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Brennan's Argument Analysis

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Brennan argues that one should not vote badly. I will be arguing in favor of Brennan’s argument. I will first start by stating the author’s argument, then I will propose objections to his argument. Brennan argue that one should obtain from voting if there vote will contribute to harmful activities. The author calls this contribution to harmful activities bad voting; he does make the distinction that someone does not vote badly if they have substantial evidence that the policy was good, but it ended up being harmful. The individual votes do not have a large enough impact to sway the outcome of the vote in a certain direction, the harm from bad voting is a collective effort among a group of voters. This argument does take into account voting…show more content…
Every person may not have the same level of these components, but it is present. Everyone will not know everything about the candidate they plan to vote for, they only know the high points of their campaign. According to the LA TIMES “It's a rare voter who carefully reads a candidate's position papers on every conceivable topic. Instead, we typically vote based on a candidate's stance on a subset of topics, assuming there will be a certain consistency on other topics…Another conscious component of political decision-making is voting for experience or competence, rather than a platform. This is so common that one study found that candidates judged to look more competent had won elections 68% of the time.” (Sapolsky) Especially, with how the media reports news about a particular candidate, they only report the parts of the campaign that the public would consider controversial. This bias also depends on the news station you are choosing to watch because the news reported is often swayed to reflect the views of a certain political party. For example, FOX NEWS is known for having republican views, MSNBC is known for having liberal views, and CNN is known for having democratic views. The question now becomes what is the threshold of irrationality, bias, ignorance or immoral belief that deems someone as a bad
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