From the Archives: Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan explores ethics of voting

Publisher's note: This article was originally published on Examiner.com on July 31, 2011. The Examiner.com publishing platform was discontinued July 1, 2016, and its web site went dark on or about July 10, 2016. I am republishing this piece in an effort to preserve it and all my other contributions to Examiner.com since April 6, 2010. It is reposted here without most of the internal links that were in the original.

Georgetown philosophy professor Jason Brennan explores ethics of voting

“Every day you see the same message: ‘get out the vote, get out the vote, get out the vote,’” says philosophy professor Jason Brennan.

“What if all the sentiments underlying that were just wrong?” he asks. What if they “could be shown to be wrong pretty easily?”

According to Brennan, his new book, The Ethics of Voting, shows those underlying sentiments to be, in fact, wrong.

Brennan, an assistant professor of business and philosophy at Georgetown University, summarized his book at a Cato Institute forum on July 21. After his presentation, he spoke with the Charlottesville Libertarian Examiner about what motivated him to write The Ethics of Voting, how the book has been received by academics, and his new research on private behavior and the common good.

Brennan has long been interested in the topic of the ethics of voting.

Is voting special?

“Growing up,” he said, “I kept hearing, over and over again, the American civic religion [says] that voting is special, that political participation is special, that serving in the military makes you an especially good person.”

These claims were not satisfying to Brennan, he explained.

“I never found myself gripped by that,” he said. “I always wondered: What were the grounds underlying that? Why did people believe it?”

He also discovered, he continued, that “at the same time, there’s a kind of interesting philosophical question about what you should do in situations where we as a group are doing something bad but that your individual input doesn’t make a difference. That happens a lot in politics.”

Those two different but related things brought him to this topic.

Is voting rational?

He had read some of the literature about voter behavior but George Mason University economist Bryan Caplan’s 2008 book, The Myth of the Rational Voter, provided extra stimulus to write his own book.

“After reading that, I asked myself, suppose he’s right that voters are irrational. What does that mean about what they should do?”

The answer is not simple, he said. One cannot simply say, “Well, if they’re rational they shouldn’t vote, because individual votes don’t make a difference.” Instead, “it’s actually a real philosophical puzzle as to why it would even matter at all [with regard to] what an individual does and why they should vote well or not.”

Caplan’s book, Brennan said, was “like the last straw” in how it “pushed me over the edge to have to write something more about the philosophy behind” the ethics of voting.

Reaction from scholars

Brennan has received feedback from other academic philosophers, as well as from political scientists. Most of it has been positive.

Jason Brennan at Cato Institute, July 2011

The reaction he has had from philosophers, he said, “has been overwhelmingly very positive. Even if they disagree with the conclusions -- and many of them do -- what they’ve tended to like about it is that it takes on common sense. What it does is start with rather simple, plausible premises and leads to counterintuitive results. Philosophers tend to like that.”

Moreover, he added, “what a lot of philosophers have recognized, too, is that there are just a lot of unfounded assumptions about how politics works and what we should do. At the very least, I’m being a devil’s advocate in challenging” those assumptions, and that challenge makes philosophers “recognize that common sense [claims] about voting need to be justified, if they are justified” at all.

The reaction of political scientists, he said, “has largely been the same,” but faculty in political science departments who do political theory, “which is sort of philosophy but done in political science,” have a tendency “to be more skeptical because they tend to have a much more strongly emotional attachment to democracy than philosophers do.”

Private behavior as a public good

Brennan is now conducting new research on how private behavior contributes to the public good, something “that ended up being a major premise even in this book.”

He explained that “we can express civic virtue anywhere: by running a good business that helps people [and] makes them richer, by coming up with inventions, by making art, and so on.”

All these things, he said, help “promote the common good. They’re doing as much good as politics is doing, perhaps even more.”

The practical effect of this for individuals is that, “if you’re a person who is publicly spirited and you want to promote the common good, that doesn’t mean you have to get out of the market and go to the forum,” Brennan explained. “It might instead mean you should stay in the market and work there.”

Giving two prominent examples, Professor Brennan pointed out that “Thomas Edison did a lot more for us with his inventions than he ever would have done as a voter. Michelangelo did a lot more with his art than he ever would have done as a voter.”

He concluded by noting that “private civil society is really important for promoting the common good. If civic virtue is about promoting the common good, then private civil society might be the way to do it.”

Brennan wrote The Ethics of Voting while he taught at Brown University; it was published in April by Princeton University Press.

Gary Johnson on Donald Trump's contempt for democratic transitions: 'Unbelievable'

Last night, in the third and final Democratic-Republican presidential debate, GOP candidate Donald J. Trump suggested that he may not accept the results of the election on November 8, continuing his theme of asserting that massive electoral fraud will take place and that is the only reason he will lose to Hillary Clinton.

Today, Trump doubled down on his refusal to accept the central tenet of American democracy, that when a person or party loses an election, they become the loyal opposition and wait for another opportunity to win public office.

According to the Associated Press:

Trump kicked off a rally Thursday in Delaware, Ohio, by saying that he "would like to promise and pledge to all of my voters and supports and to all of the people of the United States that I will totally accept the results of this great and historic presidential election."

But he added: "If I win."

In response to Trump's bizarre break with tradition, the Libertarian Party's nominee for President, former New Mexico Governor Gary Johnson, issued this statement:

Gary Johnson

“As a former Governor, who was elected and served as a Republican in an overwhelmingly Democratic state, I have to say that Donald Trump’s refusal to say he will accept the outcome of an election is just one more straw too many. It’s offensive to the thousands of election officials across the nation, and it’s offensive to a nation for which the integrity of elections is what sets us apart from much of the world.

“Peaceful transition of power, which depends entirely upon honoring the results of elections, is as fundamental to our greatness and Constitution as anything else we do in America, and Donald Trump can’t even accept that fundamental without hedging.

“Unbelievable.”

Johnson and his running mate, former Massachusetts Governor Bill Weld, have achieved ballot access in all 50 states plus the District of Columbia -- the first third-party presidential ticket to do so since Libertarian Harry Browne and his running mate, Jo Jorgensen, did it in 1996.

Measuring Partisanship

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We hear a lot of complaints that legislators -- whether Members of Congress or representatives in state houses from Juneau to Tallahassee -- are more partisan today than in the past, that politics is more polarized than it has ever been before.

Those who complain point to the lack of action in Congress on big-ticket issues like health care or climate change legislation ("cap and trade").  Liberal Democrats accuse conservative Republicans of obstructionism today, just as Harry Truman did in 1948 when he criticized the "Do-Nothing" Congress of blocking his plans for nationalizing the health care system.  (Plus ça change...)

Personally, I think these back-and-forth accusations about renewed or worsened partisanship are off the mark.  For one thing, policy differences between the major political parties go back to the Federalists and Anti-Federalists.  Why else would Americans split up into two parties?  (Or more, of course:  there are as many differences between the Libertarians and the Greens as there are between Libertarians and Republicans, or Libertarians and Democrats, or Greens and Republicans, ad permutatium.)

So much of the cloud of partisanship is based on heated rhetoric (more heat, less light, in most cases) that it is difficult to discern how accurate and justified the grousing about it actually is.

Now some movement toward a more-or-less objective measurement of partisanship has emerged on the excellently useful web site, Richmond Sunlight, which tracks legislation in the Virginia General Assembly.  (It does much more than that, but legislative tracking is its major service.)

Richmond Sunlight's founder and designer, Waldo Jaquith, has devised a tool that shows how partisan Virginia Delegates and Senators are, based upon the co-sponsors ("co-patrons" in Virginia legislative parlance) of the bills they introduce and/or co-patron.

While the measurement isn't on a conservative-to-liberal scale, and while it has its own constraints, it offers a picture of which legislators reach across the aisle to seek cooperation in arguing for bills they care about, and which ones stick mostly to their own party.  It asks the question, Do Republican and Democratic birds of a feather flock together?  The answer, while necessarily incomplete, comes pretty close to being ... yes and no.

You can see Waldo's tool here:  http://www.richmondsunlight.com/legislators/detailed/.  Click the box for "partisanship" and you'll see blue-to-purple-to-red graphs that indicate how "Republican" or "Democrat" each Delegate or Senator is.  Click on the word "Partisanship" at the top of the column and the graphs will rearrange themselves into blue-to-red order.

The data used to produce these graphs goes back to 2006 (the launch of Richmond Sunlight), so newly elected legislators have their partisanship judged on a much smaller database than the veterans.

You'll discover some interesting and unexpected results.

For instance, the newest Democrat (Kaye Kory) and one of the newest Republicans (John Cox) are the most partisan members of the House of Delegates.

You'll also notice that Bob Marshall is closer to the "center" than Speaker of the House Bill Howell or Ben Cline or Rob Bell.

It may be no surprise that two veteran legislators from Arlington, Delegate Adam Ebbin and Senator Mary Margaret Whipple, are the most partisan Democrats in their respective chambers (besides the aforementioned freshman, Kaye Kory).

Here's the real kicker (especially for all you Fifth District Tea Partiers):  The most partisan Republican in the state Senate is Robert Hurt.

Waldo, one of Virginia's most experienced political bloggers, deserves commendation for compiling this data and creating a graphic presentation that is easily comprehensible.  This will be a useful tool for years to come.






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A Notable Anniversary

Only about two hours remain in the day, so it would be unfortunate to let them pass without mentioning today's anniversary.

Three hundred ninety years ago today, the first legislative body ever to meet in America convened.

As noted on the Jamestown 1607 web site:

By 1618, martial law was abolished and a legislative assembly was created. In April 1619, Governor George Yeardley arrived from London and recommended that two burgesses from each settlement be elected to represent the citizens. The first meeting of the 22-member assembly met on July 30 - Aug. 3, 1619 at a church in Jamestown.

Most of the laws passed during that first session involved tobacco and taxes and measures against drunkenness, idleness and gambling. They even approved legislation regulating relations with the Powhatans and mandatory church attendance.

On the last day of assembly, they approved the "greate Charter of 1618" that became the first Constitution of Virginia.

What is now the Virginia General Assembly is a direct descendant of the original House of Burgesses.

Let's raise a tankard in a toast to representative democracy!

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Odd Definition of 'Democratic'

In an article that purports to analyze the political situation in New Hampshire in the wake of the state legislature's approval of a bill that creates marriage equality for all the citizens of that state (and the governor's signature on that bill), National Review Online's Mark Hemingway makes this curious statement:

Of the recent states that have legalized same-sex marriage — Iowa, Maine, and New Hampshire — none has done so through democratic means...

Granted, Iowans now have marriage equality due to a decision by the least democratic branch, the state supreme court. Even so, Iowa supreme court justices are held accountable through retention elections held one year after their appointments, and they serve limited terms of eight years, rather than lifetime terms. So that judicial decision-making body is not entirely undemocratic.

In the cases of Maine and New Hampshire, however, the decision to open up marriage to consenting adults regardless of sexual orientation was made by what one might call the most democratic branches: the legislature and the governor.

Hemingway fails to mention the other states that have marriage equality. A same-sex marriage law was passed by the legislature in Vermont years after that state first created "civil unions" through the legislative process. In Massachusetts the state legislature deliberated over and ultimately rejected an effort to overturn the state supreme court's ruling that a prohibition on same-sex marriage violated the commonwealth's constitution. In Connecticut, the state legislature approved civil unions but the state supreme court ruled that this was discriminatory and that marriage must be available to all citizens regardless of gender.

I might add that both chambers of the California legislature approved a bill to provide marriage equality, but Governor Arnold Schwarzenegger vetoed it. California's domestic partnership law gives all the responsibilities and privileges of marriage to same-sex couples, except for the name "marriage."

Hemingway has an odd definition about what is "democratic." If lawmaking by elected legislative bodies is not democratic, then what is?

It may be that Hemingway thinks that this sort of legislative action is made through "republican" means and that "democratic" lawmaking is limited to voter-approved (if not voter-initiated) referenda.

If so, Hemingway's view of legislative legitimacy is sorely at odds with the views of the Founders. It may be time for him to read The Federalist Papers. His understanding of "democratic" lawmaking is also at odds with common parlance.

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