Consensus and Climate Change

Covid and Climate Change are telling us all that we have to cooperate. Well we can’t do that very well if, whenever we make decisions, we are forever voting (“for” or) “against” each other! With a system of preferential points voting, however, people can indeed work with each other. Secondly, life these days is fairly complex, and in almost every sphere, use is made of precision instruments: speedometers in cars, altimeters in aircraft, thermometers in ovens, and so on. These tools are not binary, marked “fast” or “slow”, “high” or “low”, “hot” or “cold”; rather, they are all calibrated, in kms/hour, metres, degrees, whatever. The one obvious exception is the tool used in political decision-making, the 2,500-year-old majority vote in which opinions are labelled “yes” or “no”. There are some precision instruments in which opinions are calibrated in preferences, but many politicians as we shall see, prefer the blunt binary ballot. Accordingly, this paper reviews some of the historical work done in the science of social choice. The text first proves that majority voting can be inaccurate, before then focusing on multi-option, and later preferential-points voting procedures. This shows that people could indeed cooperate if they agreed to a multi-option procedure in which can be identified the option with the highest average preference, and an average, of course, involves everyone (who votes). For decisions to be based on such a preferential procedure, computers would need to be introduced into the world’s decision-making chambers, in order to cater for electronic, multi-option, preferential voting. If this were to happen, it could be that the political structures of countries which today regard themselves as competitors if not indeed as opponents, could merge into a commonality, to result in a more peaceful worldwide milieu, such as is so necessary to tackle the problems of climate change.