Is It Wrong to Watch Netflix Instead of Voting?

I’ve argued that you shouldn’t spend time preparing and casting an informed and debiased vote but rather use that time to earn money to donate effective charities. Given that your vote is extremely unlikely to make a difference, you can do far more good by working overtime and giving more to the Against Malaria Foundation.

Here’s an objection that I’ve heard several times: “Fair enough. But, realistically, if someone decides not to vote on Election Day, they’ll just stay home and watch Netflix. So they might as well vote.”

As a first response, I’ll note that this objection doesn’t show that I’m wrong to claim that you should earn to donate instead of preparing and casting a vote—it merely suggests that many people aren’t motivated to do what they should do. The physician who tells you to eat more broccoli to get healthier is giving you good advice; that you’re unmotivated to eat more broccoli does nothing to discredit it.

But an interesting question remains. Are you doing something wrong if you spend the hours you would have spent preparing and casting a vote doing things that you simply enjoy? I have my doubts.

To start, let’s say that it would take at least eight hours to register to vote, inform your vote, debias your vote, and cast your vote. You decide to use those eight hours to watch a movie, eat lunch at your favorite restaurant, and then walk on the beach. Did you act wrongly?

To get a handle on this question, take yourself out of the picture for a minute. Suppose that you spent that time taking a stranger to a movie, buying them lunch at their favorite restaurant, and bringing them to the beach for a stroll. You’d make their day! And you’d do more good than you’d do by preparing and casting an inconsequential vote. At a minimum, it wouldn’t be wrong to treat this person to a day of leisure instead of voting.

Does it make a significant moral difference if the person you treat to the day of leisure is you? Maybe, but I’m not entirely convinced. Consider the line attributed to Bentham: “Everybody to count for one, nobody for more than one.” If this is right, then your welfare matters, morally speaking. It doesn’t matter more than the welfare of others, but it doesn’t matter less either.

(Of course, you might reply that there are moral reasons to vote that have little to do with promoting welfare; I offered some thoughts on those here.)