Hypothetical situations are not meant to exist

I actually agree that fighting the hypothetical is annoying, and that it's easy (both in presenting and in reacting to a hypothetical) to get into a bad discussion state. Here are two reasons it can be difficult to usefully respond to hypotheticals.

1) It's perfectly reasonable to claim that a hypothetical is so divorced from reality, or so incompletely specified that it's not worth the effort to analyze. A physics analogy would be "imagine you could go back in time. how much energy would it take to get to 1983?". Just not complete or useful enough to discuss.

Many moral-intuition hypotheticals, IMO, are of this form: imagine some surface features of a situation. Now, based on the deep structure behind those features (which would take days or years to identify), how would you react?

2) Many hypotheticals are trotted out in a way that feels like (or is) a trap. It's not that you're exploring the world with your conversational partner, it's that you're trying to win an argument by getting them to admit to a contradiction. That's no fun if your partner/adversary isn't into it.

I disagree. The real world has a fixed causal structure, and therefore, a certain fixed counterfactual structure. Thus, only some hypothetical situations are realistic. Thus, some "hypothetical" thought-experiments amount to asking, "What would you do if I fundamentally altered the rules of reality in the following ways?".

I think that fighting the hypothetical is supposed to prevent these scenarios:

A: Proposes a strategy S.
B: "How well would strategy S work in an alternative universe, completely different from ours?"
A: "Not well."
B: "Therefore, let's not use S in our universe. (Let's use my favorite strategy S2 instead. It works better in the alternative universe.)"

Now if A starts objecting after the fourth line, B can say: "Hey, you already admitted that strategy S doesn't work, didn't you?" So it is better from A to say this already after the second line.

Remember that the goal of the debate is usually to convince a third observer, and A wants to prevent them from being primed by the conclusion in the fourth line.

I reject the notion that hypotheticals are actually a powerful tool, let alone a useful one. Or, at least, hypotheticals of the 'very simplified thought experiment' sort you seem to be talking about. Take the Trolley Problem, for example. The moral intuition we're supposed to be examining is when and if it is right to sacrifice the wellbeing of smaller groups for larger groups. The scenario is set up in such a way that you cannot "dodge" the question here, and you have to choose whether you'd rather be

• A tyrant who appoints himself arbitrator over who lives and who dies, but in doing is empowered to save more people than could be saved through inaction alone, or
• A passive non-entity who would rather let people die than make a morally difficult choice and thus defaults to inaction whenever matters become too difficult.

But someone might answer: "In the hypothetical, yes, you should obviously pull the lever because that leads to less deaths. But the problem assumes many premises which would not be true in real life, and changing those counterfactual premises to match reality would change my answer. In particular, humans in real life cannot be trusted to make life or death choices like this one fairly and accurately without their natural biases rendering their judgement unsound. It follows that a moral person should take precautions to prevent such temptations from arising and that, in practice, such precautions might take the form of seemingly dentological injunctions against hurting one person to help another, even when it appears to the actor that the greater good would be served."

Or they might answer: "In the hypothetical, no, you should obviously not pull the lever, because killing is wrong. But the problem assumes many premises which would not be true in real life, and changing those counterfactual premises to match reality would change my answer. In particular, it seems implausible that there is no other possible action which could save anyone on the tracks. Although it may seem callous to do nothing when helping others is within your power, the principle of 'do no harm' must come first. It follows, then, that a wise and moral person would prepare themselves in advance to take effective and decisive action even in cases where they are morally constrained from taking the most expedient option."

Both of these are contrary to the spirit of the hypothetical, but they also constitute more nuanced and useful moral stances than "yes, always save the largest number of people possible" or "no, never take an action which would hurt others"

You have a moral dilemma that you are not a expert on solving to you. You have a trained expert that specialises in these kinds of dilemmas contactable over the phone. Do you attempt to solve the problem or do you call the expert to solve it for you?

This is a kind of hypothetical to which "call the police" is a perfectly valid answer. If someone understands the trolley problem to include this problem as a master problem they might not be dodging all of the topic. Or they might be answering with a reframing ie giving you another hypothetical in return. In a discussion one could roll with the twist "okay, the police gets there, should she pull the lever or not?". Things that can be seen as fighting the hypothetical need not actually fight the hypothetical.

I regularly bicker about hypotheticals on the Facebook group. I wish I could give a tidy answer here, but I can't put all hypotheticals in the same category. Some represent reality better than others. "Where will I post my ideas if this group closes?" is a perfectly normal and useful one.

The hypotheticals I question are ones that don't plausibly occur in reality and that are known primarily because they irritate the brain, or allow social signaling, or some other non-useful purpose.

"If a tree falls in the forest..." can be useful since it exposes how unclear language can be, but if people aren't aware of it, it mostly is just trolling.

Another is the "Sophie's Choice" hypothetical. Such as the Trolley problem, where you flip the switch to kill one person or leave it as killing three. This problem is famous not because it represents something people will run into in real life, but because it irritates the brain. The brain evolved in imperfect scenarios, and where apparent bad choices like this are best handled by looking for the many answers it hasn't yet considered. Without this instinct to reject the scenario, we may never have developed tools and many other things.

So, these types of scenarios trigger a natural instinct to avoid the problem, not to answer it, which makes perfect sense given the way our brains work. Without that realization, the question is just shared to bother other people or socially signal. This isn't useful behavior, and thus rejecting those hypotheticals I think is a fine response.