These principles are intuitively appealing, and they help to explain why democracy is so popular. Of course we feel it is fair that we should have as much chance as anyone else to decide on common rules! The problems arise when we consider how the principles can be put into practice, because we need a mechanism for deciding how to address conflicting views. Because it offers a simple mechanism, democracy tends to be “rule of the majority”; but rule of the majority can mean that some people’s interests are never represented. A more genuine way of representing everyone’s interests is to use decision making by consensus, where the aim is to find common points of interest.