Sept/Oct 2013
Neg: Infringement on Personal Liberty
foundationbriefs.com
Page 46 of 104
A forced vote can contradict notions of self-interest and personal liberty, DAT 9/9 pm
Lever, Annabelle. Compulsory Voting A Critical Perspective British Journal of
Political Science (2009).
People are not always good judges of their own interests, individually or collectively. Still, respect for people’s freedom and equality and capacities for reasoned judgement, generally tells against forcing them to exercise their rights, or to make the most of their liberties and opportunities. This is partly because there are normally other, less intrusive, ways to promote people’s self-interest than forcing them to act in a self-interested manner. But the difficulty with forcing people to pursue their self interest is, also, that informed, intelligent and reasonable people can disagree about the importance of self-interested ends relative to altruistic ones and can disagree about the merits of self-interested behaviour in particular, as well as in general. Consequently, unless people have a duty to pursue their self-interest by voting, there is no justification for forcing them to vote, simply because voting would be good for them. Voting is not always in people’s interest. So even if people have a duty to vote when voting is in their self- interest, we still need some reason to believe that voting is in their interests. This is less easy then we might expect. As voters, we can only protect our interests by choosing between the available political candidates
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