Annabelle Lever

Compulsory Voting: A Critical Perspective

Compulsory voting is sometimes thought to be justified in democracies because it promotes high levels of voting and mitigates inequalities of turnout amongst social groups. Proponents of compulsory voting also argue that it helps to prevent the free-riding of non-voters on voters. This article casts a sceptical eye on both arguments. Democratic citizens do not have a duty to promote their self-interest, and their duties to others do not generally require them to vote, or to attend the polls. So, while people are sometimes morally obliged to vote, and to vote one way rather than another, legal compulsion to vote or to turn out is generally unjustified and inconsistent with democratic government.

'A Liberal Defence of Compulsory Voting': Some Reasons for Scepticism

Liberal egalitarians such as Rawls and Dworkin, insist that a just society must try to make sure that socio-economic inequalities do not undercut the value of the vote, and of other political liberties. They insist on this not just for instrumental reasons, but because they assume that democratic forms of political participation can be desirable ends in themselves. However, compulsory voting laws seem to conflict with respect for reasonable differences of belief and value, essential to liberal egalitarians. Nor is it clear that such laws would actually achieve their intended purpose. Consequently, it is doubtful that there is a ‘liberal defence of compulsory voting’, as Lacroix, among others, maintains.

What's Wrong with Racial Profiling? Another Look at the Problem

According to Risse and Zeckhauser, racial profiling can be justified in a society, such as the contemporary United States, where the legacy of slavery and segregation is found in lesser but, nonetheless, troubling forms of racial inequality. Racial profiling, Risse and Zeckhauser recognize, is often marked by police abuse and the harassment of racial minorities, and by the disproportionate use of race in profiling. These, on their view, are unjustified. But, they contend, this does not mean that all forms of racial profiling are unjustified; nor, they claim, need one be indifferent to the harms of racism in order to justify racial profiling. In fact, one of the aims of their paper is to show that racial profiling, suitably understood, “is consistent with support for far-reaching measures to decrease racial inequities and inequality” (134). Hence, one of their most striking claims, in an original and provocative paper, is that one can endorse racial profiling without being in any way indifferent to the disadvantaged status of racial minorities. In an initial response to these claims, I argued that Risse and Zeckhauser tend to underestimate the harms of racial profiling. I suggested two main reasons why they did so. The first is that they tend to identify the more serious harms associated with profiling with background racism, and therefore to believe that these are not properly attributable to profiling itself. The second reason is that they ignore the ways in which background racism makes even relatively minor harms harder to bear and to justify than would otherwise be the case. Hence, I concluded, racial profiling cannot be a normal part of police practice in a society still struggling with racism, although under very special conditions, and with special regulation and compensation in place, it might be justified as an extraordinary police measure. I want to stand by those claims. However, Risse’s response to my arguments, here, persuades me that I misinterpreted his earlier position in one significant respect. So, I will start by explaining what interpretive mistake I believe that I made. I will then argue that despite Risse’s patient and careful response to my arguments, my initial concerns with his justification of profiling remain valid.

Mill and the Secret Ballot: Beyond Coercion and Corruption

In Considerations on Representative Government, John Stuart Mill argues against the secret ballot on the grounds that voting is a trust, not a right. Mill willingly concedes that ‘Secrecy is justified in many cases, imperative in some, and it is not cowardice to seek protection against evils which are honestly avoidable’. (323) Nonetheless, he maintains, secrecy in voting should be the exception rather than the rule, and he seems to have believed that, even in his day, the dangers of coercion were sufficiently diminished to justify public elections in England. This paper examines Mill’s arguments. It shows that Mill’s conception of the franchise has the unfortunate effect of erasing significant differences in power and responsibility between voters and legislators and, thus, between ordinary citizens and their leaders. Although it makes sense to think of elected representatives as holding their powers on trust, it seems peculiar to think of the voters who elected them as trustees, too. Consequently, this paper argues, we do better to think of voting as a right, albeit one whose exercise may properly be constrained by duties to others. The idea of voting as a right by itself does not imply that voting should be secret. However, the reasons to reject Mill’s conception of voting, and the sharp public/private distinction it implies, highlight the importance of privacy to democratic politics. Hence, I conclude, we should reject the assumption, which many of us share with Mill, that the secret ballot is justified only on prudential grounds and, with it, the idea that we generally can, and should, distinguish the public and private elements of voting.

Democracy and Judicial Review: Are They Really Incompatible?

This article shows that judicial review has a democratic justification, although it is not necessary for democratic government and its virtues are controversial and often speculative. Against critics like Waldron and Bellamy, it shows that judges, no less than legislators, can embody democratic forms of representation, accountability and participation. Hence, judicial review is not undemocratic simply because it enables unelected judges to over-rule elected legislators when people disagree about rights. Against recent defenders of judicial review, such as Eisgruber and Brettschneider, it shows that democratic arguments for judicial review do not require judges to be better at protecting rights than legislators. Hence a democratic justification for judicial review does not depend on complex and inevitably controversial interpretations and evaluations of judicial as opposed to legislative judgments. Democratic government does not demand special virtue, competence or wisdom in its citizens or their leaders. From a democratic perspective, therefore, the case for judicial review is that it enables individuals to vindicate their rights against government in ways that parallel those they commonly use against each other. This makes judicial review normatively attractive whether or not it leads to better decisions than would be made by other means.

Liberalism, Democracy and the Ethics of Voting

This article summarises objections to compulsory voting developed in my previous work. It shows that compulsory turnout is harder to justify than compulsory voting and that considerations of democratic legitimacy do not usually justify it either. When abstention is morally wrong, it is unlikely to be because it is unfair to those who voted. So concerns for fairness will not justify compulsory voting. The article shows that democracy is a competitive as well as a co-operative business, and this means that political ethics are more complex than proponents of compulsory voting suppose.

Privacy and Democracy: What the Secret Ballot Reveals:

Does the rejection of pure proceduralism show that we should adopt Brettschneider’s value theory of democracy? The answer, this article suggests, is “no.” There are a potentially infinite number of incompatible ways to understand democracy, of which the value theory is, at best, only one. The article illustrates and substantiates its claims by looking at what the secret ballot shows us about the importance of privacy and democracy. Drawing on the reasons to reject Mill’s arguments for open voting, in a previous article by A. Lever, it argues that people’s claims to privacy have a constitutive, as well as an instrumental, importance to democratic government, which is best seen by attending to democracy as a practice, and not merely as a distinctive set of values.

Is It Ethical To Patent Human Genes

Human gene patents are patents on genes that have been removed from human bodies and scientifically isolated and manipulated in a laboratory. The US Patent and Trademark Office (USPTO) has issued thousands of patents on such genes, and patents have also been granted by the European Patent Office (EPO).1 Legal and moral justification, however, are not identical, and it is possible for a legal decision to be immoral even though it complies with legal precedent and procedure. So, it is surprising to learn that some people believe that the legal justification of human gene patents can remove the most serious moral objections to them.2 Yet, those who are well versed in patent law often believe that confusion over some quite basic legal and scientific facts accounts for moral objections to such patents3 and, in particular, for the belief that they justify the ownership of one person by another.4 Once these confusions are removed, they contend, we will see that there is nothing especially alarming about patents on human genes and no reason to believe them to be immoral.5

The Politics of Paradox: A Response to Wendy Brown

What role should rights play in feminist efforts to end sexual oppression? The quest for legal rights has been central to feminist political movements in the U.S., as in other countries. It has also been controversial, because it is not clear that the language of rights is adequate to feminist objectives, or how far legal rights improve the lives of women. As Wendy Brown suggests, scepticism about rights is especially appropriate in light of the undesirable, unintended, but seemingly inescapable, consequences of feminist efforts either to use liberal rights on behalf of women, or to embody feminist criticisms of liberalism in rights. Still...is that all there is to the story?

Towards a democracy-centred ethics

Abstract The core idea of this paper is that we can use the differences between democratic and undemocratic governments to illuminate ethical problems. Democratic values, rights and institutions lie between the most abstract considerations of ethics and meta-ethics and the most particularised decisions, outcomes and contexts. Hence, this paper argues, we can use the differences between democratic and undemocratic governments, as we best understand them, to structure our theoretical investigations, to test and organise our intuitions and ideas, and to explain and justify our philosophical conclusions. Specifically, as we will see, a democracy-centred approach to ethics can help us to distinguish liberal and democratic approaches to political morality in ways that reflect the varieties of democratic theory, and the importance of distinguishing democratic from undemocratic forms of liberalism.