My favorite college professor used to like to ask ethical questions that tied college students into philosophical knots. And they'd talk and talk and reach some very ideologically pure solution that made no sense, and then he'd say, "What kind of world do you want to live in?"
He would literally stop a criminology or sociology class in place and remind people that they had forgotten that the world you make is not an idea. You have to go live in it, and sometimes it changed the whole conversation. I think about it *all the time*.
I remember it coming up with regards to hypothetically punishing someone who hit and killed a pedestrian with a car. But it happened because they had lived in another country, and they momentarily confused sides of the road. Remorseful, unlikely to ever happen again.
There was an idea that emerged that in order to be fair, you had to treat everyone the same. That means you hit and kill somebody, you get treated the same as anyone else. And he asked it then about the world. He was like, "I get it as an idea, but how does it help?"
I think about it all the time.
