I am not against "higher-order thinking" but in my experience it often leads to wishful thinking and self-deception. Especially political arguments are prone to disagreements on higher order effects (as opposed to effects that are directly observable and measurable).
For example, take basic income. Opponents of basic income argue that it will lead to inflation (second-order effect) and it will have no effect. Proponents of basic income argue that it will lead to higher velocity of money (second-order effect) and it will have positive economic effect.
Often the magnitude of second-order effects is not clear (often they are large sums of small numbers, and somewhat non-linear), and this leads to disagreements even among reasonable people. It's very easy to see 2nd order effect of some type and not another. So I would be cautious to rely on it too much.
(This is also partly a reason why I am in favor of empiricism as opposed to rationalism - humans often have bad intuitions when we just think about things.)
If we allow X to speak, his ideas will spread and Y will be harmed. So banning X is best.
But why not:
Banning X will cause a back reaction in X supporters and spread X's message leading Y to be harmed.
Or any other of a number of possibilities.
There is a fallacy of "hypothetical higher order danger justifies first order violence (/action)" -- where the higher order thinking is mostly ideological fantasy.
Often that fallacy is argued on the basis of artificially reduced complexity.
"Some first order actions can be justified by higher order danger" is often transliterated as "this first order action is justified by higher order danger" precisely because it drops all the subtlety and pretense for higher-order reasoning that the original speaker intended as an unspoken follow-up.
People often seem to allow others only the luxury of starting a thought, but never finishing it.
For example, take basic income. Opponents of basic income argue that it will lead to inflation (second-order effect) and it will have no effect. Proponents of basic income argue that it will lead to higher velocity of money (second-order effect) and it will have positive economic effect.
Often the magnitude of second-order effects is not clear (often they are large sums of small numbers, and somewhat non-linear), and this leads to disagreements even among reasonable people. It's very easy to see 2nd order effect of some type and not another. So I would be cautious to rely on it too much.
(This is also partly a reason why I am in favor of empiricism as opposed to rationalism - humans often have bad intuitions when we just think about things.)