Month: November 2020

Most arguments for a moral duty to vote cast it as a general obligation of citizenship. At least as a general rule, they hold that citizens are morally required to vote in elections—regardless of how big the difference between the opposing candidates is, and regardless of which candidate the voter in question prefers. I have criticized such claims in previous writings, most recently here.

But there is another, more limited justification for a duty to vote in at least some elections. It’s the idea that we have an obligation vote in cases where the stakes are especially high. Maybe there’s no duty to cast a ballot when there is little difference between the opposing candidates, or when the differences between them won’t have much effect. But things are different if one side is vastly better than the other. That intuition underlies the oft-heard sentiment that you must vote because “this is the most important election of our lifetime” and other similar claims. And, as polarization has grown, we hear such claims more often.

There is a kernel of truth to the claim that you have a duty to vote if the stakes are high enough. But the resulting moral duty applies far less often than advocates of the argument tend to assume. And the same reasoning actually implies many people have a moral duty not to vote.

Let’s start with the kernel of truth. Imagine there’s an election for a powerful political office that pits Gandalf (the benevolent wizard in J.R.R. Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings) against Sauron, the despotic dark lord from the same story. If Sauron prevails, millions of people will die or be enslaved, while Gandalf would rule justly if he manages to win. And all you have to do to ensure Gandalf’s victory is check his name on a ballot. If you do so, Gandalf wins; if not, Sauron does.

In this scenario, it seems like you have a moral duty to vote for Gandalf, at least barring some kind of extraordinary exigent circumstance. In real election, of course, the odds that your vote will make a difference are far smaller than in this stylized example. In an American presidential election, they are, on average, about 1 in 60 million, though higher in swing states.

However, a large enough difference between the two candidates could potentially justify a duty to vote for the “right” candidate, even if the odds of casting a decisive ballot are very low. For example,let’s say you live in a swing state, and you have a 1 in 1 million chance of casting a decisive vote for Gandalf over Sauron. But if your vote does turn out to be decisive, you will save 1 million people from death, and 10 million from being enslaved. Some simple math leads to the conclusion that the expected value of your vote (the benefit of Gandalf’s victory divided by the likelihood of having an impact) is one live saved, and ten people saved from slavery.

Here too, it may be you have a duty to vote. At the very least, there can be at least some scenarios where you have a duty to vote even if the likelihood of having a decisive impact is fairly low.

But notice that the duty in question is not an obligation to participate in the process for its own sake. It’s a duty to help good triumph over evil in a situation where you can do so at little or no cost. If you have a moral duty to vote for Gandalf in these types scenario, it follows that you also have a moral duty not to vote for Sauron. Indeed, the person who votes for Sauron is more worthy of condemnation than the one who merely abstains. The former is actively helping evil win, while the latter “merely” chooses not to stop it.

While Gandalf supporters may have a duty to vote, Sauron supporters actually have a duty to abstain from doing so. Ideally, they should stop supporting Sauron entirely. But they at least should not take any actions that increase the likelihood of his victory.

All of the above analysis assumes that the voter knows which candidate is superior and to what degree. But, in reality, we have widespread political ignorance, and most voters often don’t even know very basic facts about how government and politics work. Most are also highly biased in their evaluation of the information they do know, functioning more as “political fans” cheering on Team Red or Team Blue, than as truth-seekers.

There is much that people can do to become better voters. But most will not actually do so, because such action requires a lot of time and energy, and may be psychologically painful. Unless and until a voter becomes well-informed about the issues and at least reasonably objective in his or her evaluation of political information, she has good reason to question her judgment about which candidate is superior, much less by how much. Thus, she cannot conclude she has a duty to vote to help the “right” side win. She may instead have a presumptive duty to abstain from voting until she meets at least some minimal threshold of political knowledge.

Perhaps the relatively ignorant and biased voter might conclude he still should vote, because he is at least less ignorant and biased than average. Thus, casting a vote would slightly improve the average quality of the electorate and perhaps slightly increase the odds of the right candidate winning. That could be true. But notice that figuring out whether you are better informed than the average voter itself requires time and effort and a certain level of preexisting knowledge. It also requires resisting the psychological temptation to think you must be better than average. Any duty to vote in such circumstances is likely to be greatly attenuated, at best.

Many people will resist this conclusion on the grounds that figuring out which side is the “right” one is actually easy, because the gap between the opposing sides is so great. All you have to do is open your eyes!

I myself think that there is a substantial gap between Biden and Trump, and that the former is the lesser evil here. It may not be quite as clearcut as Gandalf vs. Sauron; but it is perhaps roughly analogous to Sauron vs. Cersei Lannister—not good vs. evil, but a  great evil vs. a much smaller one.

But if the difference between the two sides were really so obvious that almost anyone can easily figure it out, then there would be no need to worry about the election outcome! Those not otherwise inclined to vote can simply leave the decision to that portion of the population that actually enjoys voting, secure in the knowledge that the latter will easily figure out that Gandalf (or even Cersei) is preferable to Sauron.

If, on the other hand, it looks like Sauron has the support of 40% or more of the population, and therefore has something like a 10% chance of winning, that suggests discerning his relative evil is a tougher task than you might at first assume. And if the task is that difficult, your own judgment about Sauron could also be defective, unless you are relatively well-informed and unbiased.

Even if you do have good reason to be confident about your judgment about the candidates, and you justifiably believe that one is vastly superior to the other, you still might not have a duty to vote if doing so is unusually costly (for example, casting a ballot would divert you from some very important task). You might also be “excused” if you have already contributed to the public interest in some other way, as per philosopher Jason Brennan’s argument in his excellent book The Ethics of Voting. But at least there might be a presumptive obligation to vote here.

Perhaps you also have a duty to become a well-informed and unbiased voter in the first place. But that requires a lot of time and effort, and may be especially difficult in a world where government policy extends to so many issues, thereby requiring extensive knowledge to understand more than a small fraction of them. It’s hard to justify the idea that we have a duty to devote that much time to politics. It’s certainly a far cry from the initial intuitive scenario where you have a duty to help Gandalf defeat Sauron, because all you need do is check the right box on a ballot.

To sum up, there can potentially be a duty to vote in a situation where 1) there is a big difference between the two sides, 2) your vote has a significant chance of being decisive, and 3) you have good reason to think you are right about which candidate is best (or at least to conclude that your reasoning is better than than that of the average voter). In that world, you also have a duty to avoid voting for the “bad” candidate. If you have an inclination to do the latter, it is better for you to abstain than to vote.

But these circumstances apply to a relatively small subset of voting decisions. In most elections, the differences between candidates are not as great, there is more uncertainty about which one is better, and a high percentage of the potential electorate have good reason to doubt the quality of their judgment.

The absence of a moral duty to vote in a given election doesn’t necessarily mean you should abstain. Unless you have a moral duty not to vote (as in the Sauron supporter case discussed above), then you can vote or note vote without fear of condemnation. In my view, you do have at least a presumptive obligation to become relatively informed if you do choose to vote. But that’s different from having an obligation to vote, as such.

Neither the duty to vote (where it exists) nor the duty to abstain (where that exists) are ones that should be enforced by the government. I oppose mandatory voting, and I am also skeptical that the government can be trusted to discern who is likely to be a good voter and who isn’t, beyond perhaps some very minimal standards. These are moral obligations that individual voters should fulfill of their own accord, though we know many may fail to do so.

If this state of affairs seems unsatisfying, then I would suggest it strengthens the case for systemic reform to reduce our reliance on the knowledge and insight of voters, who often have strong incentives to be ignorant and biased in their judgments. I discuss potential options in my book Democracy and Political Ignorance, and here. In my most recent work, how we can empower people to have greater control over the policies they live under by expanding opportunities for them to “vote with their feet.”

In the meantime, we should take seriously the possibility that there is sometimes a duty to vote to defeat a (great enough) evil. But we should also recognize the limits of such claims.

 

 

 

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During a campaign rally in Miami this morning, President Donald Trump suggested he might fire COVID-19 adviser Anthony Fauci after tomorrow’s election. Trump was complaining about press coverage of the epidemic when shouts of “Fire Fauci!” erupted from the crowd. Trump’s response: “Don’t tell anybody, but let me wait until a little bit after the election. I appreciate the advice.”

Trump has been openly critical of Fauci, who has directed the National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases since 1984, for months. “People are tired of hearing Fauci and these idiots, all these idiots who got it wrong,” Trump said during a phone call with campaign staff last month, calling Fauci a “disaster.” At that point, Trump was reacting to a 60 Minutes interview in which Fauci contradicted the president’s rosy outlook on the epidemic. Fauci’s most recent sin was a Washington Post interview last week in which he did the same thing.

Fauci’s comments are obviously inconvenient for a president who has repeatedly claimed that “we’re rounding the corner” on COVID-19, which supposedly is “going away.” But is there any substance to Trump’s complaint that Fauci “got it wrong” when he advised the president and the public about how to deal with the threat posed by the disease?

Trump’s spat with Fauci is not simply a matter of optimism vs. pessimism about the course of the epidemic. Last spring, Trump embraced an utterly implausible worst-case scenario that projected as many as 2.2 million deaths in the United States based on the counterfactual assumption of “no intervention.” The White House continues to rely on that projection, claiming “President Trump’s Coronavirus Response Has Saved Over 2 Million Lives.”

Leaving aside the fact that the worst-case scenario was never realistic, the administration’s math is puzzling. The current U.S. death toll is about 231,000, which does not leave “over 2 million lives” for the president to have saved, even if you assume no one else will die from COVID-19 and you implausibly ascribe the entire difference between reality and the fantastical projection to Trump’s policies.

Nor is the current White House claim consistent with what Trump was saying last spring. “By very vigorously following these [social distancing] guidelines,” President Donald Trump declared on March 30, “we could save more than 1 million American lives. Think of that: 1 million American lives.” That estimate was also dubious, but it was less than half the number of deaths Trump is now claiming he prevented.

Even as the Trump administration was citing the worst-case scenario to urge dramatic changes in behavior last spring, Fauci was telling Americans not to put much stock in those numbers. During a March 29 interview on CNN, Jake Tapper asked Fauci how many COVID-19 cases the United States can expect to see. “To be honest with you, we don’t really have any firm idea,” Fauci said. “There are things called models. And when someone creates a model, they put in various assumptions. And the model is only as good and as accurate as your assumptions. And whenever the modelers come in, they give a worst-case scenario and a best-case scenario. Generally, the reality is somewhere in the middle. I have never seen a model of the diseases that I have dealt [with] where the worst-case scenario actually came out. They always overshoot. So when you use numbers like a million, a million-and-a-half, 2 million [deaths], that almost certainly is off the chart. Now, it’s not impossible, but very, very unlikely.”

When it was politically convenient, Trump promoted a highly pessimistic scenario that Fauci deemed “very, very unlikely,” and he continues to rely on that scenario to make his policies look good. If the question is who “got it wrong” when it came to predicting how many Americans COVID-19 might kill, Fauci’s measured comments certainly look better than Trump’s scaremongering.

Perhaps Trump means that Fauci “got it wrong” by favoring lockdowns as a response to the pandemic. But during his debate with Democratic presidential nominee Joe Biden last month, Trump strongly implied that lockdowns had helped reduce the death toll; he even tried to take credit for those sweeping restrictions, which were actually imposed at the state level. “As you know, 2.2 million people, modeled out, were expected to die,” he said. “We closed up the greatest economy in the world in order to fight this horrible disease.”

One way in which Trump explicitly says Fauci “got it wrong” concerns the utility of face masks in curtailing transmission of the coronavirus. During his first debate with Biden in September, Trump noted that Fauci had changed his position on that issue. “He said very strongly, ‘Masks are not good,'” Trump observed. “Then he changed his mind. He said, ‘Masks are good.'”

Although The New York Times and other anti-Trump news outlets frequently imply that Fauci’s initial position was based purely on a desire to avoid shortages of face masks for health care workers, that is not true. Fauci did mention that concern in the early stages of the epidemic, but he was also skeptical that general mask wearing would do much good.

“There’s no reason to be walking around with a mask,” Fauci said during a March 8 interview with 60 Minutes. “When you’re in the middle of an outbreak, wearing a mask might make people feel a little bit better, and it might even block a droplet. But it’s not providing the perfect protection that people think that it is. And often, there are unintended consequences. People keep fiddling with the mask, and they keep touching their face….When you think ‘masks,’ you should think of health care providers needing them.”

Fauci is singing a different tune these days, saying “there should be universal wearing of masks.” He ascribes that change to accumulating scientific evidence concerning the effectiveness of masks and the importance of asymptomatic transmission. “As you get further information,” he told CNN in September, “you have to be humble enough and flexible enough to make your statements and your policy and your recommendation based on the evidence that you now have, which may actually change some of the policy.”

If Fauci initially “got it wrong” on face masks, of course, that implies his current position is right. But that is not what you would gather from Trump’s persistently muddled messages about the value of this precaution. Although the weight of the evidence indicates that it’s a good idea to wear a mask when you are indoors and in close proximity to strangers, the views Trump has expressed on the subject are agnostic at best, and his behavior suggests the same reflexive hostility toward masks that many of his supporters express. While Fauci says his opinion of masks changed based on evolving science, Trump has swung wildly between calling face coverings “patriotic” and dismissing them as a partisan affectation.

Which brings us to the current dispute between Trump and Fauci. Notwithstanding the recent spike in newly identified infections, which have reached record levels during the last few weeks, Trump insists we have “turned the corner.” During his interview with the Post last Friday, Fauci strongly disagreed.

“We’re in for a whole lot of hurt,” Fauci said. “It’s not a good situation. All the stars are aligned in the wrong place as you go into the fall and winter season, with people congregating at home indoors. You could not possibly be positioned more poorly.”

That last part seems like hyperbole. The United States would be positioned more poorly, for instance, if the case fatality rate had not fallen dramatically since mid-May, partly because of changing patient demographics and partly because of improvements in treatment. But it is surely reasonable for Fauci to worry about the course of the epidemic as Americans spend more time indoors, and he is right that we are apt to see a further increase in daily deaths, although probably not nearly as big as the increase in cases, let alone as big as the huge surge that Biden has predicted.

Fauci not only contradicted Trump’s excessive optimism. He made the mistake of contrasting the Biden campaign, which he said “is taking [COVID-19] seriously from a public health perspective,” with the Trump administration, which he said is focused on “the economy and reopening the country.”

The angry White House response to Fauci’s comments noted the falling case fatality rate but was otherwise not exactly substantive. “It’s unacceptable and breaking with all norms for Dr. Fauci, a senior member of the President’s Coronavirus Task Force and someone who has praised President Trump’s actions throughout this pandemic, to choose three days before an election to play politics,” said White House spokesman Judd Deere. “As a member of the Task Force, Dr. Fauci has a duty to express concerns or push for a change in strategy, but he’s not done that, instead choosing to criticize the President in the media and make his political leanings known by praising the President’s opponent—exactly what the American people have come to expect from The Swamp.”

In short, Deere is telling us that Fauci is a Swamp creature determined to prevent Trump’s reelection, not a scientist giving his honest take on COVID-19 trends. If the White House thinks that take is wrong, it should be telling us why. Instead, the White House is telling Americans to accept the word of a desperate politician whose allegiance to the truth is tenuous even in the best of circumstances.

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D.C. public schools were scheduled to reopen next week, but Lucy has yanked the football away again: The district announced today that distance learning will continue for most students.

“While we planned to offer in-person learning at the start of Term 2 for select elementary school students, this timeline will need to be adjusted,” wrote Lewis Ferebee, chancellor of D.C. Public Schools, in an email to parents.

This reversal came after the Washington Teachers Union voted to oppose the reopening plan. The union also instructed teachers to take a “mental health day” on Monday and refuse to teach virtually, as a show of force.

Much like the union’s earlier efforts to thwart the city’s reopening plans—which involved dumping fake body bags in front of district headquarters and staging drive-by protests—the tactics have succeeded: Officials caved to union demands without any fight whatsoever. As a result, parents who had made arrangements to send their kids back to school just a few days from now will be thrown for yet another loop.

This same dynamic—district announces a reopening date, teachers protest, district relents, working parents suffer—is playing out in large districts across the country: Chicago, New York City, San Francisco, and others. The Fairfax Education Association, which represents public school teachers in northern Virginia, doesn’t want its members returning for in-person instruction until at least the fall of 2021.

Teachers unions claim that their goal in thwarting reopenings is to keep students and teachers safe. But we know from schools that have reopened that doing so is relatively safe; meanwhile, virtual education is a completely disaster for many kids. Unfortunately, the teachers unions’ incentives are totally at odds with what families need. Students need in-person instruction, whereas public school teachers will be paid regardless of whether they actually have to show up to work.

Imagine if public education dollars followed individual students instead of automatically lining the pockets of institutions that aren’t serving students particularly well.

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