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The quick test was to see whether you would interact with me on the object level of the question being asked or on the level of the rhetorical point I was making by asking you the question. Since you did the first, and furthermore ignored all the other points I made, I realized that you had neither the interest nor the capability to discuss in general whether provocative hypothetical questions are useful or interesting. That's essentially isomorphic to getting you to answer the cow question anyway, since it implies your answer wouldn't have any interesting reasoning behind in. Consequently I lost interest in our conversation.
Look, those cute little hypothetical questions being intellectually stimulating thought exercises is a view one can take. I certainly thought so when I was an autistic teenager. But from there, we go down the path of retardation.
First off, making the cute little hypothetical question maximally gross is not some neutral and obejctive way of detecting low-decoupling sheeple. It might do that job in select cases, but to most people inserting some intentionally disgusting scenario into the conversation is an act of social aggression - forcing them to consider, imagine and spend attention on ideas that they'd spend significant energy avoiding in real life. The trolley problem is bad enough - a scenario contrived to make people weigh the value of human lives, which is something that most have been conditioned against considering. But it's also a clean scenario; a numbers game; clearly an invitation to considerations of ethics and of life-or-death decisions. I'm not a fan, I consider it pretty much entirely pointless, but sometimes lives really do need to be weighed - such as in the debate of whether hijacked civilian planes should be shot down.
The cowfucker problem is not that. The cowfucker problem exists to gross people out. It's perhaps a social ritual in which all those involved shed some degree of common decency, at least hypothetically, wink wink, in order to buy into the enlightened society of the intellectually superior; those who are willing to dedicate some portion of their minds and some small part of their lives to the idea of fucking cows. And let me be straight here - I call utter bullshit on the idea that there are any great insights to be gained from pondering cowfucking. It's a stupid little game, not some great and valuable test of intellectual capacity. I'd even go as far as to assume that its main purpose is to flaunt one's pretend superiority by ignoring social norms, some contrarian pride in communaly sticking their imaginary dicks into imaginary cows, but I can't read your mind so just dismiss that as uncharitable cynicism on my part.
If cowfucking-pondering is the standard by which you judge others, then please consider yourself judged in turn.
Based on this
...it seems like your test for permitting gross hypothetical questions is whether they force the person being asked to consider deeper questions of genuine weight. That seems fair enough-- I wouldn't support gross questions for the sake of gross questions. But I think you're missing the point of the cow question specifically, and the point of grossness in moral dilemmas in general.
The question I have actually heard asked several times-- the dog/mother question-- is empirically successful at getting people to consider questions of:
...and it also reinforces group bonds by showing each other that we can discuss contentious topics without attacking someone for saying the wrong thing. It is my opinion that these topics are neccessary and proper discussion material, not just as a matter of public policy, but as a matter of identifying what sort of values the people you're among hold. I would argue that the cow question, seriously pondered, would serve a similar function.
Now, that alone doesn't justify making the question gross. I can forsee your counterargument that if you want to discuss those topics, it's possible to just discuss them instead of posing a hypothetical. But the purpose of the grossness is additionally to determine whether people will change their answer based on the salience of the question (as opposed to the fundamental moral rules being queried.) We can ask the trolley question with famous pieces of artwork, or even other people's pokemon cards, instead of humans. In theory people should reason about the question purely based on whether they're utilitarians or deontologists... but in practice, many people will change their answer because their moral principles are inconsistent or nonexistent. Elevating the emotional impact of the scenario while keeping the fundamentals the same is a way of catching out those people.
My test for permitting very unpleasant questions is whether their usefulness justifies the great displeasure, and whether the displeasure is actually required for the usefulness. As you later intuit correctly.
There's some inferential gulf here, I guess. IMO those fundamental moral principles really aren't all that rigorously formulated and applied in real life. People changing their views depending on the subject matter instead of working on purely abstract principles seems normal and highly advisable. Examining yourself and coming to the conclusion that - descriptively - you resonante most strongly with deontology or utilitarianism or virtue ethics seems fine. Turning prescriptive, i.e., deciding that only one of those is absolutely correct and that you must rigidly apply only one such philosophy under all circumstances, seems abnormal, impractical and like philosophy turning inwards to uselessness.
Uncharitably, by the logic of your paragraph quoted above, you're not just filtering out people who don't do abstract reasoning correctly, or people who prefer not to discuss gross matters, but also the many, many people who see philosophy as a toolbox to actually use rather than as a set of toy ideas.
I like this metaphor of philosophy-as-toolbox because I believe very strongly that people should care about the condition and efficacy of their tools. That means testing their morals against toy problems so they know, in advance, what guiding principles they should use in a real crisis. It is hopefully unlikely that any one of us will be asked to fuck a cow, but many of us will be called to decide whether to euthanize pets, or vote for politicians with a stance on animal welfare, or serve on a jury considering allegations of sexual assault. It's true descriptively that people go through life without rigorously applying their stated principles-- and that's lead to no end of infuriating moral tragedies that I would rather avoid. The consequences of rigorously applying moral principles and seeing them fail is that you get to re-evaluate your principles and do better next time. The consequences of doing whatever feels good in the moment is how we get ordinary citizens convinced they're morally blameless while carrying out genocides.
Which infuriating moral tragedies are those?
As a toy example, insufficient donations to bed net and vitamin supplementation charities as compared to, say, dog cancer charities. I think fewer people would give to the latter instead of the former if they did the self-examination necessary to see that they were acting according to aesthetic principles rather than their own fundamental morality, and save lives in the process.
Isn't that just revealed preferences at work? People don't actually hold the moral beliefs they socially profess adherence to; feeling like they do something for dogs really does matter more to them than actually doing something for africans. It's not an inability to get their priorities straight, but the correct assumption that they're better off pretending to hold the socially correct beliefs.
...and that's one of the things I would like to identify by posing philosophical thought experiments, yes.
If someone has my beliefs, and understands that, I would like to identify that and make friends with them. I someone has my beliefs, and doesn't understand that, I would like them to get better at implementing my (our) beliefs. If someone has not-my beliefs, and tells the truth about that, then we can at least discuss in good faith how to compromise. If someone has not-my beliefs, and lies about it, then they are an enemy agent and I would like to identify that.
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