I have on many occasions criticized a thought experiment, but I generally manage to avoid the specific type of criticism that you’re talking about. The real problem is that a shockingly large number of the thought experiments discussed in philosophy are experiments of the form “If you kill someone, but they don’t actually die, did you do something morally wrong?”. The hypothetical situation is incoherent.
Earlier this week, I got into an argument in which someone attempted to demonstrate that things such as rights and liberty were fundamentally good, and not consequentially valuable, by asking whether a society in which all authority was concentrated in the hands of a few people, but which did not have problems with social injustice or rights violations, etc, was morally good. I was arguing that the hypothetical is flawed. If you concentrate power into the hands of a few people, you get negative consequences. I was indeed fighting the hypothetical, but I think there are cases in which doing so is a good idea.
I have on many occasions criticized a thought experiment, but I generally manage to avoid the specific type of criticism that you’re talking about. The real problem is that a shockingly large number of the thought experiments discussed in philosophy are experiments of the form “If you kill someone, but they don’t actually die, did you do something morally wrong?”. The hypothetical situation is incoherent.
Earlier this week, I got into an argument in which someone attempted to demonstrate that things such as rights and liberty were fundamentally good, and not consequentially valuable, by asking whether a society in which all authority was concentrated in the hands of a few people, but which did not have problems with social injustice or rights violations, etc, was morally good. I was arguing that the hypothetical is flawed. If you concentrate power into the hands of a few people, you get negative consequences. I was indeed fighting the hypothetical, but I think there are cases in which doing so is a good idea.