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Here are some questions I’m thinking about, and I wonder what you think.
Suppose, for the sake or argument, I’ve established that voters have a duty to vote for candidates or policies which they justifiedly believe will promote the common good. Otherwise, they have a duty to abstain from voting.
Suppose that vote buying and selling are not illegal. Now, suppose when Alf votes, he only votes for candidates whom he justifiedly believes will serve the common good. So long as Alf does that, is there anything wrong with him selling his vote? Is there anything wrong with paying him to vote that way?
In the current draft of The Ethics of Voting, I argue that it’s not wrong. So long as Alf is justified in voting a particular way for free, then it’s permissible for him to take money to vote that way and it’s permissible to pay him to vote that way.
I’m curious why anyone would think otherwise. I’ve looked at the literature on vote buying, and I haven’t found any good objections to Alf’s vote selling. Much of the empirical literature and the a priori public choice models describe vote selling as harmful, but that’s only because they discuss what happens or would happen when people don’t vote to promote the common good. So while I think these arguments are good arguments for legally prohibiting vote buying, they don’t say much about Alf’s case. For instance, many (but not all) public choice economists think legal vote selling would lead to rent-seeking, but these arguments assume that voters will vote in self-interested ways rather than abide by a duty to vote for the common good.
Rather than go on about why I think Alf’s case of vote selling is permissible, and rather than discuss some of the objections I consider, I’m just curious why some of you might think Alf would do something wrong in selling his vote. It may be that I’m overlooking some killer objection. Thanks! -J
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1 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 7:24 am
Paul Gowder
Some disconnected, slightly rambling, thoughts…
This is the sort of question that gives rise to the irresistible impulse to start evading, redefining the problem, etc., I think because it’s uncomfortably far from the way people really behave. It’s hard to get past the psychological implausibility to talk about the ethics of paying someone for something they’d do anyway. (There’s an old joke about the judge who gets paid $5k from one party and $10k from the other, and decides the ethical thing to do is give $5k back to the second guy and decide the case on the merits.)
So I’ll do that kind of duck and weave job on the question for a couple of paragraphs, partly for cathartic purposes to purge the uneasiness of contemplating someone with Alf’s motivational structure, but also because there might be useful thoughts in there…
1. One seat-of-the-pants intuition is that this wouldn’t be vote-selling at all. An essential feature of a sale is that the seller is motivated by the money to hand over the good/perform the service. But here, Alf’s not so motivated. In what sense is he really selling anything, taking a bribe, etc.?
1.5. On the other hand, if Alf were motivated to vote for the best candidate by the bribe, it seems to follow (though I can’t say quite why at the moment) that he could be motivated to vote for a different, inferior, candidate by a different, inferior, bribe. And then perhaps there’s something objectionable Alf’s disposition, insofar as it’s consistent with voting badly for pay.
2. There’s also a psychological implausibility on the buyer’s part. Why does s/he want to pay Alf for something that Alf’s doing anyway? Is Alf misrepresenting his intentions?
3. Ok, you say that Alf only votes for the candidates he believes are best qualified. I’ve been interpreting this as stating a necessary and sufficient condition for voting for a candidate, but maybe you mean it to be a necessary condition only? That is, Alf might vote, or he might not vote, but if he does vote, it’ll be for the best candidate? Then we have a plausible selling story: perhaps the best candidate’s party pays Alf to show up at the voting booth. But, thanks to the considerations expressed in 1 and 2, that seems to carry the implication that if he doesn’t get paid, he doesn’t vote. And then, if we think there’s a duty to vote well (or to vote well if one can do so cheaply, or to vote well if one has the knowledge to do so, whatever), he’s violating that, or threatening to violate that… ?
At a minimum, Alf might have an incentive to stay home or threaten to stay home in a vote-selling-is-ok system, to gain a bargaining position. In a system that prohibits vote selling, that kind of strategic behavior is unavailable, so he might just vote well.
Right, that’s my round of question dodging. Now to confront it straight-on.
4. Remember that joke? A common objection to similar questions about judges is that they’ll create the “appearance of impropriety.” Might a similar objection be advanced here? If we have a system where vote-buying happens, might even “honest” vote-buying like Alf’s threaten the legitimacy of the electoral process?
5. I guess the gut-level objection, though, is really just that the role of voter is not one that’s compatible with taking money — a gut feeling that can be expressed in some combination of virtue ethics terms and Elizabeth Anderson-style expressive values. Alf’s behavior expresses the wrong sorts of attitudes toward the political community and Alf’s fellow citizens — it says “I’m not interested in participating in this democracy because I’m a citizen who is concerned for my community and fellow citizens, I’m participating because I like money.” Alf is a greedy person, not a civic-minded one.
2 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 10:14 am
Sam Clark
I initially had a thought like Paul Gowder’s 5: selling one’s vote reveals vicious character. For the sake of getting objections out in the open, though, here’s an alternative response:
6. What one ought to do is what’s mandated by the rules which would have the best overall consequences overall if everyone followed them (see Brad Hooker, Ideal Code, Real World. See Mill, for that matter). For democratic voting, that set of rules includes a prohibition on vote-selling, because a system in which vote-selling was allowed would rapidly turn into a plutocracy. So, even if Alf’s particular act of vote-selling doesn’t have bad consequences (because he’s only willing to sell to people who want him to vote well), he shouldn’t sell his vote.
3 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 11:36 am
Aaron Maltais
I share with Paul his reactions to the nature of the question/problem you are proposing, and I am also guessing that what you want to get at in the end is if it is morally acceptable to pay a ‘good voter’ to vote if she would otherwise not vote. Economic arguments against his point 5 based on premises about the supposed high costs of voting are embarrassing non-starters.
A smaller but additional problem to those mentioned by Paul with paying the ‘poorly motivated good voter’ is that it may distort what is communicated about the electorate in a democratic election. After all the level of participation (especially changes in it) can communicate a lot about what is going on in the political culture.
4 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 1:14 pm
Kevin Vallier
J, let me structure the problem as a public reason guy would:
(1) We have publicly justified a norm which specifies not to vote unless one’s voting habits reliably contribute to the common good. (
(a) I take it this norm is meant to have its effect on the group, a moral public good, that is, since individuals can’t affect outcomes.
(b) I also take it that the notion of the common good includes a set of goods that all reasonable persons recognize as goods, despite their differences like Rawlsian primary goods; otherwise, I’m worried that even if people are well-motivated, they’ll promote common bads because they won’t respect reasonable pluralism.
(c) Finally, I take it that we’re talking about ideal situations where institutions function reasonably well.
(2) Citizens largely follow this norm.
(3) We permit vote-selling contingent on the norm being followed.
Here are some concerns:
(i) Vote-selling might lead to the break-down of the original norms. If some are allowed to accumulate for sway than others, then an individual might accumulate enough votes to control outcomes and be corrupted into promoting his own conception of the good at the expense of everyone else’s (it doesn’t matter whether he is bad or whether he is good but doesn’t understand or deeply respect reasonable pluralism - say he’s a Razian). The norm may face a public choice problem - free-riding on the norm.
(ii) I think that government institutions are publicly justified to the extent that they (a) block publicly unjustified policies and (b) permit publicly justified policies (and (a) gets more weight than (b)). I imagine that you believe something close to this - government institutions are justified only if they prevent bads and produce goods. One might worry that vote-selling would make it harder for institutions to track public justification because it would disrupt the information received about voter preferences. In other words, we might think that an institution should function by accumulating voter preferences (no matter what they are) and making judgments based on its information.
You could argue, in reply, that voter preferences are expressed in their vote-trading.
(iii) Public choice econ shows that log-rolling in legislative politics is very destructive. Groups can form coalitions that leave everyone worse off despite each individual coalition bringing about Pareto improvements (Jerry has a nice discussion of this in his PPE book). Perhaps this could happen with citizen voting as well - since you’re basically allowing a sort of log-rolling.
But you could argue that outcomes wouldn’t be worse than if citizens voted as they currently do.
I hope some of these help.
5 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 1:39 pm
Sam Clark
[I posted a comment earlier, but it seems to not to have appeared. Another go below]
My initial reaction was similar to Paul Gowder’s 5: selling one’s vote shows vicious character. But in the interests of getting objections out into the open:
6. Alf should do whatever is mandated by those rules which would have the best overall consequences if everyone followed them (see Brad Hooker; see Mill, for that matter). Those rules would prohibit vote-selling, because a system in which vote-selling was permitted would rapidly degenerate into plutocracy. So, Alf should not sell his vote, even though his doing so in particular has no (direct) bad consequences (because he’s only willing to sell to people who want him to vote well).
6 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 2:26 pm
Jason Brennan
Hi guys,
Thanks for all the responses. I’ll say some brief stuff in response here.
Paul and Sam:
I agree that the act of selling one’s vote might display vicious character, though in the book I’ve constructed a few cases where it does not. (After arguing that there’s no duty to vote, I have readers consider a case where a person of exceptional civic virtue, who has done lots of volunteering, etc., decides to take the day off rather than vote, but another person pays him to vote.) However, that doesn’t mean the act is wrong.
My thinking about these issues is heavily influenced by Brad Hooker’s work. However, I wonder whether a blanket moral prohibition on vote selling is justified. The dialectic of the book, so far, goes like this: First, I argue that you have no duty to vote. Then I argue that you have rather stringent duties to vote in certain ways if you do vote. Last, I argue that provided you don’t violate these aforementioned duties, you don’t do anything wrong in selling your vote. Selling an otherwise morally permissible vote doesn’t introduce wrongness into the world. However, if you’re voting wrongly, then taking money to vote wrongly might amplify the wrongness of your act.
Aaron:
Your point about the level of participation seems right–levels of participation can communicate important information. However, would that show that paying people to vote they way they ought to vote is wrong, or that it’s wrong for you to accept money to vote the way you ought? Also, would this kind of objection show that there’s something morally wrong with Votergasm.com or with Ben and Jerry’s offering ice cream to voters? (Actually, I think there is something wrong with Ben and Jerry’s offer, but it’s because Ben and Jerry induce people to vote badly.)
Kevin:
You’ve structured the issues nicely–1-3 summarize the issue well.
Regarding i: I think the problem of corruption might be a good reason to make vote selling illegal. However, this wouldn’t make it wrong to take money to vote well. What’s wrong is to be corrupted by money. On the other hand, if you’re the kind of person who is likely to be corrupted by money, then perhaps you should know this about yourself and not take any money.
Regarding iii: The example of logrolling Jerry gives in PPE on pp. 172-3 is an example of people violating the ethics of voting. If money is introduced into the process, that might amplify the wrongness, I agree.
7 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 2:30 pm
Jason Brennan
Here are two excerpts from the current draft of the book. (This chapter is a bit draftier than the others…)
A) Paying the Unmotivated
Suppose Alan is an expert on politics. He’s an exceptionally good person and has exceptional civic virtue. In addition to working a socially useful job as a small business owner, Alan coaches a little league team, volunteers many hours per week at Habitat for Humanity and at picking up litter, gives blood regularly, and gives significant amounts to charity. He is also the former mayor of his town, but has recently retired from public service.
Next Tuesday is an election. Alan hasn’t had a day off in weeks, but he plans to spend Tuesday watching The Godfather films rather than vote. Bob knows Alan isn’t planning to vote. He knows that Alan is a political expert and a good person, so he knows that Alan would not violate principles 1 and 2 were Alan to vote. Bob offers Alan $100 to vote. Bob says, “Alan, you’ve already done so much for others. I don’t blame you for wanting to stay home rather than vote. But it’s worth $100 for me to have a person like you vote, even though I know your individual vote doesn’t count for much.” Alan accepts the money and goes to the polls. When there, Alan uses his own excellent judgment to decide whom to vote for. He votes with the public good in mind, and he is epistemically justified in thinking that the candidate for whom he votes will do a good job promoting the common good.
In this case, I don’t see how Alan or Bob have done anything wrong. By hypothesis, Alan has good judgment and votes in for candidates that would promote the common good. He has more than paid any debts to society. In fact, he’s given more to the community than he must. He probably has more civic virtue than any reader (and certainly writer) of this book. As I argued in chapters 1 and 2, Alan had no duty to vote, and it was within his prerogative to watch movies rather than vote. If he voted for free, he’d do us a small favor, but he doesn’t owe us any more favors. Why shouldn’t he accept payment in return for doing us even more good? If Alan voted for free, he would have done something supererogatory. When he votes, he will vote for the candidate that he justifiedly believes will best promote the common good. What evil is introduced into the world by his taking a cast payment instead of doing it for free?
If Bob had convinced Alan to vote by praising voting, this would not be wrong. What evil is introduced into the world by his offering to pay Alan instead? Bob prefers to see good people vote well, and he’s willing to reimburse them for their trouble. Bob does us a public service, albeit a small one, by paying Alan.
Let’s consider a similar case. Suppose Alan has spend the last 30 days picking up litter in his town. He has done so spontaneously and on his own, rather than as a member of some voluntary organization. After 30 days, only a few streets are left dirty, so he has only 1 day of work left to make the town litter free. On the 31st day, he decides to watch Godfather films instead. The people who live on the dirty streets say to him, “Alan, we know you deserve a break. It makes sense that you’d take a day for yourself. You certainly don’t owe it to us to clean our streets today rather than stay home. However, we’d strongly prefer to have our streets cleaned, and so we’re willing to pay you $250 to clean them now instead of watching movies.” It would be beneficent—but supererogatory—if Alan declined the money and worked for free. But Alan wouldn’t do something wrong were he to accept the money.
When Alan takes money to vote or the clean the streets, no one is harmed. All parties to the transaction are benefitted. Innocent third parties are benefitted or at least not harmed. Everyone is a winner or at least no worse off. Given this, if you think Alan is acting wrongly, you bear the philosophical burden of proof. You need to produce a coherent, defensible principle that explains what makes his actions wrong. (In the coming sections, I will respond to a few arguments that attempt to show Alan is doing something wrong.) Until you produce such a good explanation of what makes Alan and Bob’s actions wrong, you should be skeptical of your belief that they are acting wrongly.
One might object that some acts are harmless in isolation but harmful when many people do them. But this doesn’t pose an objection to paying people like Alan to vote. Suppose we scale up these kinds of actions. I.e., suppose some philanthropist reliably identifies all of the virtuous political experts and pays them each a small sum to vote. At best, this means that we all enjoy better political outcomes than we otherwise would. At worst, it means that money is spent in an unsuccessful attempt to produce good political outcomes. Perhaps the irrational, immoral, stupid, or ignorant voters outvote the paid virtuous experts. If so, the money is wasted, but that’s not morally wrong.
C) Paying Someone to Vote for the Best Candidate
In the two cases above, vote sellers are paid to vote according to their own best judgment, rather than the judgment of the buyer. However, suppose instead that sellers vote according to the best judgment of the buyer. As long as the sellers abide by principles 1 and 2, they don’t do anything wrong in taking money to vote. [NOTE: Principles 1 and 2 say that in general, voters should vote for candidates or policies that promote the common good, and that people who choose to vote must vote in ways they justifiedly expect to promote the common good; otherwise, they must abstain.]
Suppose Ed is a political expert and well motivated. Fred is not an expert. He’s honest and trustworthy, though. If Fred agrees to do something, he’ll do it. Ed and Fred both know all of this about themselves and each other. Suppose Ed pays Fred to vote for a particular candidate C. Ed knows that C is best. When Ed votes, he’ll vote for C, and Ed is right to vote that way according to principles 1 and 2 above. So, Ed pays Fred to vote the same way that Ed will vote.
If Fred accepts the money and votes as Ed directs him, does he do something wrong? This will depend on whether Fred may use Ed’s testimony as a basis for his vote. So, suppose the correct epistemological theory, whatever that is, says that Fred would be justified in believing candidate C is best because Ed said C was best. If so, then it would be morally permissible for Fred to vote without payment for C, because Fred would be justified in believing that C is best on the basis of Ed’s testimony. If Fred voted that way for free, he wouldn’t do anything wrong. Why would it be wrong to accept payment to do it?
If, however, the correct epistemological theory (whatever that is) indicates that Fred should not believe C is best in light of Ed’s testimony, then Ed does something wrong in voting for C. However, he does something wrong because he violates principle 2 above. Now, taking money to do something wrong may amplify the wrongness, but it doesn’t transform a right action into a wrong one. Fred would be doing something wrong if he voted for C for free.
As for Ed, we should thank him for increasing the likelihood that a good candidate would be elected.
8 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 2:33 pm
Jason Brennan
P.S. If you’re interested, Ben Saunders just published a paper in Politics arguing that people who support compulsory voting should, instead, support governments paying voters to vote.
http://www3.interscience.wiley.com/cgi-bin/fulltext/122360124/PDFSTART
9 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 3:46 pm
Jason Brennan
Also, here’s a related puzzle. I’m genuinely unsure of what to say about this one:
Suppose it is supererogatory for you to do X. (That is, it’s praiseworthy of you to do it, but it’s not required that you do X.)
Now, suppose I don’t want you to do X, so I offer you $500 not to do it. (It’s not that I want you to do Y instead of X, but I just don’t want you to do X.)
Is it wrong for me to pay you not to do something morally supererogatory? Is it wrong for you to accept money not to do something supererogatory?
10 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 5:14 pm
Paul Gowder
Jason, I’m really curious what you’d say about a slightly more testing variation of the Ed and Fred case.
Fred, let’s say, is a conscientious voter who has done his research. Unfortunately, he’s not very smart and doesn’t know it, so his considered judgments often go wrong. Fred sincerely believes that Diana is the best candidate, and plans to vote for her.
Along comes Ed. Ed is a political expert who reliably comes to the right judgment about candidates. And let’s say that it’s correct as a matter of normative epistemology to be the sort of bayesian who shifts beliefs very heavily in the direction of expert opinion. Ed thinks Charlotte is the best candidate. Ed pays Fred to switch his vote from Diana to Charlotte. Fred does so, while still in fact believing that Diana is the best candidate.
11 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 5:32 pm
Jason Brennan
Hi Paul,
In the book, I consider a case like that. My view is that in this case, Fred has a duty not to vote for Charlotte, and it’s wrong for him to take the money. (In general, if it’s wrong to X, then it’s even worse to be paid to X.)
Now, this doesn’t necessarily mean that Ed is wrong to pay Fred to vote for Charlotte. Suppose Fred is deadset on voting for Charlotte, and the only thing that will make him change his mind is $50. Suppose Fred is just impervious to the evidence that Charlotte is better. If so, then perhaps it’s permissible for Ed to pay Fred to vote for Charlotte, though it would make more sense to give the money to Oxfam. (Fred’s vote isn’t worth $50.) Fred shouldn’t sell his vote, but maybe it’s okay for Ed to buy it.
What if Fred isn’t going to vote? That’s a bit harder. By paying Fred, Ed increases the likelihood that we will enjoy a good political outcome. No one is harmed, and some people might be benefitted. At worst, the problem is that Ed overpays for Fred’s votes. (But see the penultimate paragraph of this post.)
Suppose some philanthropist could have helped women win the right to vote by paying a bunch of people to vote for women’s suffrage. Or, suppose some philanthropist could have ended slavery sooner in the US by bribing bad voters to vote in favor of ending slavery. Let’s also suppose that these bribed voters, in both cases, remain bad voters. They vote the right way, but they aren’t justified in thinking that they vote the right way. I refer to such voters as “fortuitous voters”, and I argue that fortuitous voting is wrong. So, on my view, the bribed voters act wrongly. Still, I’m not sure the philanthropist acts wrongly by bribing them.
I’m not sure it’s permissible, either. Suppose I announce that I will pay would-be polluters not to pollute. Perhaps this will reduce pollution. Or, perhaps it will induce people to threaten to pollute unless they receive payment. Some of them will make good on these threats. The same goes for bad voting. So, a system that allows people to be paid *not to pollute* or *not to vote badly* might be a disaster. This seems like a good reason to make it illegal to pay people not to vote badly. If so, then perhaps there’s a moral prohibition that goes along with this.
So, I’m puzzled about this case. I’m pretty sure that it’s fine to buy and sell votes when doing so doesn’t lead to what I call bad voting. But when it does lead to bad voting, it’s wrong to sell votes, but I’m not always sure that it’s wrong to buy these bad votes.
12 - Wednesday, 3 June 2009 at 10:15 pm
Paul Gowder
Ok, your answer to my modified version of Fred ‘n Ed suggests that your picture is more complicated than I’d thought. I’d thought that there was a fairly simple evaluation function going on here: If Agent votes, is Agent going to vote badly? Then A has a duty not to vote. If A votes, is A going to vote well? Then A’s voting is superogatory.
In handling the original version of the Fred ‘n Ed story, I take it that you add a subtlety — “voting well” means something like “having justification for the belief that you should vote for the candidate you voted for.” Hence the appeal to correct epistemic theories.
But modified Fred votes well when he votes for Charlotte — he votes for the best candidate, and, crucially, he would be fully epistemically justified in thinking that Charlotte is the best candidate. (That’s the difference between my Fred and your fortuitous voters: Fred, if he updated his beliefs based on Ed’s choice, would be fully justified.) It just so happens that he has a mental defect such that he thinks Charlotte is not the best candidate, and so he doesn’t pick her because he thinks she’s the best candidate, he picks her because he took a bribe.
I can think of two ways to fill out the account of why Fred is nonetheless wrong to take a bribe to vote for Charlotte.
Option 1: Fred is wrong because he’s still a bad voter. A bad voter need not only make an epistemically justified choice. He must also know (or believe) that he’s making epistemically justified choice.
Option 2: Fred is no longer a bad voter. He’s wrong because he votes for Charlotte for the wrong reasons. He ought to vote for Charlotte in response to knowledge about the rightness of her candidacy, not the bribe.
Either course seems to raise problems for you. The second condemns Alf too. The first seems to provoke difficult questions about why Fred’s a bad voter, even though he’s motivated to vote for the candidate for whom there is a justified choice? Is badness of voter some kind of personal property of a voter (laziness, stupidity, etc.), or of a voter’s consciousness? I’m not particularly sure I see why a fortuitous voter on your terms is a bad voter. Nor do I see why a fortuitous voter+ like Fred, who also has this, let’s call it epistemic-justification-but-for-mental-defect property is a bad voter.
To bring this out a little more, compare the original Fred with my modified Fred. Fred1 is no longer a bad voter, because he updates his beliefs based on what Ed says. Fred2 is still a bad voter, because he doesn’t — and this even though both Freds carry out the same action for the same reason and in the same epistemic environment? That’s a little hard to swallow.
Let’s try and cut things even finer. Consider Fred3. Suppose that Fred3 has all of the knowledge and cognitive resources available to Ed. Particularly, Fred3 knows that Charlotte is a better candidate than Diana. But he doesn’t care: he’s a selfish voter, and he knows that Diana will give his town lots and lots of pork. He plans to vote for Diana. Enter Ed, with his seemingly endless wallet. Ed pays Fred3 his expected value from the pork plus one dollar, with the result that Fred3, homo economicus himself, correctly switches his vote to Charlotte. Is Fred3 a bad voter? If he is a bad voter, does it follow from his badness of voter that he’s wrong to take the bribe and vote the right way?
(Addendum: let’s specify that Fred3’s original intention to vote for Diana is not in any way strategic: he genuinely prefers Diana, and isn’t just threatening to vote badly to get money, and nobody else in society would do so if we permitted Ed to buy Fred3’s vote.)
13 - Thursday, 4 June 2009 at 12:28 am
Jason Brennan
Hi Paul,
I think I might have misunderstood your original example involving Charlotte and Diana.
My take on it is this:
Before Ed comes along, is Fred justified in believing that Diana is a good candidate? If so, then he may vote for her. Now, when Ed offers Fred money to vote for Charlotte instead, what I thought you meant was this: Fred continues to believe Diana is better than Charlotte, but accepts money to vote for Charlotte. If so, then it’s wrong for him to vote and to take the money. However, if on the basis of Ed’s testimony, Fred is now justified in believing that Charlotte is in fact better, then Fred is now obligated to vote for Charlotte or abstain. If he takes money to vote for Charlotte, that’s fine.
Also, I don’t think you need to believe that you are justified in your beliefs; you just need to be justified in them.
So, in summary, my position is that so long as you vote for candidates or policies that you justifiedly believe will promote the common good, then you don’t do anything wrong by accepting money to vote that way. However, if you aren’t justified in believing the candidates or policies will promote the common good, it’s generally wrong to take money.
Note, however, that this doesn’t mean your motivation for voting has to be that you desire to promote the common good. You need to act in certain ways, but you might have ignoble or morally neutral motivations for acting those ways. Your motivations affect your character and the moral worth of the action, but not the rightness or wrongness of it.
More later… Thanks!-J
14 - Thursday, 4 June 2009 at 12:44 am
Paul Gowder
I was trying to pry a crowbar in between those two possibilities. The idea is that Fred continues to believe that Diana is better than Charlotte, but that he would be justified to switch his beliefs — that is, he has access to enough evidence to support (compel) a vote for Charlotte, in virtue of Ed’s testimony, but something goes wrong in his mental process, so he doesn’t know it.
15 - Thursday, 4 June 2009 at 6:21 am
Aaron Maltais
Hi Jason,
I guess I was thinking of two problems: 1) that institutionalising the practice of buying votes would distort election results (e.g. having the state pay poorly motivated voters to vote) and 2) that wealthy people/agents (i.e. those with the resources to engage in significant vote buying) could end up undermining the legitimate interests of some segments of society. The first problem would count against this type of public policy while the second problem could be so serious as to justify prohibiting vote buying. The issue in the second problem is that it will be at the discretion of the wealthy vote buyers when and when not to increase voting of a certain kind. Even when the wealthy voters only buy ‘common good votes’ turning on and off the taps in this way could over the long term undermine the viability of, for example, political parties that represent the interests of labour. The wealthy vote buyers need not even be aware that they are over the long term manipulating the political system in this way, instead they may just be biased about when it is and is not worth it to get people to vote for the common good. This second problem is a bit farfetched though given that in real world voting wealthy vote buyers will not see themselves bound by the ‘only buy common good votes’ principle or if so motivated will fail to impartially apply the principle in an adequate fashion.
In the main example you describe I do not see anything wrong with vote buying/selling (i.e. without thinking about the scaling up effects). I am curious what you think the implications are more generally. It seems that both the buyer and seller are very special cases.
16 - Thursday, 4 June 2009 at 2:55 pm
Kevin Vallier
Aaron,
I think Jason could respond by arguing that so long as the wealth vote buyers are trying to promote the common good, that it isn’t clear why their purchased aggregate-voting would have worse outcomes.
One thing we know about voters is most democratic countries is that they are very, very stupid. And the arguments of some political scientists and democratic theorists that the aggregate effect of dumb voters is to produce good outcomes have a lot to say against them.
For instance, one might argue that if the rich had a higher proportion of votes that they would make the economy safer for rich people. But that that wouldn’t necessarily be worse for poorer people than an economy less safe for rich people. Some have argued that an economy safe for the rich is actually better for the poor.
I think you’re raising an instrumentalist worry about vote-trading - you think it will lead to worse outcomes on the whole. I have no idea whether this is true and I’m not sure we can know for sure. Although, it is worth noting that J.S. Mill thought that different amounts of votes should be apportioned to different social groups because only a fool would deny that some have more political expertise than others. Jason could argue that if we implemented the right ethic of permissible vote-trading, the votes would end up in the hands of those who would use them best.
Instead, I think the best way to argue against Jason’s view is to argue that each person having their voting rights be inalienable is intrinsically good. But I’m not sure how to argue for that.
17 - Thursday, 4 June 2009 at 3:04 pm
Jason Brennan
Thanks, Kevin, that’s essentially how I’d respond to Aaron’s worry.
As for inalienability: Let’s distinguish between 3 different things, which I call forfeiture of voting rights, transfer of voting rights, and (for lack of a better term), paid performance. (If you have a better term for this, please let me know.)
A person forfeits his voting right if his right to vote disappears. He transfers his voting right if he loses his right to vote, but someone else acquires that right. The inalienability of voting rights implies that it’s wrong to pay someone to forfeit or transfer his voting rights, and it’s wrong to accept money to forfeit or transfer your right.
As for paid performance: But suppose I don’t pay you to forfeit or transfer your right. I just pay you to do certain things with your inalienable right to vote. I pay you to vote a particular way. Is that wrong, just because rights are inalienable? I take it that rights to free speech are inalienable too, but it’s not wrong to pay someone to write one thing rather than another. If I accept a contract to write a crappy romance novel, one that I otherwise would not write were it not for the money, that doesn’t mean that I’ve forfeited or transfered my right of free speech.
Compare to land: I might pay you to revert your land to the commons. That’s forfeiture. I might pay you to give me your land. That’s transfer. (I might pay you to let me use your land, but you continue to own it. That’s renting or leasing.) But suppose I give you money so that you will do certain things with your land, though I never acquire a right to use your land. E.g., suppose I pay you to grow corn instead of wheat, but I don’t thereby acquire any right to corn or any right to set foot on your land. That’s what I’d call paid performance. Even if we supposed for the sake of argument that rights to land are inalienable, this would just show that forfeiture and transfer are wrong, not that paid performance is wrong.
18 - Thursday, 4 June 2009 at 3:10 pm
Jason Brennan
P.S. Someone asked what the upshot of all this was. Here goes:
The folk theory of voting ethics (the most commonly held view) says that vote buying and selling are inherently wrong. I think I can show that they aren’t. Rather, what makes vote buying and selling wrong, when it’s wrong, is that it leads to bad voting. (This is an oversimplification, but it will do here.) In principle, vote buying and selling could be morally permissible. Perhaps all actual instances of vote buying and selling in history have been wrong, and perhaps we should make it illegal, but it’s not inherently wrong.
From the standpoint of the book, by the time I get to vote selling, I’ve spent 3 chapters explaining how voters ought to vote. Then I can argue that vote selling is wrong just when it can be expected (in particular instances) to lead to violations of these duties, but it’s not wrong otherwise. So, it turns out that the ethics of vote selling largely reduces to the ethics of voting.
19 - Sunday, 7 June 2009 at 10:12 pm
Ben Saunders
Hi Jason,
Thanks for the plug (at #8 above) and sorry for taking so long to join in this discussion. It sounds like an interesting topic and I certainly look forward to the book.
I’m not sure what to say here, however, because I’m not entirely clear what the problem is. As you first described it, in the original post, I thought that Alf was going to vote for X anyway (that is he was going to vote and his vote be for X), but some chump offered him money and he gladly took it for doing what he would have anyway.
Some of your later comments, like Alan (in post #7), suggest that this isn’t your concern - or not your only one. Here it seems that Alan would vote for X, were he to vote, but the money is necessary to make him vote. Now I think the case is slightly more complicated, because Bob (the guy offering money) can use his money to influence the outcome of the election if he can incentivize people likely to vote for X but not people likely to vote for Y.
FWIW, this differs from my own proposal, in the Politics article, because you have a private individual offering selective incentives to certain others. I proposed the state paying all voters (including actually those who turnout and spoil their ballot). My proposal may affect outcomes, by increasing turnout (hopefully in a way that redresses present imbalances), but isn’t designed to favour any party or option. That’s not to say I’d necessarily reject payment in the cases you describe, I just need to be clearer about the scenario and then to think about it some more…
Moreover, I’m not sure that this ‘paying people to vote’ (if that’s your only concern) really amounts to ‘vote buying/selling’, as ordinarily understood - because that surely means paying people to vote a certain way. Maybe that’s not inherently wrong either, when it leads to good voting, but that’s the more interesting case, in my opinion.