Society-level "ought" and "can."

You might think that people who support marginal politicians like Ralph Nader or Ron Paul have different values than people who support mainstream politicians like John McCain or Barack Obama, but that doesn't have to be the case.  Suppose I support Ralph Nader because I think he would make the best president.  And suppose you agree that Ralph Nader would make the best president -- but you support Barack Obama, your second choice, because you think Nader has no chance to win.  In that case, it could well be that you and I have the same values, and rank the available candidates in the same order.  What we disagree about is how a candidate's viability ought to be taken into account.

I think it is actually very common for people to differ in this way.  How can we explain this phenomenon?  Maybe the root of it is that you and I follow different procedures for allocating limited energy and motivation for politics.  When I go out and (say) make phone calls for Nader rather than Obama, I'm raising the already-low odds of an outcome which we both agree is highly desirable; when you make phone calls for Obama rather than Nader, you're raising the already-high odds of an outcome which we both agree is middlingly desirable.  So maybe it's just that I'm more of a high-risk, high-reward kind of political activist than you are.

But I don't think this kind of explanation will work, at least not in all cases.  For one thing, almost no one is capable of appreciably affecting the odds of any given electoral outcome, and most people know this.  When you volunteer for a candidate, you might think, in a vague way, that you are helping him or her to be elected; but you probably do not deceive yourself into thinking your candidate's odds are really any different than they would have been if you'd just stayed home and watched TV.  For another thing, this phenomenon occurs even in cases where no one is under any illusions about affecting the outcome.  It occurs in sports, for instance: When the odds that the Cardinals will win the World Series diminishes, some fans switch to rooting for a more successful team, while others remain loyal.  Given this, we need to be able to explain why some people support an unlikely best outcome, whereas others support a more likely second- (or third-, or 200,000th-) best outcome, even when supporting that outcome does not involve affecting its odds.

Maybe you support Obama because you tend to become very emotionally invested in the person you're supporting, and you want to cut the chances that you'll be disappointed.  And maybe I support Nader because I don't mind much if my candidate loses.  Maybe I even like it when my candidate loses, because it gives me something to complain about.  In fact, I think this might be a satisfactory explanation in many cases.  But how upset do you really get when your candidate loses?  There are a lot of people who support Obama even though they would prefer other, more marginal candidates.  It is hard to believe that all those people have chosen to support Obama just because they're afraid, consciously or unconsciously, of having to endure the pain of supporting the loser.  So I think that, for those who are exceptions, we need a different story.

The herd mentality may be a further factor, but such explanations don't really get to the point that interests me here.  What I'm most interested in is this question: Is there any good reason to shift allegiance from your top choice to a lower-tier, more likely choice, in cases where (a) you are not in a position to affect the odds in any way, and (b) shifting allegiances won't make the loss of your top choice any more endurable?

Here's one possibility.  Perhaps when you support a given candidate, you are saying the candidate ought to win.  But if the candidate is very unlikely to win, perhaps that means that she cannot win.  In that case (if you believe that "ought" implies "can"), you should not support candidates whose chances fall below a certain cut-off.  Then we just need to decide how poor the chances can be before they fall below that cut-off.  Maybe this is the judgment-call about which the Nader supporter and the Obama supporter disagree. 

But what is really the connection between improbable and cannot?  Whether I can clean up the dishes has little to do with whether it is probable that I will clean up the dishes.  Certainly, if it is improbable that I will clean up the dishes because (say) I'm handcuffed to the couch, then that is a reason to think I cannot clean up the dishes.  But if it is improbable that I will clean up the dishes just because I'm very lazy and have never bothered to clean up the dishes before, then there has not yet been given any reason to think I cannot clean up the dishes.

However, with regard to entities like societies, cities, countries, and so on, the situation might be a little different.  Societies can be lazy, I think.  And I suppose that if a society is too lazy to do something, e.g. curb global warming, then that it is a reason to think that global warming cannot be curbed.  For example, if 99% of the electorate opposes reform just because reform will make people uncomfortable in the near-term, I think that shows laziness.  It also shows that it is very improbable for a reform-minded candidate to win an election.  And if the probability of a reform-minded candidate winning is low enough, that seems like sufficient reason to say that a reform-minded candidate cannot win.

So maybe what's going on here is something like this.  All agree that marginal candidates are unlikely to win.  Some people think that marginal candidates are so unlikely to win that they cannot win, so they decide not to support such candidates (on the implicit or explicit assumption that "ought" implies "can," and "support" implies "ought").  Others set the bar lower: they think the same marginal candidates are not so unlikely to win that they cannot win, which frees them to support such candidates without falling afoul of the ought-implies-can principle.  If that is right, then the open questions are: (1) How unlikely does an electoral (or more generally, societal) outcome really have to be before it is fair to say that it cannot happen? and (2) Does "ought," in the sense in which that word is used when we say things like "Nader ought to win," really imply "can"? 

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