[EM] STAR

[Colin Champion]

Kevin - I think I agree really. It's a debate about utilitarianism. 
There's a shallow objection to adding utilities, which is that they may 
not be suitably scaled, and a more serious one that considerations of 
justice etc may enter into people's moral judgements, and that these 
don't lend themselves to a utilitarian calculus. Different objective 
functions will have different optima. But it's one thing to cricitise 
fpdk's model, and another to criticise the conclusion drawn from it.
    And this is why I'm still puzzled by what Forest is saying. If 
fpdk's model is what I assume it to be, I don't see how there's room to 
improve on cardinal voting, or how cardinal voting can be only 'not too 
bad'. Perhaps Forest has another objective function in mind, based on 
consensus rather than utilities, but I'm not sure what it is or whether 
it's really an improvement.
    As I recall, Amartya Sen goes to town in distancing himself from 
utilitarianism. In an extreme case (which I'm not sure Sen would 
reject), collective utility might be an increasing function of the 
utility of the worst-off member of society, and a decreasing function of 
everyone else's. Obviously no monotonic transformation of individual 
utilities can reconcile this with utilitarianism.
    CJC

On 18/08/2023 23:23, Kevin Venzke wrote:
> Hello,
>
> Le vendredi 18 août 2023 à 15:59:02 UTC−5, Colin Champion <colin.champion at routemaster.app> a écrit :
>> Forest - I read fpdk's post as an implicit argument for cardinal voting
>> (which was why it was relevant to STAR). Each friend states the utility of
>> each topping to himself or herself: which topping do they choose
>> collectively? And the answer is the one whose sum of utilities is greatest.
>> I don't think there's a better answer.
>>      CJC
>>   
>>   
>> On 18/08/2023 21:50, Forest Simmons wrote:
>>>    
>>> He posed a pizza choice among friends pronlem.. a problem of consensus as
>>> opposed to "tyranny of the majority" ... how to find the best consensus
>>> decision when a simple majority first place preference would not be ideal.
> If we're discussing a group of friends as the voters, who possess a higher
> goal, not of getting the best outcome for themselves individually, but to
> ensure some global happiness with the result, I guess there would be some
> room to play around with what that happiness goal is.
>
> What occurs to me in particular is that a group might want to minimize the
> number of voters who are "really unhappy" with the result. So you might have
> some option which maximizes utility, but the group would opt against that
> one if one friend is particularly harmed by it.
>
> To be honest "max utility wins" doesn't strike me as a rule friends would
> use, unless the issues voted on are not really that critical to anyone.
>
> Kevin
> votingmethods.net
> ----
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