“This Hypothetical is Unrealistic” is not a Valid Objection

Whenever a discussion touches ethics, philosophy, or relates to guiding principles, hypotheticals become useful. We cannot investigate every idea with real experiments, but we can test the consistency and precision of principles that guide us with thought experiments. It isn’t necessary to see a man murdered in front of you to understand whether that would be good - we can simply imagine it, and realise our principles would, in that scenario, produce an answer. This process - of considering something that has not, or will not actually occur, is the basis of all counterfactual reasoning. “If X, then what?” is a piece of cognitive machinery without which we would be unable to make sense of the world.However, it is common for people to respond to questions or statements of the form “if X, then what?”, with the maddening objection “but, not X”.This objection is a general refusal of the word “if”ALL hypotheticals are unrealistic - if they are realised, they cease to be hypotheticals. Being unwilling to engage in hypothetical reasoning means you are unwilling to engage in counterfactual reasoning, and are ultimately committed to exclusively considering that which has already happened or is certain to happen. By rejecting the antecedent premise of all unrealised hypotheticals, you forgo the mechanism that allows you to make plans whatsoever.“If” inherently acknowledges that a thing does not obtain. By positing X as an “if”, you are not validly critiqued on the basis that X does not obtain. Assuming “X does not obtain” is a valid basis to dismiss a conditional premise, then this argument applies to all if statements.One may retort by claiming the steelman principle is: “X cannot obtain”. However, this does little to alleviate the burden of engaging with contrived scenarios. For one, rejecting conditionals where X cannot obtain commits you to the view that conditionals involving the past are impossible to consider - changing the past is not physically possible. So, questions