Voting to Minimize Harm in 2016

Looking at the 2016 United States general election, we are faced with bleak prospects. The Democrats have chosen to run a criminal, and the Republicans a scoundrel. Mr. Trump's protestations not withstanding, neither looks like a truly pro-life candidate. Someone with Mr. Trump's attitudes towards women is the primary cause of many abortions, and his foundation supports the pro-death cause. Thus, in my mind, both major party candidates have disqualified themselves.

Facing this situation, most voters with a conscience and a scrape of intelligence ore trying to figure out how to vote to minimize harm. The choices are essentially to vote for the major party candidate that you think will be less bad, or to cast your vote for a third party who has no chance to win in this election, in hopes of furthering the chance of a third party win in a future election. What we must not do is to let our disgust with Mr. Trump lead us into violating our own principles.

I have been reading Mrs. Simcha Fisher's writing for a long time now. I almost always enjoy her posts, and until now I have had a fair amount of respect for her positions and ideas. However, in talking about her choices in this election1, Mrs. Fisher makes a number of mistakes. She rightly talks about the limited nature of a president's authority in our system of checks and balances. She forgets, or more likely does not realize, the fact that Mrs. Clinton is a criminal. Someone who has already shown incredible contempt for the rule of law is hardly going to be a typical president. She will push the bounds of her authority like few presidents before her ever have. Mrs. Fisher is also underestimating the power of executive order and the (unconstitutional) breadth and power of regulations that are not laws. Mrs. Fisher is correct that the Hyde Amendment has done little to stop Congress from funding abortion indirectly, and that Mrs. Clinton cannot, by herself, repeal it anyway. However, Mrs. Clinton will still find ways to advance her pro-death and anti-family positions in all sorts of ways, quite possibly, as I've said, illegal ones.

Mrs. Fisher is more like her usual insightful self as she talks about the Supreme Court. To her words, I will add the fact that since I do not believe that Mr. Trump is actual pro-life, nor do I believe him to be an honest man, I do not think he will stick to his pledge to nominate pro-life justices. In this election, voting for a president to get a Supreme Court is foolish. Give that Chief Justice Roberts voted to ignore the Constitution in supporting ObamaCare, that Justice Kennedy is a President Reagan appointee who is only marginally pro-life at best, that Justice Souter was a President Bush Sr. appointee, and that Justice O'Connor was another President Reagan appointee, expecting to get a good court via presidential elections has always been foolish.

However, towards the middle of her article, Mrs. Fisher makes a grave error. She looks at the consequences of each candidates win, trying to determine which will be less harmful to life at its various stages outside of direct support of abortion. Given that both candidates are fundamentally pro-abortion, this is reasonable. Mrs. Fisher then makes the unreasonable, unconscionable decision to directly support an evil politician because she is evil. Following her reasoning, if Mr. Trump wins, people will be motivated, as they have been in the past, to support the opposition. Similarly if Mrs. Clinton wins, people will support her opposition. People are quite likely to confuse Mr. Trump's win with a pro-life win, and thus strongly support the pro-death cause in other ways, particularly their checkbooks. All this is true. We cannot however do wrong in hopes that it will result in a good outcome. We cannot support Mrs. Clinton to cause pro-life donations. We cannot support Mrs. Clinton to encourage our country to put forward a viable candidate in opposition for a future election. We can, and should withhold our support from either major party for these reasons. There is a massive and critical difference between the decision to not act, and the decision to actively advance an evil because you hope for a good side effect.

There is a principle of the double consequence. When faced with certain choices, where an act will have multiple consequences, one of them good and one of them evil, but both unavoidable, you can choose to act intending the good even though this allows the bad. A vote, however, does not fall into this category. A vote is a statement that you want the candidate, or at least his/her party, to win. The good that Mrs. Fisher wants is an effect of that win, not of that vote. Thus the good is a step removed from her action, and her desire for that good does not replace the fact that she is desiring a Mrs. Clinton victory because people will know she is evil. As you read it, as you restate it to yourself, you can see the problem. Mrs. Fisher is intending a victory by an evil candidate. We can act only when we are allowing an evil not when we are intending an evil.