[Bernard] Williams’s ideas about integrity suggest that someone who’s reluctant to follow a lesser-of-two-evils strategy needs to at least interrogate that instinct. If you’re genuinely trying make the world a better place, Williams says, it isn’t enough to simply promote the good within the limited range of choices you’re being offered. You need to try to become someone who actively builds those choices, shaping which outcomes result from which actions. And that means taking on projects and principles that you mean to live by – even if this might produce undesirable outcomes in the short term. Compare a fervent keyboard warrior – who has all the right-on takes on principles of economic justice – with a community organiser working on the ground to combat poverty, and for whom these principles aren’t passive beliefs, but an active source of motivation. For the Twitter activist, there is nothing at stake, apart from integrity itself, in being uncompromising. And to treat one’s integrity, in that situation, as a higher priority than averting disaster seems like a serious case of moral narcissism. By contrast, for the community organiser, a vote ‘the other way’ might act as a genuine impediment to their other world-shaping endeavours. So, in deciding whether to compromise your ideals, or whether to take a stand, you might ask yourself: ‘Will this compromise undermine projects that I’ve committed to, through which I’m actively trying to make the world a better place?’ (In which case: stand by your principles.) ‘Or are my ideals and principles simply idle, such that a moral compromise wouldn’t affect any projects actively in train?’ (In which case: act so as to promote the lesser of two evils.) The immediate payoff of this approach is that it gives a framework for people whose ideals make them reluctant to vote for the lesser of two evils, but who don’t have any real commitments or projects fuelled by those ideals.
Robert Simpson, When is it ethical to vote for ‘the less of two evils’?
