Why Not Vote On Principle?
Most engage with politics in line with what they believe is to their self-interest. But why?
In theory, people will vote, align with parties and signal political attitudes in two possible ways. In line with self-interests. Or in line with the perceived good.
The reality is of course more complicated. People often don’t seem to be all that great at even knowing what does and doesn’t benefit their self-interest. And of course most don’t have such conceptual clarity in mind. Many, I think, either don’t understand or don’t want to understand that there is a distinction between the universal good, the good from “the point of view of the universe” as Sidgwick has it and the personal good as realized by some arbitrary subset of individuals.
But complications aside, largely people seem to vote in line with their perceived self-interests.1 This is certainly how politicians have decided to align their messaging. It’s rare to see political messaging which bucks this tendency. Philosophy bear has a recent post where he uses survey data to argue that “ethical impartiality” is largely a left-wing normative stance. With some exceptions, like abortion, this seems true. My weakly held inclination though is that even on the left, purely selfish politicking is prominent, if not the dominant reality.
This is Dumb
Despite this reality, doing politics on self-interested grounds makes little sense. The reason is obvious to basically anyone: generally speaking, a single person won’t affect outcomes. There are a few scenarios where one’s votes and political signaling are genuinely consequential in local or national elections. But for most political actions, expected value calculations won’t find much. For instance, if you consider a win to be worth $1000 to you and there to be 100 million voters, then the expected vote benefit is .002 cents. At least, that was the calculation in a 2008 paper, but I don’t expect matters to have changed drastically since, even accounting for greater polarization, population and a different electoral landscape.
But this isn’t secret knowledge. Indeed, most voters probably do recognize that their engagement in politics is due more to civic-mindedness and general interest in political participation. And yet they will then go ahead and act as if something far more serious and personally threatening is at stake.
I don’t think it’s especially notable that people often act on selfish grounds. While it would be better if people donated more to charity, made more ethical purchasing decisions and picked up other’s trash, they don’t. Like it or not, that’s how it is.
But it is weird that people seem to take care to aim directionally to self-interest when the expected value of doing so - though positive - is vanishingly small. This doesn’t conform to any common sense notion of rational action.
One might make a symmetrical defense: the self-interested EV may be vanishingly small - but so is the selfless EV! So why bother? Why consider there to be sufficient obligation or virtue to bother at all? Maybe the politically indifferent have a case that can be made.
The problem is that this is just factually incorrect. While the .002 cents in the prior example is negligible to you, the combined boon to all other Americans may actually be as high as $60,000 dollars!2 Though this value is diffuse and not particularly well targeted at the deserving, it still possesses some considerable force. Few can give that much to charity at all.
Reasonable good-doing motivations clearly trump selfish motivations in a somewhat naively simple, one-to-one comparison. But on further consideration, the matter is even more remarkable!
We usually follow particular patterns of behavior that dictate whether we will conform to morality or to self-interest. Generally we claim that it is very important to stick to our principles. So when we fail, it is due to the costs on ourselves proving too excessive to stand, or to a lapse in judgment brought on by tiredness, or maybe a fit of anger. But we never dare attribute wrong actions to anything else.
Considering this, politics is a peculiar exception! First off, the costs are negligible. They merely involve aligning one’s political positions in a particular way and going to the polls. For those of us who already inundate ourselves with politics, there’s no opportunity cost to orienting ourselves toward the impartial good. And there’s plenty of opportunity to do so; political attitudes aren’t mere transient moments.
Secondly, the nature of political actions is extremely value-laden. Philosophy bear’s correlates show this clearly. And political ideologies are a thing! I don’t think there’s a better example of a way moral principles are systematized by members of the general public. Though I personally call myself a utilitarian, the descriptors “leftist”, “conservative” or “progressive” are far more commonly filling this role. When actions are this entangled with our moral precepts, it is generally expected that for better or worse, we actually adhere to them. Failing to do so doesn’t look like mere inattentiveness.3
Further Objections
I maintain that this is dumb. But I expect there to still be a few nebulous objections by those who just really don’t feel like I’m describing them correctly.
Great, But This is For Other People!
What if I’m completely wrong? Maybe you aren’t voting selfishly and avoiding caring too much about the impersonal good. You're doing both! What a remarkable coincidence. What's good for you, is good for everyone! In fairness, this is often true. But it’s also clear that the two don’t always coincide.
Take immigration. Many claim (wrongly, I think) that current immigration levels are hurting Americans, taking their jobs and lowering their wages. Though this is false, I can understand why it is believed. But it is much harder to claim that immigration not only harms Americans, but also harms them so considerably that the harm exceeds the benefit to the immigrants. This seems absurd to me.4
A further example is NIMBY politics. There may indeed be a few obstructionist tactics that make sense self-interestedly in specific contexts. But most political actions aren't like this: voting, political conversations and anti-development signs have very little EV. For benefits to be felt requires not only tie breaking votes, but also that loosened zoning rules actually affect the properties one cares about and that this occurs within a reasonable time limit, not 20 years later on a different street. A similar story can be told with foreign aid, as well as a multitude of other issues in less clear-cut ways.
This Won’t Go Well
There’s also a reasonable objection from someone who is maybe sympathetic to my position… but feels like this can only go wrong. Politics is full of moral panics. And it’s the incessant moralizing that drives the extreme polarization and extremism. What we really need is calm, rational deliberation. More mistake theorists, not conflict theorists.
I think this is a reasonable concern. But if anything, it undersells the prominence of certain types of moralizing in today’s politics. Grievance politics in particular. Much of moralizing in politics doesn’t stand up to scrutiny as genuine moral reasoning. It’s certainly feeding on moral psychology, but it is obviously deeply parochial. I don’t think targeting this strain of moralizing would worsen it. My argument is primarily directed at the utilitarian good, or any other notion of general beneficence. We needn’t necessarily exclude rights based claims, but I suspect that this really would just be co-opted by my target audience. For those who really want more care being given to rights violations - well, OK, I just don’t think the “violate less rights” can be popularly understood in the same way as “vote for the general good”. Individuals actually have to have some understanding of rights claims. Otherwise you may get reparations - but also libertarians cracking down on government thievery of their income.
Utilitarian Cold-Heartedness?
I’ll anticipate a final objection: “This is just a nutty utilitarian thing. Normal people know that we have special obligations to certain people”. Maybe you aren’t disturbed by your vote hurting yourself per se… but what right do you have to inflict that on those nearest and dearest?
I understand this sentiment. But I think normal people also understand that good people can do the wrong thing. This is a pretty basic lesson that kids learn from television, if not their parents.
A strong version of this belief simply doesn’t look like moral behavior, it just looks like selfishness. But we can still hang onto some weak form. And in doing so, we don’t need to reject my primary argument. Low EV for political actions is unlikely to be greatly increased if spread amongst one’s family and friends: 150 * $.002 = 3 cents, which is probably an overestimate because it ignores that different people benefit from different politics. Trust me, your children very much prefer having principled parents over ones that give them a few cents in expected value!
Try It Out!
So why not start doing politics on principle? You might even get into a situation where you seemingly flip political positions over night, even though you still expect that the enacting of these policies would hurt personally. Or maybe you earnestly talk politics in favor of one side (because of low selfish EV) and vote when it comes time for the other side (because the EV is large). What a delightfully contrarian thing to do!5 When you completely flummox the people trying to determine your politics, please direct them to this blog.
Curiously, the primary paper I’m citing has exactly the opposite conclusion. I think this is more a difference of perspective than facts. I’m not so keen on believing that what people say they believe in surveys reflects actual beliefs and motivations upon reflection. Plus, they seem to count voting in favor of “some large affinity group” as not self-interested. I can accept that one may be specially informed on the needs of one’s own group, but I’m not ready to ignore the entirety of identity politics on this basis or to consider benefiting the people one likes as a genuinely selfless act.
This number seems way too large to survive basic common-sense checks to me. Perhaps not coincidentally, it only appears in the write up, not the actual paper. Part of this may be that it considers everything positive sum, whereas in reality, some part of that $1k benefit to oneself is due to zero sum gains at others expense. But I think the spirit of the point survives. Plus, the number may be salvaged a bit if the gains to future generations and the rest of the world was factored in.
I’m tempted to make a make explicit a bolder claim: those with the most exceptionally self-regarding politics aren’t merely wrong, they are deserving of our moral condemnation. There is definitely some truth to this, but it’s intertwined with a reality of motivated reasoning and the ignorance which I’m trying to fix here. Harder to condemn people when this complexity exists.
“Oh, but I’m fine with immigrants! I only care about illegals, those criminals breaking our laws!” Bullshit.
Just be sure to resist the temptation to do this because it’s edgy and you want to show off your superior intellect. I’ll still consider you a Bad Person if you do this for only $10 dollars in EV.