Voting Self-interestedly is Immoral and Irrational

Other than that, it's a great idea

Often, voters feel conflicted when they see one candidate as better for the country and the other as better for them personally. Which one should they pick? I think there’s a clear answer: they should pick the one that’s better for the country. Opting to vote for the candidate that’s better for oneself is both immoral and irrational. Even if you’re self-interested, it doesn’t make sense to vote self-interestedly.

Irrational

If you live in an extremely close swing state, the odds you’ll flip an election are below one in a million. We’ll be generous and assume the odds are one in a million.

Let’s assume the candidate who is better for you is way better for you. In fact, he’ll benefit you by $100,000—an unusually large amount. In this case, voting for him would benefit you by the equivalent of 10 cents. So voting in this scenario would be like walking all the way to the polling station and filling out your ballot just to collect a nickel. That would hardly pass any reasonable cost-benefit analysis.

What if you’re so rich that the candidate would cut your taxes by ten million dollars? Even in this scenario, voting would only be equivalent to making ten dollars. Surely if you’re so rich that a candidate might cut your taxes by ten million dollars, you shouldn’t waste your time haggling over ten bucks!

What if we assume the worst-case scenario? One of the candidates is literally going to kill you if he gets elected, it’s a razor-close election (pun intended, because he’ll kill you with razors), and you’re in a swing state. You have maybe forty years left of life—about twenty million remaining minutes. Let’s say you spend a quarter of that time sleeping. Then you should vote if doing so takes less than fifteen minutes (for voting has a one in a million chance of adding fifteen million minutes to waking life). So even in this absurd homicidal scenario, voting probably wouldn’t pay off, if we factor in time spent registering and so on.

In a local election, prospects might be a bit better. But generally speaking, the smaller an election is, the less benefit you get from the better candidate. If your vote has a one in ten-thousand chance of being decisive, even if the candidate would benefit you by $10,000, voting is equivalent to gaining $1 in expectation. Not exactly a great deal!

So if you’re merely self-interested, it basically never makes sense to vote. However, if you’re concerned with the welfare of others, the equation changes. If the better candidate would benefit millions of people, their victory would be hugely important and make the time you lose by registering and filling out a ballot worthwhile. But if you only care about yourself, then voting isn’t worth it, because you don’t count the benefits to others.

Immoral

Voting for the candidate that is better for you and worse for others is also transparently immoral.

America is a large country (SOURCE???). It has about 340 million people. Morally, you’re arguably permitted to put your interests above others. But you aren’t permitted to weigh your interests 340 million times more than others’ interests. The average human life lasts about 2 billion seconds. So the scale at which you’d need to prioritize your interests over others to vote selfishly would also imply that you would prefer to extend your own life by 7 seconds rather than save the life of a baby. Note that this is conservative because it totally neglects the interests of all non-voters.

Here is an analogy: imagine that there were 340 million people who were each on track to get $1,000 worth of goods, and you were one such person.¹ However, you could also choose to get $2,000 while leaving no one else with anything. Surely that would be immoral. Similarly, it is immoral to vote self-interestedly, if this conflicts with voting for the better candidate. If your vote has any effect, it will make millions of people worse-off on net, even if it makes you better-off. You shouldn’t do that.

This point is clearest in national elections, but it still basically holds in local elections. They’re still large enough that even if you’re pretty extreme in your prioritization of your own interests, you should still vote for the better candidate.

Objections

There are two plausible-sounding objections to my argument, but I don’t think either of them work.

First, suppose that when making decisions, you believe it’s important to consider what would happen if everyone did the same thing you did. Perhaps you’re a rule utilitarian or Kantian of some sort. Now, here’s an empirical claim you might make based on this sort of belief: maybe things would be best if everyone voted in their own interest. That way, politicians would be incentivized to make things better for people in general.

If you think both of these things then you should vote selfishly. That’s because you’d think both:

1. You should act in the way it would be best if everyone acted.

2. It would be best if everyone voted self-interestedly.

I have four main objections to this:

1. This isn’t an argument for voting in the way that’s best for you, rather than the way that’s morally best. Rather, it’s an argument for why self-interested voting is morally best. So it’s not an objection to my thesis that when voting, you should only consider morality.

2. It’s very implausible that the right action is the one that would be best for everyone to do. Suppose that if everyone in the universe kicked nearby cats whenever they saw them, that would bring about utopia on earth. However, people aren’t going to do that. Would this fact give you reason to kick nearby cats? Would kicking nearby cats be the right thing to do, even though you know that it would have precisely zero positive effects and would hurt the cat? No, clearly not.

3. It doesn’t seem like voting self-interestedly really is the best thing for everyone to do. Among other things, it will lead to complete neglect of the interests of every non-voter. So really it seems the rule you’d end up with is more along the lines of “vote self-interestedly unless one candidate is better for non-voters.” Your main consideration, then, should be the impacts of the candidates on non-voters.

4. Voting self-interestedly wouldn’t be good if everyone did it. It would lead to 51% of people screwing over the other 49%. So then we must narrow the rule. But then we’ll probably end up with some rule a bit like “you should vote for the candidate you think is best, but you should take the candidate that’s better for you to give some evidence about who is best.”

The second big objection to this proposal: suppose you have some view of decision-theory on which what matters is more than the direct causal effects of your actions. For instance, you might be an evidential decision-theorist. Such people think that you should take the action which is such that after taking it, you expect to have the most utility. This is so even if the action doesn’t actually cause you to have the most utility. If there’s some action which correlates with being rewarded, EDT says that you should take it, even if it doesn’t cause you to be rich.

Now, perhaps you voting for one candidate correlates with them winning. If you’re a standard voter, then you voting for a candidate is evidence that they’re going to win. So arguably EDT licenses selfish voting by making the odds that you’ll influence the election non-trivial.

You might also be a functional decision theorist. You shouldn’t be, but you might be. FDTists say that when making decisions, you should think of yourself as deciding what your “cognitive algorithm” does and pick the action that timelessly gets you the most utility. So if you having the disposition to take a given action leads to you having more expected utility across time, then that’s the action you should take. Arguably, your algorithm being disposed to vote for one candidate influences other algorithms counterfactually, so if you vote for a candidate, their odds of winning are a lot higher.

Still, I don’t think either of these are quite right.

Start with EDT, because it has the nice feature that it gives clear verdicts on account of being a theory rather than a tissue of specific verdicts. Does your voting for a candidate on self-interested grounds give you much evidence that they’ll win? No, not really. It might if you were a totally random voter and had no extra information. But if you’re deciding based on the recommendations of EDT, you’re decidedly not that way.

Imagine that you couldn’t remember if you’d voted for one of the candidates. Would learning that you have—in light of other evidence, like polling results and so on—give you much evidence that they will win? No, not really—certainly not enough to make voting prudentially rational. It might boost the value of voting conditional on you being impartial, but it won’t be enough to make voting selfishly rational.

An intuition pump for this: if your vote has enormous evidential impact, then you voting becomes just about the most important thing in the world. Plausibly, you specifically voting then saves tens of thousands of lives in expectation. I agree that voting is good, but surely it isn’t this good.

It seems about as plausible that your voting impartially correlates with other people being more impartial. So then voting impartially is still good for you, because it makes them more impartial.

Turn next to functional decision-theory. Now, we have a problem here, because no one has any clue what the view says. There’s no robust theory about how to analyze what impact one cognitive algorithm being different would have counterpossibly on other algorithms. But let’s set aside that little problem.

The same basic points apply. Your algorithm endorsing one candidate isn’t really correlated with other algorithms voting for them. You’re different enough that it doesn’t seem that switching your vote to be selfless will affect their votes. And if it is, then it probably also correlates with other people behaving more altruistically. Other people being more altruistic is good for you.

In short, the same reasons you shouldn’t vote selfishly even if you adopt EDT also probably apply to FDT. Though it’s a bit hard to say, because nobody has ever successfully derived a single verdict in the actual world from FDT ever in world history. FDT lives right now as a few judgments about specific idealized cases, a promise, and a dream; it’s not a complete theory.

Conclusion

The basic reason you shouldn’t vote selfishly is that there are a lot of voters. This means your vote has a low probability of having an effect. It’s not worth it prudentially. And it’s immoral to prioritize your interests over those of millions of other people. That’s the straightforward intuition, and neither eccentric decision-theory nor universalization undercuts this core reasoning.

(This article was edited. I’m thinking of hiring the person who edited it as an editor long-term, so let me know if you found the writing noticeably cleaner than usual).