The general election seasons is underway, and so now it’s time for partisans to try to stop you from voting third party.

You’ll hear people say that a vote for Johnson, Sanders, or Stein is a vote for Trump. Trump supporters will also say that a vote for Johnson, Sanders, or Stein is a vote for Clinton. Neither claim is literally true. If you vote third party, you don’t vote for Clinton or Trump. You don’t hurt Clinton or Trump. You at most fail to help them win.

Maybe 10 or so Americans will write in Mickey Mouse. (A good choice, actually.)  Another 10 or so will write in “Santa Claus”. It seems weird to say that such Americans thereby “voted for the worse of two evils” or anything like that. Rather, they spoiled their ballots. Should we say a vote for Mickey Mouse is a vote for Trump? Or Clinton?

We have a first-past-the-post voting system. The candidate with the most votes in a state wins the electors for that state. Voting for a third party doesn’t literally help either Trump or Clinton. Rather, if you vote for a third party candidate, or write in “Santa Claus,” you simply fail to help either major party candidate win.

And, for the most part, it’s not like your vote is a big deal anyway. On the Brennan-Lomasky model or most of the older models for the decisiveness of an individual vote, your vote in this upcoming election has a vanishingly small chance of being decisive. On the newer Gelman-Silver-Edlin or Edlin-Gelman-Kaplan  models, you might have as high as a 1 in 10 million chance of deciding the US presidential election, but only if you live in a swing state and vote for one of the two major candidates. On that model, my vote (as a Virginia resident) matters, but most of your votes don’t matter.

Suppose Clinton is $1 trillion better than Trump. Suppose Gelman is right, and I end up having a 1 in 10 million chance of deciding the election. If so, then the expected utility of my vote for Clinton is $100,000. By casting a vote for Clinton, it’s like I’ve donated a huge sum to charity! Of course, this optimistically assumes that Clinton is worth a trillion more than Trump. I think she’s better than Trump, but a trillion dollars better? Not sure.

At any rate, to show that Virginians have a duty to vote for Clinton, it won’t be enough to show she’s significantly better than Trump and that individual votes for her have high expected utility. Rather, you also need to show that there’s a positive duty to help in this particular way.

As I point out in The Ethics of Voting, the best arguments for a duty to vote (rather than abstain) share a common flaw. These arguments never quite show that voting per se is obligatory. At best, they show that voting is one of many ways to discharge a more general duty. Consider the following arguments people have made:

1. The Generalization/Public Goods/Debt to Society Argument: Claims that citizens who abstain from voting thereby free ride on the provision of good government, or fail to pay their “debts to society”.
2. The Civic Virtue Argument: Claims that citizens have a duty to exercise civic virtue, and thus to vote.
3. The Complicity Argument: Claims that citizens have a duty to vote (for just outcomes) in order to avoid being complicit in the injustice their government’s commit.

Here’s a general challenge to these arguments, quoting from my forthcoming Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy entry on voting:

….These kinds of arguments seem, at best, to show that voting is at most one way among many to discharge the duty in question. Indeed, it might not be even be an especially good way. Call this the particularity problem. To show that there’s a duty to vote, it’s not enough to argue appeal to some goal G that citizens plausibly have a duty to support, and then to argue that voting is one way they can support or help achieve G. Instead, proponents of a duty to vote need to show specifically that voting is the only way, or the required way, to support G (J. Brennan 2011).

For instance, it seems that a citizen can exercise civic virtue any number of ways besides voting, many of which are far more conducive to promoting the public good than casting a vote. If a citizen wants to be an agent who helps promote other citizens’ well-being, she could volunteer, make art, or work at a productive job that adds to the social surplus. If a citizen wants to avoid complicity in injustice, she can engage in civil disobedience; write letters to newspaper editors, pamphlets, or political theory books, donate money; engage in conscientious abstention; protest; assassinate criminal political leaders; or do any number of other activities. It’s unclear why voting is special or required. Or, suppose that a citizen owes a “debt to society”, or has to avoid free-riding on other citizens’ provision of good governance. It’s not obvious why this debt must be repaid specifically by voting, rather than by performing any number of other activities that render society better off and compensate those citizens who helped to provide good government.

Even if my vote for Clinton is worth $100,000, it’s not clear that I have a duty to vote for Clinton. In commonsense moral thinking, and on most moral theories, we have only limited duties of beneficence. We should do some good for others, but at some point, we’ve done our share, and we don’t owe anything more. Doing more is supererogatory, going above and beyond the call of duty.

To illustrate with an extreme case, suppose on Monday, Nov 7, Wonder Woman has just finished saving the world for the umpteenth time. She decides to take a well-deserved rest on Tuesday, Nov 8. It just so happens that she’s registered her alter ego as a resident in Virginia. Her political theorist friend Julia finds Wonder Woman/Diana watching Netflix and says, “Diana, think of the Parable of the Good Samaritan! You owe it to us to vote for Clinton. You could do so much good with so little effort!” I think WW would be entitled to tell Julia to go to hell. She’s done her share and doesn’t owe us anything more, even though doing more would only cost her 15 minutes.

That’s an extreme case meant to illustrate the general point, but the point generalizes. If you want to show that swing state voters have a duty to vote in a particular way, you’ve got some work to do. Rather than trying to push for the claim that they have a duty to vote, I’d push the argument that for them, voting Clinton is admirable, as it’s an easy and cheap way to do something with significant expected utility.

Final point: So far, I’ve ignored all the stuff I’ve argued here about citizen’s epistemic duties regarding voting. One problem with everything  I’ve said above is that most voters aren’t in a good position to judge whether Clinton really is better than Trump or vice versa.