Law, Ethics and Justice Seminar by Cécile Fabre (University of Oxford)

Title: The Moral Duty to Vote in an Unjust World

Abstract: Proponents of the moral duty to vote have not properly addressed the question of the scope of the duty - to wit, by whom it is borne, and to whom it is owed. This is problematic: all liberal democracies (even relatively stable ones) are marred by wrongdoings, both public and private. The question, then, is whether the fact that some agent has wronged another agent makes a difference to either party's duty to vote and to their claim to be the beneficiary of the duty. While it stands to reason that, if anyone is owed a duty to vote at the bar of justice, victims surely are, it is not obvious that wrongdoers too have that claim. While it seems clear that if anyone owes a duty to vote at the bar of justice, wrongdoers do, it is not obvious that victims too owe it. I defend the following theses. First, the fact that a citizen has committed a serious wrong, of the kind described above, strengthens the case for holding them under a duty to vote. Second, the fact that a citizen has been or continues to be the victim of such wrongs does not exempt them from the duty - a duty which, moreover, they owe to wrongdoers as well as to innocent citizens, who include fellow victims. I then address complications raised by the fact that in most democratic societies, thosewho commit or are complicitous in acts of injustice are sometimes also victims thereof, and vice-versa.

Cécile Fabre is a political philosopher and a Senior Research Fellow at All Souls College, Oxford. She is also Professor of Political Philosophy at the University of Oxford, and affiliated with the Faculty of Philosophy, the Department of Politics and International Relations, and Nuffield College, Oxford. Her research interests are in theories of distributive justice; the philosophy of democracy; just war theory; the ethics of foreign policy (with particular focus on the ethics of war, and of espionage), and the moral and political philosophy of cultural heritage.

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