As I write this, it’s Election Day.

It is the first Election Day in 24 years that I haven’t voted.

Every election cycle, Republican operatives in the media—“conservative” talk radio hosts, Fox News pundits, and the like—insist to their audiences that a decision on their part to do anything other than vote Republican is a decision to vote for the Democratic Party.

Talk radio host and syndicated columnist Dennis Prager has even gone so far as to charge those Americans who refuse to vote Republican with essentially voting to further damage the country!

Let there be no mistakes about it: This line is as intellectually dishonest as it is morally idiotic.

For centuries and even millennia, the great ethical traditions of the ancient pagan, Jewish, and Christian worlds have been of one voice in affirming the essential role of intention in determining moral standing.  Roman Catholicism underscores this insight via its doctrine of “double-effect.”

According to double-effect, an action that would otherwise be forbidden may be permissible as long as its effects, though foreseen, are unintended. For example, Catholic morality unequivocally condemns euthanasia, the deliberate killing of a terminally ill patient.  Yet from this perspective, it is not immoral to withhold treatment from a terminal patient whose death is imminent and who has decided to forego further treatment that would only prolong his suffering.

The difference here is a difference in intention: A physician who euthanizes his patient intends the latter’s death.  In contrast, while a physician knows that the suspension of methods will hasten a terminal person’s life, he is not guilty of killing that person because this was never his intention: the patient’s death is foreseen, but it is not intended.

And it is this that is morally decisive.

That intention is essential to morality can be gotten easily enough from any number of examples. In driving your car, you know that you will (eventually) wear down your tires.  But you would not be irresponsible or reckless for this, for the erosion of your tires is a foreseen yet unavoidable and unintended consequence of driving your car.  Similarly, when you buy your Apple computer, you know that your decision will have the consequence of further enriching Bill Gates.  This, however, is not your intention.  Thus, you don’t deserve any credit (or blame) for serving Bill Gates’ interests.

The doctrine of double-effect is hardly without problems. But it does express an invaluable insight regarding the centrality of intention to any moral analysis.

The point here, though, is this: While I know that in not voting for the Republican candidate I am making it easier for his opponent(s) to prevail, the latter is an unintended outcome of my decision. In, say, refusing to vote for either Democrats or Republicans, my intention is to act in accordance with the dictates of my conscience, my moral convictions.  Unless one thinks that morality itself demands that all decent people vote whenever possible for Republican candidates, whomever they may be—unless voting Republican is like doing justice, or refraining from adultery and murder—then all that matters, morally, is that one’s actions conform to one’s conscience.

The idea that there is no difference between, on the one hand, a person who walks into a polling station and votes Democrat and, on the other, a person who simply refuses to vote Republican, can’t be taken seriously. It is like suggesting that there is no difference between a doctor who euthanizes a patient and one who, upon the terminal patient’s request, refrains from administering pain-prolonging treatments.

But let’s play along. It’s undeniably true that Barack Obama would have lost decisively to Mitt Romney in 2012 had those 4 million or so self-declared Republicans who decided against traveling out to the polling stations chosen otherwise.  GOP propagandists in “conservative” media and elsewhere doubtless blame this disenchanted mass for having practically voted for Obama.  Yet two can play at this game:

Had Republicans—like Mitt Romney—not spent so much of their careers insulting, condescending to, and betraying the more conservative and traditional minded that is the base of their party, then the latter wouldn’t have been disillusioned. If they wouldn’t have been disillusioned, then they would’ve come out in droves to vote for Romney.  And if this happened, then Romney would now be president.

So, for all practical purposes, Romney and his Big Government accomplices in the GOP have been busy for years casting their votes for Democrats by urinating all over traditional Republican voters.