Topics and Issues in Voting Ethics

Hi everyone,I’m currently writing a book called The Ethics of Voting, and thought I’d ask you for advice and comments about what you’d like to see and what you think is important.  The book will cover the personals ethics of voting (questions concerning how individuals should behave) but not, for the most part, the political philosophy of voting (e.g., questions concerning who has the right to vote or how best to structure government institutions).

So, the basic questions of voting ethics that I plan to respond to are 1) Do I have an obligation to vote?  2)  If I do vote, do I have obligations to vote in particular ways?  3)  Is it acceptable to buy, trade, or sell my vote (not my right to vote, but my how I will vote)?  Related questions concern the source of any obligations, epistemic or other justificatory requirements, issues concerning whether citizens should be directed toward the common good or some other end, and so on.

As I’m envisioning it now, the chapters will roughly go something like this.  The introduction explains why voting is morally important.  Chapter 1 articulates various arguments in favor of a duty to vote and shows why they fail.  However, it also produces three arguments that seem pretty plausible and don’t look like they fail.  Chapter 2 articulates a theory of civic virtue and of citizens duties which refutes these remaining three arguments.  So the conclusion is that citizens don’t have an obligation to vote.  Chapter 3 discusses cases where citizens should refrain from voting rather than vote.  My view is that citizens have duties regulating how they vote if they do vote, but not a duty to vote.  In particular, a necessary but not sufficient condition for good voting is that citizens must be justified in the beliefs they base their votes upon.  Chapter 4 considers a wide range of objections and issues having to do with deference, autonomy, and abstention.  For instance, it considers issues about whether abstention involves a loss of autonomy, or whether one should always defer to known epistemic and moral superiors.  Chapter 5 argues that citizens have an obligation to vote for the common good rather than narrow self-interest, at least under normal circumstances.  It also gives a liberal account of the common good.  Chapter 6 argues that there is no special ethics of vote buying, trading, or selling.  Instead, what determines whether these things are right and wrong is specified by the obligations we have not to vote badly and to vote for the common good when we do vote.  So long as we don’t violate these rules, we don’t do anything wrong by buying, trading, or selling votes, though doing so may not be admirable.  (For what it’s worth, I haven’t written chapter 6 yet, so I might change my mind about these conclusions once I sit down to defend them at length.)   Chapter 7 will discuss relevant social scientific research to ask, in light of this research and my theory, how good are actual voters.  Finally, I might have a chapter 8, which will go over some issues of policy, such as compulsory voting.  I’ve written drafts of the introduction and chapters 1-4 at this point.So, that’s roughly what I expect to do.

 My question for you, if you’re interested in helping me shape the project, is what do you think I should cover?  What are some important issues or questions?  Obviously I didn’t specify everything that will go in the book (e.g., I will cover tactical/strategic voting), so if I didn’t list it, it doesn’t mean I haven’t thought of it.  However, there’s no doubt that there’s at least one obvious thing that I’ve overlooked. If you were writing the book, what would you talk about? How would you organize it?  So, I’m open to any and all suggestions.

Thanks!  -J

PS. For what it’s worth, I’m already spending a few pages in the current draft responding to an objection from Aaron Maltais that he posted here in response to my “Polluting the Polls” post. So, I really do find your suggestions helpful.