Ethics of Voting

New Books in Philosophy conducted an interview of Jason Brennan about his book The Ethics of Voting.  In it he questions the conventional wisdom that we have an obligation to vote or that we should necessarily view voting as virtuous.  Instead he states that we have no obligation to vote, but if we decide to we should vote well.

I'm not sure that this would make a valuable change in a system of moral and ethical values.  One problem with this idea is that people who incorporated this into their system of moral and ethical values would weaken their political philosophy.  Our political system would be dominated by those who believe in an obligation to vote, or at least the idea that voting is virtuous.

Another problem is that in order for a system of moral and ethical values to function, people must assign blame and credit to the actions of others, but the task of voting well is no more complicated than the task of knowing what it means to vote well.  In order to encourage people to do things that are beneficial to others and deter them from doing things that are harmful, large numbers of people would have to be able to know which ways of voting were harmful and which were helpful.  If they knew this, they would know how to vote well.

Just about the only thing I can think of on this subject is that we should look at professed ignorance as an excuse for not voting.  Perhaps this might do some good.  There is a cost associated with obtaining enough information to be able to vote well.  Perhaps many people would do better by helping people in other ways.

It is easy to see where the folk wisdom is coming from on this issue.  People are more likely to interact with those who have similar views.  Adopting the point of view that people have an obligation to vote will strengthen any political point of view, because the people around any individual will tend to have similar political ideas.  Hence encouraging people to vote by promoting the idea that people have an obligation to vote will strengthen any political position by encouraging people who are likely to share that political position to vote.

I suspect that for this reason we should find any political system which depends on large numbers of people to have very good, detailed information about how we should be governed and how we are being governed leaves considerable room for improvement.  The government should be accountable to the people, but ought to be more knowledgable than them.

I frequently have a conversation with a friend of mine who insists on running while openly advocating a very wise, but politically unpopular position.  He states that the only long term way of fixing this problem is for most of the people to become educated about economics.

I'm not sure I agree.  Would it really be better to have everyone acquire the knowledge that they would need in order to be able to skillfully deal with the big picture?  Time and attention that they devote to this is time that they take their time and attention away from their various little pictures.