On October 27, roughly 7 million eligible Israeli voters will be asked to do something seemingly simple: Drop a ballot into a box. The upcoming election is set to be one of the most consequential Israel has seen in recent years – and one of the most open-ended.
After more than a decade in which Benjamin Netanyahu's Likud dominated the right-wing bloc almost unchallenged, recent polls point to a shift in the political map: Gadi Eisenkot's Yashar party is leading, the so-called change bloc has strengthened, and in some polls has come close to a majority that would allow it to form a government without Netanyahu – while support for Likud and the coalition bloc has eroded. For the first time in years, the possibility of a change of government looks real.
About a third of eligible Israeli voters don't turn out on a regular basis (in 2022, turnout was 70.63 percent, according to the Central Elections Committee). But that's the view from above. From the individual voter's perspective, it looks different: A single ballot is one among millions, and the odds it decides who forms the government are minuscule. And if I've voted again and again over the years and gotten more or less the same map each time, why bother?
This question isn't only political but philosophical: What should we do when our own act carries almost no weight and can't, by itself, change anything? Does the moral value of an action depend at all on its outcome?
To try to answer these questions, I turned to two Israeli philosophers who study ethics and morality: Prof. David Enoch of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem and the University of Oxford; and Prof. Saul Smilansky of the University of Haifa. Both agreed to think through this question with me in a one-on-one conversation over Zoom. Both start from an admission you won't hear from any campaign before Election Day: Each individual voter's ballot won't truly change the outcome. The question, then, is why vote anyway.
The important thing is to vote. But is this really true?
Enoch, who studies ethics, political philosophy and the philosophy of law, rejects one of the favorite clichés of get-out-the-vote campaigns early in our conversation: It doesn't matter who you vote for, the main thing is that you vote. "I don't believe there's a moral duty to vote. I believe there's a duty to vote correctly," he says. "If you vote in a way that causes more suffering to people, then you should not vote. If you vote in ways that infringe on people's freedom in unjustified ways, then you should not vote. The duty is not 'it's the participation that counts.'"
Very low voter turnout can indeed indicate, according to Enoch, "some kind of democratic illness," but a person has no duty to vote merely to improve the statistic. "Your duty is to vote in order to take part in an effort to improve things and not cause harm."
When I describe the influence each of us has on the outcome of the election as limited, he corrects me immediately, making no attempt to soften the answer: "That's a somewhat generous phrasing. The more accurate phrasing is that, in terms of influence on the outcome, none of us actually has any effective influence at all."
And yet, in his view, that's not a reason to stay home. We should stop thinking of voting as an isolated act, he says, explaining that we encounter the same problem in many other areas. One person's contribution to greenhouse gas emissions, for instance, is negligible. Their saving water won't solve the climate crisis either. And on a personal level, "no single cigarette is the cigarette that causes lung cancer," Enoch argues. "So the reason not to smoke the next cigarette isn't the specific harm attributable to it, but the fact that it's part of a broader pattern to which harm can be attributed."
The same goes for the ballot box: "I'm not acting now just for the one-millionth of a percent I'm responsible for, but because I'm part of a wider effort. And the wider effort can indeed have an effect." So not voting "just because you feel like sleeping in," Enoch says, "doesn't seem right to me." Not because your vote will change the country, but because your decision whether to vote is part of a collective pattern of behavior that can very well change it.
But we already tried
But many Israelis today make a different argument. They don't stay home because they want another hour of sleep. They're despondent. This is sharpest among Arab citizens, who make up about a fifth of the population. Their turnout reached just 53.2 percent in 2022 – below even the 55.9 percent average of the past decade – meaning roughly half of Arab voters sit out Knesset elections entirely.
And if for years I voted for the center-left parties I hoped would form the government, and for years got Benjamin Netanyahu – or at best Naftali Bennett and his short-lived "government of change" – maybe the accumulated experience really has taught me that there's no point in trying again.
When I ask him what the point is in voting again and again if the party I voted for in the past didn't form the government, Enoch responds with an analogy: "Suppose you tried to light a match in a vacuum. It doesn't light. Now you try again, with the same match, but this time there might be oxygen in the room. It's the same match, but the conditions around it may have changed. To be certain there's no point trying again," he clarifies, "you'd need to be certain that nothing has changed: that there will be exactly the same number of voters, exactly the same geopolitical circumstances, exactly the same coalition arrangements. Only then would the past failure truly be 'conclusive proof' of the next failure.
"I'm not exactly radiating optimism," Enoch continues. But he offers a more modest argument against despair: The fact that we tried in the past and failed is not, in itself, a reason to stop trying, because conditions have changed. "What you do know is that the fire won't light if you don't try to strike the match," he says. "And you don't know what the odds are."
"Here's a point that troubles me sometimes," Enoch adds. "My sense is that doubts of this pleasant kind – 'will I make a difference?' – aren't distributed proportionally across the population; these are doubts held by left-wing voters," he observes. "I don't see any settler or ultra-Orthodox person who stays home because of doubts of this kind, though it's possible they have other reasons not to vote." And he hopes that perhaps this very asymmetry gives left-wing voters a special reason to overcome them.
Data from the Central Elections Committee for 2022 supports this. In ultra-Orthodox towns, voter turnout reached as high as 90 percent, significantly higher than the national average. Turnout is also higher than average in certain West Bank settlements. "Giving doubts like these a lot of room," Enoch says, "is part of a pattern that has a strong asymmetric effect on the election."
The guard who changed history
Smilansky has a different way of approaching the same problem.
To challenge the widespread view that an ordinary person has no capacity to change the world, Smilansky points to Frank Wills, the security guard whose chance discovery of taped-over locks during a night shift at the Watergate building set off the chain of events that ended two years later with President Richard Nixon's resignation. Wills is also mentioned in Smilansky's book "Paradoxical Ethics," published this year by Oxford University Press. The chapter's title: "On the Common Lament, that a Person Cannot Make Much Difference in This World."
Smilansky, an ethicist who studies, among other things, questions of free will and moral responsibility, doesn't claim that each of us can change the world. Quite the opposite. He calls our human condition "relative impotence": Most of us won't solve the problem of global poverty and won't stop a war. But that doesn't mean we have no influence. A person can greatly improve, or greatly worsen, the lives of the people around them. And sometimes, as in Wills's case, a small act by an ordinary person can snowball into a historic outcome.
We also don't always know when we've had an influence. Here he adds an epistemological argument: The fact that we cannot see our own influence doesn't prove we have none.
If you haven't voted, you've no moral right to complain
The fact that our individual actions often have negligible impact, Smilansky argues, is exactly why human morality isn't built on calculating the consequences anew each time. If the moral test were always "did my action actually change something," almost anyone could justify almost anything to themselves: After all, in the sort of contexts we are considering, their individual contribution to the outcome is negligible regardless. So, in his view, much of morality is built differently: It gives us rules and duties that hold regardless of whether our individual action actually changed anything.
And this becomes especially important in collective actions – like voting. Or recycling.
Smilansky readily admits that if he, his family, his neighbors, even his entire street stopped recycling – nothing measurable would likely happen to the planet. "It really doesn't matter," he says. "But still, now, if everyone thought that way, clearly it would make a big difference."
In his view, this is precisely where morality comes in. It prevents us from saying, every single time: Since my contribution is negligible, or might even be nonexistent, I'm permitted to shirk. Why should others bear the burden while I do not?
Smilansky is willing to use decisive language about those who don't vote. "We evidently have a moral duty to vote," he says. Voting is part of a collective good that requires many people "to make an effort and do it, and pay a little." And since the price in this case is especially low, in his view, it becomes even harder to justify abstaining.
Moreover, "If I haven't done the bare minimum of at least going to vote," he says, "then morally I can't complain."
Protest votes
But this raises a different problem. Perhaps the voter isn't apathetic or lazy. Perhaps they are, in fact, quite politically engaged – it's just that none of the options on offer matches their views.
Here Enoch takes up the possibility of a protest vote: "There are all kinds of protest votes. I don't want to say protest votes are always indefensible, and I understand a protest vote as a vote meant to send a message." But he asks whether the message actually gets through. "Voting for a list that won't pass the electoral threshold is a protest that sometimes sends a message and sometimes doesn't, because it depends on the circumstances. To justify a protest vote, you need, at the very least, evidence that the message will actually get through.
"A protest vote can try to do something else – not to determine who gets elected now, but to send a message that will influence how parties behave in the future. If, for example, party leaders know their voters will never leave them because the alternative is worse, they have less incentive to listen to them."
The example he chooses comes from the U.S. Ahead of the 2024 election, some on the American left urged voters not to back Joe Biden – and later Kamala Harris – over the administration's support for Israel and the war in Gaza. The pragmatic response was obvious: The Republican alternative, Donald Trump, wasn't likely to be any closer to their positions on the issue. But Enoch thinks the counter-argument carries weight too.
Enoch lays out the logic behind that argument this way: "The Democrats need to understand that we're not in their pocket. Democrats have an incentive to keep moving toward the center all the time, because they know they're not losing people from the stronger, more left-wing side – so they keep centering themselves. If you want a Democratic Party that isn't soft-right, they need to know there's a price to pay."
That's a genuine argument, Enoch says. "But you have to acknowledge that protest always has a cost. Its cost doesn't disappear just because of its protest value. In the case of the 2024 U.S. election, the cost is that Trump becomes president. If that really is the cost, it's a terrible cost – because hundreds of thousands, maybe millions, of innocent people paid for it with their lives. So a protest needs to be extraordinary, both in importance and in effectiveness, to justify that price."
In this sense, Enoch returns to where he started: There's no moral value in voting simply because it's voting. The question is what you're trying to achieve by it, and what the likely consequences of your choice will be.
In the end, as my conversations with them taught me, the two philosophers arrive at the ballot box from different places.
For Enoch, the duty isn't merely "to vote" but to try to act rightly within a collective effort. The fact that my single vote doesn't change the outcome doesn't exempt me, just as the fact that my individual emissions don't cause the climate crisis isn't enough to justify behaving however I like. On the other hand, participation itself isn't sacred. A vote, too, can be immoral.
For Smilansky, the emphasis is different: A society cannot function if every person agrees to take part in a shared effort only when they can prove their individual contribution was necessary. We all constantly benefit from collective goods created through the small efforts of countless people. Someone who enjoys those benefits but refuses to bear their share when the cost is reasonable is, in the less polite term Smilansky prefers in conversation, a "parasite."
Enoch says that one needs "to look squarely at the reality that no single vote ever really changes anything, and to say that nevertheless there is a duty to vote, because voting or not voting is part of a broader pattern that does have important consequences."
Either way, we should ask not "will my vote decide the outcome?" but what is required of us when the answer to that question is, almost always, no.
