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Does Single-Issue Pro-Life Voting Make Sense?

photograph of abandoned pro-life signs in front of Supreme Court Building

In the U.S., twenty-seven percent of people who oppose legal abortion say they would never vote for a pro-choice candidate. (Only eighteen percent of pro-choice voters say the same about pro-life candidates.) This ensures that a large block of voters will virtually never vote for Democrats, no matter what Republicans do. I personally know a number of people who voted for Donald Trump, citing his stance on abortion as outweighing his many negative qualities.

Given the pro-life position of these people, does their stance make sense? They think that abortion is murder.

But there are many life-and-death political issues: war, the death penalty, police shootings, gun control, healthcare, climate change, pollution… Why prioritize abortion over these other issues?

A common pro-life response invokes what I call Body Count Reasoning. Body Count Reasoning suggests that, given the pro-life view, abortion should be prioritized because it affects so many more individuals. If a building is burning down and many people are trapped in one part while only one person is trapped in another part, and the fire department can only save the people in one part, it generally makes sense to do what saves the most people. In a similar way, a pro-life person might note that there are more than 800,000 abortions each year in the U.S. By contrast, there are, for instance, around 45,000 gun deaths, and perhaps as many as 68,000 deaths due to inadequate healthcare. If all, or nearly all, of these abortions really are unjustified killings of persons with a right to life, then according to Body Count Reasoning, prioritizing abortion makes sense for the same reason as prioritizing the part of the building with many people trapped. The pro-life author Jimmy Akin endorses Body Count Reasoning when he writes:

No other issue involves numbers that high. Nothing short of a full-scale nuclear or biological war between well-armed nation states would kill that many people, and we aren’t in imminent danger of having one of those.

Not even terrorists with weapons of mass destruction could kill that many people…Jobs? The economy? Taxes? Education? The environment? Immigration? Forget it… Abortion is the preeminent moral issue of our time. It is the black hole that out-masses every other issue.

Of course, one way to reject the conclusion of Body Count Reasoning is to reject the pro-life view. But in “Is Abortion the Only Issue?,” a paper forthcoming in the journal Ergo, I argue that Body Count Reasoning fails, even if we grant the pro-life view. Here is why. Consider a thought experiment sometimes discussed by philosophers, the Embryo Rescue Case:

A fertility clinic is burning down. In one part of the building is a tray with very many fertilized eggs. In the other is a five-year-old child. The fire department can only save one.

In this case, virtually everyone thinks the fire department should save the five-year-old. But on the pro-life view that personhood begins at conception, the fertilized eggs are people with the same moral status as the born child. And we saw above that it generally seems that the fire department should save more people from a fire, rather than fewer. What gives?

Some pro-choice philosophers think this shows that personhood does not begin at conception after all. But pro-life philosophers usually grant that we should save the five-year-old, but argue that this is compatible with the pro-life position.

To see how their response works, note that there are things besides a difference in basic moral status which can explain why my reasons to save one individual might be stronger than my reasons to save another.

Suppose you could save me or another person from a fire, but you also know that I have a terminal illness and will die tomorrow anyway. Or suppose you know the other person is a scientist on the brink of curing cancer. In both of these cases, you should save the other person, even though we are both people with the right to life. You have stronger reasons to save the other person, not because we differ in fundamental moral status, but because their death is worse in some other way – worse for them, or for other people. Most pro-life philosophers attempt to explain why you should save the born child in the Embryo Rescue Case in a similar way. They note that the born child has a developed personality, hopes and dreams about their future, relationships with others, the capacity to experience terror and pain while burning to death, etc., and that this makes their death much worse than the death of even very many recently fertilized eggs.

But this response undermines Body Count Reasoning. Body Count Reasoning claimed you should prioritize abortion over, say, healthcare, because abortion kills about ten times as many people. But in response to the Embryo Rescue Case, these pro-life philosophers deny that you should prioritize saving very many embryos over a single born child. And if your reasons to save a born person are much stronger than your reasons to save ten embryos, even if the embryos are people being unjustly killed, then perhaps you should prioritize healthcare over abortion, even if the embryos are people being unjustly killed.

There may be further disanalogies between the Embryo Rescue Case and abortion to which a Body Count Reasoner might appeal. I try to deal with those in the complete version of my paper. And there may be other arguments for single-issue pro-life voting besides Body Count Reasoning, but if so, I do not know of any that seem plausible, even if we grant the pro-life view. So I conclude that if you are pro-life, you should not be a single-issue pro-life voter. You should instead think that abortion is an important issue, but one important issue among many others.

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Are Politicians Obligated to Debate?

photo of empty debate stage

In the leadup to the provincial election in Ontario, many members of Ontario’s Progressive Conservative party have been avoiding the debates taking place in their respective ridings. In fact, 22 out of 34 Conservatives have recently failed to show up to debates in which members of their rival parties were participating, a number that greatly exceeds the absences from all other parties combined. When asked to comment on the situation, a campaign official speaking on behalf of the Conservatives stated that the party’s mandate was to have each candidate “carefully assess the value” of participating in a debate in order to “limit the risk” of doing so. He also stated that debates are of “low value” and a candidate’s time can be better used in other ways.

Debates ahead of elections are common in democracies around the world. So, too, are instances of politicians avoiding them. For example, in the run-up to the recent presidential election in the Philippines, candidate Ferdinand “Bongbong” Marcos Jr. participated in only one out of four scheduled debates; when asked to explain his absence, he cited the desire to keep his campaign “positive” (although many of his critics speculated that his failure to attend the debates was motivated by a desire to avoid discussing his family’s history). The strategy seems to have paid off, as he is presumed to have won the election.

Some who disapprove of Conservative Party candidates skipping debates in Canada have called the move “anti-democratic”; in the Philippines, Marcos’ opponent Leni Robredo said that participating in debates is something that candidates “owe…to the people and to our country.”

Is this right? Do politicians have any specific obligation to participate in debates? And if so, what kind of obligation?

There is one sense in which political candidates like those mentioned above are not obligated to participate in debates, given that not participating does not preclude one from running. We might think that there is a different kind of obligation involved, though, one associated with “playing fair” or maybe “being a good sport”; such norms, however, have rarely held much water in the world of politics. Of course, one risks losing face in front of one’s constituents by failing to appear for debates, but if a politician can make up that loss in other campaign activities, or if one’s target constituency doesn’t really care about the outcomes of political debates anyway, then it might be more prudent to skip debates altogether, especially given the risk of hurting one’s campaign by getting caught off-guard by a question or saying something dumb.

So we might think that politicians who refuse to attend debates are not violating any explicit electoral processes, or being imprudent, but are instead lazy, or cowards (or both). But this is perhaps a far cry from the accusations above of being “anti-democratic.”

Indeed, there does seem to be something more egregious about avoiding political debates, namely that doing so undercuts informed citizenship, something that is a necessary condition for a well-functioning democracy.

To defend this kind of argument we need to consider what we mean by “informed” and “well-functioning.” But in general, the claim is this: if those in positions of political power are meant to be reflective of, and act in service to, the will of the people, broadly construed, then those people need to be informed about what candidates’ positions are on important issues.

That’s glossing over a lot of nuances, of course. And it’s not as if every voter needs to be extremely knowledgeable about all the details of every candidate’s respective platform, or stance on every policy issue, in order to be well-informed. Regardless, the loose argument is that better-informed voters will tend to make better voting choices, and the responsibility to inform citizens lies not just with said citizens, but with the politicians, as well. Political debates are, arguably, a significant source of information about candidates. Failing to participate in such debates thus prevents voters from getting important information they need to be well-informed. We can then see why one might think that avoiding political debates is anti-democratic, as doing so is antithetical to the democratic process one is participating in.

One might think, though, that there are surely other ways in which one can become well-informed about the candidates in an election – one could, say, look up relevant information online.

Doesn’t such readily available information make political debates more or less obsolete, at least in terms of their ability to inform the public?

No, for a few reasons. First, reading statements online does not give one the same kind of information that might come up at a debate, as there are no opportunities for rebuttals or follow-up questions. Second, one does not get to compare candidates in the same way when simply reading information online. Finally, people are not great at actively seeking out information about candidates who are members of parties one does not already endorse. It seems less likely that one would change one’s mind when doing self-directed research, in comparison to a debate.

Here is the kind of being-well-informed that seems especially crucial for a well-functioning democracy: not just knowledge about what one’s favorite candidate is all about, filtered through one’s preferred news outlet or website, but information about how different candidates compare, as well as information about other choices one may not have considered. More than just custom or nuisance, debates serve an important function of helping to inform the voting public, and failing to engage in them violates obligations central to democracy.

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The Ethics of Presidential Polling

computer image of various bar graphs

Pretend you are driving your car on an interstate highway. Now envision yourself getting the car up to a speed of 85mph, then closing your eyes (actually close your eyes now) and keep them closed for a whole minute. You will want to open your eyes after a few seconds because of the fear of not knowing what lies ahead. Is there a curve? A semi-trailer in front of you? Or, is the lane ahead blocked for construction? This thought experiment illustrates in part that a major ingredient of fear is uncertainty.

Humans want to know the future, even if that future will happen within the next few minutes.

Evolution has provided us with the need to predict so that we have a better chance of survival. The more we know, the better chance we have to anticipate, and thus, to survive. It’s also true when we want to know who is ahead in political polls prior to an election. Fears about the economy, possible international conflict, a raise in taxes, and the assurance of the continuation of Social Security and health care all play a role in deciding whom we will support on election day. There may be a fear that your values and the party that best represents them will not be elected to lead the nation, and this serves as a motivation to vote your ticket.

The 2020 presidential election is over, but the dust has only just settled. State and national political polling for the presidential election began in earnest as soon as the Democratic nominee was apparent, and continued right up to the night before election day. At the same time many voters were asking the question, “Can we trust the polls this time?” Undoubtedly many were recalling the debacle of the 2016 election polling that predicted a relatively easy win for Hillary Clinton, but when they awoke the next morning, Donald Trump had been elected president. The Pew Research Center suggested that the question should rather be, “Which poll should we trust?” However, I suggest that another question should be considered as well: “Is it ethical to have public presidential election polling at all?”

Many ethical questions arise when we consider this type of public polling: (1) Does the polling sample reflect an accurate picture of the electorate? If it does, the veracity, or truthfulness, of the results can be more trustworthy. If it doesn’t, then the polling is skewed and results unreliable. (2) If the polling is skewed, how will voter behavior be affected? Could citizens be casting their votes based on false information? Research tells us that if a voter thinks their candidate will win, the less likely that person will vote. How does this affect one’s autonomous choices? (3) If the polling predictions are not accurate, what are the psychological effects on the electorate and candidates that may lead to negative outcomes when the election is over?  The benefits and costs of having polling information available to the electorate must be considered in such high-stakes activities like voting for the president of the United States. It’s imperative that any published polling be scientifically based.

The gold standard of scientific research sampling has long been established as random sampling where everyone has an equal chance of being chosen to participate. When all have an equal probability of being chosen, the sample will generally reflect the population from which it was drawn. The problem then becomes one of reaching more people, so as to even the odds that the sample is representative of the population. Technological advances have allowed us to do this, but in so doing have changed the face of public polling in ways that may compromise its outcomes.

Today, the internet serves as the tool of choice for pollsters. However, not everyone has internet access and therefore some selection bias in the sample will exist when this type of polling is used. Furthermore, the average American has 1.75 email accounts which only increases the possibility that the same person may receive more than one request for information, thereby decreasing the chance for a larger sample, so the chance for mismeasurement increases. It is understood that there is always sampling bias, and pollsters do attempt to make it as small as possible, keeping it at a manageable 2.5-3.5%. This bias is called margin of error (MOE). For example, if a poll has an MOE of 3%, and candidate A is at 48% in the poll while candidate B sits at 46%, candidate A does not have a two- point lead as some media personnel report; it’s a dead heat statistically. But, if the MOE is not pointed out at the time of reporting, the electorate receives false information. It’s even more important to look at this effect in swing states than in the national picture due to the fact that the Electoral College, not the popular vote, actually determines who the next president will be.

To alleviate the selection bias problem nationally and in swing states, many polling companies are using opt-in, or non-probability panels from which to collect data. This method uses ads to attract persons to participate in the polling. Since these ads may only appeal to, or even be seen by, certain demographics, the probability of establishing a representative sample diminishes. Some panels formed by answering these ads are there solely because of a modest monetary award for participation. One way that pollsters try to solve these potential drawbacks is to establish panels of up to 4,000 persons who have been chosen based on stratification criteria, so that the sample looks as much like the population as possible given the restraints mentioned here.  For example, if the population is 76% Caucasian and 14% African-American, approximately 76% of the non-probability panel would be Caucasian and approximately 14 % would be African-American.

Similar stratification methods would also be used for other demographics; however, how many demographics are accounted for when these decisions are made? The Gallup and New York Times/Siena College polls account for 8 and 10 demographics (weights) respectively, while the Pew Research Center accounts for 12 such demographics. Statistically, the more weights that are applied, the more the sample accurately represents the population from which it was drawn. The panels formed in this way stand for a certain amount of time, and are repeatedly polled during the political campaign.

Apart from these worries, there are other potential obstacles to consider. Take positive herding, for example — a term used by social psychologists to explain the phenomenon that positive ratings of an idea or person, generate more positive ratings. So, if candidate A continues to amass perceived higher polling numbers, the chance that those being polled later will align themselves with candidate A increases. Voters are even more likely to exhibit this behavior if we have not made a prior commitment to any response. So this affects the independent voter more than other voters, but that is the voter both parties must typically have in order to win an election. And this is compounded by the fact that the repeated public polling during a presidential campaign may increase this social phenomenon, and skew the polling results that could lead to unwary independent voters deciding for whom to vote.

Are the respondents on these panels answering the same questions as respondents on other panels? Questions posed to participants from different researchers are not standardized; that is, not every participant in every poll is answering the same questions. When the data are presented publicly, and polling data are compared, we may be comparing apples with oranges. If candidate A polls at 48% in poll A, and 43% in Poll B, we must consider on what issue candidate A is being polled? If candidate A is being polled on likeability in both polls, it must be asked: likeability based on what, candidate A’s stand on the economy or on immigration, or …? The information becomes amorphous.

How can the potential voter know what the data are measuring without understanding the make-up of the sample, the questions asked, and which method of polling was used to obtain that data? To get the complete picture is an ominous task even for a statistician, and certainly cannot be expected of most of the population to discover on their own. We rely on the media, and on the polling companies themselves to provide that information. While polling companies do publish this information on their websites, most voters do not have the time (or the inclination) to peruse the data, even when they know that such websites exist. Even if they make that effort, would most be able to understand the information shared?

The 2020 election has given us a real look at some psychological effects of polling on the American population. Former Vice-President Biden was reportedly set for an 8-point margin of victory (nationally) according to the New York Times/Sienna College final poll the night before the election. As late as 2 a.m. on November 4th, Biden held a slight lead nationally, but it was a dead heat in the swing states, and those states were leaning toward Trump at the time. In the final analysis Biden won those states after the mail-in ballots were counted. National polling did not publish survey results of mail-in voters vs election-day voters, yet the different modes of voting predicted the outcome. Psychologically, Trump supporters were primed to believe that ballots were “found and dumped” the day following the election.

It took 11 days for the results to be “finalized,” while the nation was in turmoil. Trump’s campaign used this time to start questioning the results; his supporters believed that the election had been stolen; after all, Biden won by only 3.4 points nationally after mail-in votes were tallied further adding fuel to the fire for Trump supporters. Recounts in swing states and counties were called for in the swing states based on this information, since the margin of victory ranged from less than one percentage point to just over one percentage point, but remained constant after the count was completed.

So what does all this say about the ethics of public polling? As can be seen, the numbers that get reported are based on a number of assumptions, and any model is only as good as the assumptions on which it is based. Are the policies of the candidate (the economy, immigration, etc.) measured the same in each poll?  Was the positive herding phenomenon a factor in responses? Were media personnel diligent in pointing out MOEs as they reported polling results? In all these cases, one’s voting autonomy can be affected because the data’s veracity is in question.

But the problem isn’t necessarily with our ability to read the data as much as with our choice to circulate that polling data in the first place. Uncertainty produces fear in humans; we often alleviate this fear through prediction, and polls provide that predictive factor. That information, however, provides only a perception of the reality.

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Considered Position: Flawed Democracy – Voter Participation

photograph of "Vote" written on chalkboard with drawing of American flag

This piece concludes this Considered Position series on the United States’ claim to being a “flawed democracy.” To see the earlier segments, start here (part 2, part 3).

Most people need to vote if we want most people’s interests represented. Unfortunately, a great number of people don’t vote. Either because they are prevented from doing so or because they just don’t care, many people who can legally vote don’t. In this section we will explore the idea of the “rational nonvoter.” To do so, we will consider debates around mail-in voting. Afterward, we’ll examine what may be the greatest roadblock in having a functioning, representative democracy: voter apathy.

Mail-In Voting

In recent days, mail-in or absentee voting has gotten a lot of press. COVID-19 poses a significant threat to the upcoming election. Either people go to the polls, and the virus spreads and kills, or people don’t go to the polls and the low voter turnout diminishes the legitimacy and representativeness of the results.

One prominently suggested solution to this dilemma is to have people just vote from home via mail-in ballots. Absentee ballots are already used by military personnel while serving abroad. But they are also used domestically. All states allow at least some citizens to vote absentee and more than two-thirds allow all citizens to vote this way. Those states without “no-excuse” mail-in voting require some sort of reason that explains people’s inability to physically come to the polls. Lastly, some states conduct elections entirely by mail and automatically send ballots to all registered voters.

A number of Republican politicians, including Trump, have opposed this solution, typically spreading conspiracy theories and misinformation to justify their position, but most people, including many Republicans, support some sort of solution like this. Besides the patently false idea that mail-in voting increases voter fraud in any significant way, there is one common bad reason for opposing mail-in voting. As Trump himself put the common Republican worry, “if you’d ever agreed to [universal mail-in voting], you’d never have a Republican elected in this country again.” Fortunately, this too is false. While increasing access to mail-in voting might increase turn-out and increasing turn-out sometimes modestly aids Democrats in elections, it really matters more who turns-out, and the evidence suggests that “universal vote-by-mail has no impact on partisan turnout or vote share.” In other words, if it changes anything, universal vote-by-mail increases the number of votes, but doesn’t do much of anything to affect who those votes are for.

Nonetheless, as we’ve discussed before, you can be right about something even if you don’t have good reasons. That’s the difference between true belief and knowledge. And in fact, there are some very good reasons to be wary of universal mail-in voting. It may be more of a necessary evil than a universal boon.

Probably the single greatest problem with mail-in voting is the loss of the secret ballot. “The secret ballot” refers to how, when you go to the polls to vote, you can vote whichever way you want without anyone knowing. This is fundamental to democracy. If people are paid or coerced to vote one way or another, the democratic process is delegitimized. With a secret ballot, it is still possible to pay or threaten someone to vote a certain way, but there is no way to confirm if your bribe or threat worked since no one but except maybe a few election officials will ever see your vote. So it isn’t much done. However, with mail-in voting this all changes. Someone’s abuser can stand over them, force them to vote one way, and seal and send the envelope themselves. A corrupt caretaker can do the same to an elderly person. And so could a parent coerce a child. Even without the threat of force, more subtle forms of coercion, including moral judgment and social pressure, can be much more powerful when the coercer can confirm whether or not you listened to them.

In addition, none of these examples even touch on the possibility of buying people’s votes. There are two main ways ballots are checked to make sure they are legitimate. First, there is the ballot itself. It is printed on very special paper with a special code, unique to each registered voter. This way, it’s almost impossible for people to make counterfeit ballots. Second, many states use signature verification to assure a particular voter was really the one filling out their ballot, and the United States Postal Service (USPS) has procedures for tracking mailed ballots and flagging potential fraud.

However, all this only stops people from wholly counterfeiting votes. It is perfectly possible for a real person to receive their ballot, sign it, and sell it to someone else. Even if the ballot is not mailed from the voter’s house, this will not result in it being flagged as potentially fraudulent by the USPS. This is because of the legality of ballot collection in some states. Ballot collection is the process of people other than the voters themselves collecting and submitting voters’ ballots. In some places, this is limited to family members or caretakers. In other places, people working for political campaigns can do it too. The potential for fraud is there and it would likely be difficult to identify and prevent. However, it cannot be reiterated enough that this does not happen sufficiently frequently to have been responsible for any election to have gone one way or another.

In any case, coercion of this sort would seem to be small-scale and disorganized. An abuser’s coercion of someone’s vote in one direction will be countered by another abuser’s coercion of someone’s vote in the other direction. The fact that ballot collection isn’t legal in most places, and that where it is legal there are usually limits, means buying votes in the way I described on a large-scale would be difficult. It would be tough to do systematically and given that the margins on elections are usually on the order of magnitude of at least thousands of votes, it would take a lot of work to change an election. Plus, the aforementioned USPS flagging would require any would-be election buyers to deposit those thousands or tens of thousands of ballots in a wide enough area to not arouse suspicion. And, finally, keeping any such operation secret would require each of those thousands of bought-off voters to keep quiet. The odds of this happening on such a large-scale are on par with the odds of other large-scale operations like the moon landing being faked.

On the other hand, there are some seriously good reasons to support universal mail-in voting. The biggest reason here has to do with those rational nonvoters I mentioned at the start. A rational nonvoter is someone who doesn’t vote who is rational in the economic sense. What this means is that for these people, the cost of voting to them surpasses the cost of not voting. A great deal of people, as we will discuss in more detail later, do not think their votes matter, mostly because of the influence of corporate interests like the ones we discussed when we talked about Citizens United. And if your vote doesn’t matter, why waste your time and gas money driving over to the polling station? More importantly, why take off time from work? Economic circumstance discourages many people from voting. Fourteen percent of registered voters who didn’t end up voting blame a conflicting schedule or being too busy. Filling out an absentee ballot, in contrast, is easy. They send it to you and you don’t even need to buy a stamp. By decreasing the cost of money and time in voting, you make it easier for voters to rationalize voting. And as we said at the start, the more voters, the more accurately an election represents citizens’ interests.

Universal mail-in voting would be a big change to our electoral system. Whether that change would be for the better or for the worse depends a lot on what precautions we take. Mail-in voting has real potential for fraud, even if it hasn’t commonly happened in the recent past. At the immense scale required to have universal mail-in voting for America’s hundreds of millions of registered voters, it’s certain any cracks in the system will be tested. As with any issue, we are forced to weigh the benefits and costs but we won’t really know whether we made the right choice until after the election is done.

Voter Apathy

If COVID-19 keeps a great number of people from turning out in the 2020 election, questions will be raised about the election’s legitimacy. If only a fraction of the population votes, and only a plurality of those votes are for the winning candidate, it will be difficult for the winner to claim a mandate from the people. At the same time, it would be hard for things to get much worse than they already are, turnout-wise.

In the 2016 election, 55.67 percent of the voting-age citizen population voted. That’s way lower than most other democratic nations. Let’s take things further. Donald Trump won the 2016 election according to the Electoral College while losing the popular vote, garnering only 46.09 percent of the votes cast. Doing some math here, we can see only 46.09 * 55.67 = 25.66 percent of the population cast a vote for the current President.

It is difficult to compare the election of our president to the elections of Prime Ministers in parliamentary states but doing so may give us a rough idea of how poor our president’s mandate is (importantly I don’t just mean Trump here: US turnout hasn’t changed much in the last several decades). Belgium had the highest turn out of any nation in 2014 at 87.21 percent. And, the governing coalition held 83 of 150 seats in their Parliament. With the same calculation, we can say roughly 48.25 percent voted for the ruling government. This is clearly a much stronger mandate.

Low voter participation raises fundamental questions about our democracy. A basic view of representative democracy (the sort we have) is that a representative only deserves power if they have popular support. The laws, too, are only legitimate if they are enacted by a government which has popular support. Ultimately, society and government are social constructions; they are part of the social imaginary. They don’t exist in the world like rocks or trees. So the power and effectiveness of government, much like the power of Santa Claus on small children, depends on how much people believe in it.

And people don’t believe in it very much. Around 30 percent of registered voters who did not vote in 2016 did not vote either because they “did not like the candidates or campaign issues” or because they were “not interested” or “felt [their] vote would not make a difference.” The former reason was more common than the latter but 2016 wasn’t terribly representative of people’s general reasons for not voting. Donald Trump and Hillary Clinton were both disliked more than any candidates in recent memory. But more familiar is the sentiment people have that their vote “would not make a difference.”

There are a number of reasons for this sentiment. Foremost among these is a concern with money’s influence on elections. About 57 percent of people agreed in a poll with the statement “politics and elections are controlled by people with money and by big corporations.” This is an issue we have covered at length already. In short, there is little regulation on campaign donations and what regulation there is isn’t enforced very well.

Another major reason for people’s apathy toward voting is that they don’t think their votes matter in a numerical sense. In a nation of over 300 million people, the role each individual vote has in determining a presidential winner or loser has little relevance. This argument stems from a bit of a logical fallacy though. Consider a jar with red and blue sand. When mixed, it appears purple. And every grain of sand is very small. You can pluck out any grain of sand, red or blue, and say “this grain of sand is so small, it has no contribution to the color of this jar.” And when you remove it, you don’t change the color of the jar. Does this prove your point? Of course not. By the same logic, you could claim to be able to remove all the sand, grain by grain, and that the jar would remain purple instead of clear. You could claim the same about removing all the blue sand or red sand.

When one person or one grain of sand is missing from the ballot box or jar, the color of the results doesn’t change. But if many people do not vote, the outcome can change. The only case where it wouldn’t would be if those who didn’t vote were represented perfectly by those who did. If you’re the only one not voting in your whole state, yeah, your vote or lack thereof probably doesn’t matter. But when upwards of 20 percent of the population thinks that way and elections are decided by single digit margins, it is irrational for all those people to think their votes don’t matter. It’s the same logic that advocates apathy in the face of climate change and we all know how helpful such apathy has been so far.

One legitimate grievance voluntary nonvoters have (for many people are prevented from voting by reasons outside of their control) is that candidates don’t represent them. The fault for this at least in part lies with the primary system. Political primaries are the intra-party elections held to determine which candidates will represent the parties on general election ballots. These only started happening in the 1900s and had little real influence in the determination of candidates until the 1970s. Before this, party conventions decided who would be on the ballot. Typically, the candidates were chosen by conventions based on electability. Party values were secondary to victory. Nowadays, however, primaries dominate. However, it’s not immediately clear why this objectively more democratic system should lead to problems with how well candidates represent voters.

The best way to think about it involves first remembering how little people participate in elections in the first place. If you think turnout in general elections are bad, you will struggle to believe how bad turnout is for primaries. Only 28.5 percent of eligible voters voted in both parties’ primaries combined in 2016. Only those who care most about politics are going to turn out for these, and it’s easy to see that people with more extreme beliefs are thus going to turn out than people with moderate beliefs. People aren’t passionate about moderation and compromise. This leads to more extreme candidates being elected by primaries. Those who end up thinking about voting in the general elections will be far less extreme and will thus feel unrepresented leading them to refrain from voting.

Political primaries would be a great thing if everyone voted in them: they are certainly more democratic than the older convention-based system of candidate selection. The people who rallied for them to become the standard for candidate selection were not malicious or stupid. Just as we have seen with a variety of political problems, the cause can often come from rational and benevolent individual decisions. The same goes for corporate campaign donations. While the surface-level behavior of corporate donors seems greedy and self-serving, the roots can be good.

If we are a democracy, we need to encourage changes to our electoral system that will maximize the amount of democratic participation. Those reforms could take any number of shapes but they must be made for change in any other domain to occur. Without democratic legitimacy, any leader, whatever they do, is ineffectual, since their actions are not representative of the will of the people.

Conclusion

This series concludes with a discussion of voter apathy because it is a problem that must be resolved before change can be made for the better in any of the domains we have discussed. People have to care. They have to learn and think. And we have to take care as a community to watch over one another to assure none of us contributes to something terrible out of an innocent or even benevolent motive. Even after reading all of this, having seen all these arguments and motives laid out, it is unlikely that you will change your behavior anymore than I have for learning all this. As Portia said in Shakespeare’s Merchant of Venice:

“If to do were as easy as to know what were good to do, chapels had been churches, and poor men’s cottages princes’ palaces. It is a good divine that follows his own instructions: I can easier teach twenty what were good to be done, than be one of the twenty to follow mine own teaching.”

Nonetheless, life is a series of moments. And if in some of these we remember what we have learned, we might make the right decisions. To be apathetic is to submit to the unconscious, amoral, tide of the structures of our societies that already have great control over the paths we take. And so long as we push, just ever so slightly, perpendicularly to that tide, exerting some small amount of free, conscious will, in just a very few moments, from time to time, things can change and for the better. To refrain from even this is a choice that cannot be blamed on the system, even for all of its ills.

The mission of the Prindle Institute for Ethics is to foster the skills of moral reasoning that give us the real freedom to choose in those few, decisive moments. Without these skills, the possibility for even small change in those moments is lost. Without them, the unconscious tide is all there is. As we have discussed throughout this series, plenty of extraordinarily harmful actions can be superficially justified and rationally so. And the systems under which we live, this tide, strongly incentivize us to adopt some of these while ignoring broader reaching, more complex moral concerns.

Whoever you are, whatever issues you care about, if you live in a democracy, elections and election reform are critical. Those minutes spent voting are some of the few moments where we have the chance to participate in decisive action. This series has been a depressing one, pointing out flaw after flaw in the electoral system. But we can’t just give up and focus on how depressing it is. We must think critically, examine our values, and place our focus instead on what the world can be. As the Lorax famously said in Dr. Seuss’s The Lorax:

“Unless someone like you cares a whole awful lot,

Nothing is going to get better. It’s not.”

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Democracy and the Next Generation

Photo of kids and older adults at a protest

A group of young people are suing the US government over the damage being done to the environment. The lawsuit claims that the government has not done enough to fight climate change, and it makes sense that youths are bringing the suit – it is the next generation that will feel the effects of environmental damage most strongly. They claim they are experiencing harms due to the government’s neglect of environmental concerns that amount to the government not living up to constitutional commitments of ensuring them of rights to life, liberty and property.

This lawsuit represents a thorny political issue: where is the voice of the next generation represented in government?

In a representative democracy like the US, adults have the opportunity to vote to express their preference for how the government should be run by selecting the politician who will make decisions regarding policy. A background assumption of such a system is that different voters may have different interests and the government should be in touch with these interests. People living in urban areas may want different policies than those in rural areas; home-owning married folk may favor different tax policies than long-term singles; people who have experienced medical conditions and financial uncertainty may prioritize interests differently than individuals who have not. Ideally, the representatives that result from voting represent the interests of the voters. However, it bears note that even under these conditions, a group of people is left out of the polling –those too young to vote and the interests of future generations.

The concern over the influence of age on what interests are being represented in voting is not abstract or new. Voting practices in the US skew towards older individuals. In the 2016 presidential election, 71 % of the over- 65 population voted, compared with 46 % of 18- to 29-year-olds. If we consider voters to be self-interested, then this leaves the interests of the young under-represented and the interests of future generations out of the equation altogether.

With long-term projects and programs, older voters have less vested interest in how they turn out because they will experience fewer consequences of the programs. On the other hand, older voters have had more life experiences and arguably may vote “wiser.” Preserving and protecting the environment is clearly a long-term project, as the environment is something that future generations inherit and the treatment we expose our resources to may be largely irreversible.

Young people vote less, and future generations currently have no vote. One solution to this representation problem is to have entities vote on behalf of future generations. Civic organizations with fiduciary concerns for future generations could be given some voting weight alongside the individual voters, granting the limitation in the ability or practicality of living voters to live up to obligations to these groups.

Without such solutions looking likely now, we are faced with lawsuits like the current one these young people are lobbying against the government – claiming that their interests are not being respected on a grand scale. The suit may not be successful, as it calls for changes in policy by judicial decree, which is a potential violation of separation of powers. However, it embodies a tension in the size of the problems facing our government and the limited scope of the mechanisms for choosing solutions.