Why I Said I Would Vote for Hitler

I'm sure you'll have trouble with the above title, if you don't, you're seriously messed up and need to seek the advice of a professional. The title is a reference to my interchange on Tuesday with Gregg Jackson on the morality of voting. Mr. Jackson claims that a vote for the "lesser of two evils" is an immoral act. Jackson posed the question to me, "If you had to vote for Hitler or Stalin, who would you choose." I quickly responded that because Stalin would be responsible for more death (around 23,000,000 compared to Hitler's death cost of around 12,000,000) I would have to vote Hitler, but only for the fact that it would lead to the loss of less lives.

I realize that decisions like this are never clear cut, even the argument that Stalin is less evil than Hitler isn't all that easy to make. But if we abstract the situation one step further, I think it will be clear the action one has to make. Imagine if you will, two trains flying towards each other about to crash. One train is full of passengers, the other train is carrying marbles. If you had access to a switch that could safely derail one of the trains, would you still pull the switch even if you knew that the other train would surely crash? I would have to save the passenger train, even though the marble train's engineers would die as a result of my action. My flipping the switch would result in the loss of less life.

Now back to voting in America. The upcoming election cycle will pit a Republican candidate verses the Obama Administration. Even if I thought that Mitt Romney was evil (as Mr. Jackson asserts) I would still vote for him, because I sincerely believe that the result would cause less harm for the country. I realize that there is a crowd of people out there that believe that third parties are viable alternative, but there is absolutely no chance that any third party will be viable in this election cycle.

So, to wrap things up. A vote for the lesser of two evils is in fact a vote for less evil. Even if we have two bad choices, we should still try to influence events so that less harm will result.