I am an occasional moralist, but no ethicist. So, what follows is product of considerable ignorance (and modest Platonism). Prompted by reading a detailed review of a recent book on (among other things) the ethics of torture, I wonder if it can be healthy for one's mind/soul/brain to spend a considerable amount of time thinking through in extremely fine-grained fashion "examples involving the deliberate infliction of extreme suffering." I imagine that while one can do some of the philosophic work involved by using notational variants of abstract Xs and Ys, probably considerable amount of the work is done by graphically imagining (or writing out) the various aspects of the examples that can reveal differences in intuitions or morally salient reactive attitudes. But I wonder how that could possibly be beneficial to the philosopher. A quick survey on scholar.google revealed that the ethics of torture and ticking bomb cases are thriving niches in our discipline (as well as law, medicine, etc). So, has anybody studied (phenomenologically, scientifically, literary, etc) the psychic or moral effects on philosophic-practitioners of folk working on the ethics of torture (punishment, trolley-cases, etc)?
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