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Dentin comments on Why do you really believe what you believe regarding controversial subjects? - Less Wrong Discussion
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An awful lot of controversial subjects have one thing in common: they are complicated. Often complicated enough that a clear answer isn't always obvious. An excellent heuristic I've used for years is to prefer the side that says "it's complicated" over the side that says "it's simple". Two examples of this:
the cause of the 2008 economic crisis: any side saying things like "clearly, X caused it" or "it's the fault of Y" or "the evil bankers did it" should be given lower weight than a side saying "there were a lot of factors, economics is complicated".
abortion: any side saying "abortion is murder" or "a fetus is a person too" should be given lower weight than a side saying "this is a complex problem because personhood isn't binary, our morals aren't absolute, and we make other cost/benefit tradeoffs against human life all the time".
I agree about preferring complexity in factual questions, but in moral ones? We always want to acknowledge the tradeoffs, but sometimes the moral stance is just simple.
http://www.yudkowsky.net/singularity/simplified/
Factual questions are really the only ones that I find complicated enough to be worth discussing. Moral questions don't really make sense to me, because the answer is always 'what is best for me personally averaged over the long term'.