Other not-easily-thinkable positions (I don’t believe any of these, but believe they’re not utterly ridiculous):
Upvoted for showing a good alternative to my primitive heuristic of “Cruel as fuck”. Unsettling and hard to propagate through one’s belief net, but few would call those evil.
The heuristic I used seems to be “take a position that’s controversial, and assume the arguments for it are superpowered”. E.g. animal rights become animal equality.
A position that’s uncontroversial because universally rejected makes a poor starting point; if I’m able to think of it at all, I probably won’t find very good arguments to superpower. At most, they’ll be isolated argument, not a big philosophical toolbox like “consent” or “personhood as pattern”.
A position that’s uncontroversial because universally accepted tends to have superpowered arguments in the first place, and to get controversial where their arguments start losing power. For example, “racism is bad” is generalized to “beings should be equal”, which gives controversial positions about moral status of AI, fetuses, and animals. The only uncontroversial positions I see that aren’t at the center of an ideology with controversial fringes are extremely narrow questions, like the color of the sky.
Upvoted for showing a good alternative to my primitive heuristic of “Cruel as fuck”. Unsettling and hard to propagate through one’s belief net, but few would call those evil.
The heuristic I used seems to be “take a position that’s controversial, and assume the arguments for it are superpowered”. E.g. animal rights become animal equality.
Why limit yourself to starting with controversial positions?
A position that’s uncontroversial because universally rejected makes a poor starting point; if I’m able to think of it at all, I probably won’t find very good arguments to superpower. At most, they’ll be isolated argument, not a big philosophical toolbox like “consent” or “personhood as pattern”.
A position that’s uncontroversial because universally accepted tends to have superpowered arguments in the first place, and to get controversial where their arguments start losing power. For example, “racism is bad” is generalized to “beings should be equal”, which gives controversial positions about moral status of AI, fetuses, and animals. The only uncontroversial positions I see that aren’t at the center of an ideology with controversial fringes are extremely narrow questions, like the color of the sky.