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Topic: Core Principles

Definition: The principles the other positions on this site are argued from.

Topic Metrics
Importance: not scored yet | Evidence Depth: 0 findings cited | Controversy: 0% of beliefs argued both ways

1 beliefs and 26 pages beneath them. Every number on this page is read from one of those pages; nothing here is typed.

What this page does. It gives every belief about this topic one fixed address, so the thousand ways of saying the same thing collapse into a single entry and the real reasons to agree or disagree can be counted and weighed by evidence instead of by how often they get repeated. The address has three parts, one per table below: Direction (which way it runs), Claim Strength (how absolute), and Specificity (where it sits on the general-to-specific tree). Same address means the same claim, so it merges; nearly the same address gets the redundancy discount.

📊 Continuum 1: Direction (Oppose ↔ Support)

Which way the belief runs, from total opposition (-100%) to total support (+100%). The Belief Score column is a separate thing: how well the belief holds up once its arguments are scored, not which way it points. A claim can sit at +100% and still score badly.

Position	Core Belief / Claim	Top Underlying Argument	Belief Score
-100% (Strongly Oppose)	Nothing here yet.
-50% (Skeptical)	Nothing here yet.
0% (Neutral/Nuanced)	Nothing here yet.
+50% (Supportive)	Nothing here yet.
+100% (Strongly Support)	A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong.	In a society with laws, a person's goals do not justify breaking the law to reach them.	+0.00

💪 Continuum 2: Claim Strength, How Absolute the Claim Is (Modest ↔ Total)

How absolute the claim is, from a hedged "sometimes" to a flat "always," independent of which way it runs and of whether it is true. Two beliefs match on this axis when they are equally bold.

Claim Strength	Pro Belief at This Strength	Anti Belief at This Strength	Scope & Telltale Words
Modest (20%) Hedged	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.	Narrow. "Some," "tends to," "in certain cases."
Moderate (50%) Standard	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.	Definite but bounded. "Clearly," "generally." Where most serious arguments live.
Strong (80%) Broad	A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong.	Nothing here yet.	Near-universal. "Across the board," "fundamentally."
Total (100%) Maximal	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.	Total, zero limits. "Always," "never." One counterexample sinks it.

Key insight: The strongest arguments on either side usually live at Moderate (50%), not Total (100%). Attacking only the Total versions is a straw man. Engage the best version of the opposing argument, not the loudest.

🌳 Continuum 3: General to Specific, with Branching Subcategories (General ↔ Specific)

The same topic holds claims at every altitude, from a sweeping worldview down to one line-item policy. A general belief branches into subcategories, and each subcategory holds the specific beliefs beneath it. A belief only merges with another that shares its branch and its rung, so a worldview never gets double-counted with the policy it implies.

Rung / Branch	Pro-Topic Belief	Anti-Topic Belief
Most General (Worldview)	A good end does not justify using means that would otherwise be wrong. 0.50	Nothing here yet.

📜 Assumption Stack Behind Each Position

Not a fourth axis. Continuum 3 sorts beliefs by altitude; this takes each stance and lists the assumptions a person must accept to hold it, which is how a fight at the bottom gets traced to its real root higher up.

To Hold Position	You Must Accept These Assumptions (General to Specific)
-100% to -50% (Strongly Oppose)	Nothing here yet.
-20% to +20% (Nuanced/Mixed)	Nothing here yet.
+50% to +100% (Strongly Support)	Nothing here yet.

⚖ Core Values Conflict

Advertised values each side claims, and the motivation critics attribute.

Values Supporting This Topic	Values Opposing This Topic
Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.

⚡ The Engagement Landscape (Passive ↔ Active)

A map of who will act, not a matching axis. It measures how far a person will go to act on a belief, which is a fact about the person, not the belief, so it never feeds the three-part address above. A casual supporter and someone willing to go to prison hold the same belief.

Engagement Level	Pro-Topic: What It Looks Like	Anti-Topic: What It Looks Like
1. Preference Passive lean	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.
2. Active Advocacy Engaged participant	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.
3. Principled Non-Compliance Conscientious objector	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.
4. Civil Disobedience Principled lawbreaking	Nothing here yet.	Nothing here yet.

Key insight: Engagement is independent of the three matching axes. Someone can hold a moderate claim (50%) about a cause they feel lukewarm toward (+40%) and still go to prison for it (Level 4).

🤝 Common Ground and Compromise

The scored cost-benefit trees read sideways. Compromise Candidates are the winnable disagreements, the ones a small likelihood shift can flip, as opposed to the symbolic value conflicts no negotiation resolves.

Shared Interests Impacts both sides want	Real Value Conflicts One side prices freedom, the other safety	Compromise Candidates A small likelihood shift flips a category's net
1. Both sides need atrocities and unjustified harm to be prevented. 2. Both sides need some actions to stay prohibited no matter what goal is claimed. 3. Both sides need to guard against the self-serving moral reasoning that people are prone to. 4. Both sides need a moral framework that works predictably across people and situations.	Nothing here yet.	1. A tiered rule framework should separate absolute prohibitions (torture, murder of civilians, fraud) from context-sensitive rules (civil disobedience under oppressive regimes), rather than treating every constraint on methods as equally rigid. 2. Any claimed exception should require democratic or judicial oversight, transparency, and accountability afterward, not the sole judgment of the actor who has an interest in the outcome. 3. The default should be that means matter and the end does not justify them, with an extremely high burden of proof for any exception that must be met by objective criteria rather than self-assessment. 4. The saying that the ends justify the means should give way to the principle that ends and means are both open to judgment, asking both whether the goal is actually good and whether the methods are justifiable on their own, rather than letting one override the other.

⚖ The Evidence Ledger

A highlight reel of the highest-impact evidence appearing anywhere under this topic, each side sorted by score, highest first. Evidence formally attaches to specific beliefs and is scored on its own page; this is the cross-topic view.

Supporting Evidence (Pro)	Quality	Weakening Evidence (Con)	Quality
The worst mass killings of the 20th century (Soviet collectivization, the Maoist purges, the Holocaust) were carried out by people who genuinely believed they were pursuing a necessary good.	0.50 (Nothing observed)	Philosophers from Foot to Thomson have built trolley problem and lifeboat scenarios in which strict adherence to rules about methods produces outcomes that almost everyone judges as worse.	0.50 (Nothing observed)
John Stuart Mill's rule utilitarianism holds that following rules produces better long-run outcomes than judging each act by its consequences, because rules resist self-serving rationalization.	0.50 (Nothing observed)	Just War Theory, endorsed by international law, most religious traditions, and nearly all moral philosophers, holds that some ends such as stopping genocide or repelling invasion can justify killing that would otherwise be prohibited.	0.50 (Nothing observed)
Under social contract theory (Locke, Hobbes, Rawls), constitutional government rests on the idea that people give up some freedom to act by any means they choose in exchange for legal protection, so reasoning that the ends justify the means is a one-sided breach of that contract.	0.50 (Nothing observed)	Rosa Parks and Gandhi broke the law, and most people now judge their illegal methods as justified by their goals.	0.50 (Nothing observed)
Research on motivated reasoning consistently shows that people are much better at spotting ends-justify-the-means reasoning in their opponents than in themselves.	0.50 (Nothing observed)

📏 Best Objective Criteria for This Topic

Agree on the yardstick before measuring. Each proposed criterion is a belief with its own page, scored on four dimensions: Validity (does it capture what we claim?), Reliability (do different observers get the same reading?), Linkage (how directly it connects to the claim), and Importance. Arguments that connect to high-scoring criteria carry more weight.

Proposed Criterion	Criteria Score	Validity	Reliability	Linkage	Importance
Nothing here yet.
Missing a criterion? Propose one in the repository with reasons for its validity, reliability, linkage, and importance.

📚 Best Media and Resources

Every work cited on a belief page in this topic, sorted by how much it moved those pages. Quality and impact are argued on the work's own page.

Title	Medium	Bias/Tone	Positivity	Claim Strength	Quality	Key Insight
Nothing here yet.

The Children column is where full subcategories from Continuum 3 go once they outgrow a row and earn their own page.

Broader (Parents)	Sub-Issues (Children)	Related (Siblings)	Opposing / Critical Views
Society & Culture	Nothing here yet.	People Environment Religion Family Crime and Justice	Nothing here yet.

📬 Contribute

If you would rather use git, every cell here is a row in the repository: a belief is a page row with the topic core-principles, and a cell on this page is an edges row with page core-principles and one of the topic sections.

Built from revision 42c8344, committed 2026-10-04. 2173 pages. Every number above is computed from the two tables in that revision, so a reader who fetches it gets these numbers and not different ones.