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<font face="Helvetica, Arial, sans-serif">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. <br>
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.<br>
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.<br>
CJC<br>
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<div class="moz-cite-prefix">On 18/08/2023 23:23, Kevin Venzke
wrote:<br>
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cite="mid:1825337225.1921808.1692397384785@mail.yahoo.com">
<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">Hello,
Le vendredi 18 août 2023 à 15:59:02 UTC−5, Colin Champion <a class="moz-txt-link-rfc2396E" href="mailto:colin.champion@routemaster.app"><colin.champion@routemaster.app></a> a écrit :
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">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:
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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.
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<pre class="moz-quote-pre" wrap="">
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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