Rule by the majority rules!
Taurek once wrote that, when choosing between saving one life or saving five, we ought to flip a coin, giving each person an equal chance of survival. Saving the five, he thought, was unfair, giving the one person no chance of survival at all.
The debate over this nicely mirrors some thoughts on democracy. Richard takes it that if 60% of a population always vote the same way, then this is really oligarchy and not democracy. It's unfair, you might say, to never pay any attention to the wishes of the minority.
One solution in the democratic case is to copy Taurek's suggestion. We could have "lottery democracy": Each election, pick a voter at random, and they get their way. This might be pragmatically a terrible idea, but, you might claim, it has fairness in it's favour, if nothing else.
Another solution is to hold a weighted lottery: If 60% of the voters vote one way, 40% the other, then you arrange things so that there is a 60% chance that the majority get their way, and a 40% chance of the reverse.
But there's another way of looking at things, that I think meets this fairness constraint, and allows us to stick with traditional majoritarianism. I like it, but I'm not sure if I yet endorse it.
Imagine that we ask a democratic Taurekian to give guidance for elections in ten years time. Well, they might reason, going with the majority in ten years time gives everyone now the greatest chance of getting their way - each of us is most likely to be in the majority in any vote.
So there's a sense in which going with the majority is fair (and therefore, I take it, not oligarchic). It's fair in a Rawslian sense. Behind a veil of ignorance, where you don't know whether you'll be in the majority or not, you'd hope that the majority get their way, because that's where you'll probably end up.
So majoritarianism is not so crude as it's made out to be. It's the embodiment of fairness, since it gives everyone the greatest chance of influencing the decision made.
(Equivalent remarks stand on Taurek's original point: Always save the greater number now, because that's where every person should now expect to find themselves eventually)
permanent factions
What if there are fixed factions, e.g. along ethnic or religious lines, so that a current minority cannot expect to become a member of the majority in future? Perhaps you could retreat even further to the veil of ignorance, but even there we surely wouldn't want to take the risk of pure majoritarianism without some safeguards to protect the rights of minorities, etc. (But maybe this is a separate issue from "fairness".)
Yes - I flip-flop between
Yes - I flip-flop between some form of time-delay fairness in the post, and a genuine hypothetical veil of ignorance. I think it's the latter that I mean; so I "retreat" further to the veil of ignorance.
As you accurately predict, I don't think that safeguarding rights falls under the realm of fairness at all. Some democratic processes are fairer than others, others more often generate better consequences. If what I say here is correct, then fairness implies majoritarianism, but we sometimes, for pragmatic reasons, ought to not go with the majority. That's less fair, but sometimes justified.
Al