Career Reflections

In the opening of Plato's Republic, Socrates remarks that he enjoys conversing with older companions - such as Cephalus - because they have wisdom about the life ahead of him. Perhaps the modern world is such that my impending 30s will be very different from those of my much older colleagues, but it's still helpful I think to look to those not so far ahead of me in charting where I want to go and how I'm going to get there.

Colin Farrelly reflects here on his journey to becoming full professor. Not so much explicit advice, but interesting reading for those of us following in his footsteps. Not much over a year ago, I didn't know I'd be in Stirling now. I wonder where I'll be in ten years' time...

Roundtable of Journal Editors

This discussion of how journals work in Theoria is quite interesting, especially I assume for those without much insight. I'm somewhat surprised how difficult it seems to be to find referees, though perhaps this explains why I've sometimes been asked to review some stuff that hardly falls in my area of expertise (narrowly defined). As suggested, it's doubtless because of increasing pressures to publish, and a significant influx of submissions from graduate students.

I'm not sure about the suggestion that quality should outweigh quantity in assessing scholars by their publications though. It seems to me that, other things equal, someone producing more good scholarship ought to be preferred to someone producing less scholarship of an equal - or maybe even slightly higher - standard. (This is all the more true, I think, given that quality is difficult to measure - though I'm unsure whether quantity should be measured in articles or words.) Of course, we should factor in considerations about people's circumstances: a post-doc gets more research time than a lecturer and thus ought to produce either more or better publications.

It's also interesting to get insight as to how Ethics works from Henry Richardson. Apparently they now receive around 400 manuscripts a year and only a quarter even make it to review. Hence I was pretty pleased with my paper!

BSET 2012 CFP

Having just enjoyed a very successful Law and Philosophy Graduate Conference here in Stirling, it's time already to look forward to another conference...

First CALL FOR PAPERS

The BRITISH SOCIETY for ETHICAL THEORY

2012 CONFERENCE

University of Stirling, UK

Mon 9th - Wed 11th July 2012

Keynote Speakers:

Sarah Broadie (St Andrews)
Frances Kamm (Harvard)


Papers are invited for the 2012 annual conference of the British Society for
Ethical Theory, to be held at the University of Stirling, following directly on from the Joint Session.
The subject area is open within metaethics and normative ethics. Papers on topics in
applied ethics, moral psychology or the history of ethics may also be considered provided
they are also of wider theoretical interest.

Papers, which should be unpublished at the time of submission, should be
in English, no longer than 6500 words, readable in 45 minutes and prepared for blind review.

BSET is keen that all selected papers will be communicated clearly to its conference audience.
Please bear in mind that all sessions are plenary, so the venue will be more like a lecture hall than a
seminar room.

Please send your anonymous submission electronically, and include an abstract.
In a separate document list your full name, address and academic affiliation. Those who submitted
papers for our previous conferences - successfully or otherwise - are welcome to submit again, although not the same papers.

BSET operates a system whereby the papers will have all identifications removed BEFORE being
sent to our Chief Referee, who contacts other referees and finalizes the program. The one exception to this is the identification of postgraduate status. Please tell us if you are a postgraduate student as submissions from
postgraduates are encouraged; we aim to have at least one graduate speak at the conference.

Selected conference papers will be considered for publication in the journal Ethical
Theory and Moral Practice. Please make clear in any covering email
whether you intend your paper to be considered for publication here as well as
for the conference programme, although final decision on this matter need not be made by the author
until the time of the conference itself.

The deadline for submissions is Friday 9th December 2010.

Papers and accompanying particulars should be emailed to the contact email on the following page:

http://www.bset.org.uk/2012.html [under construction]

Note that ONLY electronic submissions will be accepted.

School Skirts

I happen to have seen two interesting pieces relating to school skirts on the BBC lately, so thought I'd pass comment.

Firstly, a boy from Cambridge who found that, though his school doesn't allow shorts, it does allow boys to wear skirts. I've always thought that, while a uniform policy requiring boys to wear trousers and girls to wear skirts might pass as 'separate but equal, a uniform policy giving girls but not boys the choice is unequal. In this case, though, it seems he was only wearing a skirt as part of a peaceful protest, in an attempt presumably to be allowed shorts.

Secondly, it seems that schools it South Korea are making adjustments to desks to help girls with short skirts sit 'more comfortably.' This one strikes me as strange. I'd have thought that if the girls weren't comfortable sitting in short skirts then they wouldn't wear them. Obviously there are some concerns about peer pressure and collective action here, but nonetheless no one's really forced to wear a shorter skirt than they want to. Perhaps the real justification is to make teachers more comfortable...

Quiet Time

Apologies for the lack of posts lately. It owes in some part to being busy at work, though the main reason is that I haven't been able to post links to Blogger from home. It works fine when I'm at work but, for some strange reason, seems to have stopped functioning properly at home. So now I only have time to write here if I can find it while in my office...

FPTP Double Counts Some Votes

In my last piece, I argued that what matters when we’re thinking about a fair and democratic electoral system is not how many votes each person casts, but how many votes they have counted. I argued that, on this understanding, AV respects the maxim ‘one person, one vote.’ I didn’t criticize FPTP as such, allowing that it also satisfied this requirement. In this post, however, I want to show that FPTP actually double counts some votes and is therefore unfair.

For simplicity, I’m going to focus on an example where we have only three candidates, who I will call A, B, and C, and twelve voters. Let’s assume that (first preference) votes are allocated as follows:

A: 5 votes
B: 4 votes
C: 3 votes

Under FPTP, A is declared the winner, because A has more votes than anyone else. But what does this mean? Does it mean that A has a majority? The answer, evidently, is not in the strict sense, since a majority means ‘more than half’ and A only has five of the twelve votes, which is less than half.

It is sometimes said that A has a ‘relative majority.’ That is, A has a majority over B (five to four) and also a majority over C (five to three). Note, however, that when we compare A only with B, we ignore those who voted for C. In saying A has a majority of five to four (over B), we are only counting nine votes. Those three votes for C are excluded here (though, of course, they come into play when A’s votes are compared to C’s – there it is B’s votes that are ignored).

Saying that A has a majority – in this sense – over each of B and C taken separately does not show that A has a majority over the two of them together. It might be that all those who voted B would also prefer C to A (i.e. their full preferences were B > C > A) and similarly those who voted C prefer B to A (i.e. C > B > A). In this case, a majority (seven people) prefer B to A and a majority (seven people) prefer C to A.

How then does FPTP declare A the winner? The problem, it seems, is that FPTP either ignores some people’s votes – as votes for C are ignored when simply comparing A and B – or it double counts some. Think again of the comparison between A and B. We might imagine the votes ‘cancelling out’ until, after four votes on each side have been cancelled, A wins because there is still a remainder (one) in favour of A. To think that A also defeats C, however, we have to allow that each vote for A can cancel not only one of B’s votes but also one of C’s.

Someone who voted B doesn’t, I think, have good reason to accept defeat when only first preferences are known. They might acknowledge that B trails A by five to four at this stage, but they can rightly reply that they are not yet shown to be in a minority when we do not know how the other three (C voters) would rank A and B.

Now, it might be that C voters would prefer A to B. If this is the case, then AV would declare A to be the winner. This is a case, however, where AV and FPTP would agree. Most cases would probably be like this, so there’s little need to argue between them. If A is picked by both FPTP and AV then, uncontroversially, A should be the winner. (Remember, what we’re concerned with is who should win.)

To bring out the difference between FPTP and AV, we need a case where they come apart. Therefore let us assume that all C voters prefer B to A. In this case, B can reasonably complain about any electoral rule (such as FPTP) that awards the election to A. Here B is preferred to A by a majority of the electorate (seven of twelve), so surely the idea of equal votes and majority rule tells us that B should win.

The only way we can say that A ought to win is if we illegitimately infer that because A has a majority over each of B and C taken separately (five to four and five to three, respectively) then A also has a majority over the two of them together – but this is not so, since in this example we have assumed that a majority would actually prefer either B or C to A in a two-horse race (seven to five in either case). A only wins if votes for A are counted twice, first as defeating votes for B and then again as defeating votes for C.

As I argued last time, there’s nothing unfair about counting second preferences. Under AV, each person has only one vote counted (the three C supporters have their second preference for B counted instead of a vote for C, only once C has been eliminated). This is in stark contrast to FPTP, where as I’ve just argued A only has a majority if either some votes (those for B or C) are ignored or if those for A are counted twice.

Democracy is about responding to the people’s preferences, so surely it’s more democratic to have full information about people’s preferences. Imagine that A and B had tied in the first round (say, four against four, with three for C and one abstention). How could this be resolved?

One possibility would be some random device – such as the drawing of straws or flip of a coin. That procedure is actually deployed in the case of at least some tied elections. An alternative, however, is to break the tie by appealing to voters’ preferences – we already know those of the eight people who voted for either A or B, but we could ask either the one abstainer and/or the three who had voted for C which, out of A and B, they would have voted for had they had to. This is what AV does and surely, since it responds to people’s preferences, that is a more democratic way to break the tie between A and B.

But, if the second preferences of C voters (between A and B) are the most democratic way to break a tie between A and B, why shouldn’t they also come into a close contest? Once again, supporters of B have no reason to accept five to four as a defeat, if three people’s preferences between A and B have not yet been considered.

If C voters prefer A then, fair enough, B is in the minority (eight to four). But that is never shown under FPTP. AV will establish, once and for all, whether it is A or B that has a majority. If A, then it agrees with FPTP. But if B is preferred to A by seven of the twelve voters, then surely it’s more in keeping with democracy, majority rule, and equal votes to declare B the winner.

AV and 'Multiple Votes'

Continuing my series (1, 2) in the run-up to the electoral reform referendum on May 5th, this time I want to look at another claim on the No2AV leaflet I have in front of me: “One person should have one vote. That’s fair.” (See also here.) Again, I find this flawed on several counts.

Firstly, one natural reading of this is simply that everyone should have at least one vote, and there is obviously no conflict between that and AV. Presumably, however, their intended meaning is that everyone should have exactly (or perhaps at most) one vote. They claim that “The AV system will mean the end to equal votes,” presumably meaning that expressing a second or third preference amounts to having two or three votes.

‘One person, one vote’ is certainly a rhetorically effective slogan, but again it needs to be analysed more carefully if we are to understand its meaning and implications. The appeal of the slogan is that it expresses political equality, but there’s no particular reason why it should be ‘one person, one vote’ rather than, say, ‘one person, five votes.’

Indeed, in the Scottish elections (to be held on the same day as the referendum) each person will cast TWO votes. I don’t mean a vote for their MSP and a vote in the referendum. Rather, the Scottish parliament consists of one lot of MSPs elected on a constituency basis with a second lot elected by PR, so each voter will get two ballot papers and cast one vote on each. I don’t hear anyone protesting that this is undemocratic.

Of course, the No2AV campaigner could say that there’s a difference between having two votes on two different ballot papers and having two votes on a single ballot paper. This merely highlights another ambiguity in the slogan though. We don’t think that each person should only have one vote in their lifetime. We wouldn’t disenfranchise someone now because they already voted five years ago. Hence we don’t literally enforce only one vote, but ‘one vote per ____’ where that blank needs to be filled in to specify how often each person should get their one vote.

The No2AV campaigners would have us believe that this blank should be filled in with per election, but I haven’t heard any good argument as to why we should favour that over per *round* of vote counting, as happens under AV.

As I hope I made clear in my original explanation of AV, no one exerts more influence than anyone else. The point of people expressing second and third preferences is that these ‘alternative votes’ are counted instead of their original (first preference) vote, if their first preference is eliminated. The principle is essentially the same as in a Single Transferable Vote (STV) system which, as the name implies, gives each person only one vote – the difference being that they are allowed to transfer it. (AV is in fact STV when electing only a single person per constituency.)

We could, in fact, replicate these results by having multiple elections. That is, if no one of five candidates standing wins an overall majority, we might eliminate the fifth placed candidate and hold another election with only four candidates standing, and so on until one wins a majority. Then it would be quite clear, I take it, that each person only has one vote per election. The point of AV though is that it saves the need for multiple rounds of elections, by having voters specify all of their preferences to begin with, so we can calculate what would have happened had there been a four-way election instead of a five-way one. (This also of course means that turnout is held constant and prevents tactical vote-switching between rounds.)

‘One person, one vote’ doesn’t tell us whether people should have one vote per election or one vote per round of counting. That’s the problem with slogans – since they’re not arguments, they can’t guide us in cases of ambiguity.

Here’s another example of ambiguity where simply asserting ‘one person, one vote’ doesn’t help. It might be objected that our current system fails to respect ‘one person, one vote’ because children are persons but aren’t given the vote. We might propose to remedy this by giving parents votes to cast on behalf of their children. Is this in keeping with the requirements of ‘one person, one vote’ because it gives children votes or contrary to it because it gives parents more than one vote? Either interpretation is possible, so the slogan alone is no help here. We need to get beyond the simple slogan and explore the reasons behind it, which might help to adjudicate between these two possibilities.

The same is true when it comes to AV or FPTP. Each system reflects a different understanding of ‘one person, one vote.’ FPTP focuses on how many votes one casts, whereas AV focuses on how many votes one has counted. The essence of AV is that everyone’s vote is counted once in each round of voting. Expressing a second preference does not give one more influence overall, it merely means that one can still have influence once one’s first choice has been eliminated. That second preference is counted (if at all) instead of one’s first preference, not as well.

Now when I’ve pointed this out to No campaigners, some have acknowledged that each person only has one vote counted, but still held that it’s objectionable for people to cast more than one vote, even if only one is counted. But this doesn’t seem plausible to me. What’s important is surely how many votes you have counted, not how many you cast.

Suppose we allow everyone to cast one vote, but then a significant section of those votes (either selected at random or perhaps those of some particular group) are simply discarded without being counted. Surely that wouldn’t be democratic. The ability to write marks on bits of paper isn’t what’s at issue here; it’s influencing the political process that matters. Thus, it matters that your vote is counted, not merely that it is cast.

Someone might say that’s unfair of me. We needn’t assume that it’s either voting once or counting once. It might be that both of these matter. Thus they could say that everyone has to count once (and only once) but also that people should only cast one vote. AV respects the first requirement, but not the second.

But I don’t see why we should think that each person casting one vote ought to matter, independently of each person counting once. Suppose we had a reform that allowed each person to cast as many votes as they liked, though only their first would be counted. (Leave aside questions about how this might be enforced.) I wouldn’t see anything wrong with that. You could go down to the polling station and mark as many ballots as you like, but it wouldn’t give you any more influence than me. In other words, it doesn’t seem to matter how many votes you cast, provided only one is counted.

For the sake of completeness, we can also imagine another example, in which everyone casts one vote but some people’s votes are counted twice. That, I take it, would be objectionable and undemocratic. So everyone casting one (and only one) vote doesn’t ensure equality; we have to make sure that each person is only counted once.

Let’s recap. Each person casting one vote isn’t sufficient for equality, if some of those votes are counted twice or not counted at all. Nor is it necessary, since we could allow people to vote more often, but only count their first vote. Thus, it seems that what matters is that each person’s vote is counted once and not more. It does not matter whether people cast more than one vote, provided each person only has one vote counted.

So, even if we interpret AV as people casting more than one vote, albeit only conditionally, it doesn’t violate the supposedly democratic requirement of ‘one person, one vote.’ One person should have one vote *counted*. That’s perfectly consistent with AV.

Note I’m not saying that ‘one person, one vote’ is inconsistent with FPTP. We might have an argument as to whether ‘wasted votes’ for minority candidates are really counted. But my aim here is merely to counter an argument against AV, not to offer positive argument for it. My claim is merely that ‘one person, one vote’ – when properly interpreted – gives us no reason to favour either system over the other.

Moreover, as I pointed out at the outset, this slogan isn’t actually particularly compelling to begin with; the Scottish elections illustrating that one person might have more than one vote in both senses.

The aim of AV is to ensure that the candidate elected is preferred to his or her rivals by a majority of voters. What’s undemocratic about that?