Toward an Ethics of Citizen Decision-Making

• In Event: Knowing and Deciding Responsibly in Democracy

Abstract

Democracies require their citizens to make consequential political decisions, today most often by voting. But how should they do that? What moral principles or reasons apply to how they make these decisions? Much political science treats this process as a black box, beyond disputation, and political theory has seldom done better. Though democratic theory has in recent years been seemingly interested in how citizens decide, these debates have tended to treat the question of how citizens should decide as an appendix to other questions, such as that about epistocracy or the duty to vote, making do with placeholder accounts that lack specificity. This paper brings the question of how citizens should decide into sustained focus and makes three arguments. First, we contend that citizens can vote incorrectly or in unjustified ways such that we can say, in principle, they’ve failed the requirements of voting responsibly. Second, we argue that we can separate the question of how citizens ought to make decisions from other questions in democratic theory to which it has been attached, such as whether only informed people should have political power. Third, and most consequentially, we divide the ethics of decision making in two, consisting of the familiar ethics of the decision point itself and also the ethics of the learning process that precedes the moment of decision. Making this distinction allows us to recognize the (constrained) agency citizens have in affecting their own learning about politics–and, indeed, in constituting themselves as political decision-makers with information and concerns of a particular kind. There is tremendous work to be done in this area of what we call “the ethics of shortcuts” examining how and why citizens should choose to watch, read, or otherwise educate themselves about politics and the wider world in one way – or from one source – rather than another. We conclude that the quest for an ethics of citizen decision-making is not a mirage, but is rather well worth developing in future work.

Authors

• Kevin J. Elliott, Yale University

• Jeffrey A. Lenowitz, Brandeis University