Since Cato is a nonpartisan think tank, you won’t see our scholars offering any recommendations on how to vote. But this seems like a good time to throw out some general considerations regarding whether and why to vote.
Many libertarians take the position that, because any one individual’s vote is vanishingly unlikely to swing a national election, it’s simply always irrational to cast a ballot—except perhaps in very small local races. I’m inclined to agree with my colleague Tim Lee that this is wrong, and even somewhat morally obtuse: There are many types of cases where a good social outcome depends on members of society being morally disposed to act according to a general norm, but where any individual’s defection from the norm makes no significant difference to the outcome, and may be in some way slightly better for the defecting individual. Conspicuously, with the exception of very large donors, contributions to nonprofits like Cato are one such case! Adding or subtracting $100 from Cato’s annual budget probably does not appreciably alter what Cato is able to do in a given year—but we are extremely fortunate that so many people who can afford $100 donations make them, since together they make a great difference indeed. And I assume they do this not only because they like getting a printed copy of Policy Report and discounts in the Cato Store, but because even the most strident individualist can appreciate that moral action sometimes involves thinking in terms of what we together do, and refusing to free-ride on the willingness of others to contribute to achieving important shared goods.
This reasoning undermines the “no marginal difference” argument that one ought never to vote, but neither does it entail that one is always morally obligated to vote. (I won’t object if readers want to infer that it means they’re always obligated to donate to Cato.) As Jason Brennan argues in his fine book The Ethics of Voting, one certainly ought not to vote just to have voted, without being well-informed about the candidates and the likely effects of their policies, and indeed, in this case, one would be morally obligated to refrain from voting. More generally, when we consider the effects of what we do together, we often find that the norms we ought to follow are complex and conditional, not crude categorical commands. We’d all starve if nobody engaged in agriculture, but it does not follow in a modern market economy that everyone must therefore engage in agriculture when we can instead reap the benefits of division of labor coordinated by the price system. And in many cases involving ordinary social helping—as when a pedestrian drops a stack of important papers on a windy day—we should hope bystanders regard assistance as an imperfect duty, so that some people spontaneously choose to stop and help, but not everyone, since for a large group of bystanders this would be wasteful and likely even counterproductive.
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