I used to occasionally remark that consequentialism is a slam-dunk as far as practical every-day rationality goes; if you care about what happens, you think about what will happen as a result of possible actions. Duh.

The predictable consequence of this sort of statement is that someone starts going off about hospitals and terrorists ?and organs and moral philosophy and consent and rights and so on. This may be controversial, but I would say that causing this tangent constitutes a failure to communicate the point. Instead of prompting someone to think, you invoked some irrelevant philosophical cruft. The discussion is now about Consequentialism, the Capitalized Moral Theory, instead of the simple idea of thinking through consequences as an everyday heuristic.

I don't think I understand the problem. You say that "consequentialism is a slam-dunk as far as practical rationality goes," this comment is interpreted as the claim that "The moral theory called Consequentialism is true," and the person you're talking to asks you what you think about some common and relevant objections to that moral theory.

What's gone wrong? "Consequentialism" is used in philosophy as a term for the view that the morality of an action depends only on the consequences of that action. So I don't think you can blame your interlocutor for interpreting the term this way and raising relevant objections to this view. You seem to be using the term in an idiosyncratic way—as referring to the view that we should think about the consequences of our actions before performing them (or something like that).

The lesson of your story seems not to be that we should avoid using terms like "consequentialism," but that we should be careful to explain exactly what we mean by a term if we're going to be using it in an idiosyncratic way.

The most merciful thing in the world, I think, is the inability of the human mind to correlate all its contents. We live on a placid island of ignorance in the midst of black seas of infinity, and it was not meant that we should voyage far. The sciences, each straining in its own direction, have hitherto harmed us little; but some day the piecing together of dissociated knowledge will open up such terrifying vistas of reality, and of our frightful position therein, that we shall either go mad from the revelation or flee from the deadly light into the peace and safety of a new dark age.

-H.P. Lovecraft

Hi.

My answer to this depends on what you mean by "professional philosophers who think about". You have to be aware that subfields have selection biases. For example, the percent of philosophers of religion who think God exists is much, much larger than the percent of professional philosophers generally who think God exists. This is because if God does not exist philosophy of religion ceases to be a productive area of research. Conversely, if you have an irrational attachment to the idea that God exists this than you are likely to spend an inordinate amount of time trying to prove one exists. This issue is particularly bad with regard to religion but it is in some sense generalizable to all or most other subfields. Philosophy is also a competitive enterprise and there are various incentives to publishing novel arguments. This means in any given subfield views that are unpopular among philosophers generally will be overrepresented.

So the circle you draw around "professional philosophers who think about [subfield x] questions" needs to be small enough to target experts but large enough that you don't limit your survey to those philosophers who are very likely to hold a view you are surveying in virtue of the area they work in. I think the right circle is something like 'professional philosophers who are equipped to teach an advanced undergraduate course in the subject'.

Edit: The free will question will depend on what you want out of a conception of free will. But the understanding of free will that most lay people have is totally impossible.

It seems like, if I'm trying to make up my mind about philosophical questions (like whether moral realism is true, or whether free will is an illusion) I should try to find out what professional philosophers think the answers to these questions are.

If I found out that 80% of professional philosophers who think about metaethical questions think that moral realism is true, and I happen to be an anti-realist, then I should be far less certain of my belief that anti-realism is true.

But surveys like this aren't done in philosophy (I don't think). Do you think that the results of surveys like this (if there were any) should be important to the person trying to make a decision about whether or not to believe in free will, or be an moral realist, or whatever?