Why Democrats are generally more consistent with utilitarianism

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.

How voters think about voting

In several papers, including one recent paper that has been rejected by several philosophy journals, I have analyzed people's approach to voting in terms of whether they consider the good of "the world" (cosmopolitan voting), their nation, or themselves. It seems that all three ways of thinking exist, perhaps even co-exist within the same person. I have argued that, for most people, voting out of self-interest alone is irrational, but cosmopolitan voting is usually rational if the voter cares somewhat about the good of other people. This argument is apparently not a great insight for philosophers, and that is why the paper keeps getting rejected. However, the rationality of cosmopolitan voting, and the irrationality of self-interest voting, are apparently not ideas that most voters, politicians and journalists have considered.

In looking at what people say about voting, especially "undecided" voters in the upcoming U.S. election, I see another classification of how people think about voting for candidates, cutting across the one just described. This distinction is based on what people attend to.

The stated or likely policies of the candidate are one focus of attention. Candidates state policies to appeal to voters who think this way. The stated policies are usually selected for appeal to voters rather than experts. Policies may still be valuable indications of a candidates general approach to issues. This strategy can be harmful when voters focus on some single issue, such as inflation, or support of Israel, as the basis of their decisions.

Another focus is the character of the candidate, especially at the traits that would make a good office holder, according to the voter. These are not necessarily the same traits that would make a good co-worker or spouse. These voters might feel that policy statements are not very predictive of what will actually happen, and it is better to choose the sort of person who can deal with unforeseen problems. For example, some Trump supporters think he will be "tough" with other countries (ignoring prior harmful effects of such toughness such as Iran's nuclear ambitions).

A third focus is blind empiricism. Voters look at how things were (for themselves, for their nation, or for the world, but mostly for themselves) under the candidate's previous administration, or that of the candidate's party. ("Things were better for me when Trump was in power.") In the long run, this strategy might be slightly better than chance at picking good candidates by any criterion. But I think it actually represents a kind of laziness, and unwillingness to consider either policies or character.

More generally, people don't seem to have given much thought to the question of how they should approach citizenship. This question is not part of the civics curriculum. The right to vote, which comes with citizenship, implies a duty to vote thoughtfully, and, more generally, to take responsibility for the actions of one's government. (The utilitarian justification for this principle of duty as a general social norm is clear.) For national elections, these actions affect residents of the nation, foreigners, and people not yet born.