Recently I was asked about a study of politically tilted publications in the social sciences, including psychology. I started to look at my own publications. I realized that most of them are not political in the partisan sense, but many have concerned public policy issues. If they have had a tilt, it is strongly toward utilitarianism, but that is not a political party.
Given my current obsession with the looming U.S. election, I would like to say why I would support Democratic candidates at the national level even if Donald Trump were not a serious danger to the world. I think this view follows from utilitarianism.
The essence of the modern Democratic Party is still the views of F. D. Roosevelt. He thought it was the responsibility of government to improve the welfare of "the people", and these people even included foreigners. This view has been at the core of Democratic politics all along.
The role of government is justified in utilitarianism in several ways. First, government can solve social dilemmas by penalizing defectors. Much of the law is about these penalties. For example, the government maintains the institution of private property by punishing those defectors who try to steal or destroy it for personal benefit. But governments also establish environmental regulations, safety regulations, laws about disclosure, and so on. These regulations are sometimes controversial, and Democrats usually favor them. (Regulations can be excessive, and Republicans in the past had a useful function of trying to fix them.)
Governments also redistribute money from rich to poor (to varying extents). This improves total utility, up to a point, because money has more utility for the poor than for the rich. Once people spend about $100,000 per person on the basic necessities, additional spending tends to go toward luxuries that provide less utility per dollar.
Redistribution may be accomplished in many ways, including progressive taxation, direct handouts to some poor people (negative taxes), and direct provision of services such as health care, education and housing that provide the means for the poor to earn money themselves. Democrats favor these efforts.
Another redistributive function of government is more subtle, perhaps more a function of social norms than laws or regulations. It concerns the uses of labor. When the distribution of spending power is extremely large, the "rich" (those with lots of it) are free to spend money on goods and services that provide very little utility, since they have excess money once they have set up the basic things that everyone would want. With more redistribution, labor would be more efficient in terms of utility production, rather than production of "economic value." The latter is distorted. A $10,000 Rolex watch has over 25 times the economic value of my $35 Timex, and maybe more like 1.25 times the utility, if that. But that Rolex requires lots of labor, not just in the production facilities in Switzerland but also n the mining and selection of materials. We thus have hundreds of people, some with considerable technical skills, working to produce very little utility. The same may be said of tax lawyers who help rich people minimize their tax bills. Probably some of these people could do a lot more good as high-school teachers, or civil servants who craft the laws and regulations that the lawyers have to work around. With fewer rich people, and with a social norm of doing your share without shirking, and not being to much of a "pig" about the way you spend money, total utility would increase. Democrats tend to support this social norm, while Republicans tend to favor a norm of flaunting wealth.
The current Democratic party is less isolationist than the current Republican party. This was not always true. But isolationism in general means giving little moral weight to foreigners. Utilitarians are not the only ones who think that all people deserve something approaching equal consideration. The two big issues in the current election are global.
First is climate change. The U.S. cannot solve the problem on our own, but we can at least do our share and set an example for others. We are doing that, more or less. But Trump would remove us from all international agreements and repeal many of the laws and regulations designed to speed the energy transition from fossil fuels.
Second is Putin. Trump shows every sign of allowing Putin to win enough in Ukraine so that the Russian and Chinese people are convinced that that further efforts to build empires through military force are likely to succeed with bearable costs.
It is disturbing that these two issues play such a small role in the campaign. Voters say they are concerned about inflation, so opinion polls ask about inflation but not about climate or Ukraine, and news reports don't mention these as issues. And neither do the Democratic candidates. People get the idea that we are supposed to be concerned about local issues. But perhaps some of those undecided voters just haven't thought about the big world issues. It may seem difficult to decide who will do better at bringing down prices. But it is not difficult at all to decide how to vote if you care just a little about the rest of the world.
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