opinions-political-majorityRuleIsNotUniquelyNatural

Sometimes you hear the implicit assumption that a 50%-threshold-first-past-the-post vote decision-making rule is special; either "natural" or "most ethical" or something.

But voting with the object of letting "the majority" get its way isn't the only way to do things.

For instance some groups use super-majority voting in which nothing can be done without 80% agreement; in my limited experience, these groups tend to consider something "the will of group" when its around 80%, but just "the will of a faction of people within the group" if only 60% agree with something.

There are also decision-making processes which focus not on voting "against" one's opponents, but rather on modifying the resolution to make it more palatable to others; for example, in the "consensus"-ish{{I say consensus-ish because some of these allow a resolution to pass once, say, 95% agrees on it}} processes, when a resolution is proposed, most of the focus is on modifying it to make it more palatable to everyone else; not on "winning the vote".

Certainly a 50% threshold vote is more ethical than letting a small clique of people make all the decisions; but it is not clearly more ethical than a 60% threshold vote, or a consensus-ish process.