Lesser evilism is not endorsing genocide

I don’t like to repeat myself in close proximity, but I wanted to revisit the argument I made for voting for the lesser evil earlier in the election cycle and spell it out in more detail. I’m sorry if that’s a bit repetitive, but I want to use my tiny platform to say something about the election and maybe encourage a few people to vote, and I want to nail down the argument more precisely. Lately, I’ve seen a lot of claims that voting for the lesser evil is tantamount to supporting genocide.

You’re in hell. An election is happening. There are two candidates:

Satan who is also called The Adversary, The Prince of Darkness, The Father of Lies, The Tempter, Lucifer, Beelzebub, Iblis, Mara, The Deceiver, The Evil One, Old Scratch, Old Nick, The Lord of the Flies, Morning Star, The Serpent, The Accuser, Belial, Diabolus, Archfiend, The Great Dragon, Ruler of Demons, Dark Lord, The Wicked One, The Enemy, Apollyon, Abaddon and Prince of This World.

And Mammon .

The election is close, though Satan is the frontrunner.

Now Satan and Mammon are going to have a debate. Devils, demons, yuggoloths, shoggoths, old ones, fiends, imps, hellions, Rakshashas, Asuras, dark Jinn, Dybbuks, incubi, succubi, and plain old cubi are all going to be in attendance. All the big ticket items are on the table- torture intensification, temptation quotas, the war against heaven, the injustice system, carbon credits (you get credits for burning more coal), DEI (as in the genitive singular of Deus, the big enemy), inflation (as in the pornography genre) crime stats (WHY ARE THEY FALLING !!?!?!), deforestation (of the wood of suicides) and border security (too many damned souls escaping across to purgatory). Both sides, I can assure you, are participating in and supporting countless genocides- all of them really. The debate is particularly anticipated after a previous encounter in which Satan claimed “They’re eating the Bakenekos! They’re eating the Hellhounds!”

There are good reasons to think that Mammon will do less harm than Satan. Mammon is more focused on hoarding gold, whereas Satan’s policies are more ambitious.

Somehow, you have ended up working backstage. You have some marbles in your pocket. You could put them on the path by which Satan will walk out to the stage and then escape unseen. Creatures of darkness famously hate weakness, so a fall will create a major stumbling block for the Prince of Darkness’s campaign.

The following seems to me to hold:

1. It would be permissible to trip Satan to try to throw the election against him.

2. If it would be permissible to trip Satan, it would be permissible to vote for Mammon to try to throw the election against Satan.

3. Therefore it’s permissible to vote for Mammon.

4. If it’s permissible to vote for Mammon, it’s permissible to vote for a human lesser evil candidate.

5. Therefore it’s permissible to vote for a human lesser evil candidate.

Objections:

• It is permissible to trip Satan, but not to vote for Mammon, because voting has an expressive meaning of endorsement

There are two concerns here. The first is concern about public expression that Mammon is good. This is easily dispelled by the observation that, even in hell, voting is private, and even if you do talk about your vote, you can explain the context of it. The second is a concern that even if no one ever knows it, in the privacy of the ballot box, you have secretly in some sense ‘endorsed’ Mammon as good by voting for him, and thus supported his policies, even if you won’t admit it. I have no idea where this comes from. The idea that voting for a candidate is the same as saying “this candidate is good” is nowhere written in law. It is not part of the public view of the matter- I’d say the idea that you can vote for a sonaofabitch you hate because you hate the other guy, even more, is well understood.

• There’s no chance I’m going to change the result of the election, therefore the only reason to vote is to express affection for a candidate, therefore I shouldn’t vote

Don’t round small probabilities to zero when the stakes are high. Your odds of tipping the election in hell are low, it is true, but the stakes are huge.

The average voter, in the US according to the best study I could find on the subject, has a 1 in 60 million chance of tipping the election. In many places its much higher than that. The US president makes a difference to everyone in the world. Suppose on average and in expectation, over four years (four years which possibly include a nuclear exchange, for example), that your vote makes a 5-dollar difference. Voting is equivalent to:

(8 billion)*5/60 million=683.33 dollar

Donation you can make to the people of the world for free. If you think it’s a 50-dollar difference, your vote could be worth in expected utility terms over 6000 dollars.

• Other strategic options

What about the case, apart from deontic principles, that voting just isn’t the right strategy here- for example, maybe rather than voting for Mammon you’d be better off organizing a boycott to try and make Mammon’s side work harder for your votes next time?

If you want to support other strategic options, go with God. I have no intrinsic objection to such strategies, and whether or not they are wise depends on difficult empirical questions. Personally, I think they are probably unwise, but I could be wrong. Just don’t moralize it. Don’t pretend other people are “supporting genocide” just because they’ve made a different assessment of the factors at play.