Or shitty philosophy profs and their shitty students love oversimplified examples because they are easy to understand, than understanding the deeper social contexts and texts around which morality and moral disputes actaully constructed.

this type of ‘moral problem’ is actually specifically designed to be devoid of such context, because context is too difficult and fraught to deal with for the prof and the students, esp in a intro level coursework which in these idealized euristics types of questions that have little to no bearing on real world questions of how to treat others.

and all these type of question really is is just ‘which is the lesser evil’.

and every corporate/applied ethics course is full of nonsense like this. because it’s not about morality, it’s about abstract problem solving and argumentation… which is precisely the approach that makes corporate management often so fucking evil towards human beings in general.

stuff like this essentially is teaching people that ‘being good’ is basically the ability to elaborating justify doing evil, or , worse, creating plausible deniability of your corporate or personal agency.

which is also, sadly, why it’s so wildly popular.