system
Given the following post, respond as if you're commenting on Reddit:
human
Are you morally culpable for the actions of the person who you voted in to office?

As the title suggests. Maybe I’m too young and naive but this election cycle got me thinking hard about the morality of government officials and who is morally responsible for their actions, at least elected ones. If I vote for X candidate and X candidate ran on continuing wars that are known to have killed a countless number of innocent people am I, who voted for X candidate, morally culpable?
gpt
Here's a basic and easy to understand picture of the conditions for moral responsibility.

* You are morally responsible for *x* only if you:
 1. had control over *x* and
 2. could have reasonably known that you would have caused *x* provided the actions you took.

The "only if" means that the two conditions are what are known as necessary conditions. So, the part that comes before the "only if" being true is sufficient for everything afterwards being true.

In the case you describe, it looks like the main dispute is going to be over whether 2 is true. It seems like it--I take it you're saying that this candidate does go on to do what you describe. So, you know what they're going to do if they're in the position to do it, and you knowingly cause them to be in that position. It does seem like the folk intuition that people are morally responsible for the votes they make survives a bit of analysis.

There are a bunch of little debates and directions you can go from here and try and push and prod on each of those conditions and issues in various ways to see whether there's any skepticism warranted towards any part of this picture, but that's the basic way of thinking about it.