1
Introduction
Voting and Justice
1.1. Voting as a Duty of Samaritan Justice
Is it a duty to vote, or is voting only a right that citizens are free to ignore?
The popular wisdom is that voting is a freedom that citizens have a right to exercise or not to exercise. It is common to encounter the belief that democracy affords us the freedom to “have our voice heard,” but if democracy offers us this freedom—the thinking goes—it also offers us the freedom not to care about being heard. In other words, the flip side of the right to vote is the right not to vote if one does not wish to participate in politics. This logic resembles the rationale undergirding freedom-of-speech rights. One has the freedom to express one’s views without fearing punishment; but the freedom to speak our mind surely does not entail that we ought to do so. We may just prefer to remain silent. On this view of rights, a freedom to do something cannot, on pain of inconsistency, imply a duty to do the same thing.1
However, it is possible for a freedom to entail a duty without risking a contradiction. For example, if expressing your views will not harm you or your loved ones, don’t you have an obligation to speak up against rampant injustice when you see it affect those around you?2 Nobody should be able to punish you for failing to speak up—much less the government—but don’t you have a duty of
conscience to use your right for a morally significant purpose when doing so would not cost you much?3
That is the idea that this book defends: We have a duty of conscience to vote with care in order to help society when doing so would not cost us much. My concern is not with justifying a legally enforceable duty to vote, as in compulsory voting systems. However, my aim is to argue that we are bound by a moral duty to vote so as to help society prevent injustice and ensure decently good governance. The latter can be achieved, partly, if voters manage to elect acceptably fair-minded governments and vote out corrupt or inept ones. Voting governments in and out is not all there is to justice; and this book does not pretend to show otherwise. However, we have to start somewhere. Voting seems to be a basic democratic act because elections install governments— understanding the latter as the cadre of representatives that will occupy positions of political power in the society during a given period of time. Governments, in turn, enact policies that can have an immense impact on people’s access to basic goods such as security, economic stability, education, peace, healthcare, and others. In short, governments can foster or impede justice via their actions as well as via their failures to act.
Despite the obvious fact that elections put governments in place, voting has taken on an aura of deep suspicion lately. It is common to hear complaints about the low ability of citizens to make good decisions at the polls, and the world seems to be witnessing a worrisome wave of disenchantment with democracy.4 This sentiment may respond to the fact that, in the last years, democracies around the world have witnessed the rise of powerful anti-democratic, populist movements, many of which appear to be driving their societies into detrimental predicaments. In the face of this trend, some may think it apposite to question the power of elections to protect cherished liberal, democratic values. After all, don’t voters give these anti-democratic movements an opportunity to win and rise to the seat of power?
Among some vocal political scientists and philosophers today, it is common to hear concern about voter incompetence, which allegedly explains why democracy stands on shaky ground in many places. For example, Jason Brennan’s 2017 book Against Democracy argues that elections give voice to the uninformed and prejudiced, which undermines the values that democracy seeks to uphold, such as justice and freedom. Ilya Somin’s 2013 book Democracy and Political Ignorance proposes that ballot box voting be de facto replaced with “foot voting”— i.e., citizens’ ability to choose in which jurisdiction to live so as to influence government directly and counteract the power of uninformed majorities.5 Other pessimistic treatments of democratic rule are similar in their conclusions about the future of democracy based on the low civic capacities of the average voter.6
Do we do well in thinking of voting as a likely threat to fair governance? My book makes a case for thinking of voting as a vehicle for justice, not a paradoxical menace to it. In it, I explore two questions: Do people have a duty to vote, and if so, do they have a duty to vote with care? The central case in the book is that a natural duty of justice requires citizens to acquire minimal epistemic competence and vote with a sense of the common good in order to support fair governance. It is true that many of the governments that we consider deficient or unjust around the world may be the partial result of incompetent or immoral voting. By the same token, however, many of them are the partial result of citizen indifference, which leads to low participation rates and a lack of concern with what elections are capable of bringing about for society and its members.
The idea that it is solely incompetent, uninformed, and illintentioned voters who determine a bad electoral outcome is akin to thinking that it is only the number of car accidents a vehicle has been involved in that determines how fast it deteriorates throughout the years. In reality, the owner’s failure to have the car serviced every so often also plays a part in causing the vehicle to
malfunction. Failure to act, not only acting recklessly, contributes to things happening the way they do. When not enough citizens vote with information and a sense of justice, the incompetent voters may get to determine the outcome of an election. But one could see this result as partly enabled by the fact that the bad (i.e., uninformed or carelessly cast) votes were not canceled out by the good (i.e., informed or carefully cast) ones, especially if the turnout was not sufficiently high. What I want to suggest is that voting may many times be the problem but can also be the solution.
Discussions on the justifiability of voting in particular are alarmingly absent in the contemporary democratic theory literature. No work on normative theories of democracy that I am aware of offers a specific account of why it is justified to vote or how one should go about voting if one is to follow certain accepted standards of justice. This dearth of analysis exists despite the abundance of more general accounts of why democracy is a valuable ideal. This book offers a long-overdue argument about why voting deserves attention in its own right. It claims that we can see voting with care—i.e., with information and a sense of the public interest—in the light of a Samaritan duty of aid toward society.
Samaritan duties of aid require us to help others in need if doing so would not be unduly costly for us, but they do not assume that helping will be utterly costless. For example, a duty of aid does not demand from us that we jump into a dangerous situation (such as a fire) and perform a rescue ourselves, seriously risking our life and health. That would be heroic, therefore supererogatory. However, we may be morally required to call in for help because doing so does not seem to pose a risk that is reasonable for us to fear. This book argues that voting with sufficient information and a sense of the common good is a reasonable, non-heroic cost to expect citizens to undertake in the face of the benefit that elections can bring about for society, namely, fair-minded governments and decently just policies (although they can also bring about the opposite, as we all know). Society needs to be rescued from abusive and
unresponsive leaders and public officials; and elections provide us with a mechanism to achieve that goal at no unduly high cost to ourselves as citizens.
The book proposes that failing to vote with minimal information can be compared to failing to provide relatively non-costly assistance to those sufficiently imperiled. This may strike some as an incorrect analogy, but the impression is ultimately mistaken. Let me explain why. The most likely image evoked by the notion of the Good Samaritan is a one-time calamitous situation, such as the child drowning in the pond that could be easily saved by a passerby wearing new shoes.7 One may wonder in what ways society and democracy are imminently imperiled, and whether viewing the vote as a Samaritan obligation is adequate. I think the analogy is sufficiently valid: we should not judge emergencies as such because they happen one time; rather, we should judge them as such because they are threatening enough. The widely accepted understanding of an emergency is something that needs to be addressed immediately, not that it is non-habitual or unusual.
For example, it makes sense to think of dire poverty as an emergency because it causes people to die from starvation. However, if poverty didn’t kill but kept the hungry at a continual point of steep suffering, would we consider it less normatively apt to justify help? We would be hard-pressed to think so.8 Bad governance is a question of degree, for sure, but the worse it is and the longer it lasts, the more it can produce results that are gravely harmful and permanent. Just as poverty may call for ready action, the results of bad governance may also call for ready action despite not being the worst they could possibly be, all the time. Bad governance may mean that children are denied opportunities for healthy growth and a good-enough education. It can also mean that the elderly will be denied opportunities to end their lives with dignity and in financial security. Bad governance can further translate into citizens losing benefits (such as accessible healthcare, to name just one), which many may find necessary to keep on living or to maintain
a minimally decent standard of living. Bad governance can also ensue in wrong-headed and expensive wars that cost human lives and deplete valuable resources. These harms can be quite serious for present and future generations even if in some societies they are less acute than in others. In other words, the results of bad governance can contravene basic interests that all rational individuals can be thought to want to further, such as an interest in good health, in a minimally good quality of life, in income security, and in peace, among others.
I believe that we must not feel regret for devoting most of our time and energy to personal projects and relationships, but we should recognize that, sometimes, a Samaritan duty of assistance will call us to act. There are many pressing social problems that could be alleviated with better, fair-minded, morally responsible governance. Under the assumption that the machinery of elections works transparently, voting to elect minimally decent governments in episodic elections is one reasonably easy way to contribute to relieving society from the evils of injustice and incompetence, although by no means the only one or the most effective under all possible circumstances (i.e., if injustice is so rampant that rebellion is the only alternative, or if elections are a mere facade to disguise a de facto authoritarian regime, for example, voting as a collective act turns futile, dangerous, and possibly non-obligatory, ethically).
In the last decade, there have emerged a number of accounts in democratic theory that seek to highlight political participation and political allegiance as duties of justice owed to fellow citizens. For example, Anna Stilz’s 2009 book Liberal Loyalty argues that political obligation can rest on universal principles of justice and a consequent natural duty to buttress a state that preserves freedom equally for everybody (from this duty, the obligation to participate in politics follows as a mechanism to preserve the justice of government).9 According to this account, we owe allegiance to our state, but this obligation derives from universal considerations of justice (i.e., the mandate to avoid violence against those that live
close to us) rather than reasons of common nationality or common culture. In a similar vein, Waldron’s work on what he calls “The Principle of Proximity” shows that a duty to obey the law is called for by a natural duty of justice to avoid disorder and anarchy— not by a sense of shared national identity or culture.10 In turn, Christopher Kutz’s 2000 book Complicity originally links a duty to minimize complicity with state wrongdoing with a duty of justice in general, which entails, among other things, the duty to engage with the democratic process with an eye to addressing injustice.11 Interestingly, as I will mention later in the book, he argues that lack of significant causal influence in bringing about injustice is irrelevant to moral responsibility for complicity. What counts is one’s mere intention to participate in a larger collective effort that is unjust. In a somewhat similar vein, Eric Beerbohm’s 2012 book In Our Name presents the claim that certain forms of state support (such as taxation) and multiple benefits that we derive from political and economic institutions make us part-authors of the wrongdoing that our state intentionally or unintentionally commits.12 Using our political voice to exert change, then, is a duty of citizenship, he claims. I cannot do justice to the complexity of the different arguments in these interesting works (and similar others) but I can say that my approach on voting as a duty of Samaritanism is consistent with the idea that we have duties of justice to others that political participation can honor. My book differs from the previously described approaches, however, in that its focus is emphatically on the moral justification of voting alone. Democratic theory has consistently underexplored the role of the ballot as an instrument of justice. No systematic attention to voting as a self-standing moral issue exists in the literature with the exception of the critical accounts (already mentioned) that reject the need, rationality, and morality of voting. Moreover, my argument for Samaritanism in elections leaves out duties to offset complicity for state wrongdoing and state injustice. I consider complicity arguments extremely important in democratic theory, but my approach to the ethics of voting highlights a
duty to help society via the vote despite the fact that we, many times, may bear insignificant moral (and causal) responsibility for state and government wrongdoing. My argument is that the duty to vote is a forward-looking duty to help others as a Good Samaritan would (in this case, by voting and participating in the collective activity of elections) regardless of our part in wrongdoing, when doing so would be easy—although I do not quarrel with the argument that contributing to injustice ourselves is cause for moral blame.
The Samaritan obligation to vote with care is premised on a more general duty of justice, which calls citizens to support and encourage the emergence of just institutions and social arrangements. I take this duty to be an uncontroversial premise in our moral discourse. John Rawls brought it to the forefront of discussion in his 1971 book A Theory of Justice. He said:
From the standpoint of justice as fairness, a fundamental natural duty is the duty of justice. This duty requires us to support and to comply with just institutions that exist and apply to us. It also constrains us to further just arrangements not yet established, at least when this can be done without too much cost to ourselves.13
Where does the intuition for the duty to support just institutions come from? Rawls does not deal with this particular question. However, I think it would be reasonable to say that the duty to support just institutions derives from a previous, fundamental moral obligation to treat other individuals as equal bearers of rights. This (admittedly) abstract obligation means that we must support concrete institutions and public norms that protect those rights equally for all if doing so would not be unduly difficult for us. In other words, if we see others as equals, we need to support institutions and arrangements that will further that ideal of equality by concretely treating members of society according to principles of equal rights. Echoing this reasoning, for example, Thomas Christiano argues that
each human being has a fundamental and natural duty to treat other human beings as equals and this implies that each person must try to realize the equal advancement of the interests of other human beings. . . . Hence, each has a duty to attempt to bring about, and to conform his actions to, those institutions that publicly advance the equal advancement of interests [i.e., justice].14
Voting can heavily influence how certain institutions go about the job of enabling the equal advancement of interests in society because many institutions are stewarded by elected officials or their appointees. Thus, elections and voting do matter for justice. They matter for democracy in that they can give voice to the governed, but they also matter because they can work to further—or affront— the conditions of justice in society by virtue of authorizing (bad or decent) governments to govern.
I think it is uncontroversial that policies, institutions, and laws that give citizens equal chances of seeing their interests furthered by society are those that tend to favor the public good. I will understand this admittedly general term to entail the commonality of needs and claims that citizens have qua members of a larger scheme of cooperation with others and which require access to a host of basic social goods as well as rights. Just and fair governance, then, will be here taken to mean governance predicated on the aim of furthering the common good of society, which, in turn, requires fair access to basic social goods such as individual liberty, a minimally good standard of living, peace, decent opportunities for achieving good health, income security, and other goods that it would be reasonable to think all rational agents will want regardless of anything else they want in life.15
My understanding of the common good is informed by a particular moral reasoning that privileges impartiality. Impartiality as an ethical principle, as I will argue in later chapters, should serve as a source of moral motivation for the good voter. A voter that casts a considered ballot will not always have perfect knowledge
of facts and causal relationships (although she will try to reach a certain minimal epistemic threshold), but she will try her best to vote for the alternative that she deems most acceptable from the point of view of others, not just herself. Thus, the impartiality logic for voting justly centers on the value of putting oneself in the shoes of others when finding answers to questions such as the following: What types of concerns should governmental policies address? Or, more generally, what type of society should we strive for? When we answer questions like these bearing in mind what others, not just us, would find acceptable, we think impartially, as opposed to thinking selfishly. Although disagreement exists about how one ought to interpret what the public interest really entails, this disagreement does not preclude us from drawing conclusions as to what may be intuitively at odds with the public good because it is motivated by selfish concerns. Citizens may not always agree on what particular ideals and policies ought to be followed for the sake of society, but they may listen at each other and believe, in good faith, that their fellow citizens have the best interests of society at heart. Good voting, as defended in this book, requires an acceptably impartial perspective (which is not to say entirely others-oriented in detriment of personal needs) and a modicum of epistemic competence and information when casting one’s ballot at elections.
Even though voting may not make a difference as an individual act because one single vote will get lost in a proverbial ocean of votes, we should not stand by the promotion of a collective good (such as good and fair governance) that is morally significant. The Samaritan duty to vote is a duty not to stay in the sidelines when we could act so that our actions, together with those of many others, help society at no high cost to ourselves. The book suggests that, even if our individual act has no difference-making power by itself, it can still be what someone ought to do because it is part of a collective activity that is valuable for justice-based reasons. Elections are an example of that type of collective activity. Thus, the duty
to vote with care is really a duty of common pursuit. In order to bear fruit, it needs to be carried out by many individuals together. We could say that the duty to vote as a Good Samaritan is a duty to cooperate with others in bringing about justice. But because considerations of Samaritan justice do not require heroism from us, the book’s arguments do not prescribe a self-sacrificial duty to be politically engaged all the time. Episodic voting does not have to require constant or even frequent political participation, although it does require attention to issues of concern as important elections draw closer.
This book revives an idea already expressed a long time ago. In his Considerations of Representative Government, John Stuart Mill said that we should view the vote as a trust because it gives the citizen power over others.16 The concept of a trust implies the (benevolent) goal of protecting the interests and rights of another. Despite the fact that Mill was no fan of democracy as we know it—since he advocated for differential voting power according to the citizen’s level of education—he still saw the ballot as a vehicle for furthering the well-being of our fellow-citizens and the justice of our society. He said:
The voter is under an absolute moral obligation to consider the interest of the public, not his private advantage, and give his vote to the best of his judgment exactly as he would be bound to do if he were the sole voter and the election depended upon him alone.17
It seems reasonable to interpret Mill as saying that the franchise gives the electorate collective power to affect the fate of society since we know, as did he, that individual voters do not have a perceptible capacity to affect elections because their votes will get lost in a proverbial ocean of votes. However, and consistently with Mill’s logic, this book proposes the idea that voting with knowledge and a sense of justice can be a truly effective way to aid society by acting
in concert when participating in elections—even if it is not the only way or the best way at all times.
Voting, in fact, is a form of power besides being a moral duty— and perhaps because it is a form of power we can say that it is morally obligatory. We can think of the vote as a form of power because the right to vote can be very costly to public officials and candidates insofar as it makes their tenure in office depend on what the electorate decides, with the all-too-real possibility that they will be ousted from, or never permitted to access, the seat of political power in society. Because of how influential voting can be as a collective effort, we can say that to exercise the right to vote is akin to exercising a sort of power of attorney.18 This analogy seems apt because voting is “to perform an action which (if enough others also perform it) alters the assignment of rights and duties in the political community.”19 In other words, we can think of votes as powers in a legal sense because they “determine the legal right of various politicians to occupy high office. And this is not an incidental aspect: it is the point of voting rules to give ordinary citizens this power.”20 The right to vote gives citizens the opportunity to control government—and who becomes government. Thus, the vote is not merely a liberty. It is a power that is, collectively, judicially effective, as Waldron points out.21 Hannah Arendt, who viewed political participation as valuable in itself (not just as an instrument to further desirable results) was surely mistaken when she wrote that “the booth in which we deposit our ballots is unquestionably too small, for this booth has room for only one.”22 Voting is anything but solitary. We must see it as a collective endeavor if it is to mean anything at all for democracy.
1.2. The Libertarian Challenge
A distinctive view in the voting ethics literature has been adding to the pessimistic climate concerning the value of elections and
democracy. In particular, a libertarian account against seeing voting as a democratic duty has gained much traction in the last few years. We can call this view “libertarian” in a stipulative sense because it claims that voting is a right or a freedom, not a duty. For example, Jason Brennan contends that we have a pressing moral duty not to vote carelessly but he thinks that considered voting is an action that we are free to take but not morally required to choose.23 In light of most voters’ inability to vote with information and rationally, he claims, we do society a service if we downplay the significance of voting and stress, in turn, a negative duty to refrain from voting incompetently or immorally. Geoffrey Brennan and Loren Lomasky, earlier but similarly, suggest that voting is an exercise in futility since the individual impact of each vote is infinitesimally small.24 Thus, requiring citizens to make informed choices at the polls goes above and beyond the call of duty, they claim. Jones, more classically, intuitively dismisses a duty to vote on the grounds that choosing not to participate in politics is a legitimate preference for life-plans that are non-political.25 Voting is, on the prevailing view of voting ethics, not a duty that we can expect citizens to discharge without hindering their freedom. Moreover, it is futile in terms of its impact on the world.
This book, in contrast, shows that we do not compromise citizens’ freedom when we think of voting as a moral obligation because Samaritan duties of justice are not unacceptably demanding. It also argues that voting has moral force despite the fact that it is not always powerful as an individual act. What matters is that it is part of a larger collective activity that is not powerless at all, and highly significant from the perspective of justice.
As I see it, the libertarian critics of the duty to vote rely on the following three claims to base their case against the duty.26 First, they appear to think that citizens’ political knowledge is almost impossible to improve. Second, they argue that voting is normatively uninteresting because it cannot make a difference by itself to the results of elections. Third, they propose that voting is not morally
special as a way of furthering the public good because there are many other ways to do so that can be more effective. The chapters in this book, described later, will take on these arguments in elaborate ways; but the answer that the book offers highlights the following reasoning.
First, citizens’ competence is not a fact of nature and it can be modified. Some considerable degree of citizens’ ignorance and lack of political interest may spring from structural features of the political and economic systems, not from irreparable individual cognitive failures. Much of the (political science and political psychology) literature on voter ignorance has overtly focused on individual-level attributes (i.e., what the individual voter fails to know and how often) and has neglected to pay attention to the political and economic conditions that influence political knowledge. But there is burgeoning research in the voter behavior literature that examines how institutions and wealth distribution affect incentives to seek out political information. This new scholarship offers three potential explanations for variations in political knowledge.27 First, electoral rules can obscure or clarify the nature of the political process and, consequently, thwart or enhance incentives to seek information. Second, higher levels of economic equality measured by wealth redistribution provide better conditions for access to education regardless of income level and, therefore, also promote higher degrees of political information for the average citizen. Finally, responsive institutions (i.e., institutions that are perceived to work for citizens, instead of against them and that include their input) provide positive incentives to acquire political knowledge, whereas perceptions of institutional unresponsiveness hamper incentives to become politically informed. Unlike prevalent philosophical accounts that object to the duty to vote, in this book I explore how structural (political and economic) factors may affect voter competence. If structural variables can be altered in a way that individual cognitive flaws cannot, then so can average political knowledge. There is no reason to be as staunchly pessimistic
about the abilities of the electorate as the critics of the duty to vote have been so far.
Second, voting as an individual act is not morally uninteresting simply because it is not a difference-making action, nor is it meaningless to the voter. We may have a duty to vote so as to contribute to a larger collective activity that will be impactful in terms of justice and valuable because of that reason. In other words, we may have a duty of “common pursuit” to join forces with others and vote, so that we can all together benefit society in the way that a Good Samaritan would. This duty of “common pursuit” is a duty to participate in collective projects whose consequences are desirable for reasons that are morally significant. Fair governance is an example. When many citizens cast a considered vote, electoral results will tend to be more consonant with justice as fair governance than if people abstain or vote without knowledge of the alternatives. Voting with minimal epistemic competence and a sense of the common good is an example of an others-regarding duty of common pursuit. This duty is consistent with a logic of collective rationality, so to speak, whereby what we can accomplish together takes salience over what we can accomplish alone.
Collective rationality, by definition, leaves aside the attractiveness of free riding. Someone motivated to participate in a collective activity that is desirable because of its outcome commits to the common pursuit and, as a matter of moral choice, decides not to take advantage of other people’s contributions while not contributing himself. A duty of common pursuit underwrites the duty to vote with care because good governments can only be chosen and trusted with the popular mandate via the collective activity of elections. Other forms of political participation help people express their support or rejection for a particular electoral alternative; but none of those forms of participation formally (as a matter of law) places public officials in power or strips them of it (although revolutions and mass protests can and do take rulers down, the assumption is that under healthy democracies, elections are the only
