Back in 2016, my original essay on felons and voting received an interesting comment from A.J. McDonald, Jr. He was worried about having rapists, robbers and murders voting. One initial reply is that there are many other types of felonies, most of which are non-violent. As such, any discussion of felons and voting needs to consider not just the worst felonies, but all the felonies. And, in the United States, there are many. That said, I will address the specific concern about felons convicted of rape, robbery and murder.
On the face of it, it is natural to have an immediate emotional reaction to the idea of rapists, robbers and murderers voting. After all, these are presumably very bad people and it is offensive to think of them exercising the same fundamental right as other citizens. While this reaction is natural, it is generally unwise to try to settle complex moral questions by appealing to an immediate emotional reaction. I will begin by considering arguments for disenfranchising such felons.
The most plausible argument, given my view that voting rights are foundational rights in a democratic state, is that such crimes warrant removing or at least suspending a person’s status as a citizen. After all, when a person is justly convicted of rape, murder or robbery they are justly punished by suspension of their liberty. In some cases, they are punished by death. As such, it seems reasonable to accept that if the right to liberty (and even life) can be suspended, then the right to vote can be suspended as well. I certainly see the appeal here. However, I think there is a counter to this reasoning.
Punishment by imprisonment is generally aimed at protecting the public from the criminal by removing them from society and to serve as a deterrent to others. This could be used to justify taking away the right to vote by arguing that felons are likely to vote in ways that would harm society. The easy and obvious reply is that there is little reason to think that felons could do harm through voting. Or any more harm than non-felon voters. For felons to do real harm through voting, there would need to be harmful choices and these would need to be choices that felons would pick because they are felons and they would need to be able to win the vote. It could be claimed that, for example, there might be a vote on reducing prison sentences and the felons would vote in their interest to the detriment of others. While this is possible, it seems unlikely that the felons would be able to win the vote on their own. If there were so many felons that they could decide elections, then society has a fundamental problem.
There is also the obvious counter that non-felons are just as likely to vote in harmful ways as well, as the history of voting shows. As such, denying felons the vote to protect the public from harm is not a reasonable justification. If there are things being voted for that could do serious harm, then the danger lies with those who got such things on the ballot and not with felons who might vote for it.
Another way to justify disenfranchisement is by making it park of the punishment, which is often justified in terms of retribution. This does have some appeal, assuming the felon wants to vote. However, most Americans do not vote, so it would not be much of a punishment for most people. There is also the question of whether the denial of the right to vote is a suitable punishment for a crime. Punishments should be relevant to the crime. While paying restitution would fit for a robbery, being denied the right to vote would not seem to fit.
Criminals are also supposed to be reformed so they can return to society (assuming the sentence is not death or life). Denying voting rights would have the opposite effect as they would be even more disconnected from society. As such, this would not justify removal of the voting rights.
Because of these considerations, even rapists, murderers and robbers should not lose their right to vote. I do agree, as argued in my previous essay, that crimes that are effectively rejections of the criminal’s citizenship (like rebellion and treason) would warrant stripping a person of citizenship and the right to vote. Other crimes, even awful ones, would not suffice to strip away citizenship.
Another approach is to make the case that rapists, murderers and robbers are morally bad or bad decision makers and should be denied the right to vote on moral grounds. While it is true that rapists, murderers and robbers are generally very bad people, the right to vote is not grounded in being a good person (or even just not being bad) or making good (or at least not bad) decisions. While it might seem appealing to have moral and competency tests for voting, there is the obvious problem that many voters would fail such tests. There is also the practical problem of designing a fair ethics test. Such tests would, as history shows, simply be political tools for disenfranchising people.
It could be countered that the only test that would be used is the legal test of whether a person is convicted of a felony. While obviously imperfect, it could be argued that those convicted are probably guilty and probably bad people and thus should not be voting. While it is true that some innocent people will be convicted and denied the right to vote and true that many bad people will be able to avoid convictions, this is acceptable.
A reply to this is to inquire as to why such a moral standard should be used to determine the right to vote. After all, the right to vote (as I have argued before) is not predicated on moral goodness or competence. It is based on being a citizen, good or bad. As such, any crime that does not justly take away citizenship would not warrant removing the right to vote. Yes, this does entail that rapists, murderers and robbers should retain the right to vote. This might strike some as offensive or disgusting, but these people remain citizens. If this is too offensive, then such crimes would need to be recast as acts of treason that strip away citizenship. This seems excessive. And there is the fact that there are always awful people voting, they just have not been caught or got away with their awfulness or are clever and connected enough to ensure that the awful things they do are not considered felonies or even crimes. I am just as comfortable allowing a robber to vote as I am to allow Trump and Hillary to vote. After all, we know Trump is a felon and we know Hillary is Hillary.
Yawn. Do we want opportunists, manipulators and crooks to be president? I don’t. But, here we are, hmmmm? Contextual reality is false. But, we live in it.
I remember the news of a pedophile who even wrote a MANUAL about how to abuse and rape children. After he was found out and jailed, he was tortured and killed in jail by an inmate.
The inmate who killed the other man, was a bad man himself: yet, he was better than the other one. Even him called it ‘poetic justice’. I agree completely.
Well done. Now THAT is justice. If only the same could be done for all people like that, the world would be better off already, and in more ways than one.
Jesus generalized about sin too much, for not all sin is the same or has the same weight. I happened to read the story of children who were raped and killed (though I took much care to not learn the details, otherwise I wouldn’t sleep at night.). I never forgot the stories.
Jail doesn’t scare or deter people who are capable of committing atrocious acts.
Therefore, for me, the inability to cast votes should be the least really bad people should worry about. I’d leave thieves out. For a thief, there might be hope. But none for a truly rotten human being.
In Japan, (I am not Japanese) the samurai would commit seppuku to make up for a loss of honour, even when it was not their fault. This practice was banned sometimes during the 1600’s, I do not remember. That’s good, of course. The practice was insane. Yet this is the only other alternative I’d give to a really bad person, i.e. murderers, pedophiles, etc.
No one has the right to harm children in these monstrous ways, or to take someone’s life, unless in the latter case it is done for legitimate defence.
I can profoundly dislike someone or even hate them, but I absolutely don’t have the right to take their life or to harm them in any ways. It’s about honour. I always recall the beautiful story about Socrates and when he was ordered to execute someone. He just went back home. This man was the incarnation of human honour. One that is willing to stain their honour with an horrific crime, doesn’t deserve to live in the first place, how much less so having the right to cast a vote.
Sure, what I am asserting is ugly. But ugly or not, the justice system with the whole jail thing, is a joke. Jail should be for thieves, scammers, fraudsters only. The other ones would receive a very different treatment, in my world.
”The other ones” would be the people who wilfully committed atrocious acts, that means, they knew their actions were very bad (mens rea) and they could make basic distinctions between being good, being neutral, or being evil and profoundly immoral, including taking someone’s life for any reason except legitimate defence.
For people with evidence of them not be too right in their mind, I’d still focus on whether they knew that what they were doing was very bad, or not. If they had a history of thinking that an alien telepathically asked them to do what they did, and they still knew their actions to be very bad and could be proven, I would not make a distinction between them and anyone else.
”legitimate defence” = but if I kill someone in self-defence, this must not be done using ‘excessive force’. If someone punches me, and I punch back and the assailant falls on the ground, and I then stomp on his head and crack his skull and he dies, I would probably tried and jailed for murder.
But if I punch back and he hits his head and dies, i.e. his death being ‘accidental’, then I would probably be ok. I am not a lawyer, but this is as much as I know about this, but of course I could be wrong, but not likely.
Prof. LaBossiere is a martial artist too so I am sure he too looked into the details of self-defence.
Toss the coin. Do we want/need rich, educated rascals to make important decisions, affecting every everyone else, based on the contextual reality(ies) of those rich, educated rascals? It goes to the other extreme, doesn’t it? “everybody has their own album to do”—- that was a 70s phrase where I once lived. Again, it boils to the contextual reality notion: if, and only if, contextual reality (CR) is true, then, it would have to be true, universally. But, that could not be right, because we do not think, or believe things,universally. That is a salient point of CR: it is NOT universal…even when moralism suggests that should be so. No, contexts are only what they are made to be. This, seems to me, has always, all ways, been a problem. Mostly, I can’t make others understand it. Hell, I have not yet fully grasped it myself. Pretty bad…could he worse, I guess…
More briefly: *let he (or she*) who is without sin, cast the first stone*. I speak and understand a bit of French and Spanish. Found it ironic, in some quirky way, that sin, in Spanish, means: without. ¿sin duda, no? Ya, lo creo que si…mas o menos. So, sin duda means without doubt. I don’t know if that means sinners are doubtful. But, thinking with greater deepity, I would have to think they are, in thought and deed. Indeed. Sinning is what people do, consistently, and, contextually. Yes, I am still analyzing my own theory. As a practical matter, as it has been written, all are sinners: we all lack something. Even politicians—further, affiant sayeth not.
Seems to me there is a thin line, or a VERY tight tightrope, to be traversed here. Justice is justice and morality is morality. If we single out the worst-of-the- worst for further punitive action, in addition to penalties already in place, then what about lesser crimes and misdemeanors? Isn’t it reasonable to treat ALL who have been found guilty of violating law to endure the additional penalty of being denied voting rights? Thieves, rapists and murderers are, morally, societal scourges—I think there is little argument there. But is it truly axiomatic to deny them voting rights because they did what they did? An eye-for-eye, tooth-for-tooth approach is as sound as such logic and morality can demand. But, I don’t see that as automatically rescinding the right to vote. People vote for candidates, based on what they believe those candidates stand for;whether they think the candidates’ positions and stated intentions are representative of sound governance. The criminals being considered in this discussion are not automatically, unilaterally unable to make better decisions in the matters of democratic representation. While it is true that a rotten apple is no better than a rotten orange, people are neither apples, nor oranges. Justice is one issue;morality is another. Condemnation is not all-inclusive. If this idea is novel and/or radical, sobethat.
” Justice is justice and morality is morality.”.
This is a tautology. But even if you were right in your implication that the one thing has nothing to do with the other, morality is to justice the same way apples are to fruit, and fruit to food.
But in fact, I believe your implication of justice and morality being two completely different things, is utterly false. It’s obvious that morality plays a huge role in law, for no one gets tried and jailed for being ‘good’ or ‘neutral’, but only for being very bad, that is, for breaking obvious societal rules in unacceptable ways, that is, unfair to others.
It would be best to say that ‘justice’ doesn’t mean ‘any morality’, for the standards applied to the latter, can be too vague and loose for something like justice, which has to be as specific and precise as it possibly can.
What you called ‘morality’, I call ‘basic human conduct’ or ‘personal honour’ as I wrote earlier. We can call it Jack, it doesn’t matter. What I have been saying is that to me, giving one year of jail to a fraudster, but twenty of the same to someone who raped and killed a child, doesn’t seem justice at all: the child wasn’t a bunch of money that can be replaced with some other money.
That’s just my response to the short sentence quoted, sorry I didn’t read the rest otherwise I’ll write for a week, but I assume the rest of your thoughts are in relation to that sentence, which seems the conclusion of your argument. Respectfully.
”…such crimes would need to be recast as acts of treason that strip away citizenship. This seems excessive…”.
That’s the only thing I disagree with. It does not at all seems excessive to me to strip rapists and murderers of citizenship, in fact in the best of cases, I’d cast them away on a desert island.
Clearly, after a satisfactory trial in a court of law.
In fact, my idea of justice is ‘a tooth for a tooth, an eye for an eye’. If you took a life away, yours will be taken away. If you raped someone, you’ll be raped. Sure, this view might seem ‘insane’ or ‘brutal’. I am no brute. Even as a child, I was dissimilar to all other children, who seemed aggressive and vulgar. I was not like them. I abhor violence and violent people, to me people like that are the last hopeless stage of idiocy.
But I do not understand how a wilful murderer or rapist, can get a roof and a bed to sleep on in a ‘jail’, and have society pay for that. That’s not justice to me. If you watch interviews to people in jail like ‘Iceman’ (don’t remember his name, nor care to) when he was asked if he felt ‘anything’ for the people he killed in incredible ways, he just shrugged and said ‘No, I don’t feel anything at all for them.’, with a bit of a smirk on his face.
I have heard others saying that jail to them ‘is like camping’. See how much good jail does to them.
As for robbers and thieves, these are the ones who should be in jail. Stealing something is a crime, but murdering others, harming them in devastating ways, that’s a whole other level of crime. There’s no excuse for the latter type.
It would be interesting to see if a rapist would still commit rape, fully knowing that if found out, he will be raped all the same. There would be the problem about how to exact such justice, considering that this type of justice system would have no rapists or murderers in it, for otherwise it would be a paradox. But I fully believe that for the worst crimes, only the exact crime reversing on the perpetrator, would truly be justice.
Even as a non religious person, then what Jesus said would fully have meaning: ‘don’t to to others what you would not be done to yourself.’.
The justice system in the ‘democratic’ world is too weak. After all, it never made a big difference: the rapists and murderers did not really diminish, did they?
Thank you for your essay, Professor.
Therefore, as for voting, no, I’d not allow people like that to cast votes, for that would imply that all citizens are the same, the good and the bad, which is clearly not the case. I am not defending Mc Donald Jr, I don’t even know who he is. I assume he’s a fool, but I could be wrong.