The Thought Gauntlet

Reader. Analytic ethics readers, puzzle readers, students, people entering through trolley-style cases.

Argument. The classical puzzles keep breaking moral frameworks because they force the wrong primitives: utility arithmetic, intention magic, identity uniqueness, sacrifice logic, consent absolutism, or blame-first reasoning. Modal Path Ethics survives by analyzing loci, reachable futures, resistance, burden transfer, and moral remainder. The Parfit article makes this explicit by saying Modal Path Ethics does not generate some inherited puzzles because it rejects the assumptions that produced them.

This route is the gauntlet: every inherited shortcut gets forced through the machinery.

The route, in order

1. Formal: Contraction is Harm
2. Formal: Weighted Reachable Future Space
3. Commensurability
4. Thought Gauntlet I: The Trolley Problem
5. Thought Gauntlet II: Pascal's Mugging
6. Thought Gauntlet III: The Transplant Surgeon
7. Thought Gauntlet IV: The Replacement Problem
8. Thought Gauntlet V: The Scapegoat
9. Thought Gauntlet VI: The Omelas
10. Thought Gauntlet VII: The Experience Machine
11. Thought Gauntlet VIII: The Last Human
12. Thought Gauntlet IX: Smallpox
13. Thought Gauntlet X: The Predator
14. Thought Gauntlet XI: The Violinist
15. Thought Gauntlet XII: The Double Effect
16. Thought Gauntlet XIII: Moral Luck
17. Thought Gauntlet XIV: The Utility Monster
18. Thought Gauntlet XV: The Lifeboat
19. Thought Gauntlet XVI: Cluelessness
20. Thought Gauntlet XVII: Moral Uncertainty
21. Thought Gauntlet XVIII: Antinatalism
22. Solving the Parfit Puzzle Suite