4 thoughts on “If I Don’t Vote, You Can’t Complain

  1. Pingback: If I Don’t Vote, You Can’t Complain | Austro-Athenian Empire

  2. Possible to provide us with specifications of, say, 3 (or 5 or 12 or whatever makes sense) minute long highlight segments (e.g. ‘between 4:23 and 7:11 is particularly awesome!’) in the comments when you post these videos? Agoric Cafe espresso!

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      • Thanks, Roderick. I think you are more or less right that one might satisfy an imperfect duty to promote the public good by not voting. However, if the main effect is simply undermining electoral politics as the outlet for promoting the public good or being public-spirited, then it is not clear that promoting viable alternative routes to these things is promoted in a certain-enough or solid-enough way by not voting (in any given case). Of course, if politics, or electoral politics, is a really bad (or wrong) way of promoting the public good (and it is not the case that something as bad or worse is likely to come about upon its decline) then the purely undermining role would represent a good option.

        What you say does make me more open to not voting, but also convinces me that, if I want to go this route in the future, I need to think about accompanying motivations and actions that would open up viable alternatives to achieving public goods (and being public-spirited) through other means (that are voluntary). There are also ways other than not voting to lessen our in some respects near-exclusive reliance on electoral politics for achieving (and expressing) public values. Definitely worth thinking about the best ways to do that.

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