Voting and Collective Rationality

Abstract

This concluding chapter offers a final overview of the argument for a Samaritan duty of justice via the vote. It reminds us that voting with care is not the stuff of experts but of informed regular citizens, and that it is not the task of Saints—it is well within the scope of common morality. The chapter offers a condensed summary of the skeptics’ views against the morality of voting and highlights their most evident errors and fallacies. If voting carelessly is wrong despite its negligible impact as an individual act, that means that good individual votes ought not to be dismissed as morally trivial because they are drops in a proverbial ocean of votes, either. There is something else to the morality of voting, it is the commitment it denotes on the part of citizens who, together, can make a difference. The chapter also addresses the possibility that we can value voting (and democracy) instrumentally because of its capacity to bring about justice as well as intrinsically because of its power to reflect equality of political influence and collective self-government.