Fairness and Majority.

A real brainteaser to help everyone to take a step back and think about things a little more rationally. A lot of the time when our opinions get awoken, it seems to be that we act and speak on impulse. The idea behind these little exercises are to get you to avoid such things.

Our first case is about Fairness and Majority. If I was to say 'what would make a successful democracy?' you would probably answer back, 'well when the party with the most votes wins.' Simple as that? Indeed it is not, what if the majority does not necessarily mean fairness?

The case being that (for simplicity) 75% of people vote for Party A who support X and the remaining 25% vote for Party Y who support Y (for purposes of simplicity there would be no other options). It would seem you have no problem with saying to an extent that it was fair. However, what about those 25%? should they accept defeat of their preferences because a lot more other people say different.  Such a puzzle gets more difficult when proposing an alternative case. For this instance, 51% of people vote for Party A and 49% of people vote for party B then such a view of fairness and democracy becomes vague. If you say that this makes no difference Party A still wins fairly then you must admit to disregarding to 49% of the population which can be seen as harsh. However, if you say 'no! there's something definitely unfair', well unfortunately you come into problems too. You say there's something wrong with a 51%/49% split but there is nothing wrong with a 75%/25% then you must ask yourself, is there something special about a large majority? Should we allow the majority to rule over our lives? And where do we draw the line at a large majority.

If however, you have read to this point and disagree with everything that I have said, well you are most probably indeed are an anarchist and there are plenty of people like you who disagree with everything that is 'democratic.'