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Abstract
The use of examples and thought-experiments is a common tool in professional philosophical argumentation. Sometimes examples are used to test a certain position or even an entire moral theory. The way examples are used to test moral views resembles what, according to some classic writers on epistemology, is common in science. When we offer an example describing some events or sequences of events, such a description is implicitly connected to a set of regularities that we generally assume to govern the described events. For instance, if we speak about an action that has several effects, we cannot help assuming that more distant effects of the action will generally be less foreseeable for the agent than closer ones. It is therefore incorrect to present examples that, according to our common sense, presuppose certain regularities, then cancel such regularities ad hoc, and finally ask us to make a commonsensical reaction to them.