Does Majority Approval Make Something Right?

Majority approval can determine how a shared rule is adopted, but it cannot by itself prove that a judgement is true or right. If five people must choose a meeting time, a three-to-two vote is a way to end disagreement when unanimity is unavailable. Yet if the same three votes remove the other two people’s right to speak, the result does not acquire sufficient moral justification merely from the count.

Defences of majority rule commonly operate on at least two levels. One is procedural: when everyone has an equal opportunity to participate, majority rule expresses political equality better than allowing one person or a permanent minority to dominate. The other is epistemic: open discussion and diverse information can sometimes improve the chance of a better decision. Being more likely to be right, however, is not the same as making the majority infallible.

John Stuart Mill warned against the “tyranny of the majority” because prevailing social opinion can suppress individuals even without a despotic ruler. My judgement is that majority rule is an important procedure for shared decisions, but it must remain constrained by basic rights, public reasons and mechanisms for revision. A vote tells us who has prevailed for now; it cannot replace an argument about truth or justice.

https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/democracy/
https://www.gutenberg.org/files/34901/34901-h/34901-h.htm