Sequence 3 parts 2012
Fear of Democracy
I began by defending Jason Brennan against his critics, then had to reconsider what I was defending. Three posts on voting badly and who gets to decide that someone should not vote.
Must we destroy the profession in order to save it?
Jason Brennan, The Ethics of Voting, 2011, page 5 : “The right to vote and the rightness of voting are different things. I do not argue that we should disenfranchise anyone. Though I think many voters are wrong to vote, I will not argue that anyone should prevent them from voting.” (Emphasis mine) Eric Schliesser, …
Apologies to Eric Schliesser
In my last post , I noted that Jason Brennan’s published work strongly opposed disenfranchisement in the ordinary sense, and I claimed that Eric Schiesser had misrepresented his words in order to derive that conclusion. Today, Eric Schliesser supplied an unpublished paper in which Brennan offers an argument for experimentation with competency tests to disenfranchise…
Fear of Democracy
While there is much more to be said about the risks associated with advocating “experimental disenfranchisement,” I stand by the claim that we cannot ignore the widespread temptation towards disenfranchising ignorant citizens. We must at least acknowledge that the challenge is not simply coming from nowhere: Jason Brennan reflects a widespread, even common-sensical, fear of…