Election Day

Today is Election Day. Schools are closed in our county so Wife and I will be taking the kids with us to vote. My oldest, #1, is five, and he understands the concept of voting. At his school last week they had a mock vote for kids his age. Instead of political candidates, though, the vote was over which juice is better, apple or orange. As it turns out, comparing apples and oranges is not only possible, it’s child play.

And while we are on the topic of comparing apples and oranges, I can’t help but link to this video. It’s a heroic and humorous attempt at overcoming incommensurability via the use of an NCAA tournament-like chart to compare everything. Yes, everything. You’ll be interested to learn that oranges are better than apples (though apples are better than Regis Philbin). These folks also tackle questions such as whether seahorses are better than English people, whether penguins are better than Miracle-Gro, and whether slow food is better than democracy.

I think democracy wins. And that takes us back to our topic for today. We are supposed to teach our children that voting is important. Yet it is a mystery exactly why this is so. The familiar rational choice argument against voting is that in any state- or nationwide election, one vote—your vote—will not make a difference. Instead of waiting in line to vote, you could do something better with your time, such as volunteer at a charity, or earn extra money to buy gifts for your kids. If these two sites are to be believed, we can infer that you have a much greater chance of getting hit by lightning than making a difference in the popular vote results of a presidential election. If it’s alright for me to not worry about getting hit by lightning, I ought not to worry about failing to cast the tie-breaking vote.

My kids and I sit out on the front stoop to watch the lightning. We play soccer in the rain. No one objects. But if I tell my kids that voting is not worth it, I anticipate complaints. Heck, I feel bad saying it. Why? One counterargument to the rational choice conclusion is that it is incomplete. According to this counterargument, the relevant calculation is one in which you monetize the benefit to the country that would obtain by your preferred candidate winning, and multiply that by the chances of your vote making a difference. If that amount outweighs the monetized value of whatever else you’d be doing if you weren’t voting, then you should vote. Whether this makes it rational for you to vote depends on your estimate of how valuable your candidate’s win would be and how much good you can do in the amount of time it takes to vote. These might be difficult to figure out. But even if we could, something seems strange about an answer to the question “Why are you voting, Dad?” that involves a calculator.

One might argue that it is our civic duty to vote, our responsibility as citizens of democracy. Call this the civic responsibility approach. This sounds nice, but the point of philosophy is to move beyond nice-sounding rhetoric. If my vote will in fact not make a difference, then the civic responsibility approach is asserting that I have a duty to do something that will have no relevant effect. Call an act that will make no difference “futile” and a duty to perform such an act a “futile duty.” If the duty to vote is indeed a futile duty, then that seems to be a mark against believing it is actually a duty.

Are there other futile duties that we do accept? Sure. I have a duty to refrain from shooting an innocent person, even in cases in which there are a sufficient number of other simultaneous shooters to guarantee the person’s death. I have this duty even though it does not make a difference to the outcome.

The question, then, is whether there is a worthwhile difference between the futile duty not to contribute to a murder-in-progress and the futile duty to vote. I’ll leave that to another time. Even if I couldn’t come up with an account of why there is a difference, I’d still need an argument in favor of the civic responsibility approach, for the inevitable “why” that would follow any assertions about a duty to vote.

“What if everyone did that?” we might ask. If everyone skipped voting, that might be bad. But in any event, the question I’m asking is whether I should vote, not whether no one should vote. Asking “what if everyone did that” is a lousy way of checking to see whether one is acting correctly. As my grad student buddies and I joked, if the only acts that were allowed were those that everyone could do without a problem, then it would be wrong to “get there early to beat the rush.”

So I do not know how to explain to my children why one should vote, or even how to answer the question of whether, when they are old enough, they should vote. This will probably not stop me from heading to the polls today, carried on by the social inertia to which the study of philosophy was supposed to help me be less susceptible.

Update: Does voting kill?