Whenever a discussion touches ethics, philosophy, or relates to guiding principles, hypotheticals become useful. We cannot investigate every idea with real experiments, but we can test the consistency and precision of principles that guide us with thought experiments. It isn’t necessary to see a man murdered in front of you to understand whether that would be good - we can simply imagine it, and realise our principles would, in that scenario, produce an answer. This process - of considering something that has not, or will not actually occur, is the basis of all counterfactual reasoning. “If X, then what?” is a piece of cognitive machinery without which we would be unable to make sense of the world.
However, it is common for people to respond to questions or statements of the form “if X, then what?”, with the maddening objection “but, not X”.
This objection is a general refusal of the word “if”
ALL hypotheticals are unrealistic - if they are realised, they cease to be hypotheticals. Being unwilling to engage in hypothetical reasoning means you are unwilling to engage in counterfactual reasoning, and are ultimately committed to exclusively considering that which has already happened or is certain to happen. By rejecting the antecedent premise of all unrealised hypotheticals, you forgo the mechanism that allows you to make plans whatsoever.
“If” inherently acknowledges that a thing does not obtain. By positing X as an “if”, you are not validly critiqued on the basis that X does not obtain. Assuming “X does not obtain” is a valid basis to dismiss a conditional premise, then this argument applies to all if statements.
One may retort by claiming the steelman principle is: “X cannot obtain”. However, this does little to alleviate the burden of engaging with contrived scenarios. For one, rejecting conditionals where X cannot obtain commits you to the view that conditionals involving the past are impossible to consider - changing the past is not physically possible. So, questions like “if you never bought a dog, would you have dog food in your house today?” are off the table.
Furthermore, even granting this “impossibility” principle, the set of things which cannot obtain is far smaller than the set of things which most likely won’t obtain. This standard requires proving some contradiction inherent in the premise, or, at a practical level, that a scenario would violate some law of physics held as an axiom.
What law of logic or physics prevents a tennis match between you and Christopher Walken?
Why “contrived” is not a valid critique of a hypothetical
A hypothetical tests a principle. If you say “murder is wrong” without qualifying the statement, you are not saying “murder is usually wrong”, or “murder is often wrong”, you are saying “for all X, if X is murder, X is wrong”. This statement, though intuitive, is, in fact, extreme and virtually indefensible without caveats[1].
The set of “all X” includes the set of “all contrived, extreme-seeming forms of X”, because those things are still X.
Consider the syllogism:
X is wrong
[contrived case of X] is X
[contrived case of X] is wrong
This shows that to say X is wrong (without exception), you are committed to the conclusion that all contrived and unrealistic cases of X are wrong.
So, no matter how absurd-seeming the case of X, the syllogism always holds:
Murder is wrong
Murdering Michael Jackson in a distant marshmallow galaxy is murder
Murdering Michael Jackson in a distant marshmallow galaxy is wrong
Given this, you can test whether the principle of “(all) murder is wrong” holds by looking at contrived cases of murder.
Murder is wrong
Murdering a 99-year-old man who has 1 second left to live in order to save 1000 innocent lives is murder
Murdering a 99-year-old man who has 1 second left to live in order to save 1000 innocent lives is wrong
1 inescapably entails 3 - therefore, if you believe that statement 3 is false, then believing 1 is true produces an outright contradiction.
Answers to absurd scenarios are necessitated by universal principles
Consider the premise:
“If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out any person in tennis”
If someone accepts this principle as true, per the earlier syllogism, they accept it for all cases of “any person”. Therefore, they accept they will not be able to ace out their usual tennis partners, which is obviously true.
However, this also commits them to the view that they will be unable to ace out Christopher Walken.
If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out any person in tennis
Christopher Walken is a person
If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out Christopher Walken in tennis
Further, “In tennis” does not impose a geographical constraint. So, a tennis match played on Mars would be “in tennis” by definition.
If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out any person in tennis
Tennis on Mars is tennis
If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out any person in tennis on Mars
We can now put the two syllogisms together:
If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out any person in tennis
Christopher Walken is a person
If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out Christopher Walken in tennis
Tennis played on mars is tennis
If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out Christopher Walken in tennis on Mars
Therefore, by accepting premise 1, this deductively requires conditionally accepting the “unrealistic” scenario.
So, if someone says “paralysed people cannot beat anyone at tennis”, and you say “what if they played Christopher Walken on Mars?”, the only coherent answers to give are:
“yes, including Christopher Walken on Mars”; or
“No, I suppose in that case there might be a chance (perhaps Walken dies first) - therefore, the original statement is improperly specified, i.e., strictly false”
The reply: “But I would never play Christopher Walken on Mars”, is simply an irrelevant statement that fails to appreciate that 1 deductively leads to 5.
Accepting “If X, then Y” does not require any acknowledgement of X being true or feasible.
Why this objection is so common
To the untrained eye, dismissing absurd scenarios looks like rigor. A contrived thought experiment to elicit an absurd conclusion that they would never normally endorse, can come across as a sophist using a trick; a “slimy debate tactic”. This feeling of being hoodwinked comes from an almost-getting-of-the-point - realising that, indeed, if X is true, then Y would seemingly follow, and Y obviously isn’t true - so something must be awry. The explanation of “some kind of trick” is easier to reach for than the explanation that X may not be as true as you would like it to be.
Importantly, if one offers the statement of “murder is wrong” in a general sense, it is of course pointlessly pedantic to test it on contrived edge cases to see if the idea holds absolutely, since it is already understood to mean “murder is pretty much always wrong except for some really rare circumstances that I’m not talking about”. However, this dismisses the hypothetical on the basis of relevance, not on the basis of realism. So, if a pedant does challenge the “murder is wrong” premise with an edge-case hypothetical, it is still invalid to say “that edge case would never happen” - instead, the reasonable answer is “yes, not literally all murder is wrong, but we both know that, and a ten-paragraph list of qualifying statements isn’t necessary for the discussion we’re having - you know what I mean”. When the hypothetical test serves no clarifying purpose, and is merely pointing out that the wording of the premise is underspecified per a literal reading, it is a fruitless distraction. However, this “you know what I mean” response would itself only be a reasonable answer as long as the crux of the discussion isn’t contingent on the details of what exactly is meant by the statement.
Whenever a discussion touches ethics, philosophy, or relates to guiding principles, hypotheticals become useful. We cannot investigate every idea with real experiments, but we can test the consistency and precision of principles that guide us with thought experiments. It isn’t necessary to see a man murdered in front of you to understand whether that would be good - we can simply imagine it, and realise our principles would, in that scenario, produce an answer. This process - of considering something that has not, or will not actually occur, is the basis of all counterfactual reasoning. “If X, then what?” is a piece of cognitive machinery without which we would be unable to make sense of the world.
However, it is common for people to respond to questions or statements of the form “if X, then what?”, with the maddening objection “but, not X”.
This objection is a general refusal of the word “if”
ALL hypotheticals are unrealistic - if they are realised, they cease to be hypotheticals. Being unwilling to engage in hypothetical reasoning means you are unwilling to engage in counterfactual reasoning, and are ultimately committed to exclusively considering that which has already happened or is certain to happen. By rejecting the antecedent premise of all unrealised hypotheticals, you forgo the mechanism that allows you to make plans whatsoever.
“If” inherently acknowledges that a thing does not obtain. By positing X as an “if”, you are not validly critiqued on the basis that X does not obtain. Assuming “X does not obtain” is a valid basis to dismiss a conditional premise, then this argument applies to all if statements.
One may retort by claiming the steelman principle is: “X cannot obtain”. However, this does little to alleviate the burden of engaging with contrived scenarios. For one, rejecting conditionals where X cannot obtain commits you to the view that conditionals involving the past are impossible to consider - changing the past is not physically possible. So, questions like “if you never bought a dog, would you have dog food in your house today?” are off the table.
Furthermore, even granting this “impossibility” principle, the set of things which cannot obtain is far smaller than the set of things which most likely won’t obtain. This standard requires proving some contradiction inherent in the premise, or, at a practical level, that a scenario would violate some law of physics held as an axiom.
What law of logic or physics prevents a tennis match between you and Christopher Walken?
Why “contrived” is not a valid critique of a hypothetical
A hypothetical tests a principle. If you say “murder is wrong” without qualifying the statement, you are not saying “murder is usually wrong”, or “murder is often wrong”, you are saying “for all X, if X is murder, X is wrong”. This statement, though intuitive, is, in fact, extreme and virtually indefensible without caveats[1].
The set of “all X” includes the set of “all contrived, extreme-seeming forms of X”, because those things are still X.
Consider the syllogism:
This shows that to say X is wrong (without exception), you are committed to the conclusion that all contrived and unrealistic cases of X are wrong.
So, no matter how absurd-seeming the case of X, the syllogism always holds:
Given this, you can test whether the principle of “(all) murder is wrong” holds by looking at contrived cases of murder.
1 inescapably entails 3 - therefore, if you believe that statement 3 is false, then believing 1 is true produces an outright contradiction.
Answers to absurd scenarios are necessitated by universal principles
Consider the premise:
“If I become paralysed, I will not be able to ace out any person in tennis”
If someone accepts this principle as true, per the earlier syllogism, they accept it for all cases of “any person”. Therefore, they accept they will not be able to ace out their usual tennis partners, which is obviously true.
However, this also commits them to the view that they will be unable to ace out Christopher Walken.
Further, “In tennis” does not impose a geographical constraint. So, a tennis match played on Mars would be “in tennis” by definition.
We can now put the two syllogisms together:
Therefore, by accepting premise 1, this deductively requires conditionally accepting the “unrealistic” scenario.
So, if someone says “paralysed people cannot beat anyone at tennis”, and you say “what if they played Christopher Walken on Mars?”, the only coherent answers to give are:
“yes, including Christopher Walken on Mars”; or
“No, I suppose in that case there might be a chance (perhaps Walken dies first) - therefore, the original statement is improperly specified, i.e., strictly false”
The reply: “But I would never play Christopher Walken on Mars”, is simply an irrelevant statement that fails to appreciate that 1 deductively leads to 5.
Accepting “If X, then Y” does not require any acknowledgement of X being true or feasible.
Why this objection is so common
To the untrained eye, dismissing absurd scenarios looks like rigor. A contrived thought experiment to elicit an absurd conclusion that they would never normally endorse, can come across as a sophist using a trick; a “slimy debate tactic”. This feeling of being hoodwinked comes from an almost-getting-of-the-point - realising that, indeed, if X is true, then Y would seemingly follow, and Y obviously isn’t true - so something must be awry. The explanation of “some kind of trick” is easier to reach for than the explanation that X may not be as true as you would like it to be.
Importantly, if one offers the statement of “murder is wrong” in a general sense, it is of course pointlessly pedantic to test it on contrived edge cases to see if the idea holds absolutely, since it is already understood to mean “murder is pretty much always wrong except for some really rare circumstances that I’m not talking about”. However, this dismisses the hypothetical on the basis of relevance, not on the basis of realism. So, if a pedant does challenge the “murder is wrong” premise with an edge-case hypothetical, it is still invalid to say “that edge case would never happen” - instead, the reasonable answer is “yes, not literally all murder is wrong, but we both know that, and a ten-paragraph list of qualifying statements isn’t necessary for the discussion we’re having - you know what I mean”. When the hypothetical test serves no clarifying purpose, and is merely pointing out that the wording of the premise is underspecified per a literal reading, it is a fruitless distraction. However, this “you know what I mean” response would itself only be a reasonable answer as long as the crux of the discussion isn’t contingent on the details of what exactly is meant by the statement.