Apocryphal Arguments #2: Radical Enfranchiement

This is the second post in a series I'm calling the Apocryphal Arguments series. The idea is to briefly outline, explain, and defend a simple philosophical argument that I think is plausible. It will be in the form of precise premises and conclusions in order to maximise legibility. I aim to post only novel, interesting, and even ridiculous-sounding arguments that might question fundamental sensibilities in order to maximise impact. If all goes to plan each post should be a fun ride.

I present in this post a funny little argument that states that we are rationally obliged to abolish the voting age. In other words, that there is never a justification for disenfranchising citizens based on age. The apocryphal part of the argument is that this includes young children, toddlers, and even newborns. I make the argument by using a kind of slippery slope argument, often used by detractors of child enfranchisement. (The style of argumentation will be similar to my last entry in this series, so I highly recommend you read that first, here, if you haven't already.) This argument might supply the dumbest reason you could come up with to abolish the voting age, but here we are. This is a shortened version of a longer and more careful essay I have on this. Let's get to it. 

The slippery slope argument against child enfranchisement attempts to show that commitment to the reasoning that justifies lowering the voting age commits us to absurd conclusions. Namely, for example, that even toddlers would be able to vote. How might an argument like this work? It says that, since there is little difference between the current voting age and the target voting age, say 18 to 16, why not lower it further? But, if we lower it further, we would eventually be giving the vote to toddlers, which is absurd. In the following, I grant for the sake of argument that this conclusion really is absurd. That being said, it is not contradictory and absurdity by itself is not decisive grounds for dismissing some conclusion. In fact, it is precisely this conclusion I will end up accepting. The argument can be constructed like we would a sorites style argument. It goes as follows:

(1) 18-year-olds should have the vote because they are competent enough to vote.

Competence here is just one possible relevant grounding for disenfranchisement. This could be replaced with any other criterion or combination of criteria (such as maturity, long-term decision making, or cognitive development), and the argument stands. I will use ‘competence’ as a catch-all for any combination one deems relevant. Also, this is not to assume that 18 is some magic point in which children become competent. It is just a pragmatic proxy for what we deem to be the relevant grounding criteria for enfranchisement. At 18, we can assume some average is reached that satisfies us with regards to competence (as that is where the law stands today). I go on:

(2) There is an insignificant difference in competence between 18-year-olds and 17-year-olds.

(3) If there is an insignificant difference in competence between 18 and 17-year-olds, then 17-year-olds are competent enough to vote.

We might call premise (3) the principle of insignificant differences, which is the analogue to the principle of tolerance in a sorites series. The principle of tolerance states that small changes can be made to a state of affairs while still appropriately inviting the right application of some predicate. The principle of insignificant differences is simply that some group only insignificantly different from some other group that ought to be able to vote, also ought to be able to vote. Using this principle, we can continually apply the reasoning:

(4) There is an insignificant difference in competence between 17-year-olds and 16-year-olds.

(5) If there is an insignificant difference in competence between 17 and 16-year-olds, then 16-year-olds are competent enough to vote.

And we can carry it on, all the way down to seeming absurdity, to get:

(6) Therefore, 2-year-olds are competent enough to vote.

(7) Therefore, we should change the voting age to 2.

If we accept (3), the reasoning that gets us to (6) is of the same form. Thus, we can now see what those arguing from the slippery slope really mean to say. The general form of the argument is as follows:

(8) 18-year-olds should have the vote because they fulfil enfranchisement criteria C.

(9) There is an insignificant difference in C between 18 and n-year-olds.

(10) Therefore, n-year-olds are competent enough to vote.

(11) Therefore, according to C, everyone is competent enough to vote.

(12) Therefore, everyone should be able to vote. 

Where n can be any age whatsoever and (11) is the absurd conclusion that is supposed to defeat any argument to expand enfranchisement. 

What this argument shows, if it succeeds, is that we are always justified in lowering the voting age and that we should lower it to include even the youngest person in society. This means, effectively, that the voting age should be abolished. This is because any sharp specification of a cut-off point for any enfranchisement criterion will always be vague and vulnerable to such an argument. Thus, if the argument succeeds, there can be no in-principle objection to child voting based on competence. I call this conclusion radical enfranchisement. This is taken to be the absurd conclusion entailed by arguments for lowering the voting age.

This conclusion seems obviously false. You would probably struggle even to wrangle your 2-year-old to the voting booth. Thus, the argument must go wrong somewhere because the conclusion is false. However, it is not clear what we are supposed to reject. One could plausibly say that there really is a significant difference between 18 and 17-year-olds, thus rejecting (2). Perhaps one could appeal to notions of cognitive development and show that certain features of the brain develop, on average, to a certain level at precisely this age. However, the argument does not rely on such significant gaps in age. Its validity remains if you made the gap one day or even one second, rather than one year. Premise (3) could easily be changed to

(13) If there is an insignificant difference in competence between 18 and 18-year-olds-minus-one-second, then 18-year-minus-one-second-year-olds are competent enough to vote.

And we can still get conclusion (6) while maintaining (12) instead of (3), a much harder premise to deny.

Another strategy we can take is to show that the reasoning of the slippery slope argument leads to a contradiction because you can make the argument in the reverse direction from seemingly reasonable premises. In the basic form of the argument given earlier, one may have noticed that you can show with a slippery slope argument that any person aged n can be competent enough to vote. The same can be done in reverse, with the same reasoning, to show that any person aged n is incompetent, producing a contradiction. We begin with the negation of the false conclusion from earlier and show that it too produces absurdity:

(14) 2-year-olds should not have the vote because they are not competent enough to vote.

(15) There is an insignificant difference in competence between 2 and n-year-olds.

(16) Therefore, n-year-olds are not competent enough to vote.

(17) Therefore, no one is competent enough to vote.

(18) Therefore, no one should be able to vote.

Here, (16) and (17) follow from the repeated application of the principle of insignificant differences up to some competence level that excludes everyone in a given society. The generalised premise (16) contradicts the earlier (10), and the particular conclusion (18) contradicts the earlier (12). Thus, since this reasoning leads to a contradiction, it seems we can discard it.

However, I think I can block this conclusion. To sum up what we have so far, on the one hand, if we accept the slippery slope argument, we have two contradictory doctrines that tell us, in the limit, that either everyone is competent enough to vote or that no one is competent enough to vote. I argue that if the slippery slope argument works, it only works in one direction: lowering the vote. If I can show this, it would dissolve the contradiction produced by the reasoning of the slippery slope argument.

We can resolve the contradiction developed in the previous section by pointing out something unique about the latter argument that the former lacks. In the original slippery slope argument, the conclusion is effectively that the voting age should be abolished because there is no non-arbitrary stopping point for competence. However, the conclusion in the latter case is that no one at all is competent enough to be enfranchised (because the competence required goes above anyone in the population). The first of these conclusions, while it may make us uncomfortable and make us question how newborns could possibly vote, is not destructive to the very idea of democracy. The second conclusion is.  If no one can vote, you are not living in a democracy anymore. You are living in an authoritarian regime. Thus, we can add a highly plausible bridging premise to both slippery slope arguments:

(19) A society ceases to be a democracy if no one is deemed competent enough to vote. 

Only the latter argument violates this premise (specifically premise [17]), while the former does not. If we make the slippery slope argument going upwards in age, you are necessarily arguing for an authoritarian regime because the argument always ends up there. The argument cannot arbitrarily stop at two or more people. Denying this is also untenable as it does not seem right that you could have a legitimate democracy where no one is even justified in voting, ever. On the other hand, if you make the argument going downwards, you are merely arguing for expanded enfranchisement. Since we are concerned with voting in democracies here and not with authoritarian regimes, we can discard the latter argument as invalid while keeping the former. Thus, if the slippery slope argument works, it only works in one direction, resolving the contradiction and blocking the attempted reductio ad absurdum of the slippery slope argument. The original reasoning might still entail absurd conclusions, but not contradictory ones.

Another strategy is to identify a stopping point in spite of insignificant differences. This strategy says that we have to dismiss the argument for pragmatic reasons and in order to avoid the absurd conclusion. Even if there is no non-arbitrary reason to enfranchise 18-year-olds over some other age minutely different from 18, we should nonetheless affirm it anyway. This seems to be a reasonable move to make according to the slippery argument itself, which makes arbitrary any number. Ultimately, we must choose some age, and we should insist on it, even if it makes no difference. This amounts to a denial of the principle of insignificant differences. However, there is a serious objection to this view.

The problem with the pragmatic identification of an appropriate stopping point is that the same reasoning can be invoked for any arbitrary voting age whatsoever. Suppose we lived in a society where the voting age is 40, and some local radicals suggest that the voting age be lowered to 38. We could easily argue that this society is justified in lowering the voting age because they are surely competent enough to vote. These radicals point out that there is hardly any difference in competence between 38 and 40-year-olds and thus that we do not have consistent grounds for disenfranchisement. However, we could come along and say that we nonetheless insist on that stopping point even when there is no significant extra loss of political competence by lowering the voting age further. We go further: for all we know, we could use the same argument until we have enfranchised six-year-olds, which would be absurd! Therefore, according to this reasoning, this society should never change their voting age lest they slippery slope into absurdity.

In other words, denying the principle of insignificant differences to get around the arbitrariness of the voting age and the slippery slope is ultimately an argument for the status quo, no matter what the status quo happens to be where they are arguing. The reasoning entails that we are never justified in changing the voting age because we can use the pragmatic argument in any possible situation whatsoever. We also seem to have no grounds for repudiating this because we need to invoke the slippery slope argument ourselves in order to give it any force. This strategy remains valid even in absurd cases where the voting age is 40. Thus, to argue in this way is to argue for a particularly strict conservatism, where enfranchisement becomes entirely contingent on the particular historical arrangement of some society rather than on what is actually just. The denial of the principle of insignificant differences ends up affirming a kind of absurd conservatism.

If the original slippery slope argument works, as I have argued, there seems to be a choice between two theses we could adopt. First, we take the slippery slope argument as an argument against lowering the voting age by rejecting the principle of insignificant differences in favour of a hard stopping point. Second, we could accept the argument as valid and take seriously the seemingly absurd conclusion that even very young children ought to be able to vote. They are:

Conservatism: We are never justified in changing the voting age (because changing it always results in a slippery slope and leads to absurd conclusions, so we must draw the line somewhere).

and

Radical Enfranchisement: We are always justified in lowering the voting age (because there are only insignificant differences between individuals within and without any specification of competence).

As noted earlier, in the limit, the latter effectively entails abolishing the voting age because, due to the slippery slope argument, there is no non-arbitrary consistent principle of competence that can reasonably disenfranchise children. This means not only that we should allow children, toddlers, and newborns to vote, but that we are rationally committed to thinking that they are competent enough to vote. I unironically believe this. One way to make sense of this puzzling conclusion is to realise that I am not saying that babies have the competence we exercise when we vote that we are unaware of. Rather, I am saying that the bar for competence should be so low for voting that it includes babies in it, in order to guarantee representation of everyone in society. A second thesis would have to be accepted in conjunction with a third to avoid contradiction:

No Disenfranchisement: We are never justified in raising the voting age in a democracy (because that reasoning shows that we ought to become a dictatorship).

which is the conclusion of the reverse argument. At this point, one could still go with either. Thus, all that is left is to determine which way we ought to go I give two reasons to go with radical enfranchisement rather than with conservatism.

The first is that conservatism can never reasonably disenfranchise children. This is because they cannot provide non-arbitrary justification for their chosen age, whatever it may be, in each case. The competence it is a proxy for always applies haphazardly to those within and without the chosen age group. Thus, the disenfranchisement of children is never enacted on grounds that apply uniquely in virtue of membership in the group specified. (For example, using “under 18” as a proxy for incompetence never works because there are many 18 and over that are just as incompetent.) Rather, all disenfranchisement based on age is both irrational and arbitrary.

The second is that there are many possible situations in which conservatism would be committed to defending something obviously unjust, much more so than the current voting age is in any democracy. This includes the example from earlier of a society with a voting age of 40 but would also include any other possible society with an arbitrarily high voting age or with any other unjust electoral arrangements. On the other hand, radical enfranchisement is never obviously committed to something unjust. Instead, they take the notion of universal suffrage seriously by recognising that all insignificantly different people, and thus people of all ages, have a right to vote. The fact that conservatism affirms as just a mere historical contingency rather than what actually seems good is its most significant challenge. Radical enfranchisement does not have this problem. Rather, it follows certain plausible principles of democracy to their logical conclusion – maximal enfranchisement and thus maximal representation. We should abolish the voting age.

The strong conclusion here is that rather than being a reductio ad absurdum against those who wish to lower the vote, the slippery slope argument works as a powerful argument for radical enfranchisement. However, the weaker conclusion is that if you ever appeal to a slippery slope argument, go through it, and follow the reasoning to the end; you must choose either conservatism or radical enfranchisement. To many, both conclusions will seem wrong. Thus, this weaker conclusion ought, at minimum, to dissuade those that wish to keep the voting age the same from using such an argument. Unfortunately for them, if one does this by denying the principle of insignificant differences, they are forced to accept conservatism.

(As a final aside, before I started thinking about this, I actually believed this version of conservatism was the sensible conclusion on whether we should lower the voting age. I thought, as I still do now, that changing the age would basically be both arbitrary and inconsequential (I defend this in the longer version of this essay). So I don't mean there to be a massive negative valence around the position. I just think these are literally the only two justifiable options. The thing that changed my mind once I did start thinking about it was the modal argument advanced above: that there are possible situations a consistent conservative on this would have to assent to that are obviously unjust, based on their own reasoning.)