Wednesday, October 27, 2004

Alasdair MacIntyre agrees with me

Via Verbum Ipsum, I discover this essay on voting by eminent ethicist Alasdair MacIntyre (his book, Whose Justice? Which Rationality? was one of my required readings in a comparative ethics class I took at CUA). Note that his primary reason for not voting is exactly the same as what I laid out in my own essay on voting: it's an honest moral choice when faced with unpalatable alternatives.

There is, however, one major difference: in my argument, I say that not voting is part of how the system works. MacIntyre is saying that a considered refusal to vote is a rejection of the system. I disagree with him here. If Americans were obliged to vote, then yes, a refusal to vote would be an obvious rejection of the system. But in the US, non-voting is a live option and part of the process, not, as the misguided argue, opting out of the process.

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