Ranked voting: Difference between revisions
→Majority rule as an approximation of utilitarianism
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In order to invoke majority rule an assumption must be made that is inherently cardinally utilitarian: that satisfying each individual's preference has the same ''cardinal utility'' gain for every person, and that these utilities can be aggregated and totals compared. This is fundamentally a cardinal utility counting procedure, and in the case of two options immediately produces majority rule as a result of maximization of utility.
Therefore, all ranked systems can be seen as approximations of cardinal utilitarianism to various extents, and operate under the same core assumption of democracy as cardinal voting methods: that every individual has some fundamentally commensurable value that may be counted.
Condorcet voting systems, by applying majority rule to all pairwise comparisons, are effectively looking for the most consistently approximately utilitarian candidate. This intuitively explains the better utilitarian performance of Condorcet systems under various numerical simulations.
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