Voting, Consequentialists, And Virtue Ethicists

When it comes to voting, Consequentialists and Virtue Ethicists have different opinions on what an individual should do. Among the various motivations for voting, one is that your individual vote can make a difference in an election. Consequentialists argue that the probability of this is so slim and because of that, a person does not have a moral responsibility to cast a vote come election time. Consequentialists focus on optimizing the overall results of an action and argue that one vote will not produce the best overall result. Virtue Ethicists however have a very different viewpoint, arguing that an individual should vote when the opportunity arises. Virtue Ethics is not focused on the final outcome like Consequentialism, but rather on
An action that is optimific yields the largest balance of benefits over drawbacks. A consequentialist can argue that her or his one vote is not optimific because it is rarely ever going to be a determining factor when voting. After all, the odds of a single vote actually making a difference in an election range from a 1 in 10 million chance to a 1 in 100 million chance, averaging to about a 1 in 60 million chance in the United States (Gelman et al., 2009). To a Consequentialist, it is clear that those probabilities are anything but encouraging, which leaves them to conclude that voting will not be optimific. Hence they do not hold a moral responsibility to take part in the election. To a lot of people this can make sense—why would one go out and spend time waiting in a line to punch a ballot to walk away with a sticker that proclaims how they spent (or wasted) a good portion of their day knowing that their choice more than likely would not sway the results of an election to their favor? That is certainly not producing the greatest overall
Democracy, a government in which the people are allowed to have their say and cast their votes, is what this country was founded upon. A virtuous person would not take advantage of the right to vote therefore we should not either. There are places all around the world that operate under systems like fascism, communism, and the likes, each undesirable in its own nature. To me, for an American citizen to not vote is to be careless or downright lazy. Virtue Ethics specifically refers to carelessness and laziness as vices that should be avoided and because of this, individuals do have a responsibility to