Tuesday, October 5, 2010

Voting and Morality

There’s a common battle cry in today’s politics that goes something like this: “You’re trying to legislate morality! You’re trying to push your values onto me!” The problem I have with that is that all major laws are moral issues that people have decided to legislate. There’s no scientific reason why stealing or killing need to be illegal. There are laws against them because the vast majority of people believe they’re wrong and don’t want to live in a world where they’re allowed. Of course some laws are more arbitrary decisions, like driving on the right side of the road. But even then, you have a group of people who made a decision – what they thought was best – and then legislated it. Either way, legislating morality is at the very core of what a government is for. The goal is not to take religious beliefs out of the law, but to make sure that the right ones – the ones most people can agree on and will preserve people’s freedom the best – make it in. And even the “preserve people’s freedom” part is a religious value – relatively few people in history have held that as a high priority for the government.

Given that perspective, it’s easy to see what would happen to the world if we removed all laws that were subject to religious controversy. Should murder be illegal? Well there are plenty of people in the world that believe that you are not only allowed, but obligated to kill someone who is of the wrong religion if you can. Slavery? The folks in northern Sudan would be religiously offended by our claims that they should not enslave people they consider to be inferior. And who are we to say that their beliefs are wrong, just because we don’t share them? You see the point. We have these laws because most Americans believe that stealing and killing and enslaving people are wrong, and they are willing to legislate those beliefs.

So what about more controversial issues – values that are shared by a much smaller majority? In this case, it is even more important that people be willing to vote based on what they think is right. There are two sets of scenarios to consider. First, the majority can be right or wrong. Second, the majority can be willing to vote based on their beliefs or unwilling. Obviously, if the majority is right and willing to vote on its beliefs, then the laws will be right in a government where the people choose the laws. If the majority is wrong and willing to legislate its beliefs, then the laws end up wrong. But if the majority is right and unwilling to vote based on beliefs, the situation is no better – the laws still end up wrong. Only now, the people who knew better have to live with the will of the minority because they were unwilling to stand up for what they believed. (And of course, the minority in this case were obviously willing to vote for their beliefs.) The final possibility is that that the majority is wrong and unwilling to legislate based on beliefs, in which case the laws presumably end up right. The following table summarizes the possibilities:

Majority legislates decision

Majority does not legislate decision

Majority is right

Good laws

Bad laws

Majority is wrong

Bad laws

Good laws

So if you say that the majority should not legislate its beliefs, you are betting on most people being wrong most of the time. Not really a good bet, since if most people have wrong values, your society is going downhill anyway. It’s true that you still have a possibility of bad laws if everyone votes for what they think is right, but at least you only get the bad laws if that’s what people choose and again, if most people are choosing what’s wrong, you’re in big trouble regardless of what your laws are. It makes more sense to bet on the majority being right. Which means that everyone should vote based on what they think is right, not what they think is politically correct.

Of course that doesn’t mean that people should try to turn all of their values into laws. It just means that they should not refrain from passing a law just because it happens to correspond to a personal value. If they hesitate to vote on issues they have religious beliefs about, then the laws will still be based on values – but they will be the values of minorities. (And I don’t mean ethnic or religious minorities; I mean ethical minorities.) When any old minority can get a law passed just because the majority believes it is wrong and therefore won’t vote against it, your society is guaranteed to fail.

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