Talk:Ranked voting: Difference between revisions
→Majority rule as an approximation of utilitarianism: reply
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::: This is what you were saying with majority rule being a "first order approximation" of utilitarianism. [[User:BetterVotingAdvocacy|BetterVotingAdvocacy]] ([[User talk:BetterVotingAdvocacy|talk]]) 04:45, 9 July 2020 (UTC)
: I think that you misunderstood things. The argument here is about ordinal vs cardinal utilities, not majoritarianism vs utilitarianism, and I'm certainly NOT claiming the Pareto equilibrium is utilitarian (which is incorrect, as the dicator example clearly demonstrates), only pointing out that the Paretian ideas are present in the economics literature.
: The point is that under strictly ordinal preferences (if you are working ONLY within an ordinal utility framework, like economists do), arbitrarily anti-democratic situations must be considered acceptable, as Pareto equilibrium (the best you can do under such framework) implies you cannot violate the preferences of even a single individual, like the dictator, when changing social states. Every change has to be unanimously positive or neutral.
: This shouldn't be controversial, as it's all pretty standard in the ordinal vs cardinal utility literature.
: This argument is usually presented inverted in the literature (typically right-wing Libertarian), when people use Paretian principles to criticize democracy as a form of social organization and promote free market principles as an alternative: "democracy is two wolves and a sheep deciding what's for dinner", they say. To prevent the "mob rule" from violating even a single individual's rights, one invokes Pareto equilibrium: the wolves cannot get what they want without violating the preferences of the one sheep, so if you claim to defend individual rights absolutely you need every single individual to either agree or be indifferent to a change in the social state. Since the sheep doesn't want to get eaten, society just lives with the status quo and the sheep lives. This is seen as a triumph of "free-market" (but in actuality Paretian) principles over "mob rule" (democracy).
: This is precisely the same argument I've outlined, but now the sheep (dictator) is the villain of the story. If you wish to change to a different social state, you necessarily must violate the preferences the dictator has to remain in power. You also need an additional justification outside your framework to do so. So a Paretian framework necessarily invalidates any move towards the will of the majority, or any sense of democracy. To navigate the Pareto frontier towards a "better outcome" one must invoke some additional principles.
: The only solution out of this is to invoke some notion of CARDINAL utilitarianism, by claiming that every individual has equal claim to violate everyone else's will, and so the largest group thus decides which minority preferences to violate in their favor. This is majority rule, but it is fundamentally a cardinal utilitarian argument as you necessarily must aggregate multiple individuals preferences in a cardinal way. Under strictly ordinal preferences, there is no such concept as "counting"!
: Another point that seems wasn't clear is that cardinal utilities doesn't mean "non-uniform strength of preferences". If everyone is assumed to have exactly the same utility and you add them up, you're still operating under a cardinal utilitarian framework, you're still "adding multiple individuals".
: The claim that my A>B cancels your B>A is a cardinal claim, and this is underlying majority rule. You are simply assuming every ordinal preference has exactly the same cardinal utility difference when comparing them. Perhaps this can be edited to make the argument cleare, and I could fetch some references for specific points later on. [[User:lucasvb|lucasvb]] ([[User_talk:lucasvb|talk]]} 17:43, 18 July 2020 (UTC)
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