Dangers of Assumption and Indiscretion

In response to Sean Edwards' post 'Losing Touch?' (4/5/2013):

Sean brings up an interesting point in his post - the idea that sometimes, hypothetical situations in philosophical discussions become so absurd that they both cause debaters to lose touch with reality, and draw criticism to the entire discipline of philosophy.  Such hypotheticals may attempt to chase pure logic so far that they toss aside instinct, emotion, and social norms quite heedlessly.

I think that Sean makes a good point, but I do not think we should cease investigating a subject when it begins to appear bizarre.  Instead, perhaps more discretion is wise when discussing very controversial issues, at least until philosophers reach a firm conclusion.  It is certainly true that, if many people heard many of the strange and fantastic debates that some philosophers engage in, their faith in philosophy (assuming they had any) would be shaken, and might disappear.  However, while this might be cause for discretion, it is not at all cause for cessation of the debates!  In fact, ceasing the debates would be at least as dangerous as indiscretion.

This is because, often, even strongly held social norms are wrong.  Sean presents an example of a bizarre-sounding hypothetical discussion in his post: that of a case wherein one must either kill a wolf to save a child that the wolf is about to eat, or let the wolf devour the child.  He states that any decent person would certainly take the first option, and that the second is repugnant regardless of what logic might say.  While I will not disagree with this first statement (especially since I was not present for the aforementioned discussion, and so am not aware of its fine points), I vehemently reject the second.  Logic is, I firmly believe, more relevant to moral discussion than social norms or emotion.  What if this discussion had occurred one hundred and fifty years ago, and the question was whether it was right to kill a dark-skinned person to save a light-skinned one.  Setting aside other factors, such as whether one of the people in question was attempting to harm the other, or whether they were of different ages or familial relation to the debater, I think that many (if not most) light-skinned people would have said it was ridiculous to even consider letting the light-skinned person die.  After all, dark-skinned people might have some rights, perhaps, but the suggestion that they might be as valuable as light-skinned people was utterly fantastical (note: I am being sarcastic here, of course; I don't actually agree with the above statement).  Yet now, one hundred and fifty years later, most people (regardless of skin colour) take it without question that a person's skin colour has absolutely nothing to do with their moral value.  I am not suggesting that the two arguments are at all identical, or that racism and speciesism are the same thing - they are not - but I do think that addressing even topics which at first seem to utterly contradict common sense, emotion, or social norms is both justifiable and necessary.