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siodine comments on Philosophy Needs to Trust Your Rationality Even Though It Shouldn't - Less Wrong
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Any discussion of what art is. Any discussion of whether or not the universe is real. Any conversation about whether machines can truly be intelligent. More specifically, the ship of Theseus thought experiment and the related sorites paradox are entirely definitional, as is Edmund Gettier's problem of knowledge. The (appallingly bad, by the way) swamp man argument by Donald Davidson hinges entirely on the belief that words actually refer to things. Shades of this pop up in Searle's Chinese room and other bad thought experiments.
I could go on, but that would require me to actually go out and start reading philosophy papers, and goodness knows I hate that,
My first thought was "every philosophical thought experiment ever" and to my surprise wikipedia says there aren't that many thought experiments in philosophy (although, they are huge topics of discussion). I think the violinist experiment is uniquely bad. The floating man experiment is another good example, but very old.
What's your objection to the violinist thought experiment? If you're a utilitarian, perhaps you don't think the waters here are very deep. It's certainly a useful way of deflating and short-circuiting certain other intuitions that block scientific and medicinal progress in much of the developed world, though.
From SEP:
The thought experiment depends on your intuitions or your definition of moral obligations and wrongness, but the experiment doesn't make these distinctions. It just pretends that everyone has same intuition and as such the experiment should remain analogous regardless (probably because Judith didn't think anyone else could have different intuitions), and so then you have all these other philosophers and people arguing about this minutia and adding on further qualifications and modifications to the point where that they may as well be talking about actual abortion.
The thought experiment functions as an informal reductio ad absurdum of the argument 'Fetuses are people. Therefore abortion is immoral.' or 'Fetuses are conscious. Therefore abortion is immoral.' That's all it's doing. If you didn't find the arguments compelling in the first place, then the reductio won't be relevant to you. Likewise, if you think the whole moral framework underlying these anti-abortion arguments is suspect, then you may want to fight things out at the fundaments rather than getting into nitty-gritty details like this. The significance of the violin thought experiment is that you don't need to question the anti-abortionist's premises in order to undermine the most common anti-abortion arguments; they yield consequences all on their own that most anti-abortionists would find unacceptable.
That is the dialectical significance of the above argument. It has nothing to do with assuming that everyone found the original anti-abortion argument plausible. An initially implausible argument that's sufficiently popular may still be worth analyzing and refuting.