Abstract
I argue that, from the liberal perspective, citizens have a pro tanto moral duty to cultivate and maintain a readiness to participate in politics when such an action is called for from the moral perspective—I will call it “the pro tanto duty of political engagement.” It requires a citizen to (i) monitor what the government is doing (or not doing), (ii) evaluate its actions, and (iii) learn what she can do to intervene politically. In Section 1, I will discuss some doubts on the pro tanto duty of political engagement. In Section 2, I will describe Alexander Guerrero’s account of culpable ignorance and argue from his account that the pro tanto duty of political engagement is derived from a general moral duty to properly manage one’s morally relevant beliefs. In Section 3, I will argue that to properly assess the moral significance of any government policy or policy proposal, one must learn about the lives and personal values of those who would be affected by the policy.
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Notes
Brennan’s main target is voting, but his argument can be extended to cover all types of political activities, including paying attention to public affair. Brennan does not argue that citizens should not have the right to vote in his earlier work (Brennan 2011), but more recently he argues that democracy is a bad form of government and we should consider replacing it with epistocracy (Brennan 2016).
So it is possible that for some people, the extent to which they need to investigate or understand these things is close to zero. More on this point later.
Morally relevant beliefs are beliefs necessary for acting morally, including beliefs about the moral statuses of one’s actions and omissions (e.g., murder, or this murder, is morally wrong) and beliefs about the nature or effects of certain behaviors (e.g., shooting someone point blank constitutes killing someone—or at least an attempt to do so). To manage these beliefs is to acquire, verify or revise them.
In other words, a duty is instrumental in nature if it is grounded in the causal outcome of the action it calls for. A duty is non-instrumental in nature if it is not so grounded. For example, if a person has the duty to utter certain words under certain circumstances because doing so constitutes telling the truth and she has the duty to tell the truth regardless of the outcome, her duty to utter these words under these circumstances is non-instrumental in nature. By contrast, if a person has the duty to yell “fire” because doing so causes a morally good outcome, her duty to yell “fire” is instrumental in nature. Notice that there is a conceptual distinction between “intrinsic” and “non-instrumental.” The way I use “instrumental” and “non-instrumental” leaves open the possibility that the moral value of a duty that is non-instrumental in nature is extrinsic to the duty. To illustrate, here is an example of something (not duty) that has non-instrumental but extrinsic value: memorabilia. (This distinction is suggested by Jonathan Dancy in personal communication.)
Amartya Sen (1983) defends a similar idea. Sen points out that there has been no famine in democratic countries with a relatively free press. For example, India has not faced any famine since it became a democracy in the 1950s. By contrast, China faced severe famine and the death of millions in the late 1950s under the totalitarian rule of Mao.
It is because there is no analog of price signals in politics and political transaction is not voluntary (one cannot refrain from political participation in exchange for, say, not paying taxes). Voluntary transactions in the market, which are guided by price signals, can benefit all market participants even if each participant does not know what is good for others and acts merely on self-interest. See Brennan 2011, 124–29. While it is true that there has been no famine in democratic countries, the absence of famine is a very low bar for good policy making.
Luke Maring (2015) runs another version of the civic virtue argument in response to Brennan’s view and contends that citizens ought to vote because “excellent” citizens vote. Not voting would “disrespect” citizenship in the sense that Ricky Davis of the Cleveland Cavaliers disrespected his role as a basketball player by deliberately shooting the ball at the wrong basket in an NBA game. However, Maring’s argument begs the question against Brennan because Brennan would not accept the claim that participating in politics is what an excellent citizen must do. On Brennan’s view, contributing to the common good of society is what an excellent citizen must do, and she can contribute to the common good through non-political means.
E.g., donating to charities or establishing organizations that aid the disadvantaged, providing professional services at a discounted fee to the poor, etc.
Thomas Pogge (2011) makes a similar argument from complicity in the context of international justice. He argues that citizens in the wealthier parts of the world have a duty to aid the world’s poor because the former perpetrates and benefits from the structural injustice of globalization that is harming the latter. But Pogge thinks that the former can compensate the latter through non-political means.
We do not think about this very often because for most of us it is relatively easy to figure this out.
Critics may object that the view threatens to introduce a regress. How does the slaveholder know that slavery is morally significant enough to require a considerable effort of investigation? If the slaveholder needs to investigate the moral significance of slavery in order to know about it, then how much effort does the slaveholder need to put into investigating the moral significance (not morality) of slavery? If the amount of effort required depends on the moral significance of such an investigation, then how does the slaveholder know that the investigation is morally significant enough to require a considerable effort of investigation at a higher level? The regress seems to continue infinitely. My response is two-fold. First, there would not be a regress if the moral significance of an action can be obvious. For example, Moody-Adams suggests that the moral significance of enslaving someone is obvious in her interpretation of the Milgram experiment and that the agents have to put in the effort to ignore it (1994, 299–301). Second, an agent can have a duty not to φ even if she does not know the moral significance of φ-ing, and she can have a duty to investigate the moral significance of φ-ing even if she does not know the moral significance of not investigating.
In 2011, Alabama passed an anti-immigration bill that resulted in a labor shortage in the state, leaving many fruit and vegetable crops unharvested and rotten in the fields that year. According to the American Farm Bureau Federation, “[a]t least 50–70% of farm laborers in the country today are unauthorized. Few U.S. workers are willing to fill available farm labor jobs.” <http://www.fb.org/issues/immigration-reform/agriculture-labor-reform/economic-impact-of-immigration>
For example, Kutz (2000), Gilbert (2000), and Isaacs (2011) have conflicting accounts about moral responsibility in the collective context. The fact that people argue about whether or how one’s group membership makes one liable for group wrongdoing shows that being a member of a group gives rise to potential responsibility for group actions that one would not have otherwise.
For example, in November 2013, the Times reported that according to a South Korea newspaper and a North Korean defector group, North Korea publicly executed 80 people for watching smuggled South Korean TV shows.
For example, the Chinese government blocks selected foreign websites and web services through the so-called “Golden Shield Project.”
Morally relevant beliefs include beliefs about the psychology of akrasia. One ought, morally, to reflect on one’s psychological makeup and internal motivation so that one would put oneself into situations that are conducive to acting morally.
See footnote 4.
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Tsoi, S. You Ought to Know Better: the Morality of Political Engagement. Ethic Theory Moral Prac 21, 329–339 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9869-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10677-018-9869-7