes, but to achieve the best possible outcome given our principles. Democracy is about results, not intentions.
And unless you think Huckabee has a chance of winning the general election, Huckabee can’t be the pragmatic choice. Giuliani, Romney, Thompson, and McCain all have much better chances, in my opinion. And a presidency by any of those four gentlemen would be more pragmatic for a Huckabee supporter than one by Clinton, Obama, or Edwards.
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Two brief thoughts (Well, they’re brief by my rather liberal definition of the term)
#1) Individually, a knucklehead is given the same weight as somebody not-a-knucklehead. But if we accept the premise that there are more smart than dumb people voting, shouldn’t we expect it all to work itself out?
#2) There are very few people who vote for third party candidates who expect them to win. When I voted for a third party candidate in the last presidential election, I believe my reasoning was eminantly pragmatic.
I believed that the Gore was only a slightly lesser evil than Bush. (O.K. so hindsight is 20-20… I had no idea what would happen at the time. Bush seemed much less evil and Gore seemed like an android at the time.)
I did this wanting long-term impact. I knew if the dem’s lost they’d have to look at the base; they’d have to appeal to a larger bloc next time ’round. They would have to try and either appeal to the moderates and lukewarm Republicans or try to appeal to folks further left.
By casting a vote was the far left, I made this a sweeter pot. (granted, it was sweeter by only one vote, but hey, it’s all I’ve got.)
It seems to me that the current crop of Dem’s indicates that some of them are looking for the folks who voted for Nader. If I’d voted for somebody who was likely to win I’d have impacted that election. By voting for somebody who didn’t stand a chance, I’d argue my vote had a much longer legacy, in that it helps to shift the whole land scape of what the Democrats are doing.
#1) Individually, a knucklehead is given the same weight as somebody not-a-knucklehead. But if we accept the premise that there are more smart than dumb people voting, shouldn’t we expect it all to work itself out?
In fact, we don’t even need the premise that there are more smart people than dumb people voting, unless there are so few smart people that they make up a statistically insignificant percentage of the voters. Let us imagine there are a group of voters, let’s call them Smarties, who are more likely to be right about politics because they are more rational, more intelligent, less prone to bias, etc. The Smarties will, collectively, almost always be right. Any individual Smarty might be wrong, but collectively they should come to the right conclusion. Unless they are a statistically insignificant proportion of the population, they ought to always throw the election to the person who should win it. After all, the non-Smarties should be voting randomly and therefore would tend to cancel each other out. We are, therefore, in any election, letting the Smarties decide it.
Jeff–
On knuckleheads
Knuckleheads or not, the fact that half the voting public makes the wrong choice every election is kind of creepy to me.
On pragmatic third-party votes
That is the problem with pragmatism, isn’t it? You have to wait to see if it works. Frustrating. :-)
Andrew–
Love the stats. Interesting.
Your proposal works if being un-smart doesn’t mean you’re more likely to be deceived. Right? Because if being un-smart makes you more likely to be deceived, and it’s the bad candidate who’s doing the deceiving, then the un-Smarties will tend to vote for the bad candidate.
Unless you have the good candidate deceiving people into voting correctly. Then things could balance out. *grin*
But let’s assume that the un-Smarties do vote randomly, and “my candidate” loses an election. Wouldn’t that mean that either I’m an un-Smarty or there aren’t enough Smarties?
I find the latter easier to swallow emotionally. :-)
But let’s assume that the un-Smarties do vote randomly, and “my candidate” loses an election. Wouldn’t that mean that either I’m an un-Smarty or there aren’t enough Smarties?
You could be a Smarty who came to the wrong conclusion that particular time. In fact, though, I wasn’t really serious. I was expecting somebody to come up with the issue of systematic bias (which you brought up with your “likely to be deceived” bit) and was then going to expound on that subject for a while. Systematic bias blasts my theory right out of the water.
In fact, I believe there is sufficient evidence that everyone, even the wise (if defined as the highly educated), are irrational about politics. (I do reserve judgment on whether there might be a statistically insignificant minority who are not irrational about politics, call them the “super-wise,” but their possible existence can be ignored for all practical purposes.) Part of my analysis relies on the two different belief clusters (the left and the right). It is unreasonable to think that there is a large group of people who are prone to falsity. At best, their opinions should be unrelated to the truth, not systematically biased against it. (Even if we use your “deceived” card, we have to explain the existence of the politicians who are doing the deceiving. In any event, I certainly don’t believe that either of the two major parties are engaged in a systematic deception.) Therefore, while there probably is a true belief-cluster, there is very good reason to believe that neither the left nor the right is it.
Hmmm. “Therefore, while there probably is a true belief cluster, there is very good reason to believe that neither the left nor the right is it.”… Does anybody have any statistics on what percentage of people don’t cluster consistently on the left or the right? For our purposes, I could accept the idea that this might be close enough to people who don’t vote along party lines. (Assuming we’re all talking about American poltics.)
If smarties are defined as people who don’t consitently align to one side of the political spectrum, we can get a rough read on the percentage by knowing the number of people who cross party lines on a regular basis. (And then assuming that some percentage of line-crosses are not smarties, just random.)
Personally, I see the left and the right as fairly internally consistent world views… Of course, one might turn out to be correct and one might turn out to be wrong; I’m a left wing guy myself, but I almost think it more likely that the right wing is in touch with reality more than an inconsistent voter.
I sometimes wonder if either a consistent left wing or a consistent right wing approach might yield a better, more consistent result than our fragmented compromises between the two wings.
Last time I knew it was something like 35% on the left and 35% on the right with about 30% being the voters who matter. However, there is a problem with imagining that the swing voters constitute the smartest percentage of the population; it doesn’t seem to be the case. It’s not highly correlated with educational attainment, for example. (There is an argument to be made that they are the least biased, though. But this doesn’t seem to be correlated with intelligence. I don’t know about wisdom since I know of no proxy for wisdom like educational attainment is for intelligence, so I will withhold judgment on that matter.)
I don’t agree that the left or the right are terribly internally consistent, though. For example, we would imagine that people who support animal rights probably have a very expansive view of rights. It would not be unreasonable, therefore, to assume that they would also oppose abortion and be in favor of the rights of fetuses. In fact, these two beliefs are highly negatively correlated. Why? I know of no consistent theory that can explain it. I’m not saying that being pro-animal rights and pro-abortion are contradictory (they aren’t), but it seems more than a little strange that they should be positively correlated.
Moreover, while a theory of different values between left and right might explain differences on moral questions, the two sides also disagree on facts. People who favor the legalization of abortion also frequently believe that legalization has not increased the number of abortions. Some of my libertarian friends try to tell me that legalizing drugs will not increase drug use. People who support the death penalty are often convinced that the death penalty deters criminals while people who oppose it are often similarly convinced it doesn’t. Almost all of these factual beliefs come after they had already made up their mind about which side they were on. I know of no explanation, other than irrationality (epistemic bias), which can explain this.
I agree with you Andrew, I was trying to say basically the same thing, that it seems unlikely that the swing voters is the repository for most of the smarties.
I found it necessary to make this point because I apparently misunderstood what you said in a prior post: “Therefore, while there probably is a true belief cluster, there is very good reason to believe that neither the left nor the right is it.” It seems that I misunderstood you.
As for the question of animal rights vs human rights… hmmm. That’s a fair enough point. I’ve actually often felt frustrated with people who oppose abortion but support the death penalty on similar grounds: either life has implicit value or it doesn’t.
I suppose there are a few other inconsistencies lurking around (e.g., liberals in favor of mixed economies tend to have a positive view of human nature yet want a big government to protect us from human nature; pro-capitalist folks seem to take our greed as a given and yet don’t want a big government to protect us from this greed.)
Ahh, but Jeff, I must say I’ve often felt baffled by people who raise your objection.
Those who support the death penalty while opposing abortion see an enormous difference between taking innocent life and taking the life of a murderer. This is a perfectly reasonable distinction in my opinion.
Just as I think the opposite case is a reasonable distinction. Those who are pro choice are often opposed to the death penalty, but that is because they do believe life has implicit value, and simply don’t agree that a fetus is a life.
For myself, I support the death penalty in theory, but oppose it on procedural grounds.
As for greed, I favor government protection from greed, but I think protection from force or fraud largely covers that.
I’ll spend some time mulling over the distinctions you raise. My initial reaction is that you’re probably right on the latter case.
There might be something to the claim that one could oppose the death penalty while supporting abortion because the argument could be run that the fetus has less value than a fully formed human, regardless of what that human has done. This position can seem reprehensible to be operating from a world view wherein a human fetus has some qualitative difference from the rest of living things, but to assume this premise from the beginning is to beg the question.
As for the converse position, the position that the death penalty is justifiable but abortion is not… I’m not so sure I see this side of it. If you begin with the premise that human fetus have some inherent worth, something that far exceeds the worth of the individual sperm or egg that comrpised it, something that exceeds a fertilized fetus for some other animal, than it seems like you’d have to argue that this value is somehow diminished through the act of murder or other death penalty related crimes.
It seems to me that taking the track of “Well they killed somebody so they deserve the same treatment” would require a complete rewriting of our penal code if it’s taken to it’s natural conclusion; in this country we don’t steal from theives, rape rapists, beat muggers, etc.; I know that some countries do similar things. I know that some people believe we should… But that would be a much wider argument than simply supporting the death penalty.
(Kudos to you, by the way, for opposing it on procedural grounds… I get frustrated by folks who don’t recognize that regardless of the theoretical justification of the death penalty, we perform them in such a haphazard manner that it loses any moral creedence it might have.)
I should point out that what I am saying is not that the belief cluster typically held by the Left or the opposite belief cluster typically held by the Right are contradictory in any way. I think it is probably possible to maintain all those positions at the same time. What I am saying is that I know of no underlying moral theory that can explain the existence of these belief clusters. There are only a few issues where I think the cleave between Left and Right can actually be explained by differing fundamental moral premises and these differing premises are inadequate to explain all the other issues they disagree on.
I am therefore inclined to the view that these belief clusters come about more or less haphazardly and sustain themselves through political alliances. I.e. political beliefs are a form of social bonding. It seems to me that this is a testable hypothesis. If we studied cantankerous, anti-social people, I’d bet that their political beliefs would tend to be idiosyncratic rather than conforming to one of the two popular belief clusters.
By the by, since I mentioned intelligence and political beliefs above, I should also comment that very intelligent people who are also biased are probably the least likely to arrive at true beliefs. Very intelligent people can use their intelligence and education as tools to rationalize beliefs, when a less intelligent person, faced with the evidence and arguments against his position, would be forced to concede error. For example, when I was at University, I met a philosophy professor who was still a logical positivist and trying desperately to maintain it. I believe he was logical positivism’s last living defender (he’s dead now). Brilliant man, but that brilliance worked against him when it came to determining the truth. For this reason, it is nearly impossible to change the mind of an academic about anything important.
Andrew:
Interesting thoughts. Is there a connection between the distinction your setting up and the common sense distinctions of wisdom vs. intelligence or even street smarts vs. book smarts?
It seems like to qualify as a smartie, a person ought to both have information and have the ability to apply this information to reality and their own life.
I smiled at the tale of your old professor. In the middle 90’s I was working on a Master’s degree in philosophy in Southern California… I had a couple profs who I would certainly have described as logical positivists… (They would have probably said they were “sympathetic to the logical postivist program”) I always found it kind-of silly, like studying science from somebody who held on to the idea that the Earth is flat.
I wouldn’t care to bet that my distinction is exactly the same as the distinctions you mention. I suppose one could argue that wisdom consists of ridding oneself of epistemic bias, but I don’t know how far I’d care to argue that.
However, I should make perfectly clear my opinion as to why this phenomenon exists (very high intelligence mixed with epistemic bias). Basically, it is usually (instrumentally) rational to be (epistemically) irrational about political beliefs. People do not actually bear any costs for their false political beliefs. Even if they get made into policy, the costs will be borne by society as a whole and one’s own part in this cost will be very small. Therefore, it is (usually) quite rational to choose one’s political beliefs for reasons entirely unrelated to whether they are true. My opinion is that most people choose their political beliefs for social reasons (to fit in with whatever group they wish to fit in with), or for reasons of self-interest, or as self-image constructors. (They wish to view themselves as “compassionate” or “tough.”)
It is, I should add, no part of my theory that there are necessarily any people who select their political beliefs for rational reasons. Such people might exist or they might not. If they did exist, it would probably be due to an irrational preference for epistemic rationality.
I should say that I have some sympathies with the logical positivist program myself, but metaphysics is inescapable (and so is ethics). As Gustav Bergmann, a one-time member of the Vienna Circle, put it after breaking with positivism: “An unexamined metaphysics, that is, one implicitly held, is for a philosopher the worst metaphysics of all.” Ultimately, the positivists just couldn’t go on pretending that they didn’t have a metaphysics.
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