TITLE: Choice vs. countable choice
QUESTION [21 upvotes]: This question arose after reading the answers (and the comments to the answers) to Why worry about the axiom of choice?.
First things first.  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. 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 in. In one of the comments to the post cited above someone wrote (quoting from memory) that the majority of practicing mathematicians views countable choice 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 "unproblematic" but AC's validity is not? What is the intuitive explanation (or philosophical reason, if you will) why making countably infinite choices is "unproblematic" but making arbitrarily infinite choices is somehow "more suspicious" and "fraught with dangers"? I for one, cannot see any difference, but then again I 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.

REPLY [5 votes]: I apologize for writing the following from memory, but I don't have (and won't for a while have) access to the book I want to refer to; I trust that others on MO will correct whatever I mess up here.  The book is Gregory Moore's "Zermelo's Axiom of Choice: Its origins, development and influence," and the reason I want to refer to it is not Moore's excellent history of the subject but some letters reprinted at the end of the book.  The letters contain a discussion of the axiom of choice, not very long after Zermelo introduced it.  They were written by Baire, Borel, Hadamard, Lebesgue, and (I think) one other prominent analyst of that period.  If I remember correctly, only Hadamard favored the full axiom of choice; the others wanted only countable choice.  Why did they consider countable choice more plausible than full choice?  A cynical answer would be that countable choice is needed for lots of results in analysis, including the Baire category theorem (in general complete metric spaces) and the countable additivity of Lebesgue measure. But the reasons actually given in the letters were, to the best of my recollection, rather close to what David Speyer wrote in his answer here.