And then there's the principle of double effect.
From 2016:
Three ways to vote on Tuesday with a clean conscience
Father Matthew Schneider L.C.Nov 3, 2016
SPECIAL TO CRUX
If I can’t vote for anyone, can I vote against someone?
The current U.S. election seems to be a race to the bottom. In the past, usually I could see a good argument to vote for one candidate based on character and issues, despite a few imperfections; in this election, the argument to vote against each one of the candidates seems stronger than the argument to vote for either.
Archbishop Charles Chaput of Philadelphia summarized the Catholic conundrum: “One candidate - in the view of a lot of people - is an eccentric businessman of defective ethics whose bombast and buffoonery make him inconceivable as president. And the other - in the view of a lot of people - should be under criminal indictment. The fact that she’s not - again, in the view of a lot of people - proves Orwell’s Animal Farm principle that ‘all animals are equal, but some are more equal than others.’”
In that quote, Chaput is only talking about character, yet it seems both major candidates are seriously at odds with Catholicism on certain issues too. I won’t do an in-depth analysis, as I don’t want to beat a horse that’s already been killed three times over.
In such a situation, what is a good Catholic to do? I find it very hard to argue that you should vote for either of the two major candidates. I find many of my friends in a similar position, feeling they can’t vote for either candidate.
Nonetheless, in a democratic society, a Catholic has a duty to vote. I want to present three ways Catholics can vote with a morally clean conscience: they can vote against someone, they can vote for a minor candidate, or they can ruin their ballot.
Voting Against
Voting against someone would follow from the Catholic principle of double effect.
The opening scene of the movie Vertical Limit displays this principle graphically: a dad and his two kids are hanging perilously off a rock cliff by a single contact point and it’s slipping, so the dad instructs his son above him to cut the rope. Cutting the rope saves the boy and his sister, because they’re able to hang there until help comes, but it also causes the father’s fall and death.
This can often get confused with “choosing the lesser evil,” but in Catholic moral theology we can never choose evil. This is choosing the good which is realizable, or preventing evil when not all good is realizable.
To vote against someone technically requires placing a vote for another person, but to qualify as a voter against rather than a vote for, several principles need to be respected.
First, there needs to be no other way to prevent the dreaded result we are avoiding. If millions of Americans got together, a third party could win, but as an individual, it is a fair judgment to assume your vote for a third party won’t make it win.
Second, the person we mark our ballot for when voting against someone else needs to be less problematic from a Catholic moral perspective.
Third, our intention needs to be to prevent one person from taking the office and not to give it to the other person.
Fourth, we must fulfill the norm that our action is not intrinsically evil, because voting is good and we are explicitly trying to prevent the greatest evil from happening.
Fifth, there is a complicated point of means and ends: the means (voting for X) of achieving the end (preventing Y from being president) cannot be evil in themselves. Participating in politics to the degree it is possible is in itself good, and, if you are voting for someone with some redeeming qualities (which every candidate I know of has), you can be voting positively for those redeeming qualities. Thus, casting a vote for one of the two major candidates can be moral if it is done in order to prevent the other from taking the office.
A summary of this view was stated by a moral theologian, whose opening paragraph on who they were voting for was, “I am voting for [X] because they are not [Y].”
Knowing and using the principle of double effect, I voted against Trump.
The other two options (third party vote, no vote/write in) follow at the link.
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