Philosophical Stress Tests
Pressure-test your intuitions on morality, knowledge, and truth. Move beyond beginner thought experiments to apply rigorous analytical tools to complex everyday dilemmas.
Like Duolingo, but for Philosophical Stress Tests. Tomo turns the whole topic into a game you play five minutes a day, until it actually sticks.
A short one: 11 levels across 2 sections, about 22 minutes end to end, roughly 4 days at five minutes a day. It moves through Stress-Testing Moral Judgments and Stress-Testing Belief and Language. It assumes you already know the basics.
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Key ideas in Philosophical Stress Tests
- Thought experiments control variables by stripping out confounding emotional biases.
- Abstract framing isolates whether a specific feature alone drives moral judgment.
- Messy real-world details often mask the core ethical principle being tested.
- Double effect permits foreseen harm only if it is not the chosen instrument.
- Using a person's death as the causal lever to save others violates the doctrine.
- Side effects are unintended costs that run parallel to the primary goal.
- The shallow pond argument treats geographic distance as morally arbitrary.
- Physical proximity triggers stronger psychological urgency without altering duty.
- Failing to donate life-saving aid is framed as equivalent to watching a child drown.
- A reductio accepts the premise and follows its logic to an unacceptable conclusion.
- Forced organ harvesting from one healthy person to save five tests strict utilitarianism.
- Exposing intolerable derived outcomes proves a rule is an ad-hoc rationalization.
- The control principle states agents are only morally blameworthy for factors under their direct control
- Resultant luck alters consequences without altering the reckless choice or internal culpability of the agent
- Equal recklessness warrants identical moral censure when outcomes hinge purely on extrinsic chance
- Constitutive luck concerns the involuntary formation of an agent's predispositions, traits, and temperament
You've tried the other tabs
Thirty open tabs. Four facts you actually kept.
You watched. You nodded. By Sunday it was gone.
One answer, then back to scrolling.
Eight weeks. You meant to finish. You didn't.
Tomo gives Philosophical Stress Tests the Duolingo treatment: levels, streaks, and quick quizzes that test what you just learned. That game loop is what the tabs above never had, so it's the one you actually finish.
Here's what playing it feels like
A real question from this course. Take your best guess.
Picture a philosopher replacing a messy wartime scenario with a bare runaway trolley. What does this abstract framing achieve?
Get it right to open this lesson and 10 more in the app.
Where Philosophical Stress Tests takes you
- 1
Stress-Testing Moral Judgments
- Isolating Intuitions with Counterexamples
- Untangling Moral Luck and Culpability
- 2
Stress-Testing Belief and Language
- Auditing What You Claim to Know
- Engineering Concepts to Unstick Debates
2 sections · 4 units · 11 levels. Built to play, not to enroll.
You pick the voice
Philosophical Stress Tests is taught in the The Storyteller style: every lesson is a story. Want a different feel? In the app you can spin up the same topic in any of Tomo's teaching styles. Same facts, totally different vibe.
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