A Brown University professor named Jason Brennan has recently come out with an argument opposed to the popular catechism that everyone has a kind of moral duty to vote. Brennan’s position, on the contrary, is that some people have a moral duty not to vote. Although I doubt it will have much of an effect, I want to put forward my own two cents on this issue. For one thing, I think that idea is just wrong, and for another, I think that it could eventually have pernicious consequences. (Since Brennan’s paper on this subject is not published yet, I am not going to quote directly from it, but instead draw on a conversation that he had about the idea with Will Wilkinson on Bloggingheads TV (if you go to the Bloggingheads video, it has a link to a draft of the paper.))
Brennan’s argument goes something like this. As citizens, we have a moral duty to do what is best for our country, if not in the positive sense of doing good (ie., picking up trash on the highway, working at a soup kitchen), then at least in the negative sense of not doing harm. In the case of voting, however, many of us often do harm to the common good, because we don’t understand the issues very well, and we don’t reason very well. Because of that we favor bad policies and vote for politicians who enact those bad policies (unsurprisingly, Brennan says his idea was sparked by Bryan Caplan’s book, The Myth of the Rational Voter.) Therefore, those of us who lack knowledge and or proper reasoning skills have a moral obligation not to vote.
In the discussion with Wilkinson, Brennan uses two analogies to help illustrate the point. First analogy: let’s say a group of six people decide to go out for dinner. One person in the group (me, let’s say) is from out of town. While I may have a right to put forward my choice, it wouldn’t be a very good idea for me to do so. I should rather defer to the other five people, who live in that city and know the restaurant scene. By refusing to exercise my right, everyone (including me) ends up better off. Second analogy: we don’t think that everyone has the right to be a surgeon, or an airline pilot. Only the people with the requisite skills should be doing the sorts of things that surgeons and airline pilots do. Why then do we assume that everyone should be picking the President (this is a pretty old argument, BTW. It goes back at least as far as Plato’s Apology.)
I think that Brennan has a number of problems here but the most important is that he uses the wrong model to understand what elections are and what they do. Elections are not simply the accumulated decisions of a set number of individuals (call them citizens), all striving to make the most rational choice. That model of voting has actually been in trouble for a long time, long before Caplan decided to write his book. One of its biggest problems is that it can’t explain why it makes rational sense for any individual to vote at all, since a single vote has almost no chance of making a difference to the end result. Elections are better understood as choices that a people make collectively. They serve as a feedback loop. As long as the situation is (more or less) okay, the status quo obtains. When things get too bad, the population bands together to throw the bums out.
The thing is, if this system is going to work for the benefit of all its members, and not just some of them, it needs input from all sectors of society. A basic assumption of democracy is that the best people to decide about whether or not a change is needed, seen from the perspective of a certain geographic area, or economic class, or any other social group, are members of that class itself. Poor farmers in Appalachia may not know what the Supreme Court does or who sits on it, and they may not know who their congressman is. They may make fundamental mistakes in economic reasoning. But what they do know, very well, is what daily life is like as a poor farmer in Appalachia. They are the only ones, in fact, who have that information. If the system is going to function in a proper—hell, let’s use a real word—in a just manner, then it needs to get that information from them. Remember too, that the only way the system ever pays attention to their information is when they vote. Policy papers from well-meaning social workers don’t cut it, because ignoring such claims has no real-world consequences for politicians.
Certainly, this feedback is imperfect, for the kinds of reasons that Brennan and Caplan and others point out. Voters are ill-informed, prejudiced, and cannot give convincing reasons for why they do what they do. And they do sometimes make bad decisions, as a group. American voters may be on the brink of making one of the most disastrous decisions in the history of the republic, IMO (though recent polling is reassuring on that score). But to paraphrase E.B. White, the leap of faith required for democracy (and it is very much a leap of faith, although I think in the end a justified one) is to believe that more than half the people are right more than half the time. While an individual may persist in choosing against his or her own interests, groups over time tend not to (see James Surowiecki’s The Wisdom of Crowds). Moreover, the cure implied by Brennan’s argument is even worse than the disease it purports to treat, since it would have a group of self-selected “good voters” deciding what is best both for themselves and for everyone else. This never ends up well, for reasons I will explain in my next post.
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