Do you have a dumb question that you're kind of embarrassed to ask in the main thread? Is there something you're just not sure about?
This is your opportunity to ask questions. No question too simple or too silly.
Culture war topics are accepted, and proposals for a better intro post are appreciated.
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Notes -
Suppose you know a secret about something.
And that secret would be profoundly distressing and traumatizing to a person if said person learned about it.
And there are no practical benefits to that person learning about it (ie learning about it would not incentivise said person to act in a way to protect themselves, or to do something beneficial in any way)
Do you think it would it be ethical to tell the secret to that person or not? What conditions are relevant in deciding whether to tell them or not?
Ironically I increasingly think that these kind of thought experiments are net negative to pose, i.e. making people think about them causes them to make real-world decisions that are worse by most reasonable metrics than if they haven't thought about them. The reason is that they regularly make assumptions that are almost universally untrue, in this example the claim that we have perfect knowledge whether it has practical benefits to the person. Some people will then over-apply their conclusions from these thought-experiments into the real world (in this case, keeping secrets by finding lazy, convenient excuses), and some people will smell that something is funny and go to the other extreme (in this case, practising impractical radical honesty).
In the end, the extremely vague "Think about how you think this particular person will react to you telling them the secret, whether that reaction is good by what you judge their own moral position to be, whether that reaction is good by your own moral position and to you worth the hassle, how likely they are to find out regardless, how likely they are to find out you knew, how they'll react when they find out that you knew but didn't tell them, and so on" and further weighted by things like your own risk tolerance will lead to the best decisions. This is obviously quite bothersome to do and explains the appeal of simple approaches like radical honesty or "it's none of my business", which are also the best starting points for less important secrets which aren't worth making a huge calculus of (but which also runs the risk of falling prey to lazily call everything unimportant).
I find your judgement very pertinent. In real life there is alway a unique set of conditions to be taken into consideration, and intuition is often better than a pre determined set of rules.
Still I find thought experiments of an ideal environment, while not applicable, are good to understand our own thoughts and values. Just have to be careful.
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