I would re-frame the issue slightly; the process that philosophy/ethics goes through is something more like this:
If given A, B, and C we get D, and if not-A is unacceptable and not-B is unacceptable and not-C is unacceptable and D is unacceptable, then we do not fully understand the question. So lets play around with all the possibilities and see what interesting results pop up!
Playing around should involve frequent revisits to the differential and integral inspections of the argument; if you are doing just one type of inspection, you are doing it wrong.
But in the end you might come to a solution, and/or you might write a very convincing sounding paper on a solution, but the assumption isn’t that you have now solved everything because your integrating or differentiating is nicely explicable. It is highly debatable whether any argument in ethics is more than an intuition pump used to convince people of your own point of view. After all, you cannot prove even the basic fact that happy people are good; we simply happen to accept that as a warrant… or, in some cases, make it our definition of ‘good’.
It is worth considering the possibility that all these ethical arguments do is try to make us comfortable with the fact that the world does not work in our favor… and the correct solution is to accept as a working hypothesis that there is no absolutely correct solution, only solutions that we should avoid because they feel bad or lead to disaster. (To clarify how this would work in the case of the Repugnant Conclusion, the correct-enough solution might involve each population setting its own limits on population size and happiness ranges, and those who disagree having to make their own way to a better population; alternatively, we might define an acceptable range and stick to it, despite political pundits criticizing our decision at every turn, and many people maintaining roiling angst at our temerity.)
In the end, the primary and perhaps only reason we continue to engage in philosophy is because it is foolish to stop thinking about questions simply because we do not have a solution (or an experimental process) that applies.
I would re-frame the issue slightly; the process that philosophy/ethics goes through is something more like this:
If given A, B, and C we get D, and if not-A is unacceptable and not-B is unacceptable and not-C is unacceptable and D is unacceptable, then we do not fully understand the question. So lets play around with all the possibilities and see what interesting results pop up!
Playing around should involve frequent revisits to the differential and integral inspections of the argument; if you are doing just one type of inspection, you are doing it wrong.
But in the end you might come to a solution, and/or you might write a very convincing sounding paper on a solution, but the assumption isn’t that you have now solved everything because your integrating or differentiating is nicely explicable. It is highly debatable whether any argument in ethics is more than an intuition pump used to convince people of your own point of view. After all, you cannot prove even the basic fact that happy people are good; we simply happen to accept that as a warrant… or, in some cases, make it our definition of ‘good’.
It is worth considering the possibility that all these ethical arguments do is try to make us comfortable with the fact that the world does not work in our favor… and the correct solution is to accept as a working hypothesis that there is no absolutely correct solution, only solutions that we should avoid because they feel bad or lead to disaster. (To clarify how this would work in the case of the Repugnant Conclusion, the correct-enough solution might involve each population setting its own limits on population size and happiness ranges, and those who disagree having to make their own way to a better population; alternatively, we might define an acceptable range and stick to it, despite political pundits criticizing our decision at every turn, and many people maintaining roiling angst at our temerity.)
In the end, the primary and perhaps only reason we continue to engage in philosophy is because it is foolish to stop thinking about questions simply because we do not have a solution (or an experimental process) that applies.