If your morality prioritizes staunch adherence to standards over harm reduction, you have a stupid sense of morality.
It’s the kind of morality where someone would rather let a child die than push them out of the way of a speeding car, simply because pushing them would harm them.
Your morality should lead you to making decisions that result in the least harm. Look at it this way: if all of the people who voted third party instead of Hillary because Hillary wasn’t [insert moral standard here] enough had sucked it up and voted for Hillary, access to abortion would still be legal nationwide. (This assumes enough people to get her elected voted third party over moral objections.)
Trump is the worst president in my life time, by a huge margin, and he’s even more in favor of genocide than Biden, demonstrably. So if your sense of morality causes you to help put him in charge of our country again, in my mind, you’re a fucking moron.
Rebellion? I don't like hearing such a word from you," Ivan said with feeling. "One cannot live by rebellion, and I want to live. Tell me straight out, I call on you--answer me: imagine that you yourself are building the edifice of human destiny with the object of making people happy in the finale, of giving them peace and rest at last, but for that you must inevitably and unavoidably torture just one tiny creature, that same child who was beating her chest with her little fist, and raise your edifice on the foundation of her unrequited tears--would you agree to be the architect on such conditions? Tell me the truth."
"No, I would not agree," Alyosha said softly.
"And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?"
"No, I cannot admit it.
Ok cool. Your choice is between genocide, and genocide but worse. You can proclaim how righteous and moral you are that all the pain everyone around you is feeling is not your fault, because you merely threw your vote away, but that won’t change the outcome, and it won’t make you anything but a moron.
“And can you admit the idea that the people for whom you are building would agree to accept their happiness on the unjustified blood of a tortured child, and having accepted it, to remain forever happy?”
I’m not talking about drug harm reduction. I’m talking about the reduction of harm. Put another way, aiming to reduce the amount of harm your actions lead to.
That’s a nice platitude, but there are only two outcomes, no matter how much you might wish there was a third. Your options are to help, abstain, or hurt. Abstaining means you’d rather not help, so again, in my mind, you’re a moron.
Third party candidates are only viable when one of the major parties collapses, and the major parties only collapse when they consistently lose. So, if you actually want a viable third party, you should vote for the major party you dislike the least. Otherwise, you’re just perpetuating both.