(no subject)
"The point of considering hypothetical situations, perhaps very improbably ones, seems to be to elicit from yourself or someone else a hypotherical decision to do something of a bad kind. I don't doubt this has the effect of predisposing people - who will never get into the situations for which they have made hypothetical choices - to consent to similar bad actions, or to praise and flatter those imagined as doing them, so long as their crowd does so too, when the desperate circumstances imagined don't hold at all" (Elizabeth Anscombe, "Modern Moral Philosophy").