{"id":33873,"date":"2015-09-07T13:26:25","date_gmt":"2015-09-07T18:26:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/?p=33873"},"modified":"2015-09-07T13:26:25","modified_gmt":"2015-09-07T18:26:25","slug":"do-mormons-have-a-duty-to-vote","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/2015\/09\/do-mormons-have-a-duty-to-vote\/","title":{"rendered":"Do Mormons Have a Duty to Vote?"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"We'll<\/a>
We’ll get back to Trump towards the end.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

You might think that this is a strange question, and that of course everyone has a duty to vote. That\u2019s part of being a good citizen, isn\u2019t it? Well, there\u2019s a growing body of opinion that says this isn\u2019t so.<\/p>\n

It all starts widespread agreement that voting doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense from the perspective of an individual voter. Your chance of swaying a national election\u2014of being the decisive vote\u2014is for all practical purposes zero. So there\u2019s no benefit to voting. But there are costs. There\u2019s the gas you pay for the drive to the polling place and the value of the time you spend waiting in line, for instance. This makes voting sort of like buying a lottery ticket when the jackpot is $0.00. It doesn\u2019t matter how cheap the ticket is, no one would buy it at any price.<\/p>\n

Of course, there are some folks that think voting might be worthwhile because it\u2019s not just who<\/em> wins an election, but by what margin<\/em>. That doesn\u2019t really help, though, because making a margin one vote greater (or smaller) is still negligible. And the situation gets worse when you think that people should not only vote, but should be informed<\/em> voters. Now the cost is much higher, since you\u2019ve got to spend hours and hours reading and researching to become conversant on the important issues and on where the individual candidates stand on those issues.<\/p>\n

Given this analysis, it\u2019s no wonder that voter participation is low. It\u2019s also no wonder that voters are, as libertarian philosopher Jason Brennan recently outlined\u00a0in a piece for the Princeton University Press blog<\/a> \u201cpoorly informed, passionate, biased, overconfident, and tribalistic.\u201d He\u2019s not wrong about that, by the way. He\u2019s building on work like Bryan Caplan\u2019s The Myth of the Rational Voter<\/a> which, using the same basic cost\/benefit analysis (and a lot of empirical evidence), concludes that voters are \u201crationally ignorant.\u201d In other words, they are ignorant because informed voting isn\u2019t worth the cost. (This isn\u2019t as condemnatory as it may sound. Everyone is rationally ignorant on some topics.)<\/p>\n

So the real question then becomes: why does anyone vote at all? Brennan\u2019s best guess (and that of most people studying the issue) is that voting is just one part of a general pattern of political participation(bumper stickers, t-shirts, yard-signs, political rallies, obnoxious Facebook posts, etc.) that together constitute a form of self-expression:<\/p>\n

Voting is like wearing a Metallica T-shirt at a concert or doing the wave at a sports game. Sports fans who paint their faces the team colors do not generally believe they will change the outcome of the game, but instead wish to demonstrate their commitment to their team. Even when watching games alone, sports fans cheer and clap for their teams. Perhaps voting is like this.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Still, most people have a notion\u00a0that voting is an integral aspect of civic duty. And this is Brennan\u2019s most controversial argument: he thinks that is hogwash. In The Ethics of Voting<\/a> Brennan makes the case that there is no civic obligation to vote. Summarizing this point for PBS<\/a>, he said:<\/p>\n

I don\u2019t think people have a duty to vote. I argue that voting is just one of many ways you can exercise civic virtue. I think it\u2019s sort of morally optional. If you do it well, it\u2019s praiseworthy, but it\u2019s not anything special.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

I agree with Brennan this far: if someone is deciding between voting in an uninformed way and not voting at all, then staying home may be the way to go. But either voting in an uninformed way or staying home are each abdications of our civic duty to vote and to do so in a reasonably informed manner. I think this civic duty is general and applies to all people living in functionally democratic systems, but for today\u2019s post I will consider the issue from a specifically Mormon perspective.<\/p>\n

The Book of Mormon has quite a lot to say about kings, liberty, and government. Nephi plainly states that he was \u201cdesirous that [his people] should have no king,\u201d (2 Ne 5:18) but at the time there was no viable alternative, and so he instituted a system of monarchy that lasted for several centuries. Still, the dream of a land without kings was not abandoned. Nephi\u2019s brother Jacob later testifies that \u201cthis land shall be a land of liberty unto the Gentiles, and there shall be no\u00a0kings\u00a0upon the land.\u201d (2 Ne 10:11<\/a>)<\/p>\n

The issue of kings comes up again in Mosiah 23, when Alma\u2014leading a splinter group of Nephites who have no contact with the monarchy established by Nephi\u2014refuses his people\u2019s request to become their king. In doing so, he also begins to articulate the rationale for the Book of Mormon\u2019s anti-monarchical position, writing that after freeing themselves from one wicked king, he desires \u201cthat ye should\u00a0stand fast\u00a0in this\u00a0liberty wherewith ye have been made free, and that ye trust\u00a0no man\u00a0to be a king over you.\u201d (Mosiah 23:13<\/a>)<\/p>\n

Alma\u2019s concern was not merely the king himself. He stated that the people had \u201cbeen in bondage to him and his priests<\/em>\u201d (Mosiah 23:12<\/a>, emphasis added). So the problem here is not just monarchy, but also oligarchy. On the other hand, a constitutional monarchy may avoid a lot of these issues. The problem isn’t kings per se<\/em>. It’s concentration of power. \u00a0Any situation where a select elite are the rulers of the land is viewed with suspicion by Alma and other Book of Mormon prophets. So one has to ask, returning to Brennan\u2019s scheme, how does one decide who is \u201cwell informed\u201d enough to vote? How small will this cadre of self-appointed voters be, and how will it not end up leading to\u00a0oligarchy?<\/p>\n

Alma\u2019s concerns are restated and elaborated just a few chapters later when, in Mosiah 29, Mosiah initiates a major reform to replace the monarchy with a system of democratically elected judges. The precipitating crisis for this change was a question of succession: none of Mosiah\u2019s sons were willing to accept the throne. This meant that anyone who was appointed to that position would face a persistent question of legitimacy, and should any of Mosiah\u2019s sons change their mind civil war could easily result.<\/p>\n

But Mosiah’s concerns clearly went beyond the immediate threat of a succession crisis. He saw the moment as an opportunity to finally replace monarchy with a new system as Nephi, Jacob, and Alma had all longed for. Mosiah provides a two-pronged rationale. The first prong is pragmatic: any government by a small elite is vulnerable to corruption:<\/p>\n

Therefore,\u00a0if\u00a0it were possible that you could have\u00a0just men to be your kings, who would establish the\u00a0laws\u00a0of God, and judge this people according to his commandments, yea, if ye could have men for your kings who would do even as my father\u00a0Benjamin\u00a0did for this people\u2014I say unto you, if this could always be the case then it would be expedient that ye should always have kings to rule over you. (Mosiah 29:13<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

In contrast to the predisposition of elitist societies towards corruption, Mosiah argues that \u201cit is not common that the\u00a0voice\u00a0of the people desireth anything\u00a0contrary\u00a0to that which is right.\u201d (Mosiah 29:26<\/a>) This is an explicit rejection of Brennan\u2019s theory because it calls for all<\/em> people to participate in politics in order to render the system less vulnerable to manipulation by a small elite: \u201ctherefore this shall ye observe and make it your law\u2014to do your business by the voice of the people.\u201d (Mosiah 29:26<\/a>) A small portion of the electorate is not legitimately the voice of the people,\u201d even if they are uncommonly well-informed.<\/p>\n

In addition to the practical consideration, Mosiah also has a philosophical concern.<\/p>\n

33\u00a0<\/strong>And many more things did king Mosiah write unto them, unfolding unto them all the trials and\u00a0troubles\u00a0of a righteous king, yea, all the travails of soul for their people, and also all the murmurings of the people to their king; and he explained it all unto them.
\n34\u00a0<\/strong>And he told them that these things ought not to be; but that the burden should come upon all the people, that every man might\u00a0bear\u00a0his part<\/em>. (Mosiah 29:33-34<\/a>, emphasis added)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Even when the rulers are righteous, as Mosiah himself strove to be, the work of administering a government is difficult. It is unfair to expect a small number of people to be involved. As a principle of fairness, therefore, everyone should actively participate in government.<\/p>\n

The principles espoused by Nephi, Jacob, Alma, and Mosiah (as well as later prophets) are general, and they suggest that Mormons living in any functionally democratic society do have an obligation to actively participate in their government, including by voting.<\/p>\n

There are two additional conflicts, I think, between the model of civic duty in the Book of Mormon and Brennan\u2019s proposal.<\/p>\n

First, Brennan\u2014like many Americans\u2014has a fundamentally different set of criteria in mind for leadership candidates. Book of Mormon prophets emphasize righteousness of leaders almost exclusively. It\u2019s possible to infer some general level of competence from that, especially given Mormon emphasis on education and learning, but it certainly looks nothing like the contemporary pre-occupation with technical expertise.<\/p>\n

Compared to the apparent sophistication of our technocratic philosophy, the Mormon emphasis on moral rectitude might look quaint or even negligent, but in reality the modern fa\u00e7ade of sophistication is rather silly. There is no way to draw a straight line from the decisions of a single person\u2014even a President\u2014to macroeconomic variables like GDP or the unemployment rate. In addition, there\u2019s no feasible way for politicians to be experts in every relevant field (from economics to epidemiology) and, even if there was, there\u2019s no indication that we actually put much weight on such technical competence. The rhetoric about leadership competence is just an excuse for a hero-worshiping leader cult that is not nearly as modern or enlightened as we pretend that it is. Thinking that one candidate has a substantially better chance than another candidate at affecting the international economy is not substantially more sophisticated than hoping a\u00a0king\u2019s sacrifice while please the gods and lead to enough rain for the\u00a0crops. Not only is the Book of Mormon\u2019s emphasis on righteousness more workable for a populist understanding of civic duty, but it\u2019s also a more reasonable criteria for good governance, where the threat of corruption is generally much greater than the threat of incompetence. (I say this mostly because I see no evidence of widespread competence within large governments–or institutions of any kind–to be at risk.)<\/p>\n

\""A<\/a>
“A termite “cathedral” mound produced by a termite colony is a classic example of emergence in nature.” – Wikipedia (“Emergence”)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Second, Brennan\u2019s analysis\u2014as well as that of all the social scientists pondering the strange behavior of voters\u2014is predicated an on overly individualistic model of society. As a libertarian, he should be more familiar with Hayek\u2019s idea of spontaneous order (equivalent to the modern concept of emergence<\/a>). The entire idea of spontaneous order \/ emergence is that\u2014when lots of individual actions are combined\u2014you get structures of behavior that are not evident at the micro level.<\/p>\n

No individual termite has a blueprint for the termite mound, and yet\u2014together\u2014they build one. And, prior to Hayek\u2019s breakthrough essay The Use of Knowledge in Society<\/a>, no human being had a concept of the role of prices in conveying information through society. And yet, they did. If you insist on viewing human behavior only at the lowest level of analysis\u2014only at the level of individual actions and incentives\u2014then you run the risk of missing the forest for the trees. It\u2019s not as though the price system is inviolable, after all. More than once in recent history this or that ideology has instituted centralized, command-pricing successfully. \u201cSuccessfully\u201d in the sense of successfully eradicating a functioning market, of course. The results were decidedly less than successful for the tens of millions who starved to death as a result of these hubristic experiments.<\/p>\n

Although it is tentative, I believe that Book of Mormon references to ideas like “the voice of the people,” speak to a view that is less individualistic than our modern conception of society and that, to the extent that society is viewed as a complex system with the potential for emergent properties and behaviors, this view might be more accurate than our hyper-individualistic one.<\/p>\n

I do not argue with the contention that many of the problems plaguing the United States–and possibly other governments, although I am not in a place to say–are a result of elitism and corruption stemming from irrational voters acting out their irresponsible prejudices. One could not possibly ask for a better example than Donald Trump\u2019s current place in the polls. Brennan\u2019s recommendation, however, to just tell the irrational voters to go home is unacceptable given Mormon understanding of civic duty and in the long run would exacerbate rather than ameliorate our present, dire condition.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

You might think that this is a strange question, and that of course everyone has a duty to vote. That\u2019s part of being a good citizen, isn\u2019t it? Well, there\u2019s a growing body of opinion that says this isn\u2019t so. It all starts widespread agreement that voting doesn\u2019t make a lot of sense from the perspective of an individual voter. Your chance of swaying a national election\u2014of being the decisive vote\u2014is for all practical purposes zero. So there\u2019s no benefit to voting. But there are costs. There\u2019s the gas you pay for the drive to the polling place and the value of the time you spend waiting in line, for instance. This makes voting sort of like buying a lottery ticket when the jackpot is $0.00. It doesn\u2019t matter how cheap the ticket is, no one would buy it at any price. Of course, there are some folks that think voting might be worthwhile because it\u2019s not just who wins an election, but by what margin. That doesn\u2019t really help, though, because making a margin one vote greater (or smaller) is still negligible. And the situation gets worse when you think that people should not only vote, but should be […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1156,"featured_media":33874,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":""},"categories":[55],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-33873","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-news-politics"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_featured_media_url":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/09\/834-Trump.jpg","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33873","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1156"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=33873"}],"version-history":[{"count":2,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33873\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":33878,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/33873\/revisions\/33878"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/33874"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=33873"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=33873"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/timesandseasons.org\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=33873"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}