[CrackMonkey] Lindsey Graham

[Seth David Schoen]

Mike Goldman writes:

> Seth David Schoen wrote:
> 
> > I think my present position is close to "Voting is wrong, but it does not
> > in itself constitute consent".
> 
> Consent for the PROCESS, certainly.  Look, nobody is FORCING people to vote.  So
> if you do it, you have willingly accepted the rules.  It's like, when someone
> offers you a deal, and you accept the benefits, you acquire the obligation.

That sounds like social contract theory. :-)

The only problem with that theory as a description of actual political life
in democracies is that the actual opportunity to refuse to consent is not
given (let alone taken as a default).

So, we end up with "casuistical politics", as Robert Wolff put it in his
_In Defense of Anarchism_: there _shouldn't_ have been a state, and the
state is wrong, but some people went and created it anyway, for some
reason.  There is now an ethical question of how to behave toward it.

Many people try to say that, because of their willingness to accept the
benefits the state offers, citizens (sic) acquire obligations toward it.

If this is false, then it provides a very important situation in which some
form of participation (receiving benefits) does not imply consent.  When
we move from this relatively passive participation to active participation
(like voting), new controversies appear. :-)

The casuistical point is that, given that a state exists, you have to
decide how to behave toward it, which might involve some attempts to
change its behavior in particular instances, recognizing that it can't
be abolished immediately.

> > We had a long debate on ucb-libertarian about whether voting was moral (and,
> > if moral, whether commendable), and whether voting constituted consent.
> 
> Morality is a separate subject entirely, and whether it is commendable depends
> entirely on the perspective of those commending and the circumstances.

Right.  But these subjects tend to get brought up in discussions about
voting.

Usually people who are worrying about whether voting is right or wrong tend
to be the most interested in what voting means.  (Political scientists
might be a close second.)

> I do participate in voting (and
> commend it) within organizations that have a process I judge fair, and where I
> consent to the result even if it is adverse to my preference.

Sure.  "Voting" here only refers to state elections, although there is a
general cultural perception that majority rule is a fair or appropriate
solution in most situations of conflict or disagreement.

> > It's very clear to me that "If you don't vote, you can't complain" is bogus.
> > (That doesn't stop it from being popular; I've been told that six or seven
> > times when I told people I didn't vote.)  OTOH I don't think that that
> > implies "If you do vote, you can't complain", and I haven't seen that
> > justified in a way that entirely convinced me.
> 
> You CAN complain, no matter what, but whether you have proper STANDING to
> complain depends again on what you are complaining about.  If you vote for one
> candidate, and he or she does not win, I think you have standing to complain that
> the specific policies of the winner are disagreeable.  On the other hand, you do
> NOT have standing in this case to complain about the legitimacy and propriety of
> the winner exercising his or her authority in the manner that he or she sees fit.

Another way to talk about this would be to say that certain complaints are
inappropriate because they have been pre-empted by the complainer's own
actions.

If voting implies consent to the results of the vote, I think there is a
good case that voters' complaints about the legitimacy of the authority
of the winner are inappropriate.  But here we still have the problem of
why voting implies consent to the process.

Most of the "voting implies consent" arguments I've heard of are based on
the premise that "if you don't consent, you shouldn't vote" (morally or
tactically).  Can you go from that to "if you _do_ vote, you consent"?
Or is there another way to get to "if you vote, you consent"?

-- 
Seth David Schoen <schoen at loyalty.org>  | And do not say, I will study when I
Temp.  http://www.loyalty.org/~schoen/  | have leisure; for perhaps you will
down:  http://www.loyalty.org/   (CAF)  | not have leisure.  -- Pirke Avot 2:5