Brookes Brown

Many political philosophers contend that citizens have a moral obligation to vote. Those who do not ignore important values, are wrongfully complicit in injustice, and undermine the foundations of democracy. Others argue that given the insignificance of individual ballots, voting is too costly to be rational, much less obligatory. This chapter develops an alternative account of civic ethics that avoids the unattractive features of both these positions. Citizens, it argues, do not have a duty to vote. But this is not because voting is morally insignificant. Instead, it is because the act is non-unique. Rather than having a duty to go to the polls, citizens instead have a responsibility to do their share of _civic work_—a class of actions that includes but is not limited to voting. Many can satisfy this duty without casting a ballot. However, those who take this option do not float free of obligation; they must satisfy it in other forms. Our mistake, the chapter shows, has been treating voting as a distinct morally significant act rather than as one component of a complex joint project to which citizens bear responsibility. Rectifying this error makes possible a more nuanced and complete account of civic ethics, one that can unify previously discordant philosophical debates and speak to the complexity of real-world political institutions.

Semiotic objections to market exchange of a good or service maintain that such exchanges signal an inappropriate attitude to the good or to associated individuals, and that this provides a weighty reason against having or participating in such markets. This style of argument has recently come under withering attack from Jason Brennan and Peter Jaworski (2015a, 2015b). They point out that the significance of any market exchange is explained by a contingent semiotic norm. Given the tremendous value that could be realised by markets in, for instance, bone marrow, or kidneys, deferring to such norms across the board would have very significant opportunity costs. In the absence of any rationale for these norms, they should be ignored completely. We provide one important rationale. Unlike many semiotic objections to markets, we provide a broadly consequentialist semiotic argument. We argue that a range of behaviours play important signalling roles in interpersonal social practices; in particular, in practices involving caring, esteem, and testimony. Markets in these behaviours would distort these signals. Moreover, many of the productive advantages yielded by markets rely in turn on positive market norms that also inhibit the signalling behaviours associated with these nonmarket behaviours. We conclude that there will inevitably be trade-offs between the distributive advantages of new markets and these interpersonal social practices.

Standard accounts of reciprocal citizenship hold that citizens have a duty to participate in politics. Against this, several business ethicists and philosophers have recently argued that people can satisfy their obligations of civic reciprocity non-politically, by owning, managing, or working in for-profit businesses. In this article, I reject both the standard and the market accounts of reciprocal citizenship. Against the market view, I show that the ordinary work of profit maximization cannot take the place of traditional political activity. Yet contra the standard political account, I show that a special class of the actions we perform in our work as employers and employees in for-profit companies can fulfill our obligations of reciprocity. Business ethicists must therefore develop a more nuanced account of the relationship between for-profit business endeavors and the debts we owe fellow citizens who undertake burdensome political work to our benefit.

Ignorance of current events is ordinarily treated as a moral failing. In this article, I argue that much of this ire is misplaced. The disengaged are no less positioned to do good or dispense beneficence, no more arrogant or complicit than those glued to the headlines. Nonetheless, I contend that citizens do have moral reason to remain informed – they ought not be indifferent to others. This, I show, provides a standing reason to pay attention to distant strangers: by bearing witness, we avoid indifference. It follows that we should reconsider our media diet and our critiques of the disengaged.