Aeon: Given how little effect you can have, is it rational to vote?

This is fine, perhaps even compelling, as an esoteric argument. But taken to its logical extreme, this classical account of rationality would imply that nobody should ever vote. This outcome would gut democratic governance of its central regulating mechanism. Society would be left worse off, even if each citizen were spared the apparently pointless expense of time and energy involved in a trip to the ballot box. Two facts are missing from the classical view: that elections are ultimately cooperative ventures, and that the rationality of participating in them depends on more than an individual-level cost-benefit analysis of the effort involved in each pull of a voting-machine lever or crossing of a ballot paper. An individual’s true interest in voting is inextricably intertwined with the interests of the polity as a whole.

In this, voting is not fundamentally different from many other actions. Failure to participate in a collective endeavour is fundamentally irrational whenever it risks contributing to outcomes contrary to our own basic interests. We rely on cooperation to solve a range of pressing challenges, from global warming and extreme poverty to preventable disease. Few question the rationality of minimising our individual carbon footprints, for example, or individually deciding to boycott companies that rely on child labour. No one person who engages in such behaviour will individually solve the climate crisis or eliminate the exploitation of children. But it is still rational to undertake individual actions that contribute to a collective effort likely to have desirable effects for humanity as a whole. [...]

In my view, there is not. If we fail to save a child drowning in a pond – to use an example made by the Australian philosopher Peter Singer in 1972 – we are causally implicated in the death, even if we didn’t put the child in the water to drown. Similarly, one individual decision not to vote – combined with similar decisions by others – can keep unjust governments in power or just ones from being formed. There is nothing irrational about wanting to avoid these possibilities by acting in conjunction with others in the same way that we cooperate with others by recycling or donating to charity. Even if I have no way of knowing if others will vote, I should act as if they would vote, and they should act similarly. This is the logic of collective commitment that undergirds the morality of voting.

read the article