TERMS: HYPERTHETICAL AND HYPOTHETICAL —“Thought experiments have done yeoman’s

TERMS: HYPERTHETICAL AND HYPOTHETICAL

—“Thought experiments have done yeoman’s work in philosophy ever since the tale of the ring of Gyges in Plato’s Republic. There clearly is a place for them in testing our moral intuitions, yet they have been taken too far down the trolley track in contemporary ethical theory. At issue here is modality: the meaning of the possible for making sense of ethical life. Let me suggest two modes of the possible. One is the merely conceivable, which involves science fiction elements or extraordinarily rare circumstances, things that are not logically impossible or outright violations of the laws of nature. The other mode is the genuinely plausible, scenarios that are either actually possible (because they have happened) or feasible given a reasonable construal of existing realities. I would like to narrow the use of hypothetical to the latter set of plausible cases and coin a new term, hyperthetical, for the merely conceivable.”— Michael Philip

Excellent reframing. I would suggest you take my approach of a minimum three points to make an argumentative line, and follow your own sentence structure: 1-Conceivable, 2-Plausible, and 3-Feasible. (I am going to steal it. thanks. )