[ExI] Conscientious objections

[Dan]

On Wednesday, November 14, 2012 2:47 AM Adrian Tymes <atymes at gmail.com> wrote:

> On Tue, Nov 13, 2012 at 11:33 PM, Rafal Smigrodzki <rafal.smigrodzki at gmail.com> wrote:
>> I am human. My desires don't come into existence through the act of
>> voting, therefore failure to vote does not remove me from the moral
>> calculus ("right to object").
>
> Your hypocrisy - refusing to take effective action to register your
> objection - does come into existence that way.  This hypocrisy
> removes the validity of your objection.

I don't think it's hypocrisy at all. Hypocrisy is when one puts on appearances, no? Rafal is not doing that. He's stated why he didn't vote. You might disagree with his reasons, but that's not hypocrisy -- unless you're going to hold that disagreement with you alone is hypocritical. Surely, you don't take that position.

>> I changed my mind. Voting legitimizes the state. I will have no
>> voluntary involvement in that.
>
> You choose to remain within the geographic boundaries the
> state has sovereignty over.  That is your voluntary involvement.

It's not voluntary at all -- no more than, say, if you hand over your money to an armed robber you are voluntarily consenting to the exchange. In fact, in political terms, consent really should be -- if it's to be consistent and make sense -- express consent where someone openly expresses her or his consent for a specific action, condition, or policy. Otherwise, I can state that your lack of active resistance in something is consent. Thus, the Jews who didn't actively resist being hauled off to death camps, consented by that standard.

> If you truly wish to have no such involvement, then leave.  Your
> presence legitimizes the state by proxy, no matter how much
> you wish things were otherwise.

I think that's also not so. He doesn't want to, in my understanding, legitimize the state via participating in voting. Simply living inside a region a state happens to control is not consent and doesn't legitimize it as such -- any more than in my previous example: going along with the armed robber doesn't legitimize her or his claim to your money.

> Want to put it to the test?  Try refusing to act in accordance
> with the state's laws - in particular, refusing to pay income tax.
> Quite a few people legitimize the state by winding up in its
> prisons that way.

This seems rather silly. People can withhold moral support for something by not pretending to go along with the forms and rituals of that thing. Not voting and actually telling people about this is actually a good means to start up a conversation about state legitimacy (or lack thereof). Yes, it's likely many if not most people will disagree and respond with the knee jerk "if you didn't vote, you can't complain" line, but a few might listen.

Simply participating in voting doesn't do much. One vote out of thousand or millions doesn't count unless there's a really close race. And participating is likely to persuade people you go along with the whole sham. Let's say Rafal did vote. Who would he vote for? Let's say he voted for the LP candidate -- though, IIRC, Rafal is an anarchist like me, so why the LP? Did the LP candidate even get enough votes to do anything? Is either national party in fear that the LP (or any other third party) is stealing votes from them? Are the analysts even looking at the LP? It seems like he might just as well have voted for anyone at random and had the exact same impact: which is no impact.

(On this, see also Bryan Caplan's _The Myth of the Rational Voter: Why Democracies Choose Bad Policies_. Caplan has some good observations on how the cost and impact of voting and of supporting political positions in general is negligible such that this allows people to hold all kinds of ridiculous and wrong views. He focuses on bad economic views -- in fact, the same economic fallacies that have been time and again refuted since David Hume's time -- are easy to hold because each individual vote doesn't count, so the cost of the bad position doesn't really matter all that much. By the way, that the same fallacies keep cropping up, over and over, to me hints that there might be some room for an evolutionary psychology explanation here. A systematic bias across generations and cultures for the same kind of wrong ideas seems to show that humans are somehow evolved to hold the wrong ideas -- not exactly that the ideas are innate, but that humans brains seem
 to easily fall into the fallacies.*)

Regards,

Dan

* See http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_the_Rational_Voter for a summary of the four biases Caplan deals with in his book. Regardless of one's political philosophy, at least two of his biases seem uncontroversial: pessimistic bias and anti-foreign bias. The former seems to happen regardless of how well things turn out. People just assume things are always getting worse and worse, even when their fortunes are actually doing better. For instance, with the recent financial crisis, yes, things are bad, but are they really bad as the 1970s or the 1930s? Doubtful.
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