Right Reason

Voting: Individually Costly Yet Often Beneficial to the Group

 

The queue, one of the many costs of voting.

 

Voting is certainly a costly norm for the individual voter. There is much to do n life and as has been shown elsewhere, voting is more than likely to have a very small payoff. The man who merely cares about the expected pay-offs of his behavior is unlikely to be a man who votes since each vote has so little effect on the general election (). From a purely Benthamite position, it could even be said that voting is irrational with some justice to the topic because of how low the payoffs are compared to the costs of voting. However, ending the investigation here, as all too many who discuss the topic do, would be to end before considering what may be one of the most powerful reasons to vote: allegiance to a group norm.

Voting may certainly be an individually costly norm, but it is also a norm that greatly benefits the success of a group, say Republican or Democratic. The groups that are constituted by individuals who follow the norm of voting come hell or high water will have a much greater chance at winning elections and this will result in those groups that have voting members becoming dominant. If every single Republican were to vote with mechanistic certainty, then Governor Romney would have a much greater chance of winning the election just as President Obama would have a much greater chance of winning. This can be true at the same time as it is true that the expected cost of voting exceeds the expected payoff. Yes it may very well be individually costly to vote, but if one wants to be a member of a winning group in politics, then one needs to adopt the behaviors that help define such a group and one of those behaviors is voting. Of course, people may need a reminder or two that plays on their moral sentiments to vote, and the successful groups will be those that are able to motivate their constituents to go vote despite the costs.

 

So the question to vote or not becomes less about the individual costs and more about the question of whether one is apart of a group that can benefit from a high election turn-out. So, even though your vote may not matter much, the votes of one's group may very well matter and the success of the group may depend on individuals adopting costly behaviors.  

When Huayna met Francisco: Jared Diamond on Group Selection

 

"Pizarro Seizing the Inca of Peru" by John Everett Millais

 

The greatest argument for group selection has to be that the set of strategies each human being may choose between and the pay-offs that those strategies yield are greatly conditioned by the social ecology that they find themselves in. Every human being is born into a society with institutions and culture already in place. These constrain the scope of action that each human being may take.

Group selection also helps to explain why some human societies have been overwhelmed by other societies in the course of human history. The most classic example of this is the Spanish conquest of the Aztecs and the Inca.

 

The most famous attempt to explain this moment in history has been provided by Jared Diamond in his book Guns, Germs and Steel. In it, he argues that the course of events that followed with this meeting of cultures was geographically determined. This is a form of group selection. It was not individual Spanish conquistadors that had developed firearms, deadly diseases or steel weapons, but rather each was a factor that each individual within their history had only a negligible control over. 

Moctezuma II and Huayna Capac did not have the option of using the horses, guns and steel that provided a relatively small army of Spanish conquistadors the ability to subjugate entire populations. Nor did they have the good luck of having their enemies decimated by germs that they have no immunity of while coming into contact with no similarly dangerous strains. Moctezuma and Huayna Capac were both doomed once the conquistadors arrived on the soil of America. Both the Aztec and the Incan cultures could not equip their members with strategies that could have countered what the Spanish culture brought to the table.

 

This is also where Diamond's thesis about geography determining the dominance of Western cultures errs: it fails to consider how different cultures can vastly change the possibilities and scope of human action occurring within it. Though Guns, Germs and Steel, does provide a strong case for different environments leading to the group selection of Spanish culture against that of the Aztecs, it does not explain why Western culture has been chosen for over the past three hundred years across the world and especially in Asia. Asian cultures. India and China both had the advantages that Diamond attributes to being so crucial to the ascendency of the West and both even enjoyed eras of greater technical progress that European countries throughout their history. Diamond simply cannot explain why it was Warren Hastings who the English Governor-General of India who defeated Shah Alam II, the Mughal emperor of Delhi, rather than the other way around. He cannot explain why it was the European great powers who divided Chinese coastal cities among themselves rather than the other way around.

Though Diamond is correct to note the emphasize the importance of group selection in determining the course of the evolution of human societies, he vastly underestimates the importance of culture. It was Western culture that provided institutions of human beings within it to cooperate in ways that were far more efficient and provided far more wealth than social cooperation within other cultures. That is what group selection means in the present world. Not the victory of certain groups over others due to merely geographical factors, but rather the selection of cultures within which social cooperation yields the most wealth.