Voting—the “formal expression of choice or opinion by means of a ballot, show of hands, etc.” (Concise Oxford English Dictionary, 9th edition)—is an essential part of modern democracy. The “folk theory of voting ethics” set out by Jason Brennan in The Ethics of Voting says that 1) “[e]ach citizen has a duty to vote,” 2) “any good faith vote is morally acceptable,” and 3) “[i]t is inherently wrong to buy or sell one's vote” (p. 3). He argues that points 1 to 3 are false and defends a somewhat unorthodox form of epistocracy. He does not deny that all citizens have the right to vote, but he holds that only those who are sufficiently informed and well motivated ought to exercise that right. The ethics of voting is undertheorized, and so any serious academic work on the matter is welcome. Brilliant works such as Brennan's most certainly are.
On the author's “No Specialness View,” voting is just one way in which we can harm or benefit others. True, a single vote is extremely unlikely to make any difference in the pursuit of either harmful or beneficial policies; so voting differs from many actions in interpersonal settings, where the agent's actions might be crucial to others (e.g., a doctor's decision to operate is decisive in the survival of the patient). But there are many nonvoting contexts where it is true of each individual member of a group that his or her actions are inconsequential, whereas what the group does has a huge impact. It makes no difference to global warming whether I go by bike or car, but it makes a huge difference to global warming how many of us do one mode of transportation and how many do the other.
Very often Brennan fortifies his position by showing that the iconoclastic claims he is making would stand even if the premises on the basis of which he is arguing for those claims are rejected. It is interesting to note that this goes for the No Specialness View itself: He suggests that even if voting were special, the folk theory would still be false. Suppose, for example, that voting is an exercise of civic virtue. He points out that there are other ways of exercising civic virtue, such as doing military service, which on a particular occasion might be incompatible with voting, in which case one has no duty to vote.
The book consists of seven chapters and a stage-setting introduction. The first two chapters submit, pace point 1, that in typical circumstances no citizen has a duty to vote. Some citizens, including those who lack relevant knowledge, even have a duty not to vote, despite the fact that “individual bad votes do no significant harm” (p. 12). Brennan critically examines eight arguments for point 1. With the exception of two set out by Brian Barry and Anthony Downs, these are his own constructions, but none is a real straw man. He shows that most of the eight are clearly flawed. Those that are not are then shown to presuppose a mistakenly narrow view of civic virtue. We should endorse an “extrapolitical conception of civic virtue” that makes ample room for nonpolitical ways of exercising civic virtue and paying one's debts to society. By promoting the common good in “being a conscientious employee” (p. 44), one does not free-ride even if one does not vote.
Chapters 3–5 take issue with point 2, arguing that voters have a duty not to vote badly. In Brennan's view, two kinds of voting violate this duty: “unexcused harmful voting,” that is, voting without epistemic justification for a candidate likely to enact harmful policies; and “fortuitous voting” [sic], that is, voting without sufficient epistemic justification for a candidate who is likely to enact beneficial policies (p. 68). The former violates a duty “not to engage in collectively harmful activities” (p. 71). The latter violates a duty not to “participate in collective activities that impose undue risk provided that refraining from such behavior imposes little personal cost” (p. 80).
Chapter 6 attacks point 3. Trading votes is permissible when it does not result in voters not voting for candidates “they justifiably expect to promote the common good” (p. 135). It is permissible to pay pure egoists to vote for a party they know will promote the common good instead of voting for one which they know will undermine it while serving their own interests (p. 146). Acutely, Brennan observes that strictly speaking, vote buyers buy not the right to vote—a right the seller retains—but an exercise of the voter's right.
The final chapter surveys empirical studies of voting behavior and seeks to assess whether voters in fact behave well. It gives the impression that many voters engage in fortuitous or unexcused wrongful voting. For some voters, it might even be instrumentally rational to be epistemically irrational about politics, for example, because such irrationality “can help achieve conformity with the group and thus facilitate social acceptance” (p. 174).
While I am enthusiastic about this book, I found parts of it less than fully persuasive. Let me indicate a couple of reservations. First, the fact that I vote for a particular candidate may in itself have good or bad consequences. On Brennan's account, these effects appear to be irrelevant to the permissibility of my voting, unlike the consequences of the policies that the candidate that I vote for is likely to enact. Is that correct? Suppose that most people regard me as such a despicable individual that if I vote openly for a candidate likely to enact harmful policies, many who would otherwise have voted for that candidate will vote for a better one. Suppose also that I justifiably believe this candidate to be likely to enact harmful policies. On Brennan's account, I engage in unexcused harmful voting by voting for the bad candidate—unexcused because it is not the case that I am epistemically justified in believing it to be likely that the candidate will enact beneficial policies. Yet in doing so I vote the way I ought to vote.
The author's account of the impermissibility of fortuitous voting is also problematic, I think. He assumes that voting “for the wrong reasons or for no reason at all” (p. 68) imposes undue risks on others (p. 80). Presumably, he thinks that this is not true of voting correctly for the right reasons. Otherwise that would be impermissible, too. But nonriskiness need not be correlated with voting for the right reasons. Suppose that engaging in the sort of complicated reasoning required to vote correctly for the right reasons carries a huge risk of getting it disastrously wrong, whereas engaging in simple reasoning almost certainly will make one vote for the wrong reasons but in such a way that one gets it nearly right. The person who engages in the first kind of reasoning and gets it right is the one who, together with others who reason similarly, imposes undue risks—not the person who engages in the second kind of reasoning and gets it exactly right by sheer coincidence. Yet on Brennan's account, only the latter acts wrongly. I should stress that I believe that an account of impermissible voting that accommodates these two criticisms will still support his case against the folk theory.
The book makes an impressive case against some dogmas that go largely unquestioned in discussions of the ethics of voting. It is engagingly written, and it will be of great interest to specialists and to graduate students attending courses in democratic theory.
