 Abstraction forestalls unhelpful disputes over historical details. It also reduces bias—we are inclined to view actual conflicts through the lens of our own political allegiances. But it also has costs. We should be proportionately less confident of our intuitions the more removed the test case is from our lived experience. Philosophers’ scenarios involving mind-control, armed pedestrians, trolleys, meteorites, and incredibly complicated causal sequences are pure exercises in imagination. How can we trust our judgements about such cases more than we trust our views on actual, realistic scenarios? What’s more, abandoning the harrowing experience of war for sanitized hypothetical cases might be not merely epistemically unsound, but also disrespectful of the victims of war. Lastly, cleaned-up examples often omit morally relevant details—for instance, assuming that everyone has all the information relevant to their choice, rather than acknowledging the “fog of war”, and making no allowances for fear or trauma.