Abstract

Moral philosophy has for quite some time practiced the use of thought experiments in argumentative strategies. Thought experiments can be understood as imagined scenarios with a certain level of complexity and novelty, which are usually designed and used to elicit our responses or moral intuitions in order to make our use of key moral concepts clearer or in order to support or reject a particular ethical theory, general moral principle, hypothesis, deeply held moral belief or presupposition. Such imagined cases also often offer us a new insight, illumination and perspective on a given problem. One of the open questions is what is the epistemic status and value of such generated intuitions given their variability and instability. The paper combines a moderate defence of moral intuitions with a discussion of selected aspects of the use of cases in ethics education.