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Tim Tyler's avatar

Re: what grounds are there for weighing everyone equally?

If you are dealing with a democratic organisation, or one where the members like the American Declaration of Independence, or go in for political correctness, that assumption might be useful.

It seems to me that there are other cases where it is not such a useful assumption. Ignoring the views of the old is common: they will be dead soon anyway - so their opinions don't matter. Ignoring the views of the young is common: they are too inexperienced to know better - and so on.

In some circles, idea that "everyone is equal" is considered to be politically-correct nonsense - and if you are offering economic advice to groups of such folks, "efficiency" seems unlikely to be a good selling point.

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Overcoming Bias Commenter's avatar

Does efficiency measures not assume that valuations are meaningfully comparible? Is this true for any "interesting" issue? Also, couldn't one say that if you really (and strongly) believed this (efficiency over liberty) Robin, that you would not enter into a debate format, but mearly take a poll at the begining, sum the results, and say "that is the winning idea here?", "I win" or (more paradoxically) "I lose" (repeat in case of tie until summed indifference is broken?). Doesn't debate assume a liberty perspective?

http://arare-litus.blogspot...

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