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orthonormal comments on The Preference Utilitarian’s Time Inconsistency Problem - Less Wrong
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"Exposed to these situations" means to say that when someone asks about utilitarianism they say, "if there was a fat man in front of a train filled with single parents and you could push him out of the way or let the train run off a cliff what would you do?" To which my reply is, "When does that ever happen and how does answering that question help me be more ethical?"
Digression: if a decision-theoretic model was translated into a set of axiomatic behaviors could you potentially apply Godel's Incompleteness Theorem to prove that simple and consistent is in fact too much to ask?
Please don't throw around Gödel's Theorem before you've really understood it— that's one thing that makes people look like cranks!
Very rarely; but pondering such hypotheticals has helped me to see what some of my actual moral intuitions are, once they are stripped of rationalizations (and chances to dodge the question). From that point on, I can reflect on them more effectively.
Sorry to sound crankish. Rather than "simple and inconsistent" I might have said that there were contrived and thus unanswerable questions. Regardless it distracted and I shouldn't have digressed at all.
Anyway thank you for the good answer concerning hypotheticals.