Ilaria Salis, an Italian anti-fascist activist, recently spent more than a year in jail followed by more than a month under house arrest in Hungary, where she was charged with conspiring to assault participants of a far-right march in Budapest. Her detainment, which drew international criticism and caused a diplomatic scandal between the far-right regimes of Italy and Hungary, ended, for now at least, in mid-June 2024 when Salis was elected as a Member of the European Parliament in Italy and thus gained parliamentary immunity.
This development was not a surprise: the Green-Left Alliance (Alleanza Verdi e Sinistra, AVS) announced in April 2024 that it would nominate Salis as a candidate in order to save her from what was widely seen as her unjust detention and treatment in Hungary. Her case attracted considerable attention, with serious concerns about both the substantive grounds of the charges against her and the circumstances of her detention. She was arguably an ideal candidate for what is commonly regarded as a heavily politicized public prosecution to convey the messages that leftist politics is deeply entangled with violence and that left-wing activism in Hungary is an internationally organized, foreign political influence. And, irrespective of the merits of the case, the conditions of her pre-trial detention—in which she was allegedly denied medical care and held in rat-infested cells—were widely held to violate her fundamental rights (see, for example, this question submitted by several MEPs to the European Commission about her case), causing a prime ministerial-level exchange between Italy and Hungary about her case. (Unsurprisingly, Hungarian authorities deny rights-violating treatment.)
Are voters morally justified in using their votes to save a single person from serious injustice in a world where so many other injustices can be addressed in an election?
My aim here is not to evaluate these claims, nor to prejudge the legal proceedings. Instead, I will simply assume for the sake of the argument that these criticisms are well-grounded—that is, that both the alliance nominating Salis and the voters casting their ballots for her were justified in believing either that she was unjustly charged or that she was unjustly detained, or both. These are very serious injustices and stipulating them allows me to focus on a philosophically interesting issue in the ethics of voting: are voters morally justified in using their votes to save a single person from serious injustice in a world where so many other injustices can be addressed in an election? I argue that they can be so justified, provided that their vote also serves to mitigate (at least some) other systemic injustices. Voters have agent-relative prerogatives to promote causes that especially matter to them, even if voting in other ways would mitigate somewhat more, or more serious, injustice overall.
The common good, justice, and the purpose of the vote
The moral challenge of using an election to prevent harm to a particular person arises from a broadly liberal view of the function of elections. On this view, the moral function of elections is to contribute to the common good (Brennan 2011) or justice (Maskivker 2019). Votes should thus be cast for the common good and justice. Trivially, reasonable people disagree about what the common good or justice consists in—which is one of the reasons why we need to vote at all. But this view implies that at least certain kinds of reasons for voting are illegitimate because they compromise the proper function of elections. Chiefly, votes should not be used to promote a particular person’s or group’s interests. That would be a form of political nepotism on this view, much like handing out offices to one’s nearest and dearest. The liberal view builds on a separation between narrowly personal and political aims and insists that voters should pursue only political aims through their ballots.
If voting is a particularly effective way to remedy larger, structural injustices, then it is far from obvious that we may unconditionally use voting to rescue a single person.
In our case, the aim of voting is not merely to promote an individual’s interests but also to resist injustice. By nominating Salis, AVS intended to fight an injustice, which is a political aim. The problem concerns which injustices we should strive to eliminate or mitigate through our votes. Even granting, as I am, that Salis is the victim of serious injustice, the fact remains that there are many injustices that we ought to address. And directing our efforts towards mitigating structural injustices that affect many people will likely result in considerably higher moral gains. True, there is a moral difference between simply promoting a particular person’s interests—for example, buying them a luxury car with public funds—and rescuing a particular person from an injustice. But this does not settle the issue of how one ought to vote. If voting is a particularly effective way to remedy larger, structural injustices, then it is far from obvious that we may unconditionally use voting to rescue a single person. Nevertheless, I suggest that such voting is permissible in some cases.
False dilemma?
To begin with, it matters whether there is a trade-off between rescuing the one and mitigating larger structural injustices. If there is, then we need weighty reasons to justify using the ballot to benefit the one (I’ll return to this possibility later). There need not be such a trade-off, though, for at least two reasons. Let us look at how these obtain in Salis’ case.
First, in electing Members of the European Parliament, voters in each member state vote not for individual candidates but rather for ‘closed’ party lists of several candidates running on a party’s or alliance’s platform. As voters can choose only between party lists, and not between individual candidates, they have to evaluate the lists as package deals. So, even if Salis is unable to work as an MEP to mitigate larger, structural injustices, other candidates on her list might well be able to do so and thus a vote to save Salis does not require a trade-off between injustices. If, by contrast, voters had to select individual candidates, then such a trade-off would have been much more likely to obtain.
Second, regardless of the voting system, voting to save a particular person might also serve, directly or indirectly, to mitigate greater injustices, for a number of reasons. For example, she might be expected to be a particularly talented and effective representative working for the best causes. Or, she might be expected to be an ineffective parliamentary representative but nonetheless someone who could use her personal plight to highlight structural injustices affecting a large number of people. Salis might not be the only person to have been politically detained and subjected to unjustified treatment in Hungary, for example, if the allegations about her mistreatment are true. Putting her in a high-profile role could draw continued attention to these practices.
There need not be a trade-off between rescuing one person from injustice and rescuing a larger population from (even more) serious injustices
Taken together, these conditions suggest that there need not be a trade-off between rescuing one person from injustice and rescuing a larger population from (even more) serious injustices. While there could be many reasons why voters chose AVS in this year's EP election in Italy, some speculate that Salis’ reputation attracted a considerable number of votes to the Alliance’s list, which received 6.78% of all valid votes in the Italian election. Numbers are not informative about voters’ motivations, of course: some of them may have intended only to rescue Salis; others may have intended to both rescue her and mitigate other injustices through the same vote; yet others might have intended only to mitigate other injustices and seen Salis’ case as instrumental to that aim, or seen saving her as a fortunate side-effect of voting for AVS. Still, one may ask: even if there is no moral trade-off, is it morally justified for a voter to vote for a list or candidate with the soleintention to rescue one person, or should voters be motivated by preventing wider injustices?
Even if voters intended only to contribute to Salis’ liberation and merely foresaw the effect of mitigating other injustices, it is hard to see how they thereby acted impermissibly. On the liberal view, there is no duty to vote on the basis of the morally best reasons when you can contribute to the same outcomes by acting on other moral reasons. One reason why liberals care about individual motivations for voting is that elections are a particularly effective means of realizing justice and hence should not be wasted on promoting other aims. However, there is no wasting when there is no moral trade-off. If one’s vote contributes to the collective aim whose realization is the most important moral function of elections, then it is not objectionable on this view to use one’s ballot to contribute to other aims too, nor to be motivated by these further aims—especially when they are clearly morally valuable.
Voters should still exercise due care on this approach, ensuring that their also vote is likely to serve the primary moral function of elections of mitigating serious injustice. This holds regardless of their voting intentions, including the intention to rescue one particular person. If their planned vote will not foreseeably serve the primary purpose of elections, then voters should vote for a different option that will (also) serve that purpose.
Partisan parties and partisan voters
What if there is a trade-off? That is, what if the victory of one party list or candidate will rescue one person from a serious injustice but will not contribute to rescuing more people from (potentially graver) injustice—or at least, it will not contribute to rescuing as many people from as grave injustices as voting for an alternative? Is it permissible to vote for such a party or candidate?
From an impartial perspective, it is hard to argue that such moral trade-offs are permissible on the liberal view, which sees voting as a particularly effective and scarce instrument of promoting justice.
But it’s not clear that we are required to be (wholly) impartial when we cast our ballots. Arguably, we are permitted some degree of partisanship in political action. Political parties are morally valuable not only as vehicles of different conceptions of justice and the common good but also as political agents who pursue certain partisan interests and commitments that they do not share with other parties. It seems perfectly legitimate, for example, for a party to focus on mitigating injustices to certain groups, such as women or the working class. Likewise, voters are not and need not be merely impartial arbiters among political parties and candidates, as if the latter were parties to a lawsuit and they the ruling judges. Rather, voters enjoy agent-relative prerogatives as members of a particular class, or racial or ethnic or religious minority, and so forth, that permit them to vote for parties that represent these particularistic interests and honor more particularistic social or political commitments.
Voters enjoy agent-relative prerogatives as members of a particular class, or racial or ethnic or religious minority, and so forth, that permit them to vote for parties that represent particular interests
The crucial question, then, concerns the extent of these prerogatives. Some political projects – advocating for racial segregation, for example – are beyond the moral pale. Groups that are already especially well off might not be permitted to further promote their interests rather than mitigate injustice. It seems unlikely that billionaires are permitted to pursue their special interests at the expense of promoting some conception of justice, for example. Prerogatives are justified exceptions from a norm, but they cannot obliterate the norm. If billionaires were morally permitted to pursue interests that lead to some of the most unjust inequalities, this would make the norm of voting to promote justice entirely vacuous. Likewise, it is impermissible to vote to rescue a single person if that would further aggravate or perpetuate other injustices or entail failing to act against considerably graver injustices.
But voters’ prerogatives may well extend, for instance, to choosing which of several roughly equally grave or incommensurable injustices to address through their ballot, other things being equal (cf. Lever 2016). Assume that one party offers to address intergenerational injustices that primarily affect young people (such as climate-related harms), whereas another party offers to address class inequalities that primarily affect working class people (such as the disproportionate burdens imposed on them in order to mitigate the effects of climate change). Some voters may be victims of both kinds of injustice but others may only belong to one of these victim groups. If the two affected groups are roughly equal in numbers, voters have a prerogative to choose which injustice they want to address.
Similarly, voters are morally permitted to choose between two parties when one of them offers to rescue a single person and mitigate some further serious injustices, whereas the other offers to mitigate a (partly) different package of roughly equally serious and extensive injustices and there is no morally superior offer on the political spectrum. At a minimum, agent-relative prerogatives permit agents to choose among such morally equal, disjunctively required courses of action instead of tossing a fair coin. A more expansive conception of prerogatives would permit voters to cast their ballots to mitigate marginally lesser injustices, including in cases where voting to prevent the lesser injustice is also a means of saving one particular person from injustice.
The reasons justifying an agent-relative prerogative for voters need not leave them full discretion over how they may vote. Suppose, for example, voters have such prerogatives because they are essential for honoring some of their valuable social and political commitments. If so, then they may use their prerogatives only to vote for candidates or parties that are in line with these commitments and not to choose a random party that is irrelevant to their commitments, even if it delivers on justice only marginally less well than another party. Alternatively, if voters enjoy prerogatives as victims of a particular injustice, then they may vote to (somewhat) preferentially address that injustice—but not just any injustice—over equal or almost equal injustices. In practice, though, these prerogatives typically leave voters considerable discretion as reasonable disagreements arise—inter alia—about which party will best serve a set of broad social or political commitments, and which party is most likely to address a given injustice.
So what should our verdict be in Salis case? I suggest that Italian voters voted permissibly to save Salis if they had good reason to believe that she was suffering from serious injustice(s) and that at least one of the following three conditions held: (i) voting for her party alliance was also foreseeably the best option to mitigate injustices more broadly, (ii) saving her would best mitigate one of roughly equal injustices and thereby best honor their social or political commitments, or (iii) saving her would best mitigate an injustice that personally affected them.
References
Brennan, J. (2011). The Ethics of Voting. Princeton University Press.
Lever, A. (2016). Must We Vote for the Common Good? In E. Crookston, D. Killoren, & J. Trerise (Eds.), Ethics in Politics: The Rights and Obligations of Individual Political Agents (pp. 145–157). Routledge.
Maskivker, J. (2019). The Duty to Vote. Oxford University Press.
Attila Mráz is a political philosopher based in Budapest. His research focuses on democratic theory and the ethics of political participation, especially in non-ideal circumstances. His work has been published in Ethical Theory & Moral Practice, Legal Theory, and Contemporary Political Theory, among other places.
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