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David 
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| Post subject: Collective action and individual responsibility |  |
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This is something I just posted on Facebook. Would be interested to hear your thoughts:
Hypothetical: Next election, without informing anyone of your intentions, you vote for Hitler and his National Socialist Party. Hitler wins your electorate by 1500 votes and goes on to become Prime Minister. Are you morally responsible for his victory, and if so, to what extent?
Before you answer this, consider that you go to the polling booth intending to vote for Hitler, but at the last second vote for Abraham Lincoln instead. Hitler wins by 1499 votes. Are you any less responsible for his victory now? Or were your actions in each case ultimately irrelevant, despite the fact that, as we all know, if everyone else independently did the same thing, Hitler wouldn't have been elected?
Is there a philosophical or psychological term for this paradox?
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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Wokko 
Come and take it.
Joined: 04 Oct 2005
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Ahhh, the illusion of democracy.
The ones to blame are either those who influence enough public opinion to bring about a negative result OR those who created the conditions for extremism to take root. So for example, destroying an economy and then having your society fall into moral degradation is a great way to bring on a Nationalist movement.
Starving peasants are a great way to bring on a Communist Revolution etc.
An individual voter is totally powerless and absolved from responsibility unless that voter convinced enough people personally to follow their lead. |
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Dave The Man 
Joined: 01 Apr 2005
Location: Someville, Victoria, Australia
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Hitler is Dead so that Makes no Sense
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I am Da Man |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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I chose voting as my particular example here, but I could have chosen others – say, the individual's choice to buy unethically sourced products from a supermarket, or (my girlfriend's example) the decision to drop a single lolly wrapper on the beach. Essentially, acts that in isolation have minimal (or zero) real-world impact, but if repeated en masse have serious consequences. How do we assign responsibility in such cases? More to the point, is there any use in privately talking your wife out of voting for Hitler knowing that that decision in isolation will have practically zero impact on whether or not he gets in?
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie 
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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Interesting.
If you vote for Hitler and he wins by one vote, are you any more or less responsible than everyone else who voted for him?
Like the lolly wrapper, one vote means nothing it's only when there's enough of them does it mean something.
I'll work on the theory that everyone is responsible for their own actions but not for the collective actions of others.
To paraphrase your question David with a real example, if you voted democrat back in the 80's when Meg Lees helped Howard get in the GST, what's your level of responsibility for the GST?
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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| stui magpie wrote: | Interesting.
If you vote for Hitler and he wins by one vote, are you any more or less responsible than everyone else who voted for him?
Like the lolly wrapper, one vote means nothing it's only when there's enough of them does it mean something.
I'll work on the theory that everyone is responsible for their own actions but not for the collective actions of others.
To paraphrase your question David with a real example, if you voted democrat back in the 80's when Meg Lees helped Howard get in the GST, what's your level of responsibility for the GST? |
I guess it depends whether or not they were running on that policy (from memory, a lot of Democrat voters saw it as a betrayal). A better example would be Liberal/National voters as Howard explicitly ran on that policy.
On the first question (i.e. Hitler winning by one vote), your culpability is ostensibly the same as everybody else who voted for him, but your specific single voting decision (just like every other individual Hitler voter's) has actually had real-world consequences – which it wouldn't have had if he'd won by 3 votes, or 100 votes, or so on. And this is such a rare outcome that I think we can safely say* that an individual vote practically never achieves anything at all.
* although we probably shouldn't, because then people actually will stop caring about voting and you actually will get real-world consequences.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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stui magpie
Prepare for the worst, hope for the best.
Joined: 03 May 2005
Location: In flagrante delicto
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I used the GST scenario as an example of when your actions have unintended consequences.
If you drop a lolly wrapper on the beach, can you reliably foresee that a penguin will choke on it and die?
If you vote for a minority party can you reliably foresee that they may make a deal with the government to pass legislation you disagree with?
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Every dead body on Mt Everest was once a highly motivated person, so maybe just calm the **** down. |
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David
I dare you to try
Joined: 27 Jul 2003
Location: Andromeda
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On the lolly wrapper, I guess that comes down to information. Many people, one would hope, realise that plastic can kill seabirds. But what if nobody ever told you? Is it your fault for not knowing? What if you did once know, but forgot? All interesting things to consider here imho.
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All watched over by machines of loving grace |
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think positive
Side By Side
Joined: 30 Jun 2005
Location: somewhere
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| David wrote: | | On the lolly wrapper, I guess that comes down to information. Many people, one would hope, realise that plastic can kill seabirds. But what if nobody ever told you? Is it your fault for not knowing? What if you did once know, but forgot? All interesting things to consider here imho. |
You'd hope some one had pointed out, or you just happen to notice that lolly wrappers on the beach look messy, and yeah just take your crap home already!
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You cant fix stupid, turns out you cant quarantine it either! |
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HAL
Please don't shout at me - I can't help it.
Joined: 17 Mar 2003
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| Yes. |
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Mugwump
Joined: 28 Jul 2007
Location: Between London and Melbourne
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| Post subject: Re: Collective action and individual responsibility | |
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| David wrote: | This is something I just posted on Facebook. Would be interested to hear your thoughts:
Hypothetical: Next election, without informing anyone of your intentions, you vote for Hitler and his National Socialist Party. Hitler wins your electorate by 1500 votes and goes on to become Prime Minister. Are you morally responsible for his victory, and if so, to what extent?
Before you answer this, consider that you go to the polling booth intending to vote for Hitler, but at the last second vote for Abraham Lincoln instead. Hitler wins by 1499 votes. Are you any less responsible for his victory now? Or were your actions in each case ultimately irrelevant, despite the fact that, as we all know, if everyone else independently did the same thing, Hitler wouldn't have been elected?
Is there a philosophical or psychological term for this paradox? |
There was once a great Austrian philosopher called Ludwig Wittgenstein. He was very difficult, but in essence his argument was that most philosophical problems stem from the difficulties we have in how words relate to the world, especially abstract nouns. It's not just a matter of different definitions, it's the near impossibility of connecting abstract nouns to states of affairs in the world.
Many of the discussions on here are cases in point, and this seems to me one of those. The word in this case is "responsibility". In the "Hitler as PM" case, you are not responsible in that your action did not itself cause the state of affairs to arise. You are responsible insofar as your act of will expresses a belief which you presumably would want others to hold, and/orinsofar as you assented to the state of affairs that has now come into being. Equally, by voting for Hitler, you are providing fuel to increase his political standing, even if he did not win. In all of those sense you are responsible for boosting Hitlerism, but you are not responsible for his becoming Prime Minister, no.
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Two more flags before I die! |
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