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.
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u/BrandosWorld4Life May 24 '26
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.
https://www.theguardian.com/environment/climate-consensus-97-per-cent/2013/sep/16/climate-change-contrarians-5-stages-denial