The Moral Duty to Vote (MANCEPT)
| Dates: | 11 May 2023 |
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| Times: | 16:00 - 17:30 |
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| What is it: | Seminar |
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| Organiser: | School of Social Sciences |
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Cecile Fabre (All-Souls, University of Oxford)
Abstract: As of 2022, 27 democracies make it compulsory for all or most of their citizens to vote in
local or national elections. In the world's two oldest liberal democracies, the United States and the
United Kingdom, if we are to believe opinion polls and surveys, a majority of citizens have consistently
held the view that they are under a duty to vote, even though turn-out is consistently low. In the US,
the figure stands at 90%. In the UK, the independent charity National Centre Social Research, which
runs regular surveys on British social attitudes, finds that every decade, support for the moral duty to
vote declines; yet in a survey conducted in 2022, the public opinion data company YouGov found that
71% of (1764) respondents believed that citizens are under such a duty. By far the most common
justification for the legal and moral duty to vote appeals to citizens' general duty of reciprocity, or fairplay, not to free-ride on the public good of democratic governance from which they all benefit. In this
paper, I argue that citizens are under a pro tanto moral duty to vote conditioned on their not voting for
flagrantly unjust and/or undemocratic outcomes. I anchor the duty in a more general duty to express
support just institutions in general, and democratic institutions in particular. I also provide an account
of the scope of that duty - to wit, by whom it is borne and to whom it is owed. I first construct the
argument for cases in which the choices on offer to citizens include at least one reasonably just choice
with some chance of winning. I end the paper with some thoughts on cases in which citizens must
necessarily choose between unjust options, or in which the reasonably just outcome for whatever reason
will not prevail.
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Samuel Alexander Building
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