election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto)
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@clay, that is not “ethics 101”; it is a substantive and highly contested form of moral subjectivism. Aristotelian, Kantian, contractualist, natural-law, constructivist, moral-realist, and many consequentialist theories do not define “ought” as “I would subjectively prefer that.”
Likewise, legal rights are created or recognized by law, but moral rights are precisely the standards by which laws may be judged unjust. Saying that “rights are just laws” eliminates the distinction between legality and justice by definition rather than defending that conclusion.
Describing domination as a conflict between two utility functions also does not resolve the normative issue. It tells us that the parties prefer different outcomes; it does not tell us whose preference should govern, whether both preferences deserve equal standing, whether malicious or coercive preferences should count, or what constraints should apply to their aggregation.
You are advancing a preference-subjectivist theory of normativity. That is one possible philosophical position, but it is not the definition of “ought,” and it does not make competing ethical theories disappear by stipulation.
But setting that aside, I asked several questions above that your response did not address.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, that is not “ethics 101”; it is a substantive and highly contested form of moral subjectivism. Aristotelian, Kantian, contractualist, natural-law, constructivist, moral-realist, and many consequentialist theories do not define “ought” as “I would subjectively prefer that.”
but they're wrong. and you can trivially demonstrate that. preference sovereignty principle. I explained all of this and you're not making contact with it.
https://wonk.blog/ethics.html#isought
Describing domination as a conflict between two utility functions also does not resolve the normative issue.
Yes it does. normative just means relating to subjective preference.
some people support the death penalty, some people don't. some people think abortion is wrong, other people don't. it's just subjective preferences.
Do you literally think there is some physical property called morality? Do you think I can make a device which can measure it in atoms? this is unhinged.
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@cfrank The problem here is that you have profoundly broken mental models of a number of foundational concepts. The ethical piece and lack of recognition of the preference sovereignty principle is a major one, but the subsidiarity component is maybe more blatant because it's so much more straightforward.
the binding problem is real, i'll grant it outright. a powerful group can override a smaller one for a small gain to itself and a large loss to them. that's game theory, and it happens.
take the hardest version, zoning. upzoning a block cuts housing costs for thousands and mildly inconveniences a few current neighbors. the ones who'd gain most are the people who'd move in, and they can't vote yet, because the units don't exist and they don't live there. the biggest stake sits outside the electorate entirely.
now look at what people actually reach for to fix that. state preemption, by-right approval, ending single-family zoning. nobody proposes giving pro-housing voters extra votes across the board. even in the hardest case, the blanket multiplier isn't on the list, because it's the wrong instrument: it hands a faction more weight on every question to patch a shortfall on one, at a cost well above what it fixes.
and most of the time the problem is smaller than it looks, because good aggregation absorbs it. a candidate who upzones and pairs it with concessions the neighbors actually want takes both camps and beats one who serves a single faction. that's triangulating to maximum total support, and a higher-VSE method does it by construction, capturing intensity across factions without making anyone's vote count double.
to apply that to your example, if people in the Chinese mainland are barely affected by what goes on in Hawaii, then a politician who makes policies that significantly harm Hawaiians but only marginally improve utility for people living on the Chinese mainland, then with a good voting method he won't do well. and if for some reason they actually do get utility from affecting policy in Hawaii, then enacting that policy is by definition good.
you can make a stupidly simple example where you have a district composed of two cities of equal size several miles from each other and there's a vote on a district-wide law concerning noise ordinances. people in City A just want to party and don't care about loud noise. people in City B are old and retired and want peace and quiet. it's just a few people in the Party City are anti-noise and pass this law by 51% that governs how both cities collectively regulate noise, you could say that's really bad because voters in one of the cities are controlling what voters in the other city are doing even though it doesn't affect them.
but stop and think about this for more than 5 seconds. it can be helpful.
if the noise in city A really doesn't affect people in city B, then they won't be willing to sacrifice very much to get that policy. The winning candidate will tend to be somebody who only wants to apply noise ordinances to City B. or who just wants to leave it to the cities to regulate locally. because somebody who embraces across the board noise ordinances only slightly increases utility for people in city B who just have a weird urge to regulate things that don't even really affect them. but it significantly decreases the utility of people in city A.
this is all just super trivial basic social choice theory. I find it kind of baffling that this is even up for debate.
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@clay, you still have not answered the questions I asked. But your response regarding Hawaii is clarifying. You appear to be saying that if a sufficiently large outside population gains enough aggregate utility from controlling policy in Hawaii, then such control is “by definition good,” regardless of Hawaiian self-government, political membership, jurisdiction, or consent.
Is that in fact your position?
If so, then your theory does not merely reject territorial weighting within an existing polity. It rejects any independent normative significance for self-determination, sovereignty, jurisdiction, bounded political membership, or consent whenever aggregate external utility points the other way. That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”
The same logic would appear to permit a policy such as: “Take all extractable resources from region A and transfer them to region B,” provided that the aggregate utility gain claimed for the population of B exceeded the aggregate utility loss imposed on the population of A. Would that policy therefore be “by definition good” under your framework?
More fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals? It seems unlikely to me that we could use, for example, atoms, or some such thing.
Moderator note: Describing another participant’s mental models as “profoundly broken” is personal disparagement. Address the argument rather than the participant’s competence. You have already been warned about this. Further personal disparagement may result in moderation action.
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@cfrank you can choose whether you want to debate with the moderator or with me. take your pic.
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@clay you misunderstand. I am both a participant in this discussion and a moderator of the forum. The moderation note concerns your conduct; the rest of my post concerns your argument.
For reference, the Code of Conduct can be found here: https://www.votingtheory.org/forum/topic/16/read-me-code-of-conduct?_=1783225633021
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, [...] You appear to be saying that if a sufficiently large outside population gains enough aggregate utility from controlling policy in Hawaii, then such control is “by definition good,” regardless of Hawaiian self-government, political membership, jurisdiction, or consent.
no. i'm explaining that "good" is relative. to the chinese, the move would be good. to the hawaiians, it would be bad.
and given you have a given population, the best outcome is the one that has the highest sum of utilities. this is just proven.
Is that in fact your position?
it's not a "position", it's just a potential set of preferences, and a mathematical proof.
If so, then your theory does not merely reject territorial weighting within an existing polity. It rejects any independent normative significance for self-determination, sovereignty, jurisdiction, bounded political membership, or consent whenever aggregate external utility points the other way.
this is confusion. "normative" just means "related to subjective preference", and the hawaiians in that example would experience a loss of self-determination/sovereignty/etc. as "lower utility". that's what happens whenever you make group decisions aka "elections". other people in your city will vote on laws that affect you. they will vote to take your money by force (taxes), vote on how late you can buy alcohol, etc. that just affects your utility. we're just talking about preferences. social choice theory 101.
That is a radical substantive political theory, not “trivial basic social choice theory.”
no, it's just basic social choice theory.
https://wonk.blog/ethics
https://rangevoting.net/UtilFoundnsi'm not sure why you refer to learn about this topic, yet continue to confidently make incorrect statements about it.
The same logic would appear to permit a policy such as: “Take all extractable resources from region A and transfer them to region B,” provided that the aggregate utility gain claimed for the population of B exceeded the aggregate utility loss imposed on the population of A. Would that policy therefore be “by definition good” under your framework?
it's not my "framework", it's just mathematically proven.
https://rangevoting.net/UtilFoundnsMore fundamentally, how do you propose to measure utility and make cardinal interpersonal comparisons of it across the affected individuals?
elections.
https://rangevoting.net/WhyNoHumansvoting theory 101.
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@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified. That is the standard use in political philosophy. You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.
You now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own. A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice. Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments. Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.
Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force. They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total. So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?
Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison. Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.
Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility. A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains. Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.
So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance? You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, I introduced “normative” to mean questions about what institutions ought to do and what arrangements are justified.
"ought" just means "would satisfy my preferences". if you say someone "ought" to do something, that's identical to saying, "i would prefer it if you would do that thing."
similarly, "justified" means "satisfies my preferences". that's it.
That is the standard use in political philosophy.
show me any use of these words that you think constitutes "political philosophy", and i will demonstrate that it just means subjective preference. your lack of familiarity with basic social choice theory is astonishing.
You may argue that normativity reduces to subjective preference, but that is your metaethical theory, and that conclusion has not been established here, nor is it the definition of the term.
yes it has, and i just proved it. and you have zero counterargument.
https://wonk.blog/ethics#isoughtYou now appear to be defending total utilitarianism: for a given population, the best outcome is the one with the highest sum of utilities. That is a controversial normative principle, not something mathematics proves on its own.
you're dead wrong, and this is proven.
A theorem may show what follows from a chosen social-welfare function; it does not prove that summed utility is the uniquely correct standard of justice.
you have this completely backward. the theorem proves what the correct social welfare function is. it does not use the social welfare function as a premise. you have absolutely no idea what you're talking about.
Without an independently justified method for specifying and comparing utilities, the framework can be made to rationalize radically different outcomes simply by changing the utility assignments.
this is a classic novice fallacy, thinking that utilities have to be in a consistent scale to be summed. this is obviously wrong, as harsanyi proved.
it is amazing that you refuse to spend a few minutes learning about this topic before plodding in and making a series of confidently wrong arguments.
Your own citation is substantially more cautious about interpersonal utility comparison than your claims here.
it is not "cautious", it just explains the fact that i just explained to you in even more layman-friendly language with the hope that you might be able to grok it.
Harsanyi's argument "Social Utility" is the average of individual utilities
Let uk(e) denote the utility (according to individual k) of an event e. We want to investigate how to aggregate the individual utilities into a "social utility" saying "how good e is for all of society." For what reason should we claim that social utility is just the average of individual utilities?
J.C.Harsanyi, in a 2-page article involving no mathematics whatever [J.Political Economy 61,5 (1953) 434-435], came up with the following nice idea: "Optimizing social welfare" means "picking the state of the world all individuals would prefer if they were in a state of uncertainty about their identity." I.e. if you are equally likely to be anybody, then your expected utility is the summed utility in the world divided by the number of people in it – i.e. average utility. Then by the linear-lottery property (Lin) of von Neumann utility, it follows that social utility is averaging.Regardless, your framework also seems to give rights, consent, sovereignty, self-determination, and distribution no independent force.
it is not my "framework", it is just obvious factual reality. the only "force" people care about is their utility. preference sovereignty principle.
why do you insist on plodding ahead making these kinds of vacuous statements when you could just spend a few minutes learning basic social choice theory?
They apparently matter only insofar as they affect the utility total.
"matter" literally means "has utility", so this is a lovely tautology.
So I will ask again: if a large outside population gains many small benefits by confiscating nearly all resources from a smaller region whose residents suffer catastrophic losses, is that policy “by definition good” whenever the summed utility favors the outsiders?
and i will repeat, again, that it is good to those who benefit, and bad to those who don't. maybe learn what the word "preference" means.
Nor does “elections” solve the problem of cardinal interpersonal utility comparison.
there is no "problem" of interpersonal utility comparisons, as i have voluminously explained to you. could you please try actually reading anything i sent you instead of repeating confused nonsense? this should only take a few minutes to read, and would save you a lot of time. and it would save me a lot of time, not having to explain second grade level conceptual reasoning to a grown adult.
https://clayshentrup.medium.com/understanding-social-utility-through-harsanyis-argument-528ba25241fd
Elections record choices under a particular procedure and produce a collective decision; they do not place different people’s welfare on a common measurable scale.
you DO NOT NEED A COMMON SCALE! the voting method with the highest VSE already has the highest expected utility FOR YOU!!! IN YOUR OWN PERSONAL UTILITY SCALE!!!!
please spend more than 30 seconds studying and trying to understand this before sending me another round of confused nonsense.
Furthermore, the veil of ignorance reasoning does not by itself imply that individuals would prefer social positions that maximize their expected utility.
utility is a measure of how much you want something or prefer it, so of course you by definition want that which maximizes your expected utility.
A chooser behind the veil may evaluate not only their expected payoff, but also the distribution of benefits and burdens, the condition of the worst-off, exposure to domination, and whether some losses may legitimately be imposed for others’ gains.
this is sheer confusion. behind the veil of ignorance, you do not need to think about anyone else. you can think purely selfishly and that will be identical to being "altrustic" toward everyone else because they are ALSO uncertain of their identity. selfishness and altruism become the same thing. you may already BE the worst off—there is some probability of that. so you've already taken that into account.
you. are. confused. wake up.
Treating the veil as a device for maximizing summed expected utility imports the utilitarian conclusion into the assumptions rather than deriving it.
no, it does not use summed expected utility as an axiom whatsoever. you're just wrong and clearly confused.
So the normative question remains: should political institutions be governed solely by aggregate preference satisfaction, or do rights, consent, distribution, non-domination, self-determination, and political membership have independent importance?
- there is no such thing as a "normative question". there's just utility/preference. those things you just listed, to the extent they are even meaningful concepts, are just "things which affect your utility". specifically, there is no such thing as "consent" in group decisions. consent only applies to personal decisions made by a single individual. you only "consent" to having your favorite option selected, but some option is going to happen regardless, and the only thing we can optimize is how well off you are. many/most people will not get their favorite option. this is just reality.
the amount of confusion in your words is staggering.
You have asserted one answer. You have not shown that the question is confused or that your answer is mathematically compulsory rather than a contestable normative commitment.
i have absolutely shown those things. the fact that you are confused is not an argument.
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@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused. If you continue engaging with others on this forum in this manner, I expect you will receive responses similar to mine, and if you continue not to adhere to the Code of Conduct, you may eventually face moderation action, including a ban.
Regarding reading material, I linked you to the Code of Conduct, and I strongly advise that you read it before continuing to participate here. I would also suggest consulting a standard dictionary entry for “normative,” since the term does not mean “whatever satisfies my preferences.”
Readers can judge this exchange for themselves. You repeatedly cite your own writings as authority, refuse to engage reasonable objections in good faith, and do not answer basic questions put to you. The external citations you provide are themselves significantly more measured than your presentation of them suggests. Harsanyi, for example, explicitly presented his conclusions as conditional on particular ethical postulates and assumptions about rational choice and interpersonal comparison; he did not claim to have mathematically proved the uniquely correct theory of justice. I see no value for me, for you, for this forum, or for the broader reform movement in continuing this exchange. Best of luck to you.
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@cfrank said in election by jury (www.electionbyjury.com/manifesto):
@clay, there is no purpose in continuing this discussion with you. Your approach to discourse is unlikely to convince others, and it is not because you are right while everyone else is wrong. A good-faith response to a serious objection is to examine the premise and answer the question—not repeatedly declare the questioner confused.
I have meticulously dismantled your arguments point by point.
for example, you made the classic fallacy of thinking my arguments require interpersonal utility comparisons. but harsanyi's observation is that you don't need this at all. The outcome with the highest group utility will also have the highest expected utility for you in your own utility scale without any need to have the different utilities in common units.
when you think about it for a second this is trivially obvious from grade school level mathematics. but I actually cited a voluminous link about it written by a math PhD who is widely regarded as the foremost expert in this field and you STILL just ignored it.
My point here was not just "convincing", it is trivially obviously true. and you're in a forum that is literally called "voting theory"—yet you have chosen to not just spend a little time reading about the foundational principles of the field that literally any expert in the field is familiar with. you should really reflect on this. this would be like going into a climate change debate and saying climate change isn't happening because there was an unusually bad winter storm somewhere. anybody familiar with the topic would absolutely roast you for failing to grasp a multitude of basic scientific concepts that anybody up for a debate should have invested the time learning about.