Dear Abd ul-Rahman,
No. It's an understanding of what utilities mean.
If you think so...
If A does not win,
the supporters of A lose something. They are in the majority. If each
of them grabs a B supporter and wrestles with him, or her, I suppose,
the excess A supporters can then arrange things the way they like. A
drastic picture, but actually part of the theory behind majority rule.
That's more or less the point I try to make over and over again: A democratic
decision system should not reproduce what would happen in an anarchic world
such as you describe but should instead protect the weaker parts of society
against the majority by giving them their just share of power instead of
letting the majority always overrule them.
If C wins, the B supporters gain 60% utility, that's large. If they
pay the A voters the equivalent of the A loss, 20%, they are still
way ahead.
You still assume that their is a loss to the A voters. But that is just
wrong: the A voters have no right to the election of A, it is not their
property which they can loose.
It is a very good deal for the B voters
No, they would have to pay for a solution which I think they have a right to!
Jobst regards it as unjust that the majority should be paid by the
minority to get an outcome he regards as more just. However, he isn't
looking at the utilities
No. Why must I repeat over and over again that I don't believe in measurable
utility. I interpret the numbers I gave in the example in the way I describes
several times: as representing preferences over lotteries!
The actual
consequences of the election are irrelevant to him.
What do you think you do here? Where did I say such a thing? The actual
consequences should of course be that the obvious compromise solution C should
be elected without anyone having to pay for it!
But this is a democracy.
What is the this you are referring to?
Sure, one can imagine systems where majority
rule is not sufficient for making decisions,
I cannot imagine a system where majority rule *is* sufficient for making really
*democratic* decisions.
Contrary to what Jobst might assume, I have a lot of experience
with consensus communities, both positive and negative.
I don't assume anything about your experience and have never said so. But
please keep in mind that consensus is a much different thing from majority
rule. I should think my example makes this very clear: No consensus about A nor
about B, only consensus about B being nearly as good!
However, when you get down to the nuts and bolts of a system,
*including how the system is implemented,* majority rule has proven
itself to be practical *and* sustainable.
Could you give any evidence for this fact?
Point is, when you don't have majority rule, you have decisions being
made by something *other* than the majority, even if it is only the
default decision to change nothing. And a determined minority can
then hold its right to withhold consent over the rest of the
community, in order to get what it wants. Again, it would never, in
that context, blatantly do this, but it happens, social dynamics do
not disappear in consensus communities.
Therefore I don't consider consensus as a parcticable idea in all situations.
There is nothing magic about 50%, it is simply the point where there
are more people on one side than another, there are more saying Yes
to a motion than No. Or the reverse. In real communities, other than
seriously unhealthy ones, the majority is restrained. It does not
make decisions based on mere majority, ordinarily, it seeks broader
consent, and deliberative process makes this happen.
You repeat this, but could you give evidence for this claim?
The original conditions assume commensurability of utilities,
No, definitely not! I would never propose such a thing! I only said
that those who believe in such measures may interpret the given
numbers in that way...
If the utilities are not commensurable, then there is no way to know
who is the best winner. If Jobst does not understand that, if he does
not understand how normalization -- and these are clearly normalized
utilities, can distort the results, we could explain it for him.
I gave a reasoning why C is the better solution than A. Commensurable utilities
are nonsense in my opinion. Nice for use in models but no evidence for them.
Essentially, the C-election 20% preference loss of the A voters could
have an absolute value greater than the 60% gain by the C voters. A
negotiation would expose that, because a negotiation, You give us
this in exchange for that causes the utilities to be translated to
commensurable units, the units of the negotiation. As I mentioned, it
does not have to be money.
So what unit will it be then if not money? Please be more precise,
The assumption that Jobst easily makes, that the C option is more
just, is based on an assumption of
