From the Archives: Why Vote for the Lesser of Two Evils

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(First posted in Dec., 2011)

A recurring question in the American political experience is this: ”Should people of conscience vote for the lesser of two evils?” The question is of interest to all who care about right and wrong but carries special interest for Christians, since their aim is to do all things in obedience to Christ.

My thesis is simple. In a vote between two evils, Christians ought to back the lesser of the two.

For the purposes of this essay, I’m assuming readers already believe Christians ought to vote. My aim is to present three arguments for voting for the candidate who is least evil, whether the office is President of the United States, U.S. Senator or Village Clerk.

1. Such a vote is the lesser of two evils.

The first argument for voting for the lesser of evils is in the proposition itself: less evil. Who can be against that? Here’s the argument one statement at a time:

  • It’s good to do what results in less evil.
  • Voting for less-evil candidates results in less evil.
  • Therefore, it’s a good thing to vote for less-evil candidates.

Let’s evaluate the argument one premise at a time.

The first premise should be an easy sell. All good people want to see less evil in themselves and in the world around them. Some may object that there really are no good people—and they’ve got a point. No one is “good” in the sense of Mark 10:18 (ESV: “No one is good except God”) or Romans 3:12 (“no one does good”). But many are good in the sense of Romans 15:14 (“you yourselves are full of goodness”), and even more are good in the sense of Proverbs 13:22 (“a good man leaves an inheritance”) and 14:14 (“a good man will be filled …”). All decent people are in favor of doing what results in less evil.

The second premise is the controversial one. What sort of voting behavior really results in less evil, especially in the long term? Three attitudes toward that question predominate. Some voters maintain that, over time, more good (less evil) comes from supporting only those candidates who are a near-perfect match to the ideal. In this view, though voting exclusively for superb candidates may have worse results in the short run, we would eventually see excellent results if everyone voted this way.

Another attitude is that there is no voting behavior that results in less evil. The world is doomed to ever increasing wickedness and there is nothing any of us can do about it. Evil will increasingly dominate until Christ personally establishes His geopolitical kingdom on earth.

Parts of that attitude resonate with me. In the end, evil will come to dominate the globe as never before, and that situation will be reversed only when Christ conquers. However, the Scriptures that reveal this end game have been in the Bible for more than two thousand years (much longer, if you include Daniel!). During that interval, human history has witnessed many periods of increased justice (and diminished evil) in various regions—sometimes for centuries.

Christians understand that human nature will remain sinful regardless, and that the redemption of the planet comes only through the reign of Jesus Christ. But it doesn’t follow that we are unable to reduce the evil in the world in one place or another for a few decades or longer.

So what kind of voting results in less evil in our land? The third attitude toward that question is that a voting strategy that results in less evil in the short run often results in less in the long run as well. Good ideas are amenable to more good ideas, and even a leader with few good principles is more open to improvement than a leader with zero good principles.

An objection is that the leader with only a few good principles must have a whole bunch of bad ones. And just as good ideas tend to lead to more good ideas, bad ideas tend to lead to more bad ideas. But this argument actually supports the third attitude: if both good and bad thinking tend to lead to more of the same, the leader who starts out with fewer erroneous beliefs is the best choice.

If less evil is better than more, and voting for the lesser of evils results in less evil, it follows that this is a wise way to vote.

2. The alternatives are imaginary.

At this point, we need to clarify what we mean by “evil” when we say “lesser of two evils.” In my experience, debaters on this point tend to equivocate, defining “evil candidate” sometimes as “garden variety sinner” and other times as “people like Stalin.” The “never vote for a lesser of evils” crowd uses a Stalinesque idea of “evil candidate” to argue against voting for a garden variety sinner they don’t like. The equivocation comes when they turn around and defend voting for the candidate they do like (also a garden variety sinner) because he is no Stalin.

Not exactly a strong argument.

So what do we mean by “evil” when we say “lesser of two evils”? As long as we’re internally consistent (that is, if we don’t equivocate), it doesn’t really matter. If we say an “evil candidate” is any candidate who is not Jesus Christ, then we really have no choice but to vote for “the lesser of evils.” On the other hand, if we say that an “evil candidate” is one who belongs in a whole different class from your average sinner—the class that includes Hitler, Stalin, and Saddam Hussein—it’s pretty unlikely that we’ll ever be choosing between two candidates who are in that class.

Either way, we’re stuck with voting for someone who is less imperfect than someone else.

“But there’s another category!” some insist. Any Christian is not an evil candidate. The thinking here is that if there are two top candidates who are unbelievers and one unelectable, obscure candidate who is a true disciple of Jesus Christ, we can vote for the third and avoid promoting the lesser of evils.

What this counterargument has going for it is that there is indeed a fundamental difference between the regenerate and the unregenerate. You’ll get no denial of that from me. It would also be hard to overstate the potential of that fundamental difference to change how a person weighs his options and governs.

However, the difference in how the believing leader weighs his choices and governs is a potential difference, not necessarily an actual one. Though the believer is fundamentally devoted to Christ, he or she does not necessarily respond to every choice with a conscious and passionate desire to know what would please our Lord. We should make every choice that way, but we all know we don’t. So what’s the real governing difference between an unbelieving candidate and a believing one? Because of the blessing of common grace—often in the form of Christian principles that influence even the thinking of some atheists—a Christian who is immature or poorly informed may govern less Christianly than an unbeliever who has been instilled with deeply Christian habits of thought and true breadth of knowledge.

Of course, having “deeply Christian habits of thought” will not save the non-Christian. Only faith in Christ, and the resulting imputed righteousness, can do that. But these habits will make him a wiser ruler than anyone who lacks them.

If you get out much, you’ll meet non-Christians who, despite their unregenerate condition, think and act much like Christians should. I don’t get out much, and even I’ve met a few. What I’ve encountered more often are professing Christians who do not evidence particularly Christian ways of evaluating the kinds of the moral and ethical questions statesmen face.

To summarize, then, while all believers are “righteous” in a sense that all unbelievers are not, this spiritual and positional difference does not necessarily correlate with governing in a truly Christian way. So when it comes to voting, we can’t class all non-believers as “evil” and all believers as “good” in any sense that relates meaningfully to ability to govern wisely and justly. The real choice we face is one of choosing among candidates who are evil in varying degrees and in different ways.

3. You can still vote your conscience.

I often see this issue framed as though there are two, and only two, choices: voting for a candidate who can win or voting your conscience. It’s an interesting disjunction. Let’s scrutinize it a bit. This argument basically says that you can either vote for a candidate who is nearly perfect or, if you vote for another guy, you are voting for all the things he lacks—you are falling to pragmatism. So a citizen (especially a Christian one) can either vote his conscience or he can vote according to practical considerations.

There’s an unstated premise in this argument: practical matters have nothing to do with conscience.

But how well does that hold up? Suppose I’m fleeing from a burning hotel and discover a damsel in distress on the way out. She’s helpless, pinned down by a heavy beam. For some reason, my many hours of typing haven’t resulted in enough muscle to free her. So what’s the right thing to do? If I stay with her, we both die. If I leave her there and run for help, someone might be able to get her out. The idealist reasons that practical results are irrelevant and conscience requires that a man of principle must not abandon a damsel in distress. But most people abandon idealism in these situations. They understand that conscience sometimes dictates that we do what is practical.

Proponents of “voting your conscience” often make the mistake of assuming that if practical considerations can ever define the conscionable choice, they must always define the conscionable choice. Worse, they often assume that if practical considerations have any role in making ethical choices, they must have the dominant or exclusive role.

But the truth is that there are at least three approaches to the relationship between conscience (principle) and practical results:

  1. Pragmatism: practical results are always decisive and are all that matter.
  2. Idealism: practical results are completely irrelevant; only principle matters.
  3. Principled realism: practical results are part of the principle that matters.

Two of these approaches are ways of “voting your conscience.”

If I believe that voting for candidate C (who is a close match to my principles) will result in the election of candidate A (who believes in very little that I know to be wise and good), and I vote for candidate B (who is better than A) for that reason, I am voting my conscience. I just don’t happen to be an idealist.

Whatever the ticket ends up looking like in 2012, Christians ought to vote with the goal of putting power in the hands of the lesser of evils.

Discussion

It’s easy to become cynical about politicians in general. Super easy. But they are ultimately just human beings manifesting human nature in some special ways that politics creates.

  • If you believe every negative attack ad, you’ll soon conclude that the whole lot of them are evil beasts.
  • If you disbelieve every attack ad, you’ll soon conclude that every one of them plays awfully fast and loose with the truth when striving to discredit the opposition.

Somewhere between is probably the wiser course, leaning toward the second option.

As for Cruz, the emails I get from the campaign every day (often multiple times a day) do show a certain manipulativeness. They are heavily spun. You could argue that this is just the genre. But the constant manufacturing of crises that need my donations to help with… they cannot all be real.

As a strategy though… wow, these guys know how to campaign. It’s excessively pragmatic, but the thing about pragmatism is that it, well, works.

Verifiable facts

Given the verifiable facts about Trump vs. the verifiable facts about Cruz, it is quite obvious who has more credibility when it comes to the accusations that go around in campaigns. It’s abundantly clear what sort of liar Trump is. He’s been cutting lose whoppers every day for 40 years. (Pinch of hyperbole there, but not much I think.)

Cruz isn’t spotless in this department, sadly. But if Trump is the NFL of lying and womanizing, Cruz is kind of the backyard flag football match.

James 4

A word about how James 4 applies in the case of politicians who claim (credibly or not) to be Christians. When you run for public office you are putting your character out there for all to analyze and pass judgment on. So you’ve invited that. That said, we do all have an obligation to be as factual as we can… and not reckless in accusations.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

Definitions are important.

What does it mean to “support a leader who is a sinner”? I am to pray for those in authority. I am to submit to those in authority. But I owe no support to leaders when their course of action is against God’s will (Acts 4).

As for 1 Cor. 5:9-10, the key definition is for “keep company”. Paul’s point is that we don’t need to live in a monastery or convent. When candidates come to Iowa I can visit with them in person and even eat with them. However, 1 Cor. 5:9-10 gives no indication that I need to vote for any of them and give my support to ungodly policies and positions. On the other hand, my understanding and application of passages like Eph.5 is that I should not vote for any candidate who pursues ungodly policies. Eph. 5 speaks of “taking part” which is a stronger relationship than “keeping company”. While the primary application of Eph 5 isn’t voting, I believe the principles in Eph. 5 do apply to voting. And in this case “less” does not matter.

While everyone is a sinner, some rulers are evil and some are not. And some rulers are more evil than others (1 Kings 16:30). So there is a basis for us to categorize some candidates as evil and some as not evil.

The point of Hitler vs. Stalin is not that any candidate today is like Hitler or Stalin. The point is that there is a certain level of evil that people will not cross. The question then becomes, what is your maximum level of evil? And if the syllogism is sound, then it should apply in all cases, even with Hitler vs. Stalin.

I think I understand you better, Jonathan.

Part of the case I make in the article is that 99% of the time, when people decry voting for the lesser of evils, there is not really an “evil” candidate on the ballot, much less two of them. That’s the gist of argument #2.

But does the logic of argument 1 work in a genuine “two evils” scenario? No. It’s really not meant for that.The whole piece is about what to do when one electable option is actually less problematic than the other.

But the logic of argument 1 can still work in a Hitler vs. Stalin scenario if a few stipulations are thrown in. One of them is already included: that we can actually tell which of the two is less evil. If we stipulate as well that in the case, a vote for a third “can’t win” option or a refusal to vote at all has the result of helping the worst of the two win, the reasoning that a voter for the better of the two is a vote for less evil still holds… which is pretty much the reasoning of argument 3. Actual results have moral significance.

So probably what helps most at this stage is point out that argument 1 in the essay assumes that there is a candidate who can win who is likely going to do less evil than the alternative. The logic holds in the scenario it’s meant for.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

I think the main issue for me is “where do you draw the line?” It’s not so much the “lesser of two evils” as it is “how evil do they have to be before you refuse to vote for them?”

If you had to choose between Hitler and Stalin, obviously that’s a Hobson’s choice, but when it’s not as extreme as that, where do you draw the line?

Given the choice between Clinton (pro-choice) and Trump (who I believe to be neither pro-choice nor pro-life but instead pro-Trump), I can’t choose. It’s six of one, half dozen of the other.

If history is any indicator, what a theoretical President Cruz would accomplish in reducing gov. spending vs. what he would like to accomplish will differ by a good bit.

To Steve’s comment. I don’t personally believe the degree of evilness is relevant. We always want less of it, so the guiding principle for voting has to be “what is likely to result in less evil?” as best we can determine that. Where that principle truly fails is when there is no reasonable certainty as to which option is going to be less evil… There is always a lot of uncertainty, and it comes down to voter’s best judgment. But sometimes even best judgment can’t identify a better option.

And, as already noted, there is the short-term vs. long-term good-vs.-evil factor, which gets even more difficult to evaluate. But sometimes it can be better in the long run for the inferior candidate to win and make a short term mess. Sometimes. It’s risky because you never know what the electorate will actually learn from a disaster. Given that most of them voted on pure emotion to begin with (or so it certainly seems), it’s improbable that letting the worst option win to “teach ‘em all some long term wisdom” would prove to be effective.

The electorate does not seem to actually learn much.

Blessedly, where bad policy has relatively short term disastrous results—which is the case not all that infrequently—even our cognitively-challenged electorate gets in a mood to try something else. And a little good comes of it now and then.

Democracy… if only there were something better. But not as long as sinners rule over sinners.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

In the article I show why we cannot morally ignore outcomes… At least when we have a high level of certainty.

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

I’m not sure how to evaluate a high degree of certainty when it comes to the whole “vote for candidate B who’s a scoundrel to block candidate A who is a worse scoundrel” scenario. This presumes to know that candidate A is a lock unless we all gang together to vote for candidate B. And who exactly are the “all of us” who will stand together to establish this certainty?

I think the whole thought process assumes a level of control over the outcome of an election that no single person can possibly exercise.

Pretty much everything we do in life is in hopes of accomplishing particular results—results we are always less than 100% certain will occur. . But we are supposed to try. We all rightly admire the guy who tries to rescue a drowning person in frigid water even though he is not able to be certain he’ll succeed. (but we don’t admire the guy who attempts this when he himself doesn’t know how to swim! )

Views expressed are always my own and not my employer's, my church's, my family's, my neighbors', or my pets'. The house plants have authorized me to speak for them, however, and they always agree with me.

I’m not responsible for who wins the election. I’m only responsible for my involvement.