It diffuses responsibility – "we all voted for it, just not me!" – with unlimited justification – "hey, majority makes it right!"

Which is why I tempered it with a call to respect the right of exit.

But yes, I agree it's awful solution for government, my post was in the context of collective decisionmaking.

It diffuses responsibility – "we all voted for it, just not me!" – with unlimited justification – "hey, majority makes it right!"

Unlimited horror without responsibility – hell on earth.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Consensus_decision-m…

While I agree with the gist of some of the things you're recognizing, I think your argument is rather flawed. I would agree with the general idea you bring up in terms of costs of divestiture and least resistance, but I ask you to consider the following rephrasing:

[ In the real world, transaction costs are not zero, and abiding by a MINORITY decision may in many instances simply be the path of least resistance; in some circumstances the actors may judge that even though they disagree with the MINORITY, the process of divestiture affords no greater opportunity, in which cases they agree to abide by the MINORITY decision. ]

My point is that we can conceive of situations in which least resistance might point in the direction of a minority or plurality instead of majority. To write these off seems inefficient. While at the same time the serious issues they pose LIKEWISE are problems in situations of majorities.

In general I see consensus process (in one permutation or another) as the only possible way to reach decisions collectively. But consensus process is dynamic enough to include and handle those sort of divestment / least resistance situations well (and does so on a regular basis in every meeting).