Should You Vote? An Argument from Analogy

Is there a duty to vote, is it even responsible to vote, and if so, should you be an informed voter?

It is often taken as a given, that people in liberal democracies have a moral duty to vote; you are doing a disservice to yourself, your country, and democracy by not voting. But is this the case?

Hospital Analogy

Suppose that a huge hospital is being built in your country. As a means to give people power over this hospital, everyone over the age of 18 is being asked to lay down one brick in the hospital. There are no requirements of bricklaying-experience, for laying a brick, so that no one gets oppressed in the building of the hospital (except minors). Now, you have just gotten a letter in your mailbox asking you to lay a brick, but you have no prior experience of laying bricks, and thus might risk diminishing the structural integrity of the hospital, by misplacing it. It is important to add, that the bricks of all the people who do not show up will just be aggregated equally amongst the people who showed up, such that the hospital will be built whether or not you participate. Now the question is: Do you have a duty to lay a brick?

If it is not already obvious, the hospital in this thought experiment is a government, and the bricks are votes. The bricklaying-experience would be analogous to having some relevant knowledge about politics. My intuition is quite strong here: You do not have a duty to lay a brick, actually you might even have a duty to refrain from laying a brick, so that the people who know what they are doing can build the hospital. I assume this is the intuition most people would have, since laying a brick would likely worsen the structural integrity of the hospital. The most important question is then whether the analogy holds.

To me it seems that voting is in some ways quite analogous: Each vote has a very small impact on the outcome of the election, just as each brick has a small impact on the stability of the hospital. If you refrain from voting, the impact of each of the other votes just gets increased, just like refraining from laying a brick would mean that the rest of the people would gain a bigger influence on the integrity of the hospital (by laying more bricks). There might, however, be some crucial disanalogies, that one might raise.

Is Political Knowledge Analogous to Bricklaying Expertise?

This worry is probably the first that would come to someone’s mind. It seems like there is a clear difference between bricklaying and politics (well, quite a lot, but one that is relevant here): In bricklaying there is a clear right way to do things, while in politics there is no clear right answer.

This problem can be split into two distinct problems: A relativistic one, and an epistemic one.

The Relativistic Problem

The objection here is that there is no right answer in politics, or that the right answer might not be stance-independent. This objection would of course not be raised by moral realists, since they think moral facts are stance-independent. A non-realist, however, might object that there is no right answer to political questions, and thus you cannot know stuff about political questions in the same way that you might know about bricklaying. But is there an objectively best way to do bricklaying? Hardly! There is an objectively best way to lay bricks, to achieve a certain goal, but that goal might be arbitrary. In the same way, there might be a best way to achieve political goals, despite those goals being arbitrary. If those goals are shared goals, then political knowledge is again analogous to bricklaying knowledge.

But are these goals shared? Is there not a lot of disagreement about what is the best thing to do in politics? Yes, I think there is, but this is not necessarily because there are different goals, but might be due to the complexity of the issues; it is hard to figure out what the best way to achieve a political goal is. These disagreements might thus be due to differences in reasoning steps, and not in axioms. I think that many people in fact do largely share goals, like optimizing well-being, and minimizing rights-violations. While these might not be objective goods, but they are still widely held goals by people all over the political spectrum.

It seems to me that most differences in value might be accounted for in terms of disagreement further up the reasoning tree. For example, equality is often taken to be valuable in itself. But the intuition for this might be accounted for in terms of the circumstances around inequality: Inequality is often accompanied by negative things, like bad living conditions and resentment amongst groups. But now we just accounted for the intuition of the value of equality in terms of other more basic values. But we then just showed that something that seemed to be a difference of value, was again a case of difference of reasoning, and not axioms (this is of course going to be controversial).

It might also be good enough to say that many (or most) people share the same values. Return to the analogy for a moment. Suppose that you think the goal of bricklaying is to optimize structural integrity. This is probably going to be the view of most people, so if you are not experienced, you are better off leaving it to the people who are experienced. If, however, you are some crazy philosopher, who thinks that the goal of bricklaying is to make the walls as thin and full of holes as possible, you are then, I think, justified in trying to achieve your goal, since you think that most people are horribly mislead about the purpose of bricklaying, such that even if you are a terrible bricklayer, you are going to do a better job than experienced people who, nevertheless, have the wrong goal in mind. I do, however, think that most people are not crazy philosophers, and thus the analogy would hold for them.

I myself lean towards moral realism so this point is not a sticking point for me personally. It is, however, useful to give a non-realist account of the analogy, for dialectical purposes.

The Epistemic Problem

But even for the realist, there might be a problem that makes voting disanalogous with the hospital example, namely that it is a lot harder to figure out what is the right thing to do in politics, than in bricklaying. This, I think, is answered quite straightforwardly, by an alteration to the analogy. Imagine that it was extremely hard to figure out what was the best way to lay a brick, such that there was reasonable disagreement between the greatest bricklaying minds about the issue. Would this mean that you now would have an obligation to lay a brick? Of course not! The fact that it is now harder to figure out what the best way to lay a brick should, if anything, make you more cautious of laying a brick. There might not even be an agreed upon answer to the question of what is the best way to lay a brick, but what then makes you think that you have a better chance of guessing correctly, than people who have spent more time thinking about bricklaying than you? So making the analogy more analogous just seems to strengthen the intuition rather than weaken it.

Are You Obligated to Learn?

But if you agree that you do not have an obligation to vote, if you are uninformed, you might still think that there is an obligation to become informed. This, again, seems to be shown to be wrong by referring to the analogy. In the analogy, are you obligated to learn the craft of bricklaying in order to lay a single brick? I would say that that would be highly implausible. It seems very strange that you should be obligated spend many hours of your precious time on this earth, in order to make the tiniest difference. And in the case of elections, it seems that the disparity between the time spent and the difference made is even bigger. Politics is a whole lot more complicated than bricklaying (not that bricklaying is easy), and the difference you make is negligible (one amongst millions).

But what if Everybody Did That?

But you might retort: What if no one voted? Well, if you have been following, you would have picked up that I am not proposing no one should vote, but rather that no one who is uninformed should vote. This is then compatible with the Kantian categorical imperative that you should:

“Act only on that maxim that you can consistently will to be a universal law.”

Since making the maxim that “no one who is uninformed should vote” can be made into universal law.

But there might be another point, that turns out to be problematic, namely the one that you are not obligated to learn: If no one is obligated to learn, and no one who is uninformed should vote, it might turn out that no one should vote. Here I would just point to the fact that it would probably never be the case that no one is going to be informed. I think that there are plenty of people who think that politics is interesting, and would spend time learning it, even though there is no obligation. Were it the case that almost no one learned politics of their own volition, I think that there might actually be an obligation to learn (at least for the most intelligent people). But I think that is very far from being the case.

Is Control by Minority not Dangerous?

A small reservation some might have is that the number of people who vote would be vastly reduced, if everyone followed the maxim. A rule by minority seems like it would be dangerous. I do think that rule by minority is generally dangerous, but I think this case is not like that, due to the reason why it is a minority that rules. Usually, a rule by minority would be structural, such that only a few elites have power, and the rest of the people are powerless. This is a problem for reasons covered below. But if people freely refrain from voting it avoids the dangers of restricting voting rights, while gaining the benefits.

Should You Restrict Voting Rights?

It might seem that an implication of what I am saying is that we should restrict who is able to vote. This is however not what I think; that would be catastrophic. There are a few problems with restricting voting rights.

First off, it would just be impossible (or at least involve extreme amounts of bureaucracy) to determine who should be able to vote. If the procedure was a test, to test your knowledge of politics, it is also not hard to imagine that this test could be unfairly biased towards a certain point of view.

Another consideration would be that beginning to restrict voting rights is a dangerous ground to tread. If you begin saying that people who are uninformed do not have a right to vote, then it becomes up to the government to determine who is uninformed, which could very easily be exploited.

All this can be true, and it still be true that you ought not vote. This is similar to free speech. You have (and should have) the right to call someone an asshole, but this does not mean that you should call someone an asshole.

So Should You Vote?

I think this is up to the individual to judge. First off whether they find my arguments persuasive, and second off, if so, whether they are informed enough to vote. It might be hard to judge whether you are informed enough, but I think that many people who do vote would, after some reflection, see that they are probably not informed. This is, again, something for the individual to judge, and I do not think that we should discourage specific individuals from voting, but rather make it clear that it might not be as obligatory as many think.