 I hear that Obama studied some really esoteric moral philosophy while he was at Harvard. I'm glad that we finally have a president with some ethic diversity. If your Facebook feed is anything like mine, it's pretty clear that many Americans don't think that they're just choosing between different tax plans or health care policies to this election season, but between good and evil. Or between evil and not so evil. Or between stupid, crazy, renegade, alliance, chaotic neutral, framing a decision like voting as a moral choice opens up an entirely different can of worms from simple disagreements about policy. Claiming that voters are acting morally or immorally by voting a certain way implicitly assumes that there's some sort of objective standard of good and evil that their actions can be judged by. Unfortunately, and I don't know if you've noticed this, there's some disagreement about which votes are good and which ones are evil. If you're a moral realist, someone who believes that there are certain facts about right or wrong that are true regardless of someone's personal opinion, then you're probably going to want some sort of objective system that dictates what those are. These sorts of systems, collectively termed ethics, are meant to justify certain moral assertions in a way that's a little bit more convincing than, uh, no, I just know good and evil better than you do. There are hundreds of such systems, but philosophers have managed to cram them more or less into three main categories. Deontological Ethics, Consequentialist Ethics, and Virtue Ethics. Let's take a very brief look at some notable examples from each category and how they might apply to the presidential election. Please note that I'm trying to summarize over 2,000 years of philosophy in about seven minutes, so if you have any interest in the details, check out the links in the description. You're probably familiar with the most famous of deontological, or duty-based ethics, the Golden Rule. Do unto others as you would have them do unto you. Ethical forms of ethics stress the rightness or wrongness of actions in and of themselves. It's not do unto others as you would have them do unto you, unless they're a jerk, or if it wouldn't make you late to fencing practice. Ethics of this form are sometimes called non-consequentialists, because as far as the system is concerned, it doesn't really matter what happens after you act. All that matters is that you do, or don't do, something. Many religious forms of ethics are deontological, as the rightness or wrongness of an action may be judged according to whether a deity commands or forbids it. The idea of intrinsic human rights also fits into this category. Violating someone's rights is always wrong, even if it might lead to something good later on. These sorts of ethical systems tend to be very clean and well-ordered. They reflect moral intuitions that many people share, and they're often very easy to apply. But they also have some drawbacks. Let's look closely at one of the most famous deontologies ever invented, Emmanuel Kant's Categorical Imperative. Explaining it fully would take a few episodes unto itself, but in brief, Kant asserted that morality was a natural extension of rational thought, that the rules of right and wrong were deducible from the principle of logical non-contradiction. Let's say that you're thinking of lying. Under Kant's method, you would consider what the world would be like if the underlying principle of your action, lying, was universal. In that world, as a general rule, people lie whenever they like, and everyone understands that fact and expects the same sort of behavior from everyone else. In such a world, there's no real reason to believe that someone who tells you something is telling the truth. So people generally wouldn't trust each other to tell the truth. So there would be no value in lying in the first place. For Kant, that leads to a sort of self-contradiction. By lying, you're willing a world in which your action has no meaning. That doesn't make a lot of sense, so a rational individual shouldn't lie. That's fantastic. A system of ethics built on logic. The problem is Kant's categorical imperative forbids lying no matter what. Even if doing so might be a good thing. Even if there are Nazis at your door asking where you hid the Jews. The cleanliness and simplicity of deontologies is only really possible because they're non-consequentialists, because they don't really muck about with the likely outcome or detail surrounding an action, even if those details seem morally significant. As such, if you wanted to vote deontologically, the only things that matter are in the voting booth with you, the ballot and your rules for how any person should vote. What other voters are likely to do, which candidate has the best chance of winning, none of that is morally relevant. In fact, according to the categorical imperative, it would be immoral to try and vote strategically. If everyone was second-guessing how everyone else would vote and shifting their own accordingly, there wouldn't be any legitimate votes left to strategize around. The most common foil to deontology is consequentialist ethics. Based on the idea that the only thing that really matters for determining if a given action is right or wrong is the ultimate outcome of that action, whether it makes the world better or worse. Most consequentialist ethics descend from a theory developed by Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill called utilitarianism. Utilitarians assert that the only morally correct sort of action is one which maximizes happiness or pleasure and minimizes suffering, the combination of which is called utility for short. For them, the only intrinsic value in life is utility and an action's value can be determined by how much it increases utility compared to other possible actions. This is a plausible sounding idea. If someone needlessly increases the amount of suffering in the world or decreases the amount of happiness, then that would be morally wrong. Killing one person to save millions of lives might be the right thing to do. Okay, I can get behind that. Mill and Bentham are both pretty clear that you're not expected to try and calculate the utility for every single person on Earth, for every single action you take to make sure that it's moral. That's a whole lot of really complicated math and while you're crunching numbers and probably getting the wrong answer anyway, you're sacrificing utility to do so. That's time that you could have spent eating ice cream. Utilitarianism is more of a description of what good and evil are and a general guide for our moral intuitions. Do what you think would maximize utility and then after the fact, we can check to see which actions were actually good or evil. But utilitarianism and other consequentialist ethics share a common problem. When the only thing that matters is the result, it becomes easy to imagine some uncomfortable scenarios that are technically good, but don't really feel that way. Enslaving a few people so that nobody else has to worry about doing their laundry ever again, for utilitarians, that might be a good thing. Euthanizing a healthy patient and harvesting their organs to relieve a few others of chronic pain, also possibly good. Of course, utilitarianism isn't the only version of consequentialist ethics, but they can all seem dicey in certain hypothetical scenarios. It becomes difficult to decide what's at fault, the system itself or our moral intuitions. Still, there's something compelling about trying to act in a way that results in the best outcome for as many people as possible. A utilitarian voter would probably think hard about everything, from other voters to the candidates' likelihood of getting elected, to their probable actions in office, and then vote in a way which selected an outcome from those available, which would result in the greatest happiness and the least suffering. A third category of ethics from ancient Greece fell out of favor while philosophers were developing these other systems, but has experienced a resurgence in popularity in the last century or so. Virtue ethics. All virtue ethics theories take some direction from the philosophy of Aristotle, who asserted that everything has a sort of purpose and that for human beings, that purpose is flourishing and fulfillment. We might have some other sub-goals, but they all point at this ultimate end goal that of a happy and self-actualized life. For Aristotle, a human is to a fulfilling life as a wheel is to rolling or a razor is to shaving. There are certain essential characteristics that make these things especially well-suited to fulfilling their intended function. For a razor, sharpness. For a wheel, roundness. For a human, well, it's a little more complicated. In order to achieve that human purpose of flourishing, virtue ethics asserts that moral behavior is behavior which encourages the development and realization of those useful virtues which make people better suited to that end. Just like balancing a wheel or sharpening a razor, morality is all about shaping oneself to be an ideal person. In a situation where something scary was preventing an ideal person from living a good life, they would confront it bravely and try to overcome it. So courage is, by Aristotle's definition, a virtue of humans, and in order to act morally, we should strive to be courageous whenever we can and to continue cultivating bravery until it's second nature. This approach has the benefit of getting us out of some of the problems that sometimes beset other forms of ethics, because we can't really take virtues to absurd extremes without upsetting what we were trying to do in the first place. A person who walks out into traffic isn't being what we'd call courageous. They're being foolhardy and it's not really going to help them flourish. However, unlike deontology or consequentialism, we're not really being given a whole lot to go on here. I mean, is it virtuous to kill one person to save many or to torture someone if it means saving innocence or to choose paper or plastic? Meh. Still, virtue ethics does provide some useful guides to behavior, including voting. If you go into the voting booth to cast your ballot solely out of terror that one candidate might win, then you're acting from fear, which is blunting your virtue of courage. That would be immoral. An ideal virtuous person would probably vote decisively, thoughtfully, wisely. What I'm saying is that they would probably know the ballot measures before they went in and not use the wrong writing implement. There's a pen attached to the booth, guys. All sorts of different things might inform your decision to vote. But if you believe that there's a moral element to this election, it probably behooves you to think a little about where those morals come from and whether there's a system of ethics that you'd subscribe to, which would dictate a particular choice. Personally, I'm just a pragmatist. If you're in a swing state, vote red or blue. If not, toss a vote towards Zoltan Istvan. He's the only candidate who's campaigning on a platform of election reform and human immortality. What system of ethics do you find most compelling? Please leave a comment below and let me know what you think. Thank you very much for watching. Don't forget to bulb off, subscribe, share, and don't stop thunking.