Raise the Hammer

Whatever else may be going on I would argue that when someone votes in an election in Canada today they are performing an evil act.

Evil: That which is manifestly unjust; profoundly immoral, ethically indefensible.

Why? Because the act of voting is voluntary, that is it is not forced upon the voter; by voting one becomes an accessory to the process of Government, and that process is evil. To be an accessory to evil is do do evil oneself.

An example:
Lets say you freely agree to drive the “get away” car in a bank robbery. It's agreed that your friend Joe will go into the bank and steal the money, you will wait in the car with the engine running. Things don't go as planned and Joe winds up shooting and killing a bank teller. You are an accessory to murder. Even though you never held the gun you directly and knowingly participated in the chain of events that led to the murder of the bank teller and thus share the moral responsibility for it.

With me so far? If the process of Government is ethically indefensible then to vote is ethically indefensible...

How can I say that Government is ethically indefensible?
Premises:
1: There are such things as ethical standards and we can come to common agreement on at least some of them.
2: A social institution (in this case government) can be said to be “ethically indefensible” if it repeatedly, egregiously, violates these standards.
3: One of the attributes of an ethical standard, which distinguishes it from a mere personal preference, is that it is universally applicable. I.e. that it can be applied to all people under consideration.
4: One such standard is that: It is unethical for one person to freely initiate the use of physical violence against another person without their consent.
I'll call this this “The non-violence principal”, and it's unethical opposite: the free (unforced) initiation of the use of physical violence against another person without their consent, “The violence principal”.
5: Canadian governments at all levels; municipal, provincial, and federal repeatedly practice The violence principal, so doing lies at the centre of their activities.
Conclusion:
From (5) it follows that Canadian governments at all levels are ethically indefensible.

Some illustrative examples of the premises:
3) “The use of Mayonnaise as a condiment for French fries is wrong” is a personal preference. It's my feeling but I don't think an argument can be advanced that everyone should be governed by it. “Murder is wrong” on the other hand is a principal that it can be applied to everyone.

4) Bob asks Alice to have sex with him. Alice refuses. Bob responds by knocking her to the ground and begins tearing off her clothes. In the struggle Alice drives her thumb into Bob's eye socket, fracturing the base of his skull. Bob subsequently dies of a brain hemorrhage. In this situation Bob's actions violated the The non-violence principal, Alice's did not. In both cases the violence that each party inflicted on the other was non-consensual, but Bob initiated the attack. The non-violence principal does not preclude self defence.

5) Speaking directly to the question of Government and the non-violence principal: Lets consider the components of Government. There is the Parliament, or Council in the case of municipal government. It's members central function is to enact laws and regulations. None of these are mere “suggestions”. Disobedience of any of them carries an explicit provision for some penalty, even if the disobedient individual in no way consented to be bound by their decisions. Absent voluntary submission such penalties will inevitably be inflicted by force, through the actions of the police, prison guards, soldiers, and other agents of the states security / enforcement apparatus. There need be no question of self defence on the part of these actors, passive peaceful refusal on the part of the disobedient party will not keep the gun out of the room. It's hard for me to imagine a more dramatic expression of the indefensible “Violence principal” than is seen in the action of Government.

I don't want to make this post a book, and have no idea if folks here are interested in this position in any way, so I'll leave it there for now...