Julia Maskivker, The Duty to Vote , New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780190066062, $39.95 Hbk.
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Julia Maskivker, The Duty to Vote, New York: Oxford University Press, 2019. ISBN: 9780190066062, $39.95 Hbk. Christopher Freiman1 Accepted: 28 September 2020 © Springer Nature B.V. 2020
Julia Maskivker’s The Duty to Vote is an outstanding contribution to the ethics of voting literature. The book develops what I take to be the strongest defense of a duty to vote on offer. It’s comprehensive, original, and powerfully argued. At the heart of Maskivker’s case for a duty to vote are two principles. First, we have the Principle of Minimal Altruism, which makes “altruism morally required, as opposed to morally optional, because of its non-burdensome nature under regular circumstances” (p. 41). To borrow one of Maskivker’s examples, if you can easily give a stranded tourist the money she needs for a bus ride to her embassy, you’re morally obligated to do so. The cost to you is low and the benefit to the tourist is high (p. 136). If voting well is not especially costly and provides significant benefits to others, then the Principle of Minimal Altruism would provide support for a duty to vote. One natural objection to this line of argument is that an individual’s vote does not produce significant benefits in the way that an individual’s coins produce significant benefits for the stranded tourist. As Maskivker acknowledges, the coins make a difference, but a vote typically does not (p. 139-140). Thus, a second principle enters the picture—collective Samaritanism. We have, on Maskivker’s view, a Samaritan duty to contribute to collective efforts that produce beneficial outcomes even if our individual contribution to the effort is small. To illustrate, we can consider Maskivker’s modified version of the stranded tourist example. Here the tourist needs an expensive train ticket, too expensive for you to buy on your own. In this case, all of the bystanders have a duty to chip in some coins to a common pool for the tourist so that she can buy the ticket (p. 140). As Maskivker puts the point, “We do not assess the moral permissibility of individual actions according to their differencemaking impact on a collective result. Rather, we assess individual actions according to the nature of the collective activity to which they contribute” (p. 51, italics in the original). Taken together, the principles of Minimal Altruism and collective
* Christopher Freiman [email protected] 1
Department of Philosophy, College of William & Mary, P.O. Box 8795, Williamsburg, VA 23187‑8795, USA
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Book Review
Samaritanism suggest that individuals ought to contribute to highly beneficial collective efforts when they can do so at a reasonable cost to themselves. From here, the path to a duty to vote appears straightforward. Voting well, when done collectively, results in better governance and thus substantial social benefits such as the promotion of justice and the common good. Moreover, voting well is not particularly burdensome. Maskivker argues that citizens should acquire information and deliberate impartially about how t
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