Areas of Specialty: Social and Political Philosophy, Moral Philosophy, Metaethics

How citizens vote is morally significant. When citizens vote, they can make government better or worse, and in turn, make people’s lives go better or worse. Bad choices at the polls can destroy economic opportunities, produce crises that lower everyone’s standards of living, lead to unjust and unnecessary wars (and thus to millions of deaths), lead to sexist, racist, and homophobic legislation, help reinforce poverty, produce overly punitive criminal legislation, and worse.

My second book, The Ethics of Voting, forthcoming from Princeton University Press in March 2011, inquires into when it is right and wrong for citizens to vote, and how they should vote if they do. I argue that while citizens have not duty to vote, if they do vote, they must vote well—on the basis of sound moral and empirical beliefs in order to promote the common good—or otherwise they are morally obligated to abstain. Though individual votes make no significant difference to political outcomes, bad voting violates either a duty not to participate in collectively harmful activities or a duty not to participate in collective activities that impose undue risk upon innocent people.

Voters should vote for the common interest rather than for narrow self-interest. Federalism and democracy do not lead self-interested votes to promote the common good, as if by an invisible-hand of politics. Institutions and policies should be publicly justifiable. For it to be legitimate to enforce compliance with the rules of a modern democracy, everyone subject to coercion should have a stake in those rules. The rules should benefit the overwhelming majority of people without exploiting anyone. Democratic voting should be a positive sum game, and when it is, voters have an obligation to keep it that way.

As citizens, we have no general duty to vote as opposed to abstain. Even if we grant that citizens owe a debt to society or have a general duty of beneficence, there are many ways besides voting well to pay off this debt or serve the common good. Voting is not special or privileged as a means of promoting the common good or paying back a debt to society. In fact, political participation more generally is not privileged as a way of exercising civic virtue or public-spiritedness. While it is might be disastrous if hardly anyone voted, it does not follow that the optimal amount of political participation (even if it were informed, rational participation) is one hundred percent. Rather, if we want people to serve the common good, we want to encourage a division of labor in which people serve the common good in different ways.

The folk theory of voting ethics holds it’s wrong to buy or sell votes. People regard vote selling as corrupt, abhorrent, and distasteful. They take it not just to be wrong, but uncontroversially wrong. In contrast, I argue that under some conditions there is nothing morally wrong with buying and selling votes. Vote selling and buying are not inherently or intrinsically wrong. When they are wrong, what makes them wrong is that they lead to violations of the duties I’ve described in earlier chapters. So long as vote buying and selling don’t lead to such violations, they aren’t wrong.