Must consequentialists vote for Joe Biden?
The problem with pro-Biden consequentialists is that they're not real consequentialists
A prominent argument for voting for Joe Biden to be president is that it’s a consequentialist or utilitarian obligation. (Consequentialism is a superset of utilitarianism, so I’ll lean on the former term in the rest of this post.) My own ethics skew consequentialist, so it’s an argument I take seriously.
The nub of the argument is that as president Joe Biden would do more good, or at least less harm, than Donald Trump. One New York Times op-ed from May, “I Believe Tara Reade. I’m Voting for Joe Biden Anyway.” even uses the word “utilitarian”!
Suck it up and make the utilitarian bargain.
All major Democratic Party figures have indicated they’re not budging on the presumptive nominee, and the transaction costs of replacing him would be suicidal. Barring some miracle, it’s going to be Mr. Biden.
So what is the greatest good or the greatest harm? Mr. Biden, and the Democrats he may carry with him into government, are likely to do more good for women and the nation than his competition, the worst president in the history of the Republic. Compared with the good Mr. Biden can do, the cost of dismissing Tara Reade — and, worse, weakening the voices of future survivors — is worth it. And don’t call me an amoral realist. Utilitarianism is not a moral abdication; it is a moral stance.
Sometimes the argument’s phrased in terms of “harm reduction”: installing Biden as president would do less net harm than Trump, so consequentialists should vote for Biden. A couple more New York Times articles document this phrasing as well. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez used the phrase in an interview (“Beating Donald Trump is a matter of life and death for our communities. I think it’s a difference between making an argument for harm reduction, and making the argument for, there’s actually going to be progress made for us”) and a report about black men in battleground states observed that for “some Black male voters, their argument for Mr. Biden at this point was one of harm reduction”.
Let’s cast the argument in explicit, rigorous form.
Major premise: good consequentialists must vote for the presidential candidate who’d have better consequences for everybody.
Minor premise: a Biden presidential term would have better consequences for everybody than a second Trump term.
Conclusion: good consequentialists must vote for Biden.
You can of course defeat the syllogism by discarding either premise. If you’re not a consequentialist, why vote based on your vote’s consequences? Or, if you think that a second Trump term would be better than a Biden term, you can get the opposite conclusion: you must vote for Trump! Maybe you think Trump’s tax cut was the best thing ever, and expect you’ll get another if Trump’s re-elected, and that’s all that you think matters.
But a lot of us accept both premises, and it’s pretty hard to question the conclusion if you do. In one conversation, popular left-wing YouTubers ContraPoints and Vaush (with 1,355,000 subscribers, and rising, between them) endorse a utilitarian approach to voting, and freely disdain “the incredible resistance to voting for a candidate who we don’t like but who’s obviously, obviously, better than the other one … people are not thinking in terms of, of, y’know, likely effects of their actions”. The consequentialist argument is so elegant as to seem ironclad.
Unfortunately, the elegant argument has an elegant hole in it!
The hole is that consequentialism requires consequentialists to account for all of the (predictable) consequences of a decision. So consequentialists must assess not just what happens during the next presidential term, but the long-term consequences that play out after the term. And the biggest of those long-term consequences is that electing Biden now might make it more likely that Trump, or someone even worse than Trump, becomes president later! And, to my knowledge, not one proponent of the consequentialist case seriously addresses that long-term consequence!
In short, the syllogism fails because the minor premise isn’t obviously true, because it really refers to all foreseeable consequences over all time. 4 years of Biden might be better for everybody during those 4 years, but if they cause a backlash that re-elects Trump (or elects Tucker Carlson or elects Richard Spencer) in 2024, those 4 years of Biden could prove worse than 4 more years of Trump. The fallacy of our supposedly consequentialist Biden backers is that they’re applying consequentialism improperly by neglecting potential consequences!
You can argue that the risk of backlash is speculative and hypothetical, but the original fallacious argument is also speculative and hypothetical (we’ve yet to observe Biden’s actual performance as president), so no one who accepted the original argument can make this rebuttal.
A slightly better rebuttal is that the risk of backlash is too low to matter. But to make that rebuttal, you have to make a case for why you think the risk is low, and specifically why you think it’s low enough. I myself don’t think the backlash risk is high, but it doesn’t have to be. If electing Biden instead of re-electing Trump raises the risk of someone 100 times worse by even a few percent, I can turn the original argument back on itself: wouldn’t left-wing consequentialists have to vote for Trump to lower the risk of getting someone worse in 2024?
Perhaps the best rebuttal is along those lines. After all, if the backlash risk is bad enough, my argument would oblige even a left-wing consequentialist to vote for Trump in this year’s election, and isn’t that a reductio ad absurdum? Well, maybe, but my counter is that we don’t really know the backlash risk. We know it isn’t negligible — after all, it was an Obama-Biden presidency that begot a Trump presidency. That makes the risk big enough that it should enter our calculations, and it makes things uncertain enough that it’s not obvious whether, in the long run, 4 years of Biden is really better than 4 more years of Trump. But I don’t claim to have a reason why the backlash is so big a risk that we have to support Trump. Just that it’s a big enough risk to make a consequentialist’s voting decision cloudy.
Ultimately, that’s all I need for my consequentialist counterargument to work. Biden is likely the better choice by my standards. But neither I nor you know enough about the longer-term risks to be sure that consequentialists must vote for Biden.
Update, 10 November 2020: Axios reports that Trump is already considering running for president again in 2024. See, I thought of that possibility, because I did my consequentialist homework, and you probably didn’t. And no, your knee-jerk excuses for neglecting the prospect of a 2024 Trump run don’t work. Trump won’t be too old to run again: he’s nearly 4 years younger than Biden. Trump probably won’t be dead: actuarially, Trump has an 86% chance of surviving 4 more years. And Trump won’t be in prison: when was the last time an American billionaire or an American ex-president went to prison, let alone an American billionaire ex-president?