Don't judge the Trump Voters

Some 59 million people chose to enact horror and obscenity, and they’re agents in the world. They acted wrongly and are blameworthy. Whatever mistakes other people made in persuading them don’t lift the moral responsibility from their own shoulders.

I’ve got arguments aplenty with other people who rejected Trump, and there are of course prudential reasons to care intensely about how best to persuade those who chose him not to choose horror and obscenity in the future. But I’m going to try to avoid the temptation to be angrier at the people who seem closer to me—because they’re smart and could have chosen differently!—than at the directly responsible actors.--Jacob Levy "They Make Choices, Too" @Dailynous.

There are few people I admire more professionally and personally than Jacob Levy (who was on faculty when I was a PhD student at Chicago and whose writings I often engage with), so I was startled by his anger and by his treating electoral agency primarily as the occasion for moral judgments. Levy and I share a scholarly and emotional fondness for the complexities of classical liberalism as a living tradition -- and the Constitutional order of the U.S. is, warts and all, one of its central legacies. The tradition recognizes human imperfection and emphasizes that our knowledge of social reality tends to be occluded to agents at a given time. (The preceding sentence explains some of the tradition's warmth toward markets.) Even so, I do not share his perspective on the Trump voters.

In particular, voters qua being voters should not be judged in moral terms (on the whole); whatever the responsibility of voters is, it is not primarily a moral one. Levy's remarks share here a tendency, also notably present in recent just war theory and often on display in Jason Brennan's anti-democratic theory, to moralize exactly bits of social reality where morality is out of place (and also likely to lead to permanent and increasingly harsh conflict).

For, first, voting is not primarily a moral act. It is an opportunity to express one's choice for a political representative or a political leader. There are lots of a-moral and even immoral considerations that enter into such a choice. To be sure, I am not denying that a voter can legitimately chose to let morality guide her vote or that she can choose to be concerned primarily with morality in her vote. But it is not reasonable to demand that other voters be guided wholly by (your sense of) morality. Let me elaborate.

Voting is the wrong sort of behavior to evaluate morally. Because of secret balloting we have no access to the intentions and characters of particular voters, so there are no deontic or virtue-theoretic grounds to judge voters qua voters. The outcome of a vote is a merely a winning candidate (or party in some countries); that is, the main effect of voting is, on the whole, fundamentally a-moral. So, there is no easy consequentialist ground to judge a voter morally. It's only the behavior of the elected representatives and leaders that can be judged morally. But crucially voters do not control that behavior. In addition, due to the division of labor and lack of government transparency, voters often know very little about what their representatives do. (How little and to what degree this matters in judging the nature of democracy is subject to controversy [recall].)

Moreover, any voter's individual responsibility for the outcome is trivially small. (This is analogous to a kind of argument rational choice theorists love to trot out to claim that voting is irrational--I don't accept that interpretation of voting.) This suggests that the blameworthiness that attaches to their action, if any, is rather thin.

Levy may suggest that it is a foreseeable consequence of this election that as President Trump will enact horrible things, and so his voters have a collective moral responsibility for these outcomes. Let's stipulate, for the sake of argument, that Levy is right about the future President Trump and that the horrors to be produced by him are worse than what the alternative candidates would have offered. (Bill Clinton's execution of Ricky Ray Rector remains, I think, the most horrid thing done by an American politician while running for office in my adult life-time, and I say that without wishing to justify any of Trump's awful things.) Liberals ought to  be cautious about going for collective moral responsibility. In part because it prepares the way for the very illiberal collective punishment. (We learned that lesson in our reflections on the war-crime firebombings of Dresden, Tokyo, and than the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki.) This is not to deny such a thing as collective complicity in the horrors perpetrated by others; but this complicity is not a feature of voting, but rather a feature of the silences and passivity during hate crimes and other horrors.

In his post, Levy explicitly rejects the idea we should criticize others for the rise of Trump. This is a bit odd because the media and several other politicians enabled the rise of Trump through their actions and in-actions. The media's role is especially important because it raises challenging questions for liberalism more generally--both for the nature of free speech as well as about the role of profit in the media-landscape. In addition, the anti-intellectual celebrity culture of a wealthy, capitalist society played some role in generating Trump's fame (not to mention the absence of serious estate taxes). If we are going to continue and revive our tradition, we will have to face these challenges (and --to briefly mention my own interests -- the foreseeable byproducts of technocracy and meritocracy, and here) unflinchingly. The political class seems to have been entirely oblivious to the existential threat to and fragility of the body politic until rather late in the day--again stipulating Levy is right about this (for some of my views on Trump see here). By contrast, I claim (to paraphrase Spiderman), with greater power comes greater moral responsibility.

Levy's post instantiates a peculiar and recent reversal of understanding of liberal democracy. Rather than requiring moral voters, it is an institutional response to human imperfection (including immorality). It is designed to mitigate the dangers of civil war and to ensure peaceful transfer of power. It is designed to empower people's tribal feelings and other aspirations; when the institutions and political class function properly, these are channeled to slightly better ends. It is undeniable that we're living through a period in which liberal institutions are malfunctioning; the voters' decisions are a symptom of this.

Finally, assigning moral responsibility to (other) voters is also futile.+ It is unlikely to change behavior and if it is heard at all, it is likely to be interpreted as a kind of sanctimoniousness that only entrenches positions in ongoing cultural conflicts.* I doubt it will invite the kind of conversations that are needed to have people recognize and acknowledge each others fears and aspirations.

 

*Yes, I am aware that some of my philosophical peers think I am sanctimonious. Some other time, I'll return to that.

+In this post I am ignoring his anger (because I have no complaint against it).

Comments

[Samuel Rickless]

I'm a little baffled by your claim that voting is not a moral act. Voting for someone who has revealed himself of herself to be hostile to republican values is immoral, assuming that the right thing to do is preserve the republic. That means no Le Pen, no Farage, no Hofer, no Jobbik, and, also, no Trump. It doesn't matter whether your own vote is not a difference maker. If you participate in a collective scheme to elect someone who is hostile to liberal values, you are complicit in evil. It's really not complicated. Now it might be counterproductive to accuse Trump voters of immorality. But that doesn't make the accusation false.

[Eric Schliesser]

Sam, you are not alone in your response (I received a lot of similar comments on Facebook). Yet, I reiterate that on my view, which I take to be the liberal/republican view, you engage in a category error when you assume that voting for somebody who is hostile to republican values is immoral as such. We wouldn't have the institution of representative democracy in the way we do if we thought voters were moral or that we wished to facilitate their morality.(I allow that if somebody explains his/her vote in immoral ways then, sure, you can say something about the morality of the vote.) Moreover, in practice, it is inevitable that even if we want to be moral, we vote for immoral/illiberal/un-republican folk not infrequently (in the post I used an example that truly shocked me at the time). Finally, like you, I take complicity with evil seriously, but I think the locus of responsibility is elsewhere (also for prudential reasons you hint at).

[John Quiggin]

I also can't follow this. It seems to have the following elements.

1. Voters may vote on the basis of incorrect beliefs about their candidate. I can't see how this applies to Trump voters, unless they have avoided news media for the past 25 years.

2. We can't be sure of the motivation of any individual Trump voter. Sure, but this a matter of evidence, not judgement. It's true of any wrong act done by a large group of people

2. Individual responsibility for the outcome is thin. The rational voting calculation on which this claim is based is false (I can give links). Roughly speaking, every Trump voter is responsible for their share (1 in 60 million) of the damage caused by Trump. (7 billion * harm done by Trump to the average person in the world). That's a big number just from climate denialism, before you get on to the risk of nuclear war etc

3. Risk that it will lead to collective punishment. Here I think you have something, but not enough. In a democratic system, it's necessary that we shouldn't legally punish people for voting, even if they vote for a racist. But that doesn't mean we shouldn't judge them, any more than we shouldn't judge members of the KKK for exercising their legal right to racist sppech.

[Eric Schliesser]

John, I think I may have mislead you about my argument. The core argument relies on the thought that rather than requiring moral voters, liberal democracy is an institutional response to human imperfection (including immorality). We vote because we are immoral. So, to point at some (or very many) immoral voters qua voters misses the point of liberal democracy. (The other arguments were designed to show that this insight is, in fact, part of the structure of voting which is designed to obscure the moral intentions of voters.)

On your 3. I think the more likely effect of taking ethics of voting serious is (as I said in my follow up post) a push toward disenfranchisement of immoral voters.

[David Hilbert]

I share the idea that something has gone wrong with your argument. I think I can grant your assumptions and still morally evaluate voters for their voting behavior. Democracy is an institutional response to human imperfection. So we don't want to require that only the perfect participate in democracy. In that sense, you may be right that we vote because we are immoral (or perhaps better, because many of us are immoral and we don't have perfect tests morality or perfect institutions to administer those tests). But that feature of voting doesn't preclude us from criticizing (including on moral grounds) people for voting the way that they do. The criminal justice system is another institutional response to human imperfection. That fact about it does not preclude us from pointing out the imperfections of those who are subject to it. What I can't do, on your account, is criticize the electoral system for allowing the imperfect to vote but I really don't understand why I can't criticize voters for their behavior (including how they vote).

[Eric Schliesser]

Thank you for your thoughtful response, David.
I find the analogy with the criminal justice system useful here. For, (i) it's purpose is aimed at discovery of truth and to establish/judge guilt/innocence (etc.). It has procedures to do so. A byproduct of these procedures is that we became aware of all kinds of morally relevant details. Yet, absent those details -- and the sense that the procedures and fine-grained verdicts are functioning properly (which they don't always do) -- we would be very cautious about inferring moral claims about even convicted criminals (or conversely, we would never infer from 'he is innocent to he is moral').
By contrast (ii) voting does not aim at truth (with Madison and others I affirm that political life is the realm of opinion); the choice may easily combine different aims, including political, economic, power, culture, loyalty, and moral aims (or not). So, our ends are potentially diffuse when we vote, but the mechanism a vote on a candidate (relative to other candidates) or a list, etc. is extremely coarse-grained.
So, for these reasons I think the analogy is very very strained (unless a voter communicates (directly or indirectly) her reasons for voting and these turn out to be immoral).
In addition, I think I have failed to make clear one of the things that follows from the assumption that representative democracy is an institutional response to human (moral) imperfection; one reason why it is so is that if we turn the question of who gets to get political rule on questions of morality we are likely to generate worse mutual conflicts. (Moral conflict can generate extremely bitter factions.)
I agree with you that I prefer to insulate the electoral system from criticism against allowing the imperfect to vote, but that's not what I am defending. (So, I think in the seminar room we should be debating the merits of different kinds of electoral systems.)

[John Quiggin]

The crucial point here is that criticising a choice (including a vote) does not imply opposition to freedom of choice (in this case, democracy). If you think one leads to the other, you should supply empirical evidence.

Otherwise you are simply arguing that morally correct beliefs (namely, that voting for a racist is wrong) should be repressed (or maybe suppressed) because their expression might be politically harmful, by generating conflict.

[Eric Schliesser]

First, I am not suggesting you should repress morally correct beliefs.
Second, you can criticize a choice in lots of ways without moral criticism.
Third, the entailment from 'X is immoral [and ignorant]' to 'X should not be allowed to vote' need not be empirical.
Fourth, in America's history there have been instances in which voting for a racist was the best choice available, and such a vote not obviously immoral.
Finally, plenty of Trump voters voted for what they can see is an immoral Trump in order to promote what they take to be manifestly moral ends (e.g., to secure Conservative judges that protect abortion or at least block an assured Liberal court). It's a bit quick to claim that such a vote is immoral in virtue of the fact that Trump is a racist. The institutional design of Liberal democracy suggests that other people's voting is not the right place for moral evaluation.

[John Quiggin]

Thinking about it, I suspect I'm responding not so much to your point as to suggestions that we need to legitimate the (presumed) concerns of Trump voters, for example by playing down "political correctness". That's really a different issue, but the two are easily conflated.

[Eric Schliesser]

Yes, and I am certainly not suggesting that all the concerns of Trump voters should be legitimated. In fact, I think part of politics and moral responsibility is the articulation and evaluation of these concerns.