Politics is the mind-killer; our opinions are largely formed on the basis of which tribes we want to affiliate with. What's more, when we first joined a tribe, we probably didn't properly vet the effects it would have on our cognition.
One illustration of this is the apparently contingent nature of actual political coalitions, and the prima facie plausibility of others. For example,
- In the real world, animal rights activists tend to be pro-choice.
- But animal rights & fetus rights seems just as plausible coalition - an expanding sphere of moral worth.
This suggests a de-biasing technique; inventing plausible alternative coalitions of ideas. When considering the counterfactual political argument, each side will have some red positions and some green positions, so hopefully your brain will be forced to evaluate it in a more rational manner.
Obviously, political issues are not all orthogonal; there is mutual information, and you don't want to ignore it. The idea isn't to decide your belief on every issue independently. If taxes on beer, cider and wine are a good idea, taxes on spirits are probably a good idea too. However, I think this is reflected in the "plausible coalitions" game; the most plausible reason I could think of for the political divide to fall between these is lobbying on behalf of distilleries, suggesting that these form a natural cluster in policy-space.
In case the idea can be more clearly grokked by examples, I'll post some in the comments.
The "plausible alternative coalitions" game seems to illustrate — by contrast — the historical processes by which actual political positions came about. For instance, the anti-abortion position didn't actually come about through an "expanding sphere of moral worth" extending rights to fetuses; and the fact that anti-abortion folks are not the same people as animal-rights folks is evidence that it didn't.
Early anti-abortion jurisprudence in England and the U.S. categorized a woman taking an abortifacient as felo de se — a felon against herself — the same standing as a suicide. [1] The crime was not defined in terms of the fetus possessing rights, but in terms of a violence against the woman's body. On similar reasoning, many first-wave feminists opposed medical abortion as a violent intrusion;[2] while they were interested in reproductive freedom, for many of them this meant the right of a wife to choose when and whether to have sex with her husband.
Other issues involved in banning abortion in the U.S. included the legal establishment of the medical profession (with physicians using the law to drive midwives out of business) and eugenics. The major customers of abortion in the 19th century were middle- and upper-class native-born white women; and eugenicists raised the concern that these desirable classes would commit "race suicide" and be outbred by undesirable immigrants and poor people. [3]
The modern religious "pro-life" anti-abortion position, although it is often stated in terms of fetal rights, is also entangled with other motives: among these, religious opposition to contraception in general, and opposition to the social consequences of individual control over reproduction, viz., sexual freedom or license.
Few of these actual historical entanglements have the sense of an "expanding sphere of moral worth" towards the fetus; in other words, a moral foundation of fairness and justice. They show patterns more attached to other moral foundations — care towards the woman herself; loyalty towards racial and class groups; religious authority; and sexual sanctity or purity.
Conversely they were in favor of abortion and sterilization (frequently forced) for the poor and undesirable.