I had no idea that function had a name.

I've always been conflicted about this. I remember reading some Ayn Rand book where she was arguing that you shouldn't get hung up on how a philosophy handles weird edge cases, but rather how it handles the bulk of plausible ones.

At the time, I had a visceral reaction against that position. If your philosophy doesn't handle the weird cases, doesn't that imply your principles are not correct? And, if your principles are not correct, then why do you think they account for anything well.

I've become more sympathetic to the idea of focusing on the center of the distribution, though. It's like getting the first order approximation established. From there you can develop the more complex second and third order approximations of moral truth.