Compulsory Voting

[BrianSoddingBoru4]

Eating meat is not an immoral act. Why do you think it is?

Because somebody has to die for you to eat meat, and buying meat is supporting that.
But let's think of a slightly different analogy... What you said is like saying farmers are not committing an immoral act by preventatively giving antibiotics to farmed animals because they are not motivated by immorality.

You’ve just refuted Huemer’s view that ALL voting, in and of itself, is immoral.

That's not what he said. He said that voting in most elections (because, in most elections, it is impossible to be an informed voter) is immoral. Like voting between Hillary Clinton (a woman who threatens to start World War 3, who is explicitly against LGBT people, and so on...) and Donald Trump (who is obviously incompetent): how would you inform yourself on what is the less of the two evils? If some election is about a single issue which it is possible to inform yourself about, then voting there is not immoral.

Suppose you find a wallet in the street. The wallet is stuffed with cash and credit cards. You find the owner’s name and address in the wallet. Unfortunately, he lives more than 100 miles away and you lack the means to return it in person. Being a good citizen, you turn the wallet in to your local police station and they return the wallet. Later, you discover that the owner of the wallet was a paedophile and used the money you returned to him to purchase child pornography. Have you committed an immoral act by returning the wallet before you found out everything you could about the owner?

That might be the correct analogy for: "You are forced to vote. You have a choice between something you think will benefit you (keeping the wallet) and something you think will benefit the society (returning the wallet). You vote for that which you think will benefit the society. That turns out to have disasterous consequences.", but that's not how most elections work. In most elections, you are not forced to vote. You can say that you will not vote. And that's what I think is the most moral thing to do.

1. Death is not immoral, nor is killing (necessarily). No, giving preventive antibiotics to food animals, while arguably not the wisest course of action, is not an immoral act.

2. Wrong. Huemer goes on at great lengths that voting or any other political action, is inherently immoral (this is to be expected from an anarchic-capitalist). By extension, Huemer would us collapse into a quagmire on indecision, because it is impossible to know all the outcomes of any decision we make about anything.

3. You didn’t answer my question (not that I was expecting you to do so). Your analogy is flawed because it hasn’t been established that you are forced to do anything about the wallet. And you are still ignoring the point that the unintended consequences of an act carry no moral weight for the original actor, one way or the other.

Boru