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I don't think you can determine philosophical quality on purely formal grounds: much depends on the substantive content of the claims in question. So, for example, it could be that arguments for the view that "pain is intrinsically good" are all terrible, even if a normative skeptic could "turn it around" and similarly doubt any argument…
I don't think you can determine philosophical quality on purely formal grounds: much depends on the substantive content of the claims in question. So, for example, it could be that arguments for the view that "pain is intrinsically good" are all terrible, even if a normative skeptic could "turn it around" and similarly doubt any argument for the claim: "pain is intrinsically bad". The latter view may just be objectively self-justifying in a way that the opposite view is not. (Compare the Moorean response to skepticism.)
Generally speaking, I don't think it's always possible to convince someone sympathetic to a crazy view that their view is crazy. Still, some views -- like "pain is intrinsically good" (or, I would add, "utopia is no better than a barren rock") -- are nonetheless objectively crazy.
> "It's hard to square the arguments for actualism being *terrible* with thinking those arguments give you any reason at all to inherently prioritize the actual."
I disagree. In general, it is very easy to square "we plausibly have *extra* reasons of sort X" with the view that the supporting arguments would be a *terrible* reason to think "we have *only* reasons of sort X".
But again, a lot here depends upon substantive judgment calls in reflective equilibrium. I don't expect to be able to persuade everyone to share my judgments. But I think/hope that *most* probably would, if they read all I've written on the topic.
If *a lot* here depends on substantive judgement calls in reflective equilibrium, isn't calling the arguments all terrible too strong? I would hope whatever standard you use for deciding whether an argument was terrible wouldn’t depend much on substantive judgement calls. I think all choices of formal grounds require substantive judgement calls, too, but typically much less controversial ones, so I also agree this is at least somewhat unavoidable, but I think the lines you're drawing probably are pretty controversial. That pain is inherently bad, or at least not inherently good, seems far more straightforward and far less controversial.
I think one of the problems is that the argument you ultimately fall back on is to basically just assert lives can have positive value, which I'd guess is ~totally unpersuasive to almost anyone sympathetic to person-affecting views who has thought much at all about them. It's obvious that they’d be denying this or something similar. I think if I judged by standards like you do, I'd consider this a terrible argument, because to me it's obviously silly to say that we have reason to create people for their own sake, and that misses the point of ethics.
You're free to consider my arguments terrible! It's a judgment call. (If you think what I'm saying is "obviously silly", all things considered, then that sounds a lot like "terrible" to me.)
As I've tried to stress, this sort of substantive judgment differs importantly from purely academic assessments. Many substantively terrible arguments can still contain valuable philosophical insights that make them worth publishing in academic journals, discussing seriously in philosophy seminars, etc. Here I'm just talking about what I think people should actually *believe* at the end of the day. But I freely admit that it's all contestable -- like the existence of the external world, and literally everything else in philosophy.