I love this style of reasoning. Status quo bias is a severely strong psychological effect on some people in some cases. This is a nice way to "bust the cache" ;

I love this style of reasoning. Status quo bias is a severely strong psychological effect on some people in some cases. This is a nice way to "bust the cache" ;) There's a really cool philosophy paper "The reversal test: Eliminating status quo bias in applied ethics" - using a reversal like the one you describe (imagine a world where the opposite was true). But then the authors also do a double-reversal (imagine the world is identical to ours, but there's a policy about to be implemented which will make it into "mirror world" and we have the option to do nothing and let it happen, or act and prevent the reversal). Great thinking tool! https://philpapers.org/rec/BOSTRT https://philpapers.org/rec/BOSTRT full paper PDF: https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/statusquo.pdf https://nickbostrom.com/ethics/statusquo.pdf