Are Trump voters morally responsible for the harms that will follow from his policies?; Australian Broadcasting Corporation, November 10, 2024

Jessica Wolfendale , Australian Broadcasting Corporation; Are Trump voters morally responsible for the harms that will follow from his policies?

"The nearly 73 million Americans who voted for Donald Trump cannot claim ignorance of Trump’s racism, misogyny and his endorsement of white supremacy and white supremacist terrorism. In the lead up to the 2024 US election, Trump falsely claimed that large numbers of unlawful immigrants were being allowed to entered the country to vote, repeating the ideas of the “white replacement” theory, which claims that “legacy [white] Americans” are being replaced “more obedient people from faraway countries," in the words of right-wing commentator Tucker Carlson. 

Trump has also made no secret of his views about women and about LGBTQ+ people. Indeed, the Trump campaign made anti-trans ads the biggest focal point of its spending. As laid out in Project 2025 — the policy blueprint created by former Trump officials — there is little doubt that Trump’s presidency will seriously erode the basic rights of LGBTQ+ people, women and immigrants, in addition to seriously threatening progress on climate change.

So, are Trump voters racist and misogynist because they voted for a candidate who espouses racist and misogynist views? And do they bear some responsibility for the outcomes of a Trump presidency?

Individual moral responsibility for collective actions

Voting is a collective act. This means that, in most elections, a single person’s vote makes little difference to the outcome. For example, the likelihood that one person’s vote will be “decisive in a presidential election” is about one is 60 million. So, each Trump voter could say, correctly, that their vote made no difference the outcome of the election, and hence they are not responsible for the policies that Trump enacts and the serious harm that those policies are likely to cause thousands, perhaps millions, of people.

The problem with this view is that a person’s moral responsibility is not just based on the causal relationship between their actions and a bad outcome. In my work on war crimes and responsibility, I argue that sometimes a person can be blamed for participating in a harmful collective act even if their participation didn’t make a difference to the outcome. Other scholars agree: the idea of complicity is one way of capturing this intuition. Sometimes a person is blameworthy for simply being part of a wrongful plan, even if it doesn’t go ahead, because they were willing for it to go ahead.

Similarly, it makes intuitive sense to say that all members of the KKK bear some responsibility for the terrorism and violence inflicted by that organisation, even if not every member participated directly in the violence. Put another way, the victims of KKK violence would be justified in blaming all members of the KKK, and not only directly involved in an attack, because all members were willing to allow Black people and their supporters to be harmed and killed. By joining the KKK, these members communicated morally abhorrent attitudes towards the potential victims of KKK actions that make it appropriate for the victims to blame them.

This doesn’t mean that everyone involved in a harmful collective action is equally responsible — those who contribute more bear greater responsibility for that outcome. But that doesn’t mean that a person can simply evade responsibility for the harms caused by a collective act they are part of by claiming that their participation didn’t make any difference to the outcome. Participation is moral communication, and it makes a moral difference to our responsibility. 

What does this mean for the question of voting and moral responsibility?"