As an alum, my engagement with the opinions page has been limited. But this week, Oliver Hudson '14 argued for an unpopular view - only taxpayers should vote ("Universal suffrage is immoral," Nov. 13). My Facebook feed was full of angry students decrying the classism embodied in Hudson's claim.
While I share the distaste for the conclusion, that's only half of what Hudson offers. No matter how much we dislike it, if Hudson's argument is sound, we must accept the conclusion. In this column, I will show where the argument fails by using Hudson's own premise to support the opposite conclusion. Hudson's reasoning leads us not to restrict suffrage to those who pay income taxes, but to expand it even to non-citizens. Hudson is committed to what we can call "multiversal suffrage."
I take it that this conclusion is as absurd as Hudson's own. But it will allow us to get a better grip on what is wrong with his premise. Here, I think, is Hudson's argument:
First, only those who own a share of the country or its resources should be allowed to help decide what is done in it, i.e. vote. Second, only taxpayers own a share of the country. Therefore, only taxpayers should be allowed to vote.
Hudson supports the first premise by analogy with corporations - "If you own stock in a company, your shareholder's vote is in proportion to your ownership of the company." This is the weaker premise - there seem to be clear disanalogies between companies and nations. But, I want to show that even on his assumptions, his argument supports a different conclusion.
So the issue is "who owns the country?" or "who owns the country's resources?" The best way to answer this question is to look at ownership itself. What does it take to own something? A popular answer is John Locke's. On his theory of property, many people own a share of the country or its resources.
Again, we use a rights-based theory of property because it is the most friendly to Hudson's conclusion. The main competitor to a rights theory is a consequentialist one. And despite Hudson's bluster, it is apparent that handing over the country to the richest folk around does not get the consequentialist stamp of approval.
In "The Second Treatise of Government," Locke offers three conditions for coming to own something. You can't take more than you can use, you must leave enough and as good for everyone else, and you must mix your labor with the thing you want to own.
It is hard to understand how to apply the first two conditions to a country. Though we know how natural resources can spoil or be depleted, the ownership of either a country or its fiscal resources is at issue. We are giving Hudson as much as we can, so let's say that the rich fulfill the first two conditions. That assumption cuts both ways though - if the rich can't use up the country, neither can the poor.
Then comes the true heart of the issue - the third condition. What does it take to mix labor with something? Here is a natural proposal: You mix your labor with a thing when it becomes what it is by virtue of your actions. If you start to grow crops on some land, the land and crops are yours because you turned them into a farm. Some counterexamples might spring to mind, but it turns out they are easily avoided.
Whose actions make this country what it is? Well, what is a country beyond the people living there and their social structure? In that case, we all own a piece of the country because we all own ourselves.
Whose actions generate the wealth in the treasury? This is a lesson we learned months ago, from our president's "You didn't build that" speech. No one of us did the work, we all did.
Moreover, we've all had a part to play in filling its coffers by being alive - someone at some point spends money on you, and that money goes into the economy and, far enough downstream, into the government. And that happened in part because of one of your actions, living.
This reasoning naturally extends to many non-citizens and foreigners. We are forced to conclude that if Hudson's first premise is true, children and many non-citizens should be allowed to vote since we all own and have labored to own a piece of this country - ourselves at the least.
Let's wrap up - we saw that Hudson's first premise can be used to support two incompatible and crazy conclusions. It is easy to get suckered in by its simplicity, but morality has a much richer texture than that. Simple, straightforward principles ignore how complicated our lives are - especially when it comes to doing the right thing.
In the end, Hudson provides us with a valuable lesson: If you think morality is easy, you're going to do some awful things.
David Black '12 is pursuing a PhD in philosophy at Rutgers University. He supports radical paternalism and anti-democracy. You can reach him at david.black@rutgers.edu.
