Example: Most defensible argument: "Authoritarian trans activists on power trips labeling female professors TERFs and instigating twitter mobs to get them fired is a bad thing" Least defensible intention: "Cops shooting unarmed black men should suffer no real consequences"
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Much of this applies to everybody in the US. If you genuinely weighed Hillary v. Trump this way and concluded (say) that an unchecked militarist neocon agenda that might be pursued by H was the greatest risk and that Trump was all harmless fascism-theater talk, I respect that.
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One reason I am so openly partisan these days is that I don't think Trump supporters actually process in this "least worst" way. Their profile (people who never left hometown, live in homogeneous neighborhoods, have contempt for college) does not inspire confidence.
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To realistically assess "the worst that could happen to the most vulnerable people who could be affected by your decision" you have to have curiosity about the world beyond your borders. Because your tax dollars can buy airplanes that can bomb any point on the planet.
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The great risk of parochialism in globally consequential decision processes is the "one death is a tragedy, a million deaths is a statistic" effect. Great mindset for purely local decisions with no spillover effects. Terrible when you are structurally complicit in global ones.
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There aren't many ways to counterprogram parochialism in your thinking. It's not a question of intelligence, but input. The 3 known ways are education, travel, and seeking out interactions with people very unlike yourself. All three are driven by curiosity/openness to experience
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Guess what kind of people resist all 3 impulses? Guess how they act politically? In my processing, the greatest worst-case risk is simply having parochial people, contemptuous of the entire world beyond their horizons, making globally decisions consequential decisions.
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End of conversation
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