First things first. The In my intuitive conception of the hierarchy of sets, the axiom of choice is obviously true. I mean, how can the product of a family of non-empty sets fail to be non-empty? I simply cannot fathom it. A Now, I understand that there are people who disagree with me; a mathematician of a (more) constructive persuasion would reply that mathematical existence is constructive existence. Well, we can agree to disagree. And besides, the distinction between constructive and non-constructive proofs is very much worth having in mind. First, because constructive proofs usually give more information and second, there are many contexts where AC is not available (e.g. topoi).
A second (personal) reason for championing AC is a pragmatic one: it allows us to prove many things. And "many things" include things that physicists use without a blink. Analysis can hardly get off the ground without some form of choice. Countable choice (ACC) or dependent countable choice (ACDC) is enough for most elementary analysis and many constructivists have no problem with ACC or ACDC. For example, ACC and the stronger ACDC are enough to prove that the countable union of countable sets is countable or Baire's theorem but it is not enough to prove Hahn-Banach, Tychonoff or Krein-Milman (please, correct me if I am wrong). And this is where my question comes : why do in. In one of the comments to the post cited above someone wrote (some) people have no problem about quoting from memory) that the majority of practicing mathematicians views countable choice but sudenly get very nervous when as "true". I have seen this repeated many times, and the way I read this is that while the majority of practicing mathematicians views ACC as "obviously true", a part of this population harbours, in various degrees, some doubts about full AC. Assuming that I have not misread these statements, why in the minds of some people ACC is invoked"unproblematic" but AC's validity is not? What is the intuitive explanation (or philosophical reason, if you will) why ACC making countably infinite choices is "obviously trueunproblematic" but making arbitrarily infinite choices is somehow "more suspicious" and "unproblematic" but not ACfraught with dangers"? I for one, cannot see any difference, but then again I know next to nothing freely confess my ignorance about these matters. Let me stress once again that I do not think for a moment that denying AC is "wrong" in some absolute sense of the word; I just would like to understand better what is the obstruction (to use a geometric metaphor) from passing from countably infinite choices to arbitrarily infinite ones.
Note: some rewriting and expansion of the original post to address some of the comments.
