Sympathetic Magic

[billroper]

catalana mentioned that one of the topics they're covering in her classes this semester is why someone should bother to vote in a population with a large number of eligible voters, given the vanishingly small chance that one vote will make a difference. Since this came up at about the moment that she was getting out at the train station, I didn't get a chance to hear the reasonable explanation of why a person should vote.

My unreasonable explanation for why I vote is that I view it as a form of sympathetic magic. If I bother to go out and vote for a candidate or issue that I care about, other voters who agree with me may somehow be stimulated to do the same thing.

Of course, living in Cook County, I have a problem finding voters who agree with me, but that's a different problem altogether. :)

Comments

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Actually, it's not so much that we covered it this semester (although I think it came up as an example with Kant and the Categorical Imperative...and, now that I think of it, as an argument for rule-utilitarianism), but it's a spiel I give every fall that there are elections.

Essentially, it is a lovely illustration of problems about universalizing actions. Suppose I think "Oh, it doesn't matter if I vote - one vote won't make a difference. I might as well go to the movies."

Okay, so few national elections are decided by one vote, true. But what if everyone starts reasoning like that? Sure, maybe it doesn't matter in the grand scheme of things if one person doesn't vote...but it certainly matters if *no one* votes.

(Plus, of course, lots of local elections are decided on much smaller margins.)

This isn't exactly an illustration of a slippery slope fallacy, but it's a similar kind of problem; one person not voting doesn't destroy the system. But everyone not voting does...and figuring out exactly where to draw that line is hard. (Much as losing one hair doesn't make you bald, but losing all of them does; we may not know where to draw the line between bald and not-bald, but it's certainly possible to pass from one state to the other!)

[beige-alert.livejournal.com]

Or the other way around, one person dumping waste into Lake Michigan doesn't matter. Everyone in Chicago doing so, does. A lot of harm in the world is the sum of teensy-weensy harms times six billion times 365. The quantity of harm observed is evidence that people have a really hard time thinking this way.

[madfilkentist]

As far as I understand Kant, he would object to the idea that the effect of an action on other people's motivation can be part of a moral argument. By calling it a "categorical" imperative, he was saying that the obligation to act on universalizable principles is prior to any if-then arguments.

[catalana.livejournal.com]

Kant says we should act in such a way that its maxim is universalizable. The proposition "Vote unless you think it won't matter" isn't universalizable because of the consequences on society (and, possibly more importantly, because it would in a sense render "democracy" senseless; you can't have a democracy where no one votes.)

[madfilkentist]

Fallacy of begging the question. Your argument implicitly assumes that "no one thinks it matters" is an accepted premise of the debate. If some people think their vote matters (the correctness of their view is irrelevant here) and they follow the proposition "Vote unless you think it won't matter," then they will vote.

[billroper]

Ok, that makes sense.