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Comment by danbruc | Hacker News Reader

But even then, if the better part of a population [1] just really, really wants something even if it objectively makes no sense at all, on which ground do you oppose the desire of the majority? I am not sure if you could justifiably oppose the majority, but if you can, it requires probably quite a bit of philosophical work to make that case.

[1] Just to be clear, I am not talking about this specific case, there is no majority here, but about the general case where a majority has some unreasonable ideas.

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I can oppose the desires of the majority on exactly the same grounds as I can oppose the desires of a single person. Being in the majority doesn't give anyone the right to impose their desires on everyone else. There is really nothing morally special about a majority.

You have the constitution setting the framework of what's permissible. Some countries like Germany have portions of the constitution that can't legally be changed, relating to human rights or the state being a democracy.

Of course a sufficiently large majority can just ignore that.

Our democratic model will bend to the unreasonable demands of the majority.

But religious people are increasingly not the majority in Europe, certainly not the ones that demand special animal abuse privileges.

I wouldn't even want to restrict this to religion, there are other topics like taxation, climate change, capital punishment, gun laws, and what not where I can easily imagine that the majority opinion might be flawed because people don't think the issues through carefully enough. And I would guess that it is actually not too uncommon that politics acts against the majority opinion or at least the opinion of large groups. I don't think that this is necessarily bad, after all they are - at least supposed to be - the experts. And that is why I commented to begin with, there is probably some interesting philosophy going on in this area as the majority opinion is not necessarily the correct opinion.

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