Are ideas about proposed world social structures inherently "primarily opinion-based"?

Question

I read, and liked the question about Courier Ethics. I liked it enough to actually try and answer it. Later I returned to the question as a result of a comment on my answer. It took a minute before I realized it had been placed on hold as primarily opinion-based. I'm new to the site, so I don't pretend to know the parameters used for on-topic/off-topic. A short review of some suggested questions given by the system as I typed the title seems to suggest that maybe this one shouldn't have been closed after all.

Of course, any "idea" presented in answer to this question will be evaluated by the OP and their opinion will rule as to which one is best. Of course that works the same on any SE stack. Similarly, any answer given can be equally valid, in some context, as any other. This is fiction so suspending belief is inherit to story enjoyment. How far the world creator wants to stretch that line is a personal choice. Adding in the criteria of which answer fits better into the OP's world, however, removes the "all equally valid" argument.

In my reading of the question, the OP defined well what the objective was, and excluded a certain range of options:

I'm looking for ideas on how they could correctly or mostly correctly identify messages they found unethical. Magic is OK but I'd prefer to avoid just hand-waving everything with a spell that "knows" if a message is evil or not.

At least 3 well rep'd users, one >10K user deemed it answerable as well, so I know I'm not alone in thinking it to be a decent question.

As an extra note, I still don't see any comments suggesting an edit, or way to improve the question, so as to not be "primarily opinion-based", contrary to recent meta post, “Primarily Opinion Based” is a reason to edit, not to close.

As a site scope issue, should this question, as posted, remain closed? What part of the question is triggering the "opinion-based" evaluation? How could it be improved to remove the opinion-based evaluation, if that is even possible?

Answer 1

Since I was the fifth close vote, I'll identify the items that caught my attention as problematic.

1. The question specifically calls out that the asker is "looking for ideas" for a solution. This means there aren't really any constraints to define a "best" answer other than being within the concept of a Medieval/Fantasy setting.
2. Magic is allowed, but the asker has failed to specify how magic works in his/her world. Every solution is now valid, and each person will envision the magic system differently, bringing in an opinion-only aspect.
3. The asker has failed to identify why the simplest solution (i.e., reading the message, as identified in the first comment) does not work. Answers must then either use this as their solution, or devise a reason for why it cannot be used, which would be altering the asker's world to suit the answer and make each answer an opinion rather than fact within the asker's world.

As is, I believe the question should remain closed. If the asker edits the question to address these issues (placing constraints, defining the magic system, and explaining why couriers cannot read the messages), then the question may be reopened.

Answer 2

Opinion-based Question very often involve the Respondent's own inferences because the question doesn't describe enough

Last year, year before, we had a huge meta discussion about the relative merits of a no-longer-existent close reason known as "Idea-generation". The results of that discussion was the identification of Question Constraints as an essential component of an answerable question. If a question was insufficiently constrained, it could not be answered in the time and format available on WB. (Alternatively, if it was overconstrained, it probably wasn't a good fit for WB either since it was too specific.)

While I didn't cast a VTC for this question, I probably would for the following reasons:

1. The Courier's ethical code wasn't identified.
2. Any kind of hint about how they might go about identifying good and evil. This alone would push me to VTC because this is a question that philosophers and ethicists have been asking for thousands of years and there is no universal answer.
3. There's a little bit of a distraction in the question about how to conceal messages from hostile parties (but this is a minor point in the question).

To answer this question, a respondent would have to infer the courier's ethical code (and the priorities inherent in all ethical codes), then invent a set of rules for match messages with that ethical code. Since a huge portion of the answer depends on whatever the respondent pulls out of thin air, there will be far too much variation in the answers.

I also note that the question doesn't indicate anything about identification of second-order effects from a successful delivery method. How do the courier's deal with messages that don't explicitly order the death of innocents but indirectly cause their deaths anyway?

Edit

Without specifics about the ethical code, the situation or the message to deliver, I don't think anything useful can be said about the decision function to deliver or not deliver a given message.

Tl;dr

Extract details from ethical system A, combine with information extracted from courier situation s and message content m then define a mapping from all that information to "good " or "evil". Which information to pick from A, s and m and what to do with that information will be the algorithm contained in D. Some information will be deemed unimportant and discarded. Conversely, other information will be deemed important and retained.

Since A may specify conflicting outcomes, D will need to be robust enough to resolve those conflicts since D must always resolve to "Good" XOR "Evil". Perhaps, A will be internally consistent, in which case D doesn't need to include a conflict resolution mechanism for conflicts in A.

Long Answer

Given, message $m$, courier situation $s$, ethical code $a$ and decision function $D$, resolve $$\{good, evil\} = D(a, m, s)$$ Observe that $a \in A$ where $A$ is the set of all possible ethical systems. The OP hopes for a description of $D$. That's fine. $s$ and $m$ are free variables, dependent on the storyteller and can be anything. Since $a$ can also be anything, including internally inconsistent ethical systems, how do we resolve those conflicts to simple "good" and "evil"? Ideally, we want $D$ to resolve exclusively to "good" or "evil", never both and never neither.

$A$ represents all possible ethical systems. It cannot be less than all possible ethical systems since no constraints were placed on $A$ by the OP. We know that any ethical system will fall somewhere on the continuum between being complete but conflicted, or, it will be incomplete and consistent. No non-trivial system can be both complete and conflict-free.

Systems of the first kind, $A_{complete}$ [complete-conflicted], make the job of $D$ harder since $D$ must now resolve extra conflicts from $a_{complete}$. Systems of the second kind, $A_{incomplete}$ [incomplete-consistent], are amenable to our task of resolving {good, evil} since they always provide consistent answers even if they can't handle all situations described by $s$ and $m$.

The resolution of conflicts inherent in $a_{complete}$ must either happen in $D$ or be prevented entirely by the definition of $a \in A_{incomplete}$. As only data, $s$ and $m$ don't carry any interpretative power in and of themselves to make assertions about their own goodness or evilness. Thus, $a$ makes assertions/interpretations about the important characteristics of $s$ and $m$. $D$ combines the rule set embedded in $a$ with information from $s$ and $m$ then returns "good" XOR "evil"; or more specifically, "will deliver message" XOR "will not deliver message". $D$ must be robust enough to handle instances of $a$ where the rule sets are inherently contradictory.