Democracy by Jason Brennan

Author:Jason Brennan
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Oxford University Press
Published: 2022-06-15T00:00:00+00:00

Mill suggests that votes might be apportioned to individuals by their work.

However, right before the quoted passage above, Mill notes that citizens could become jealous or contemptuous of power if they perceive it to be distributed by income or wealth. The typical banker is richer than the typical laborer. The typical college graduate is richer than the typical high school–only graduate. The plurality voting scheme does not directly distribute power by income or wealth. Instead, it distributes power based on real qualifications that happen to be positively correlated with wealth. In the same way, medical licenses tend to go to higher-income people, but that doesn’t mean medical licenses are distributed according to wealth. Still, the (mistaken) perception that they are distributed by wealth could be a problem.

Mill anticipates objections: isn’t this scheme unfair to those who receive fewer votes? Doesn’t it treat them as inferior? Might they perceive it as mistreating them? He responds:

There is not, in [the plural voting scheme], anything necessarily invidious to those to whom it assigns the lower degrees of influence. Entire exclusion from a voice in the common concerns is one thing: the concession to others of a more potential voice, on the ground of greater capacity for the management of the joint interests, is another. The two things are not merely different, they are incommensurable. Every one has a right to feel insulted by being made a nobody, and stamped as of no account at all. No one but a fool, and only a fool of a peculiar description, feels offended by the acknowledgment that there are others whose opinion, and even whose wish, is entitled to a greater amount of consideration than his. To have no voice in what are partly his own concerns is a thing which nobody willingly submits to; but when what is partly his concern is also partly another’s, and he feels the other to understand the subject better than himself, that the other’s opinion should be counted for more than his own accords with his expectations, and with the course of things which in all other affairs of life he is accustomed to acquiese [sic] in. It is only necessary that this superior influence should be assigned on grounds which he can comprehend, and of which he is able to perceive the justice.11

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