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Ezekiel comments on Rationality Quotes February 2012 - Less Wrong
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This is probably me projecting, but I took it to be about distinguishing between those which make claims about reality and those which don't.
For example: If somebody says "You should be democratic, because the people have the right to rule themselves" - that's not even claiming to be a fact, just an ethical position. If they say "You should be democratic, because democratic countries do better economically," then that's a about the real world, which I could even test if I wanted to.
In my admittedly limited experience, it seems that a lot of confusion in the greatest mind-killing subjects (politics and spirituality) come from people not properly distinguishing between those two kinds of statements.
And that issue often becomes circular. People often have both ethical and factual reasons to take a political position, and they don't clearly split them apart in their mind, each reason propagating to reinforce the other.
I'll take a personal example : I oppose death penalty for many reason, but among them one is ethical (I don't approve of voluntary terminating a human life for ethical reasons) and one is more factual (I believe as a fact, from various statistics, that death penalty does not deter crime). But it requires a conscientious effort from myself (and I didn't always do it, and I suspect many don't do it) to not have each of two reasons reinforcing the other with a feedback loop.
The interesting question is how you evaluate proposed big changes. Democracy has turned out to be a moderately good idea, but trying it out for the first few times was something of a leap in the dark.
There are reasons for thinking that democracy might work better than monarchy-- generally speaking, a bad ruler can do more damage than not having a great ruler can do good, but is the theoretical reason good enough?
From what I heard, the person who established Athenian democracy did so after first overthrowing the previous ruler in a civil war, having concluded that becoming powerful was the best way to become a Great Man. He then reasoned that, since everyone should strive to be a Great Man, then everyone else would also be obliged to do the same thing he just did - which would mean endless civil wars. Which would be bad. So he came up with the clever solution of making everyone a ruler, so they could all be Great Men without having to kill each other first. Hence, democracy.
Or something like that, anyway. Wikipedia doesn't say all that much, so I suspect that the story I remember is more story than actual history.