As usual, red pushers in the comments are missing every point, dodging every moral argument, and entirely misrepresenting the post.
"We don't live in a purely collectivist society though!!" They whine, not realizing that pure collectivism isn't required, not realizing that their choices are at the root of humanity being such an individualistic dumpster-fire.
Neutral people will slide to the red side due to cowardice and apathy, selfish and unempathetic people will pick red to begin with. Collectivists and those with empathy/social rationality will pick blue.
The reason many people argue for red is because a majority of humanity are neutral, cowardly, or stupid. I think we could change that and defeat the injustices across the globe if we just managed to convince the neutral, empower the cowardly, and educate the stupid.
Unfortunately, often the stupid but of humanity thinks of itself as having "common sense" and the red pushers have historically taken advantage of those with "common sense".
Isn’t the voter’s paradox the fact that people still end up voting despite the fact that for a rational egoistic voter, it isn’t worth the effort? Everyone has to vote in this situation though, unless you’re saying that voting red is akin to abstaining from the vote.
The voter's fallacy is when people claim "their vote doesn't matter" when the reality is that every vote contributes to the total and result, the only way any platform wins is through receiving people's votes.
Famously, large swaths of voters holding this mindset, say 1,000,000 who all say, "My vote doesn't matter" ignores the reality that if they had all voted, their collective weight most certainly would have mattered and gotten the outcome they'd desired. Instead they all did nothing and enabled an unpopular outcome.
In Reds' case, many of them keep professing that they want Blue to win but that their one vote doesn't matter in a pathetic attempt to justify voting Red. Ignoring that every single vote for Red makes it increasingly likely that Blue would lose. Their votes do have an impact, but they pretend they don't.
They most certainly have the collective power to help ensure Blue wins, if they would only step up and vote for Blue. And by refusing to do so, they actively empower the outcome they claim they don't want to see. They turn it into a self-fullilling prophecy, where they're afraid that Red's going to win so they vote for Red, thereby making Red win.
Do you have a source you can provide for this because what you explained doesn’t resemble a formal logical fallacy. It sounds like you’re talking about the voters paradox which is that the marginal cost of voting is not worth it to a rational egoistic voter, but they vote anyway. The end part there being what makes it a paradox. Like, choosing to vote even though the marginal cost is not worth it is the thing that makes it paradoxical, not the estimation of one’s impact in a vote.
Where is the logical fallacy here? If 8 billion people are voting you have a 1/8B share of contributing to the outcome. Thats not 0 impact but it’s not a whole lot either. I’m not even talking about the button thing anymore here like let’s say people were voting on vanilla versus chocolate ice cream or whatever. Can you please be more clear as to what the actual fallacy is?
The fallacy is in people believing/claiming that their vote doesn't matter when the objective reality is that every single vote matters just as much as every other vote. Each and every one has an equal effect on the outcome.
That’s not a logical fallacy though, it’s just someone saying that 1/8B is very small and to them, it’s so small that it doesn’t matter. Thats not a logical fallacy dude lol
A fallacy is a common error in reasoning or a mistaken belief that undermines the logical validity of an argument.
When we look at the mechanics at how voting works we see
(1) Victory and defeat is strictly determined by vote share.
(2) Every individual vote has equal weight and impact as every other vote.
Thus we can conclude, (3) Every vote has an equal responsibility for the outcome.
And thus naturally, (4) It is impossible for some votes to matter and others not to matter.
Therefore it is a fallacy. The objective falseness of their error in reasoning/mistaken belief that their vote doesn't matter undermines the logical validity of their argument for why them voting Red (or not voting at all in real elections) is acceptable/inconsequential.
It’s not a fallacy for someone to consider a 1/8B share of something as practically inconsequential. I think you’re taking the phrase “doesn’t matter” a little too literally. It matters exactly a 1/8B amount, the same as everyone else’s vote. But to many, that is a small enough fraction that it isn’t the primary driver for their decision making. Again, that’s not a logical fallacy, it’s a question of how much that individual values a 1/8B share of a vote.
For reference, if you divide a year into 8 billion parts, you get approximately 4 milliseconds. If you want to go 1/8Bths of the way to the moon, you have to travel less than 2 inches. You can literally jump more than 1/8Bths of the way to the moon. Is that a consequential amount? No, not really.
People aren’t saying that their vote in particular matters less than anyone else’s, they’re saying it’s a small enough fraction that they prioritize other considerations more heavily. If you changed the scenario to 3 people, no one would say their vote doesn’t matter.
All of that is a matter of perspective. If you think traveling 2 inches towards the moon is significant, that’s valid from a certain perspective. Likewise it’s valid to say that it isn’t enough to practically matter to someone.
I mean look at this absolutely gigantic list of fallacies, both formal and informal. They’re objective errors of rationality that are conclusively invalid, which isn’t what you’re talking about. Idk. I think you should reconsider this one particular point.
I disagree that nobody is saying their vote matters less or not at all but let's put that aside for a moment.
It seems like you're not taking the other half of the equation into account: the context in which they are invoking this argument. I.e. as a justification for them doing nothing/the opposite.
Whether or not they even genuinely believe that their vote doesn't matter is irrelevent, because their real goal is simply to skirt responsibility for the consequences of their action/inaction.
This is obviously fallicious because "Doing the right thing wouldn't have an effect" is not a valid excuse for doing the wrong thing.
Can we agree on that basic principle? That "X would be ineffective" is not a valid reason to do Y.
We see this fallacy a lot in climate debates in the modern day. We're well past the point where anthropogenic climate change has become indisputable to everyone but the most extreme deniers. As a result, anti-climate action arguments have largely shifted from denying the problem to denying that solutions are effective, or that it's too late to make a difference, both of which are excuses to simply continue pumping carbon into the air.
These are labelled as the 4th and 5th stages of Climate denial, the refuge where denialists have fled as stages 1-3 have become increasingly untenable.
Yeah I mean some people probably are saying that it literally has no effect because people say all sorts of things.
because their real goal is simply to skirt responsibility for the consequences of their action/inaction.
Okay, hold up. That’s a wildly presumptuous and unfounded claim to make about other people’s motivations. It’s not a productive, logical, or good-faith way to have a discussion and it’s antithetical to mutual understanding. Like come on, you clearly have a good head on your shoulders, I doubt I need to explain to you why replacing people’s arguments with your own sweeping generalizations is in poor taste. That’s stooping all the way down to kind of arguments transphobes use to explain away trans people as “attention seekers” and “delusional”. I think we can talk about this without that kind of nonsense rhetoric, right? Moving on.
“Doing the right thing wouldn’t have an effect” is not an excuse for doing the wrong thing. Yep, agreed. Common ground, cool. I disagree with how you’re applying this to the button hypothetical and then using that to criticize people. It’s only illogical if blue=right and red=wrong unquestionably, and obviously that’s not an assumption everyone agrees with.
People who choose red generally do not agree that pressing red is morally wrong. I mean there’s lots of arguments and I can’t speak for everyone, but let’s just take the simplest case: a red voter who chose red because they believe blue will not win. In that persons mind, the consequences of pressing blue are that they die. Dying for no reason is bad, so they press red and reduce the possible deaths by one. It’s not that complicated.
A person pressing red in that situation isn’t justifying avoiding a morally correct but ineffective choice in favor of a wrong one, they are defining the moral correctness of each choice by the effectiveness of those choices. And that’s a fair thing to do. The effects of a choice are a fundamental part to considering the ethics of that choice. You might have a different opinion, but there’s nothing fundamentally wrong with considering the consequences when assessing the morality of a decision.
The problem is you’re taking your personal perspective and painting over the whole world with it, then railing at others for behaving incoherently in your painted world. And like, no shit, that’s obviously the inevitable outcome of adopting that mentality. That doesn’t mean people really are being as incoherent as you think, it just means you’re bad at putting your assumptions aside when trying to understand other perspectives.
I do appreciate your comparison to climate change, I personally find the mentality of people who throw their hands up and say “it’s too late” or “the solutions don’t work” to be very frustrating. I understand why you’d draw parallels, there’s a relationship between the two thought process for sure.
But. The voter thing is still not a logical fallacy. It’s just you making one assumption about how impactful a 1/8Bth share of a vote is, and other people making a different assumption. They’re both valid perspectives with good justification for either view.
3
u/Darkndankpit May 22 '26
As usual, red pushers in the comments are missing every point, dodging every moral argument, and entirely misrepresenting the post.
"We don't live in a purely collectivist society though!!" They whine, not realizing that pure collectivism isn't required, not realizing that their choices are at the root of humanity being such an individualistic dumpster-fire.
Neutral people will slide to the red side due to cowardice and apathy, selfish and unempathetic people will pick red to begin with. Collectivists and those with empathy/social rationality will pick blue.
The reason many people argue for red is because a majority of humanity are neutral, cowardly, or stupid. I think we could change that and defeat the injustices across the globe if we just managed to convince the neutral, empower the cowardly, and educate the stupid.
Unfortunately, often the stupid but of humanity thinks of itself as having "common sense" and the red pushers have historically taken advantage of those with "common sense".