In my experience most people accept that voluntary interaction with other people is morally good, and coercing innocent people is morally bad. If I have a dollar and you have a pen and I want your pen more than my dollar and you want my dollar more than your pen, then we can make a trade where I get your pen, you get my dollar, and we both feel better off by the result: we both got what we wanted, and we would both say we're better off than we were before our trade. People only engage in voluntary interactions when both parties will benefit from the result (where benefit is understood in the broadest sense). Even charity benefits both parties because the person giving is deriving some psychological or other benefit from the act of charity at the same time the person receiving charity is getting some (usually) tangible benefit.
The beauty of voluntary interactions is that they almost by definition require both parties to benefit (sans mistakes). If one or both parties would not benefit from the interaction, why would they choose to engage in such interaction voluntarily? Obviously they wouldn't. Voluntary interactions demonstrate our preferences through the choices they actualize.
If I hold a gun to your head and demand that you give me your money or else I'll kill you or lock you in a cage, virtually nobody thinks this is moral. Coercion is immoral because it violates individual rights. Even if I used some of the money I took from you by force to help orphans, this would not make my act of coercion any more moral. Coercion is wrong because it's an immoral means, regardless of what the ends are. This is easy to see when we talk about a man robbing people at gunpoint.
For reasons that aren't entirely clear, if we add in a voting process to the previously mentioned example of robbing people at gunpoint many if not most people seem to think robbing people at gunpoint becomes moral. If everyone in our neighborhood votes on whether or not to send people with guns to take money from everyone by force and the majority favor it then most people seem to accept that. Why is that? In part I think the answer is that humans have an innate respect for authority. So when a person or institution claims to have authority we are likely to accept their claim by default. Another reason for this is our pervasive bias in favor of the status quo, whatever it is (slavery was regarded as perfectly normal and acceptable by most people for most of human history). As far as I know the only rational way of coming to question the status quo is by becoming educated in rationality, ethics, and maybe history. Since few people have taken the time required to seriously study such things most people are likely to accept however things already are. Acceptance of the status quo is further facilitated by plausible-sounding myths in popular culture and by outright propaganda used by those who might mean well but are poorly informed, or more cynically, by those who benefit from the status quo.
Does voting about something change the morality of that thing? No. If 99% of everyone in your neighborhood voted to kill the remaining 1%, would that be moral? Obviously not. What if 99.99999% vote to kill just 1 innocent person -- would that be moral? No. No matter the breadth of a majority, the morality of an action is unchanged. If voting is allowed to have unlimited scope, unlimited power, then it is nothing but the tyranny of the majority. In a just and moral society it's absolutely essential that minorities be protected because by definition they lack the numerical strength to protect themselves. The smallest minority is the individual. A just and moral society protects individual rights no matter how many people vote to violate those rights. Should we let a majority white population vote on whether to keep black slaves? No. Should we let two wolves and one sheep vote on whether to have mutton for dinner? No. The legitimate scope of power for what voting can do, or what government can do more generally, is not unlimited. In a just and moral society the proper role of voting and government is limited to protecting individual rights. Every inch moved beyond this is an inch in the direction of tyranny. Whether tyranny by government or tyranny by the majority, it's tyranny nonetheless -- even a well-meaning tyranny is still a tyranny. Any system that gives itself the power to violate individual rights -- even for well- meaning ends -- is a system of tyranny and oppression that we should all oppose.
If a healthy patient walks into a doctor's office for a routine checkup and the doctor has waiting 5 other patients in desperate need of a heart, liver, kidney, etc. Should the doctor murder the one healthy innocent patient to save the 5 who need organs? No. Even if the net number of lives saved is 4, the ends don't justify the means. So it is with voting and government policy. The ends can never be used to justify any means, because if you take that approach it can be used to justify any horror you can imagine, even murdering an innocent stranger for the purpose of harvesting their organs. Even ignoring the principled ethical argument, just consider the practical horror of ends that are desired but never achieved. In Soviet Russia they desired some kind of Utopian nation and used this goal to justify mass starvation, gulags, countless arbitrary executions, etc. So if you take the approach of saying the ends justify the means you can quite literally justify killing millions of people and still never actually achieve your goals. And again, that's ignoring the principled ethical argument against the ends justifying the means which says actions must be ethical, and so no matter the end-goal, the methods of achieving it must be ethical. Or in other words: the ends can't justify the means -- we must evaluate the ethics of each action, not just the desired outcome.
I'm going to guess that you the reader agree that voluntary interactions are good, forcing people to do things at gunpoint is bad, that voting to kill innocent people is unjust even if a large majority of voters agree that they want to kill innocent people, that harvesting the organs from an unwilling and innocent person even to save several others is not just, and that ends cannot justify the means no matter how well-meaning the ends are. Though watch what happens to your own emotions when I bring up forced wealth redistribution in state welfare programs. Do you think it's just and moral for people with guns to come take your justly acquired private property by force? No. But what if they use some of the loot they took to help poor people -- is it moral then? No. What if the people with guns are representatives of the government -- is it moral then? Do the ends justify the means in this instance? Why is that? How can you justify your position without engaging in a logical fallacy like special pleading, appeal to consequences, appeal to emotion, appeal to expediency, etc? I'll save you the trouble: you can't. It's simply not possible to make a philosophically robust, principled argument in favor of coercing innocent people.
Yet many people do argue in favor of coercing innocent people in some cases. How do they do it? They rationalize. They change the subject. They throw out red-herrings. They use vague or misleading language to cloak their position in a way that makes it seem morally respectable. They give examples of what amounts to how two wrongs make a right. They appeal to systems of ethics that might sound good, but in the final analysis depend on evasions or errors in reasoning. They hem and haw about a "social contract" that nobody signed. They engage in victim-blaming and tell you that if you don't like having your individual rights violated you should move. In other words they respond with emotions, not reasons. Just as you probably are right now (link1: "When our beliefs are threatened by facts, we turn to unfalsifiable justifications"). Remember earlier when I said to pay attention to your emotions as I talked about this? How do you feel now? Are you upset? Do you feel repulsed by what seems like a cold apathetic maybe even malevolent attitude toward poor people? But wait: we're not talking about poor people, we're talking about the just and moral use of force against innocent people and how voting interacts with this. I picked this example to provoke emotions and demonstrate how it is that we justify coercing innocent people. We justify such things not with sound ethics and reason and evidence, but with emotions. Then later we rationalize our emotions with increasingly clever arguments that we find endless support for because of our confirmation bias -- we seek out information that supports whatever it is that we already believe (link2: "Selective Exposure Theory", link3: "How facts backfire"). Is that what you're doing right now? Are you currently screaming at the page with your favorite rationalizations? Have you decided that the implication of what I've written is such that you think I'm an amoral psychopath and thus you feel justified dismissing whatever I've written? I encourage you to ask yourself: do you have rational arguments against what I've written, or does it simply make you uncomfortable and thus you desire to reject it? Are you engaged in careful rational deliberation about the facts of the matter, or are you letting your emotions get the better of you? Is it possible even in principle if you're mistaken? Is it possible there are things you don't know? Is it possible you've been misled? Is it possible there is a compassionate "third way" that doesn't involve letting children starve nor violating the individual rights of innocent people? I will not answer such questions here, I raise them only to encourage you to open your mind (link4: "Why Are Unfalsifiable Beliefs So Attractive?").
The key moral problem with Soviet communism, or Nazi socialism, or any number of lesser attempts at socialism or "mixed" economies is that people are forced into the system. With such systems you either accept the diktat of the people in charge or you risk execution or imprisonment. If a group of people willingly join together to create their own communist commune for just their own members and violate no individual rights in the process, I say good for them. Or if a business owner wants to make their business by owned by the workers as in socialism, so long as they're not violating individual rights in the process that's a fine thing too. What people choose for themselves is none of my business or anyone else's so long as any harm is restricted to consenting adults. The trouble comes in when people want to impose their will on innocent people by force. This is why voting and governments must have very limited scope: to help ensure nobody can initiate violence against or enslave their innocent fellow man. To help ensure no ideology (no matter how well-meaning) can be imposed by force on unwilling people.
So what are government-mandated welfare programs? They are programs created by usually well-meaning people that accept using violence as a legitimate means of achieving their goals. Either accept this violation of individual property rights and involuntarily pay into the system or we'll send people with guns to your house and put you in a cage. This is an example of well-meaning tyranny, but tyranny nonetheless. It's also a poorly informed policy in terms of how well it does what it aims to do (lookup the goals of the war on poverty vs. the outcome 5), what kind of unintended consequences it has (subsidizing poverty rather than eliminating it), etc. And it's astonishingly short-sighted: are the key problems that are attempting to be addressed by welfare programs the best place to take action? If you only look at a snapshot of the present world you might think struggling children are the key issue in need of being helped. But why are there struggling children? If you look one level deeper it becomes clear that the key problem is actually parents making the immoral choice to have children they can't take care of. Parents without the skills, material means, environment, etc are having children that they won't be able to raise on their own to be well-adjusted. So really the problem is parents. Parents are the moral agents making the implicit or explicit choice to have children they can't provide for.
Should the immoral choices of others be sufficient to justify harming innocent 3rd parties? Clearly the answer is no: forcing innocent people to pay for the immoral choices of others is a bad system. And yet that's the system we have. People defend it because they are used to the status quo, and because they can see no better option. But appealing to the status quo is not an argument, it's a logical fallacy.
Nobody wants to see children suffer. Children are not to blame for their parents bad choices. I think most people would agree that progress toward protecting individual property rights can't take a path that involves children currently benefiting from welfare starving to death. But for the purpose of this essay I will not address possible solutions to this problem and instead will confine myself to a discussion of our perception of morality and how it changes when voting is involved.
Here's where I think we usually go wrong in such discussions. We tell ourselves that "sure initiating violence is in principle wrong, but in practice there are a few careful well-meaning limited exceptions." This is a mistake. What we should be doing is questioning our assumptions. We should be working to discover the principles that maximize human flourishing. Once we have those principles we should work on plotting a gradual course in the direction of that ideal of human flourishing. The right answer is not that we accept poorly defined principles and only apply them sometimes. The right answer is that we define better principles and better paths to achieve our principles. To many this sounds unnecessarily rigid or dogmatic, but recognize the fork in the road we're discussing: one path uses reason and evidence to maximize human flourishing. The other uses emotion instead of reason, popular myths instead of evidence, and moves only chaotically toward a future that may be better or worse. If you want to build a rocket that can send people to the moon or you want to build a microchip, emotionalism and a lack of evidence are not successful attributes. So it is for working towards a better world for all of humanity in the realm of ethics and politics. My argument here is not saying we should ignore emotions and let robots make all our choices -- not at all. My argument is that rationality and evidence enable us to be most successful at whatever our goals are. If we don't have a firm grasp of the principles that do (or should) guide us or we don't have principles that work in practice (i.e. we need various exceptions), then this is a sign that our principles are not as good as they could be and that we're relying on intuition (chock full heuristics and biases and all the problems that entails!) and thus making less progress toward the ideal of human flourishing than we could be making.
Should we ignore evidence? Deny rationality? Reject ethics? Of course not. No matter what our goals are, we need ethics and rationality and evidence to make good choices that enable us to best achieve our goals. What is true for designing a spaceship is true for designing government policies. Emotions are an input, a factoid, a piece of data: not a reliable decision-making technique by itself.
Conclusion
There's nothing magic about voting. Voting cannot trump ethics and rationality. If we want to live in a better world we need a better understanding of ethics, rationality, and the legitimate (limited) scope for the power of voting. We need to reflect very carefully about how democratic voting has acquired an almost mystical quality in popular culture, and we need to question our assumptions about such things.
