A better analogy: the villagers have a swivel cannon facing a line of human-shaped figures. At some point in the line are real humans, the rest are mannequins. Each villager gets to swivel the cannon very slightly to the left or the right. Should you swivel it or not?
Answer: you should swivel the cannon if and only if doing so has positive expected value, say because you have a better-than-average sense of what the safer direction would be (or else better goals than some of the villagers who positively want to kill the real humans who they view as "witches").
You don't get relieved of responsibility by doing nothing when you could have saved the villagers' victims. But sure, you shouldn't swivel the cannon just for swivelling's sake, if you're actually less likely than the other contributors to get it right.
What's important is getting the right result, not who contributes and who abstains. You should contribute, or abstain, in whatever way increases the odds of a better result. Wrongly abstaining when you should have voted for a better party is basically equivalent to wrongly voting for the worse party when you should have abstained. (In the UK election, knowing nothing else about it, I'm guessing it's probably helpful to vote for *any* mainstream party over the "cut the immigrants in half" guys.)
Even if I were able to make a rough EV comparison between parties, maybe I’d still worry that I choose the wrong party, and that because of my vote, that party interprets high voter turnout or a large margin of victory as a mandate to push their policies harder? Whereas if I don’t vote, whoever wins will have a comparatively weak mandate.
Do those concerns, if realistic, do anything to motivate the idea that the abstainer limits their responsibility? Or is there a way to factor those worries into the expected value comparison?
It seems like your vote is about as likely to reduce the mandate of the winning party (when you vote for the loser) as it is to increase the mandate (when you vote for the winner). But it's also not a priori that a weaker mandate is better. It surely just depends on whether the proposed policies are good ones or not?
Makes sense - maybe my worry would have more validity if we think the mandate of the winning party is a function of the total votes they receive, rather than a function of the margin of victory? That way, voting for the loser wouldn't weaken the mandate of the winner. I could see a party being emboldened by "x% of the country supports us" and disregarding that "X-Y% of the country supports the opposition." X could plausibly be more salient than Y to many people.
As to whether a weak mandate is better, I agree, certainly depends on the policies - I guess my worry in the real world is that the it's possible that the major contending parties agree on a lot of terrible policies (ie war) that outweigh, in their terribleness, the other marginal differences between the parties. So maybe weakening the mandate of whoever wins (by abstaining) could have better expected consequences than choosing a winner that has slightly better policies than the next worst candidate?
I think this idea is both logically invalid, and morally wrong. Validity first:
**When you don't vote, you increase the value of everybody else's votes.** The witch-stoning analogy is fundamentally flawed: in order to fix it you'd need to contrive a situation whereby if you don't throw stones, the stones everybody else is throwing somehow become heavier. There may be "some number of stones needed to kill a witch" but there is no fixed number of votes needed to win an election; you need n+1 votes to win, where n is the number of votes the next best candidate has. If there is some god's-eye-view ideal outcome, and if "intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed" is defined in this case as "more likely to guess and vote for the ideal outcome", then either:
A) You are less intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed than the average voter, in which case on average abstaining means increasing the voting power of people who vote more intelligently, compassionately, and well-informedly than you would have done, or else
B ) You are more intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed than the average voter, in which case by abstaining you are, on average, increasing the voting power of people who vote less intelligently, compassionately, and well-informedly than you.
In other words, by not voting you shift the most likely outcome *away from* whichever side of the average you're on; great if you're worse than average; bad if you're better than average - and the average British voter (as you clearly understand very well) is.... really not great. Which brings us to morality:
I can't speak to your intelligence or compassion, of course - but how much work, exactly, do you think it would take for you to become more well-informed than the average voter? How much work does the average voter put into becoming well-informed? I put it to you that the cost of becoming more well-informed than the average voter is perhaps two hours of research and contemplation, and perhaps half a page of scribbled notes (and frankly I think I'm being very, very generous to the average voter here..)
By not voting you're saving yourself the trouble of having to do two hours' work [or whatever number you believe pertains to the informedness of the average voter, plus a safety margin] at the cost of shifting the outcome of the election slightly towards a (god's-eye-view) worse outcome. Claiming it's your civic duty, as an ill-informed person, to not vote is analagous to claiming that the two hours' [or whatever] work it would take you to become better-informed than average is just too much for the the country to expect you to contribute to its future. I struggle to imagine a reasonable code of morality that would justify this.
(Side note: I think your position actually reduces to one of the "straw Vulcan" fallacies! In one of the -many- "straw Vulcan" situations in Star Trek, Spock (the supposedly logical Vulcan character) says something like "I can't possibly learn all possible relevant facts therefore it would be illogical for me to argue for or against this proposition", and it's the illogical, hot-headed characters who are presented as being prepared to reason under uncertainty and just do the best they can with some reasonable level of confidence that they can do better than average (and thus move the needle in the right direction). It's kinda cool to see an actual straw Vulcan moment in the wild, so to speak - so thanks!)
This is the right view if you’re a consequentialist (about voting), but I’m claiming that there’s a deontic constraint against casting an uninformed (in absolute, not relative, terms) vote in a consequential election. Even if abstaining from stoning will make everyone else’s rocks marginally heavier, I still take myself to be obligated to refrain if I’m not sufficient informed in absolute terms.
This makes sense, thanks for the reply. I do still have a few problems, though:
(Apologies in advance if these comes across as overly negative or critical; really am grateful to you for having responded to me and honestly am just trying to enumerate my problems as best I can!)
1) Your definition seems to preclude almost everybody from voting. You seem to describe the bar such that one would have to be a national-level expert on most key national issues in order for it to be morally permissible for you to vote; by your criteria there should be maybe a miniscule handful of voters, in total. A sort of "council of the wise". If that's the system of government you'd prefer, fine (to be honest I suspect I might even agree with you!) - but it's not the system of government we actually have. It's not clear to me why you would choose to (or exhort anybody else to) act in a way that would be morally correct under a system of government that we don't actually have.
2) Deontologists are allowed to have reasons for their beliefs, y'know! If your action can be shown to make the world, on average, a worse place from a god's-eye-view, in order to be morally consistent you do kinda need to demonstrate a pretty good reason, whether deontological or not, why your action takes precedence over a general imperative to make the world a better place. (Or else to demonstrate the flaw in the argument which appears to show your action seemingly make the world worse - which I'd be very interested to hear, if you have one!)
3) "I am not going to spend the effort to become well-informed enough to vote because I could better spend the time pursuing other, more beneficial interventions" is a *very* consequentialist argument! I can understand having a deontological belief system and I can understand having a consequentialist moral code, but I struggle to understand a moral code or belief system that allows you to freely chop between deontology and consequentialism in order to best defend whatever your current position happens to be!
4) Should anybody, anywhere, ever vote, like ever? Take your (admittedly heavily paraphrased) assertions: "only incredibly well-informed people should vote", and "becoming well-informed enough to vote is on net worse than spending the time and energy on other social interventions". I'm pretty sure if you simultaneously believe both these things that effectively makes you an anarchist..
5) [This is the key problem for me, I think] I understand you have a spectacularly high bar for how well-informed one needs to be in order to vote - but why do you believe the bar is exactly there, specifically? Say the spectrum goes from "totally uninformed voter whose vote is chosen by essentially random chance" to "omniscient and omnibenevolent super-being" - why is the cut-off point at "national-level expert on most key election issues"? I think the cut-off point is at "better informed that the current average voter" because this is the point at which you start being able to move the needle in the correct direction: Why is this too low? Why is "being able to move the needle in the correct direction" not enough? (And, for that matter, why would "world-class expert on every single key election issue" be too high a bar?)
I think your reasons for not voting here are too idealistic. You're far more informed on most of these topics than most people. You *not* voting means one less potentially reasonable vote in a constituency which could cancel out a vote for a rascal someone might be making on the basis of populism, racism, or other terrible reasons.
I have usually enjoyed your writing and thinking Amos but this one left me a bit cold. I'm afraid it sounds very much like you've never done anything politically? I say that, with genuine curiosity, because anyone whose really spent time trying to fix the problems knows that they come loaded with contradictions, complexities and moral quandries that likely no one could resolve even to minimal degrees. All we can do is make baby steps forward with corrections as we go. We could do with much better politicians and parties to help us understand the issues but the problems will remain. I've been a senior member of a political party and have participated in dozens of protests, campaigns and movements. I've got two degrees in politics and philosophy. Yet by your standards i'd probably be disenfranchised? You seem to make a case for the 'informed' without really defining who that is and it leaves a large gap in the comprehension? Equally, my wife, an NHS doctor, given that she knows very little about politics would lose her vote. It seems as if you are confusing sufficiency and necessity? To be sufficiently informed to make a positive contribution to politics one would need an enormous amount of knowledge. The necessary knowledge to be a citizen would be a lot lower and exclude alot less people? I'm a full throated democrat, so never likely to agree, but i've found the work of writers like Jason Brennan a good challenge to my ideas. I think you'd like his take. I still think you're both wrong though :)
Disclaimer: I went through exactly the same thought process in the first election I could vote, and ended up really regretting not voting.
You, Amos Wollen, almost certainly have a better understanding of the issues than the average British voter, so by voting you will be dragging up the average informed-ness of the decision even if it still isn't very informed. Don't let confident fools Dunning-Kruger their way to victory.
It’s true I could fix the problem by becoming informed, but I’m not, so I shouldn’t vote. (Not obvious to me that becoming informed is the most reasonable course of action: the pay-off is that I can permissibly cast a vote with a tiny chance of swinging an election (depending on my constituency): in the time it takes to become informed, I could be doing other more impactful pro-social things).
Yes, spending a couple of hours to become more informed than the average voter (so that your vote is better than average and thus moves the needle in the right direction) is only going to have a very slight impact - but just two hours of *anything* in isolation, including probably most charity work, is only going to have a very slight impact too. Do you really think there's something else you're going to spend two hours on, today, that's more pro-social than voting? Who do you think you are, Mother Theresa?
On this point, we're talking about doing abstruse philosophy here too, not studying for a neurosurgeon exam!
Obviously, like most EA's one can always tell themself a story about the impact of the choices that they're making. With the benefit of hindsight we can look back on the careers of several EA's and assess whether writing pieces and being a part of some think tank *really* was as impactful as becoming a medical doctor (the career choice EA's hate).
I would say that you have two duties here, one is to vote simpliciter, the other is as a citizen to become informed and civically engaged. Whilst you can be better on the one front and become more informed you still ought to vote.
Interesting argument. I have some points on the 'relative' level, which I'm aware is not what you're arguing, but I'll put them to you so that you know where I stand. I then have a question on the 'absolute' level.
I have thought this myself, and I do think that if you're less informed than the average voter, you shouldn't vote. But I disagree with your decision not to vote, because I think if you *are* better informed than the average voter, it seems to make sense to vote. Unless you think there's some EV argument where sufficiently low turnout could tip the balance towards society realising how uninformed everyone is and then doing something about it. But this seems unlikely.
What do we need to be informed about to vote? Where's the bar? Voting in national elections is a tricky business anyway, because our vote will have consequences on both local and national levels. I do find it likely that many otherwise politically-informed people don't know enough about the local issues to be able to make the right choice on that level. And I also think that many people who are politically-informed haven't actually thought the whole thing through well enough. But I'd rather have those people voting than abstaining, to outweigh the influence of the less politically-informed.
The above is an argument about relative knowledge, however, which is not what you're arguing. So I think my next question is: where does this deontic constraint come from? Don't we often do things despite being somewhat uninformed about the decision? Is the national-level knowledge enough, or do we need to be highly informed about the local issues too? Is 'being informed about the politics' enough, or do we also need to be extremely good philosophers who have thought through the ethical implications of both the vote and the political consequences?
Again, I agree with abstention if you're less informed than the average voter. But given that I doubt you *are* less informed, I'm not sure about the argument.
Among the many issues that other people have already pointed out, this assumes that all disputes between the parties are about factual issues, and none about ethical issues. I'm more confident about this when it comes to the US, but I think it's also true in Britain that many disputes between the parties boil down to different ethical systems. For example, in the US Democrats pretty clearly put a greater value on interests of non-Americans when it comes to foreign policy (greater support for foreign aid budget by and large, this has changed a bit now but more concerned about interventionism). I'd argue that the same is also true of future generations w.r.t. climate change.
I don’t think it does follow—it might be that epistocracy would be (a) infeasibly unpopular, and (b) impossible to execute without bias creeping into tests that are meant to screen for political knowledge.
I find the idea of self-limiting humility to be both intriguing and appealing. There are and have been shameful attempts to impose limits from without on voting (only property owners, only members of certain races, genders, caste, etc), but a culture of self-imposed limits from within could be an interesting way to funnel the distribution of interests at scale. As a form of political etiquette of sorts.
That said, there is a major challenge to your position: it assumes a that the objective knowledge bar to meet lies well beyond the subjective/cultural/taste/disposition aspects of voting bleeding in. On any given question that makes it to the top-heavy, major choice between option A and option B, beyond the sort of information you’d get from spending a few minutes reading up on a subject, the politics of a given situation often seems pretty clearly differentiated between positions that pertain to one’s value-orientation. One doesn’t need to spend 35 weeks reading up on the history of abortion policy to understand that a pro-choice or pro-life candidate’s respective aims would not have a tangible impact on the values one holds in their lived-experience life. If
Let me throw at you one of my own personal low-rent paradoxes that I thought up many years back (and that I’m sure was thought up by someone else).
Say you hold a dichotomously-stated position on a complex subject S. (Pro life vs pro choice)
At any given point it is extremely likely that there exists someone else who has (a) a superior command of knowledge about said subject and (b) persuasion skills to express it, and holds to not-S. Thus, forcing you to shift your position to not-S, according to the terms of reason and openness to “educating oneself”
But - you can guess where this is going- once your position is shifted to not-S, it is extremely likely that there exists someone out there who (a) … and (b) … holds to S, and so turns your not-S to S, if you are indeed committed to reason and openness to “educating oneself”
Which is to say that your position is only as strong as who you happen to meet on the street or bar or train or class room etc.
Which is to say, it’s irrational to ever hold any belief.
Which is absurd.
I said low rent paradox bc this is easy to defeat in any number of ways, but I do see your ask of “voter standards” to potentially fall into this trap.
The obvious solution is that values and personal normative standards temper what it means to “educate oneself” and pertain very much to the options in front of the voter.
There are very very intelligent people out there who deeply believe that the world is about 6,000 years old, and would likely run circles around me in a debate about “the science of carbon dating”. These people have very specific ideas about which text books should be used in schools. And they are “much more educated” than I am on the issue at hand.
That doesn’t mean I am going to spend 5 years of my life obtaining a PHD in geology to refuse sophistical pseudo-scientific nonsense about carbon dating before I make a judgement about how religious fundamentalism gets awful cute with science, and had real tangible impacts on policy. Eg textbooks used in education. Or for that matter the simple phenomenon of how smart, educated people can believe preposterous things.
I’m not claiming the problem is easy, but I am claiming that while I would be “abstaining from voting” to learn more about “the scandal of evolution”, text books would be selected by those who are more educated about the “fraud” of carbon dating and confident enough to vote their choice.
This assumes your vote actually has any substantial effect on the outcome, which it never does. The only thing to be concerned about in voting is one's own moral integrity, and since voting is in some sense approving the actions of the person you vote for, the only safe choice is to refrain or cast a blank ballot. One cannot vote, in most circumstances, without compromising one's integrity, so one shouldn't vote.
There is a clever theoretical concept, I think it is called the miracle of aggregation. The idea is that if the errors of uninformed voters are unbiased, then they cancel each other out, and what ends up deciding every contest is the opinions of the informed voters. By that logic, withholding your vote on the grounds of uninformedness would be a mistake. On the other hand, Bryan Caplan's book, the Myth of the Rational Voter, is basically a contemplation of why we should not think that uninformed voter opinions are unbiased, and the consequences. I recommend it.
The post presents a good argument against democratic voting, perhaps against representative government. As such, it is worth contemplating: What do we hope voting will accomplish? Perhaps we hope it will tend to produce better governing, or at least reduce conflict among the populace. Perhaps people have a right to a say in what gets done by government, or a right to constrain or react to what gets done. Does voting actually accomplished this? What does it actually accomplish?
Pathetic, you've attempted to outsource your thinking to experts, who will have their own agendas, as experts at times can be a kind of priesthood anointing power rather than scientists and truth tellers working out optimal truths. And occasionally you'll see experts who have just failed upwards.
Work out yourself which policy would be best for housing and for whom. By abstaining your vote you've just tried to escape responsibility.
“Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.” -The Wisdom of Crowds
Can you explain what you believe is wrong with Crown9's argument? I think you're a clever and interesting person: everybody would much rather read your actual reasoning rather than just yet another one of the internet's sixty trillion poorly-punctuated and essentially meaningless put-downs.
I understand that, yes, it's basically it's somewhere around the lowest two levels of Graham's Hierarchy (which I'm sure as a philosopher you're already familiar with, but for anybody else reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg ) - but I don't understand how that "isn't about the argument"? Like, if you say "This argument is pathetic" or "this argument's proponent is pathetic" - they seem to very much be statements about the argument, to me!
Either way, I was just asking for something from higher up Graham's Heirarchy, which I'm sure you have and which I 'm pretty confident that everybody who follows Amos' Substack would rather read. If you don't have anything (or you do but you don't want to share it) then no worries, feel free to forget that I asked.
“Like, if you say "This argument is pathetic" or "this argument's proponent is pathetic" - they seem to very much be statements about the argument, to me!”
But I didn’t say either of those things. I said explicitly the secondhand embarrassment comes from this person calling either the author or the author’s argument pathetic. Maybe you’re confusing me with the commenter I replied to?
Crown9 argues that one ought to work everything out themselves from first-principles instead of trusting experts' judgement, because experts' judgements sometimes aren't evidence-based and sometimes the experts themselves are insufficiently qualified.
You explain that, in saying you're embarrassed, you really mean that Crown9's argument (or possibly Crown9 as a person) is pathetic.
I just want to know what you actually think is wrong with Crown9's argument. I have read some of your writing and I know you're pretty clever: I very much suspect that you have thought about this and you do in fact have a good counter-argument to Crown9's central point ("don't trust experts"), or else a good refutation of Crown9's reasoning ("experts are sometimes unqualified and sometimes religious proselytisers").
I absolutely understand, beyond any doubt, that you believe Crown9's argument is pathetic and that you're embarrassed on Crown9's behalf - but I want to know is *why Crown9's argument is wrong*; where the argument is flawed or invalid; what your counter-argument is.
And I suspect I'm not alone. I very much suspect that pretty much every single person who comes to a philosophy blog would rather read an actual refutation or counter-argument rather than just "I'm embarrassed on your behalf".
A better analogy: the villagers have a swivel cannon facing a line of human-shaped figures. At some point in the line are real humans, the rest are mannequins. Each villager gets to swivel the cannon very slightly to the left or the right. Should you swivel it or not?
Answer: you should swivel the cannon if and only if doing so has positive expected value, say because you have a better-than-average sense of what the safer direction would be (or else better goals than some of the villagers who positively want to kill the real humans who they view as "witches").
You don't get relieved of responsibility by doing nothing when you could have saved the villagers' victims. But sure, you shouldn't swivel the cannon just for swivelling's sake, if you're actually less likely than the other contributors to get it right.
What's important is getting the right result, not who contributes and who abstains. You should contribute, or abstain, in whatever way increases the odds of a better result. Wrongly abstaining when you should have voted for a better party is basically equivalent to wrongly voting for the worse party when you should have abstained. (In the UK election, knowing nothing else about it, I'm guessing it's probably helpful to vote for *any* mainstream party over the "cut the immigrants in half" guys.)
Even if I were able to make a rough EV comparison between parties, maybe I’d still worry that I choose the wrong party, and that because of my vote, that party interprets high voter turnout or a large margin of victory as a mandate to push their policies harder? Whereas if I don’t vote, whoever wins will have a comparatively weak mandate.
Do those concerns, if realistic, do anything to motivate the idea that the abstainer limits their responsibility? Or is there a way to factor those worries into the expected value comparison?
It seems like your vote is about as likely to reduce the mandate of the winning party (when you vote for the loser) as it is to increase the mandate (when you vote for the winner). But it's also not a priori that a weaker mandate is better. It surely just depends on whether the proposed policies are good ones or not?
Makes sense - maybe my worry would have more validity if we think the mandate of the winning party is a function of the total votes they receive, rather than a function of the margin of victory? That way, voting for the loser wouldn't weaken the mandate of the winner. I could see a party being emboldened by "x% of the country supports us" and disregarding that "X-Y% of the country supports the opposition." X could plausibly be more salient than Y to many people.
As to whether a weak mandate is better, I agree, certainly depends on the policies - I guess my worry in the real world is that the it's possible that the major contending parties agree on a lot of terrible policies (ie war) that outweigh, in their terribleness, the other marginal differences between the parties. So maybe weakening the mandate of whoever wins (by abstaining) could have better expected consequences than choosing a winner that has slightly better policies than the next worst candidate?
I think this idea is both logically invalid, and morally wrong. Validity first:
**When you don't vote, you increase the value of everybody else's votes.** The witch-stoning analogy is fundamentally flawed: in order to fix it you'd need to contrive a situation whereby if you don't throw stones, the stones everybody else is throwing somehow become heavier. There may be "some number of stones needed to kill a witch" but there is no fixed number of votes needed to win an election; you need n+1 votes to win, where n is the number of votes the next best candidate has. If there is some god's-eye-view ideal outcome, and if "intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed" is defined in this case as "more likely to guess and vote for the ideal outcome", then either:
A) You are less intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed than the average voter, in which case on average abstaining means increasing the voting power of people who vote more intelligently, compassionately, and well-informedly than you would have done, or else
B ) You are more intelligent, compassionate, and well-informed than the average voter, in which case by abstaining you are, on average, increasing the voting power of people who vote less intelligently, compassionately, and well-informedly than you.
In other words, by not voting you shift the most likely outcome *away from* whichever side of the average you're on; great if you're worse than average; bad if you're better than average - and the average British voter (as you clearly understand very well) is.... really not great. Which brings us to morality:
I can't speak to your intelligence or compassion, of course - but how much work, exactly, do you think it would take for you to become more well-informed than the average voter? How much work does the average voter put into becoming well-informed? I put it to you that the cost of becoming more well-informed than the average voter is perhaps two hours of research and contemplation, and perhaps half a page of scribbled notes (and frankly I think I'm being very, very generous to the average voter here..)
By not voting you're saving yourself the trouble of having to do two hours' work [or whatever number you believe pertains to the informedness of the average voter, plus a safety margin] at the cost of shifting the outcome of the election slightly towards a (god's-eye-view) worse outcome. Claiming it's your civic duty, as an ill-informed person, to not vote is analagous to claiming that the two hours' [or whatever] work it would take you to become better-informed than average is just too much for the the country to expect you to contribute to its future. I struggle to imagine a reasonable code of morality that would justify this.
(Side note: I think your position actually reduces to one of the "straw Vulcan" fallacies! In one of the -many- "straw Vulcan" situations in Star Trek, Spock (the supposedly logical Vulcan character) says something like "I can't possibly learn all possible relevant facts therefore it would be illogical for me to argue for or against this proposition", and it's the illogical, hot-headed characters who are presented as being prepared to reason under uncertainty and just do the best they can with some reasonable level of confidence that they can do better than average (and thus move the needle in the right direction). It's kinda cool to see an actual straw Vulcan moment in the wild, so to speak - so thanks!)
This is the right view if you’re a consequentialist (about voting), but I’m claiming that there’s a deontic constraint against casting an uninformed (in absolute, not relative, terms) vote in a consequential election. Even if abstaining from stoning will make everyone else’s rocks marginally heavier, I still take myself to be obligated to refrain if I’m not sufficient informed in absolute terms.
This makes sense, thanks for the reply. I do still have a few problems, though:
(Apologies in advance if these comes across as overly negative or critical; really am grateful to you for having responded to me and honestly am just trying to enumerate my problems as best I can!)
1) Your definition seems to preclude almost everybody from voting. You seem to describe the bar such that one would have to be a national-level expert on most key national issues in order for it to be morally permissible for you to vote; by your criteria there should be maybe a miniscule handful of voters, in total. A sort of "council of the wise". If that's the system of government you'd prefer, fine (to be honest I suspect I might even agree with you!) - but it's not the system of government we actually have. It's not clear to me why you would choose to (or exhort anybody else to) act in a way that would be morally correct under a system of government that we don't actually have.
2) Deontologists are allowed to have reasons for their beliefs, y'know! If your action can be shown to make the world, on average, a worse place from a god's-eye-view, in order to be morally consistent you do kinda need to demonstrate a pretty good reason, whether deontological or not, why your action takes precedence over a general imperative to make the world a better place. (Or else to demonstrate the flaw in the argument which appears to show your action seemingly make the world worse - which I'd be very interested to hear, if you have one!)
3) "I am not going to spend the effort to become well-informed enough to vote because I could better spend the time pursuing other, more beneficial interventions" is a *very* consequentialist argument! I can understand having a deontological belief system and I can understand having a consequentialist moral code, but I struggle to understand a moral code or belief system that allows you to freely chop between deontology and consequentialism in order to best defend whatever your current position happens to be!
4) Should anybody, anywhere, ever vote, like ever? Take your (admittedly heavily paraphrased) assertions: "only incredibly well-informed people should vote", and "becoming well-informed enough to vote is on net worse than spending the time and energy on other social interventions". I'm pretty sure if you simultaneously believe both these things that effectively makes you an anarchist..
5) [This is the key problem for me, I think] I understand you have a spectacularly high bar for how well-informed one needs to be in order to vote - but why do you believe the bar is exactly there, specifically? Say the spectrum goes from "totally uninformed voter whose vote is chosen by essentially random chance" to "omniscient and omnibenevolent super-being" - why is the cut-off point at "national-level expert on most key election issues"? I think the cut-off point is at "better informed that the current average voter" because this is the point at which you start being able to move the needle in the correct direction: Why is this too low? Why is "being able to move the needle in the correct direction" not enough? (And, for that matter, why would "world-class expert on every single key election issue" be too high a bar?)
I think your reasons for not voting here are too idealistic. You're far more informed on most of these topics than most people. You *not* voting means one less potentially reasonable vote in a constituency which could cancel out a vote for a rascal someone might be making on the basis of populism, racism, or other terrible reasons.
I have usually enjoyed your writing and thinking Amos but this one left me a bit cold. I'm afraid it sounds very much like you've never done anything politically? I say that, with genuine curiosity, because anyone whose really spent time trying to fix the problems knows that they come loaded with contradictions, complexities and moral quandries that likely no one could resolve even to minimal degrees. All we can do is make baby steps forward with corrections as we go. We could do with much better politicians and parties to help us understand the issues but the problems will remain. I've been a senior member of a political party and have participated in dozens of protests, campaigns and movements. I've got two degrees in politics and philosophy. Yet by your standards i'd probably be disenfranchised? You seem to make a case for the 'informed' without really defining who that is and it leaves a large gap in the comprehension? Equally, my wife, an NHS doctor, given that she knows very little about politics would lose her vote. It seems as if you are confusing sufficiency and necessity? To be sufficiently informed to make a positive contribution to politics one would need an enormous amount of knowledge. The necessary knowledge to be a citizen would be a lot lower and exclude alot less people? I'm a full throated democrat, so never likely to agree, but i've found the work of writers like Jason Brennan a good challenge to my ideas. I think you'd like his take. I still think you're both wrong though :)
Disclaimer: I went through exactly the same thought process in the first election I could vote, and ended up really regretting not voting.
You, Amos Wollen, almost certainly have a better understanding of the issues than the average British voter, so by voting you will be dragging up the average informed-ness of the decision even if it still isn't very informed. Don't let confident fools Dunning-Kruger their way to victory.
This is a great argument that we should have stopped at the 1832 Reform Act like Palmerston said
in seriousness though, I think democracy has a lot going for it: https://ryanhalpin.substack.com/p/in-full-throated-defence-of-democracy
If you do not feel informed enough to vote, the most reasonable remedy is to become informed.
It’s true I could fix the problem by becoming informed, but I’m not, so I shouldn’t vote. (Not obvious to me that becoming informed is the most reasonable course of action: the pay-off is that I can permissibly cast a vote with a tiny chance of swinging an election (depending on my constituency): in the time it takes to become informed, I could be doing other more impactful pro-social things).
Now if you take the time to become informed before this, you then get the opportunity to inform others, and thus magnify the impact of such knowledge.
Yes, spending a couple of hours to become more informed than the average voter (so that your vote is better than average and thus moves the needle in the right direction) is only going to have a very slight impact - but just two hours of *anything* in isolation, including probably most charity work, is only going to have a very slight impact too. Do you really think there's something else you're going to spend two hours on, today, that's more pro-social than voting? Who do you think you are, Mother Theresa?
On this point, we're talking about doing abstruse philosophy here too, not studying for a neurosurgeon exam!
Obviously, like most EA's one can always tell themself a story about the impact of the choices that they're making. With the benefit of hindsight we can look back on the careers of several EA's and assess whether writing pieces and being a part of some think tank *really* was as impactful as becoming a medical doctor (the career choice EA's hate).
I would say that you have two duties here, one is to vote simpliciter, the other is as a citizen to become informed and civically engaged. Whilst you can be better on the one front and become more informed you still ought to vote.
Condorcet's jury theorem, a mathematical argument for voting:
https://webcomic8.substack.com/p/condorcets-jury-theorem
Interesting argument. I have some points on the 'relative' level, which I'm aware is not what you're arguing, but I'll put them to you so that you know where I stand. I then have a question on the 'absolute' level.
I have thought this myself, and I do think that if you're less informed than the average voter, you shouldn't vote. But I disagree with your decision not to vote, because I think if you *are* better informed than the average voter, it seems to make sense to vote. Unless you think there's some EV argument where sufficiently low turnout could tip the balance towards society realising how uninformed everyone is and then doing something about it. But this seems unlikely.
What do we need to be informed about to vote? Where's the bar? Voting in national elections is a tricky business anyway, because our vote will have consequences on both local and national levels. I do find it likely that many otherwise politically-informed people don't know enough about the local issues to be able to make the right choice on that level. And I also think that many people who are politically-informed haven't actually thought the whole thing through well enough. But I'd rather have those people voting than abstaining, to outweigh the influence of the less politically-informed.
The above is an argument about relative knowledge, however, which is not what you're arguing. So I think my next question is: where does this deontic constraint come from? Don't we often do things despite being somewhat uninformed about the decision? Is the national-level knowledge enough, or do we need to be highly informed about the local issues too? Is 'being informed about the politics' enough, or do we also need to be extremely good philosophers who have thought through the ethical implications of both the vote and the political consequences?
Again, I agree with abstention if you're less informed than the average voter. But given that I doubt you *are* less informed, I'm not sure about the argument.
Among the many issues that other people have already pointed out, this assumes that all disputes between the parties are about factual issues, and none about ethical issues. I'm more confident about this when it comes to the US, but I think it's also true in Britain that many disputes between the parties boil down to different ethical systems. For example, in the US Democrats pretty clearly put a greater value on interests of non-Americans when it comes to foreign policy (greater support for foreign aid budget by and large, this has changed a bit now but more concerned about interventionism). I'd argue that the same is also true of future generations w.r.t. climate change.
If this argument is correct, does it follow that universal suffrage should be replaced by some non-universal suffrage?
I don’t think it does follow—it might be that epistocracy would be (a) infeasibly unpopular, and (b) impossible to execute without bias creeping into tests that are meant to screen for political knowledge.
I find the idea of self-limiting humility to be both intriguing and appealing. There are and have been shameful attempts to impose limits from without on voting (only property owners, only members of certain races, genders, caste, etc), but a culture of self-imposed limits from within could be an interesting way to funnel the distribution of interests at scale. As a form of political etiquette of sorts.
That said, there is a major challenge to your position: it assumes a that the objective knowledge bar to meet lies well beyond the subjective/cultural/taste/disposition aspects of voting bleeding in. On any given question that makes it to the top-heavy, major choice between option A and option B, beyond the sort of information you’d get from spending a few minutes reading up on a subject, the politics of a given situation often seems pretty clearly differentiated between positions that pertain to one’s value-orientation. One doesn’t need to spend 35 weeks reading up on the history of abortion policy to understand that a pro-choice or pro-life candidate’s respective aims would not have a tangible impact on the values one holds in their lived-experience life. If
Let me throw at you one of my own personal low-rent paradoxes that I thought up many years back (and that I’m sure was thought up by someone else).
Say you hold a dichotomously-stated position on a complex subject S. (Pro life vs pro choice)
At any given point it is extremely likely that there exists someone else who has (a) a superior command of knowledge about said subject and (b) persuasion skills to express it, and holds to not-S. Thus, forcing you to shift your position to not-S, according to the terms of reason and openness to “educating oneself”
But - you can guess where this is going- once your position is shifted to not-S, it is extremely likely that there exists someone out there who (a) … and (b) … holds to S, and so turns your not-S to S, if you are indeed committed to reason and openness to “educating oneself”
Which is to say that your position is only as strong as who you happen to meet on the street or bar or train or class room etc.
Which is to say, it’s irrational to ever hold any belief.
Which is absurd.
I said low rent paradox bc this is easy to defeat in any number of ways, but I do see your ask of “voter standards” to potentially fall into this trap.
The obvious solution is that values and personal normative standards temper what it means to “educate oneself” and pertain very much to the options in front of the voter.
There are very very intelligent people out there who deeply believe that the world is about 6,000 years old, and would likely run circles around me in a debate about “the science of carbon dating”. These people have very specific ideas about which text books should be used in schools. And they are “much more educated” than I am on the issue at hand.
That doesn’t mean I am going to spend 5 years of my life obtaining a PHD in geology to refuse sophistical pseudo-scientific nonsense about carbon dating before I make a judgement about how religious fundamentalism gets awful cute with science, and had real tangible impacts on policy. Eg textbooks used in education. Or for that matter the simple phenomenon of how smart, educated people can believe preposterous things.
I’m not claiming the problem is easy, but I am claiming that while I would be “abstaining from voting” to learn more about “the scandal of evolution”, text books would be selected by those who are more educated about the “fraud” of carbon dating and confident enough to vote their choice.
This assumes your vote actually has any substantial effect on the outcome, which it never does. The only thing to be concerned about in voting is one's own moral integrity, and since voting is in some sense approving the actions of the person you vote for, the only safe choice is to refrain or cast a blank ballot. One cannot vote, in most circumstances, without compromising one's integrity, so one shouldn't vote.
There is a clever theoretical concept, I think it is called the miracle of aggregation. The idea is that if the errors of uninformed voters are unbiased, then they cancel each other out, and what ends up deciding every contest is the opinions of the informed voters. By that logic, withholding your vote on the grounds of uninformedness would be a mistake. On the other hand, Bryan Caplan's book, the Myth of the Rational Voter, is basically a contemplation of why we should not think that uninformed voter opinions are unbiased, and the consequences. I recommend it.
The post presents a good argument against democratic voting, perhaps against representative government. As such, it is worth contemplating: What do we hope voting will accomplish? Perhaps we hope it will tend to produce better governing, or at least reduce conflict among the populace. Perhaps people have a right to a say in what gets done by government, or a right to constrain or react to what gets done. Does voting actually accomplished this? What does it actually accomplish?
Any thoughts?
https://michaelkowalik.substack.com/p/is-it-rational-to-trust-the-experts
Pathetic, you've attempted to outsource your thinking to experts, who will have their own agendas, as experts at times can be a kind of priesthood anointing power rather than scientists and truth tellers working out optimal truths. And occasionally you'll see experts who have just failed upwards.
Work out yourself which policy would be best for housing and for whom. By abstaining your vote you've just tried to escape responsibility.
“Paradoxically, the best way for a group to be smart is for each person in it to think and act as independently as possible.” -The Wisdom of Crowds
secondhand embarrassment
Can you explain what you believe is wrong with Crown9's argument? I think you're a clever and interesting person: everybody would much rather read your actual reasoning rather than just yet another one of the internet's sixty trillion poorly-punctuated and essentially meaningless put-downs.
The secondhand embarrassment isn’t about the argument. It’s about calling the OP or the argument pathetic.
I understand that, yes, it's basically it's somewhere around the lowest two levels of Graham's Hierarchy (which I'm sure as a philosopher you're already familiar with, but for anybody else reading: https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/File:Graham%27s_Hierarchy_of_Disagreement-en.svg ) - but I don't understand how that "isn't about the argument"? Like, if you say "This argument is pathetic" or "this argument's proponent is pathetic" - they seem to very much be statements about the argument, to me!
Either way, I was just asking for something from higher up Graham's Heirarchy, which I'm sure you have and which I 'm pretty confident that everybody who follows Amos' Substack would rather read. If you don't have anything (or you do but you don't want to share it) then no worries, feel free to forget that I asked.
“Like, if you say "This argument is pathetic" or "this argument's proponent is pathetic" - they seem to very much be statements about the argument, to me!”
But I didn’t say either of those things. I said explicitly the secondhand embarrassment comes from this person calling either the author or the author’s argument pathetic. Maybe you’re confusing me with the commenter I replied to?
Crown9 argues that one ought to work everything out themselves from first-principles instead of trusting experts' judgement, because experts' judgements sometimes aren't evidence-based and sometimes the experts themselves are insufficiently qualified.
You explain that, in saying you're embarrassed, you really mean that Crown9's argument (or possibly Crown9 as a person) is pathetic.
I just want to know what you actually think is wrong with Crown9's argument. I have read some of your writing and I know you're pretty clever: I very much suspect that you have thought about this and you do in fact have a good counter-argument to Crown9's central point ("don't trust experts"), or else a good refutation of Crown9's reasoning ("experts are sometimes unqualified and sometimes religious proselytisers").
I absolutely understand, beyond any doubt, that you believe Crown9's argument is pathetic and that you're embarrassed on Crown9's behalf - but I want to know is *why Crown9's argument is wrong*; where the argument is flawed or invalid; what your counter-argument is.
And I suspect I'm not alone. I very much suspect that pretty much every single person who comes to a philosophy blog would rather read an actual refutation or counter-argument rather than just "I'm embarrassed on your behalf".
Not an argument. Do some thinking. Believe in something. Take life into your own hands.
No!