Devin Lane (University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill), "Expert Disagreement and the Duty to Vote"

Forthcoming, Philosophers' Imprint

By Devin Lane

Both scholarly literature and public discourse make a big deal about there being a duty to vote. It’s our duty as citizens to go to the polls, or so the story goes. The most plausible basis for such a duty, in my view, is that voting contributes to a process that has beneficial consequences for us and our fellow citizens. But what this reveals is that if there is a duty to vote, it is not a duty to vote any which way. It’s a duty to vote well. If it’s the consequences for our fellow citizens that ground the duty to vote, then we’d better vote in such a way that’s likely to bring about good rather than bad consequences.

One dimension of voting well concerns one’s beliefs. If you’re going to vote well – again, in a way that’s likely to help bring about good consequences for your fellow citizens – your vote should be based on beliefs about what consequences your vote will help bring about. Furthermore, those beliefs shouldn’t be groundless. They should be justified beliefs. Many of the beliefs that feed into your evaluation of the consequences of your vote will be about complicated empirical topics. To justify your belief that the policies or candidates you vote for will bring about good consequences, you’ll need to appeal to many policy-relevant scientific and social scientific claims.

In my new paper “Expert Disagreement and the Duty to Vote,” forthcoming in Philosophers’ Imprint, I raise a problem for voting well in this sense, and thus (ultimately) for the purported duty to vote. The problem is that sometimes justified beliefs about such complicated empirical issues are simply beyond our reach. It’s not just that it’s sometimes hard to arrive at justified beliefs. There are circumstances under which it’s impossible. In particular, consider circumstances in which the experts disagree about some issue. If the experts can’t make heads or tails of the issue, then how likely is it that we laypeople will be able to figure it out? Very unlikely. When the experts disagree, we laypeople ought to suspend judgment; so, when the experts disagree, we laypeople can’t form justified beliefs.

If we can’t form justified beliefs about the voting-relevant empirical issues, then we can’t base our votes on justified beliefs about the consequences of the policies or candidates we’re voting for. But if that’s so, then we can’t vote well. And if we can’t vote well, then we can’t be required to vote well. Expert disagreement can nullify the duty to vote well. But as I’ve suggested above (and elaborate on in the paper) any duty to vote is ultimately just a duty to vote well in disguise. That being so, expert disagreement can nullify the duty to vote altogether.

I’ve made no claims about precisely how common this problem is. That’s an empirical issue that I can’t settle here. There are some instances in which the problem of expert disagreement may not apply. When there is one party that advances a policy agenda based on denying a well-established expert consensus and one party that advances a policy agenda based on accepting that well-established expert consensus, the argument may not apply. This is because in such a case we can form justified beliefs about the empirical facts surrounding the relevant policy issue that distinguishes the two parties; expert disagreement does not block us from doing so. So we can form a justified belief about the consequences of electing one party versus another. And so we can vote on the basis of those justified beliefs, satisfying the conditions of the duty to vote well.

But whenever there isn’t one party that’s out-of-sync with well-established expert consensus, then the argument applies. And that description applies to many voting contexts – in many cases we’re not dealing with one party that’s out-of-sync with expert consensus. This is especially likely to be so with respect to party primaries, elections at the state and local level, and single-issue referenda.

That’s the gist. There are of course various points where one could resist my argument. In particular, you might wonder whether we should really characterize voting well in terms of justified beliefs. Maybe thinking about voting well in decision-theoretic terms, a framework which needs not appeal to beliefs but only credences, can help us out. Or maybe appealing to the famous Condorcet Jury Theorem or miracle of aggregation can save us. I’ve got things to say here. I think expert disagreement can cause similar problems for the duty to vote, no matter how clever we get. But I won’t get into all those details here. You’ll just have to read the paper.