Mardi intime de la Chaire Hoover par Cécile Fabre (Oxford University)

Standard justifications for the moral duty to vote appeal to citizens' general duty of reciprocity not to free ride on the provision of the public good of democratic governance, or to a general duty of justice to support just institutions - which include democratic institutions. However, proponents of the duty have not properly addressed the question of the scope of the duty - to wit, by whom it is borne, and to whom it is owed. This is problematic: all liberal democracies (even relatively stable ones) are marred by wrongdoings, both public and private. The question, then, is whether the fact that some agent has wronged another agent makes a difference to either party's duty to vote and to their claim to be the beneficiary of the duty. While it stands to reason that, if anyone is owed a duty to vote at the bar of justice, victims surely are, it is not obvious that wrongdoers too have that claim. While it seems clear that if anyone owes a duty to vote at the bar of justice, wrongdoers do, it is not obvious that victims too owe it. I defend the following theses. First, the fact that a citizen has committed a serious wrong, of the kind described above, strengthens the case for holding him under a duty to vote. Second, the fact that a citizen has been or continues to be the victim of such wrongs does not exempt her from the duty - a duty which, moreover, she owes to wrongdoers as well as to innocent citizens, who include fellow victims.