Morality and relativistic vertigo

I don't see how this answers my objection. I'll try to restate my main point in a more clear form.

The claim that "'healthy' is not a precisely defined concept, but no one is crazy enough to utter that medicine cannot answer questions of health" is, while superficially plausible, in fact false under the interpretation relevant for this discussion. Namely, the claim is true only for those issues where the concept of "health" is precise and uncontroversial. In situations where the concept of "health" is imprecise and a matter of dispute, there are sane and knowledgeable people who plausibly dispute that medicine can legitimately answer questions of health in those particular situations. Thus, what superficially looks like a lucid analogy is in fact a rhetorical sleight of hand.

(Also, I'd say that by any reasonable measure, questions of health vs. disease are typically much more clear-cut than moral questions. The appearance of coughing or headaches, ceteris paribus, represents an unambiguous reduction of health; on the other hand, even killing requires significant qualifications to be universally recognized as evil. But my main objection stands regardless of whether you agree with this.)

Nobody would claim that I became more moral if I started stealing, killed two people for money, or turned into a notorious liar.

Nobody except every single person that ever lived. I call bullshit on this entire thread. Pretty much every culture supports these in some contexts and condones in some other contexts, with contexts differing between cultures.

Even today we have ridiculously many contexts in which killing another human being is considered morally acceptable, and consequentially equivalent inaction resulting in someone's death hardly triggers any moral reaction at all.

Could moral absolutists name even a single action that is universally condoned by every culture? (just don't try implicitly answering with moral context, "intentional killing" would be an acceptable answer if it was true, "murder" would not)

Fuzzy concepts about "morality" and fuzzy concepts about how to classify things based on their empirical features are not even the same type of fuzziness. This is philosophy 101.

It probably is Philosophy 101. But in Philosophy 202 you go back and review the overlap and interaction of the two.

I didn't mean it as a criticism of you -- I meant more that I was shocked that people in the comments disagreed with your argument. I mean, no matter how you form your moral values, they're going to be affected by factual claims, and people will change their opinions on moral issues based on learning new objective facts. Actually, that's probably the predominant way that people change their minds on moral issues.

"X is good."

"What's that? You say X kills vast numbers of people? You have strong evidence for that? Oops, X is bad."

...science bears upon instrumental issues but not terminal ones.

For what I consider non-obvious reasons, I disagree. As you say (and thanks for pointing this out explicitly),

What would falsify this idea would be an example of new factual knowledge changing someone's perception of the moral value of some action, with this change persisting even after adjusting for the effect the knowledge has on the instrumental value of the action.

I have undergone changes in values that I would describe in this way. Namely, I had something I considered a terminal value that I stopped considering terminal upon realizing something factual about it. I'm guessing LucasSloan and Jayson_Virissimo are referring to similar experiences in these comments.

You could argue that it changing means "It wasn't really terminal to begin with". However, the separation of a given utility function into values and balancing operations is non-unique, so my current opinion is that the terminal/instrumental distinction is at best somewhat nominal. In other words, the change that it stopped feeling terminal may be the only sort of change worth calling "not being terminal anymore".

So I think you should more precisely demand an example of a person's utility function changing in response to knowledge. On the day of the factual realization I mentioned above, while it's clear that my description of my utility function to myself and others changed, it's not clear to me that the function itself changed much right away. But it does seem to me that over time, expressing it differently has gradually changed the function, though I can't be sure.

I only hinted at all this when I added

First of all, you might change your morals in response to them not relating to each other in the way you expected. Ideas parse differently when they relate differently. "Teachers should be allowed to physically punish their students" might never feel the same to you after you find out it causes adult violence.

When I first made the utility function/description distinction, it was for abstract reasons (I was making a toy model of human morality for another purpose), and I didn't quite notice the implications it would have for how people think of moral progress. Now in response to your demand for explicit examples, I'm a lot more motivated to sort this out. Thanks!

What you write is true, but these facts should be seen as imposing practical limitations on science. Sometimes, scientific inquiry will stumble onto ideologically charged questions, and the less aware the scientists are of the ideological implications, the greater the chance that their work will be sound. If the ideological implications are clear, the partisan opinions impassioned, and the consequences for practical power politics undeniable, we can't realistically expect that the results will not be influenced by these considerations, whether consciously or not. And if the scientific work is specifically motivated by the fact that the question is interesting for reasons of ideology or policy, the confidence we can have in its quality is very low indeed.

For all practical purposes, this imposes limitations on the efficacy of institutional science of the sort we have today, and this must be recognized by anyone whose interest is finding truth rather than ideological ammunition. There are already many research areas where the ideological influences are so strong that their output can be trusted only after a very careful examination, and there are those whose output is almost pure bullshit, yet nevertheless gets to be adorned with the most prestigious academic affiliations. Therefore, it seems pretty clear to me that in the present situation, science is already excessively engaged in ideologically sensitive areas, and encouraging further such engagement will result only in additional corruption of science, not bringing clarity and rigor to the discussions of these areas.

Take your example of vaccination. In a situation where researchers consider it a moral imperative to dispel the crackpot conspiracy theories and pseudoscientific claims about vaccination, I have very little confidence that their research will provide an accurate picture of the risks and negative consequences of vaccination if their magnitude actually is non-negligible, for fear of providing ammunition to the anti-vaccination side. Now, in this case, it does seem like the situation is simple enough that all evidence overwhelmingly points to the pro-vaccination side, and assuming agreement on the facts, there is no significant additional disagreement on values and preferences, so there isn't much concern overall. But often neither is the case, and insisting that science should be involved in the controversies more heavily will ultimately just corrupt and debase science, not bring any clarity to the situation.

Same here (at least twice).

Yeah, but that makes you really really weird.

First of all, that was intended as a general statement, not an absolute description of every case. Experiments have been done on people to see if, for example, they stop being opposed to incest in fictional scenarios where the incest is stated outright to be harmless.

Before the scenario was presented, people offered utilitarian justifications for the incest taboo, but even when those were stripped away, they insisted that incest is still "just wrong". My point is that this is what generally happens when someone points out incoherency in a moral system. People generally switch to offering an axiomatic rationalization for their moral sentiments instead of a utilitarian one.

Also, I have to say:

I have changed my mind about my values due to noticing that my values were inconsistent.

Do you mean that you made a judgement elevating one value above another you had in cases where they conflict? Or do you mean you actually gained a new value? It seems like you must have used some sort of higher level value preference to make that meta-level moral judgement.

What if being raised by gay parents improved a lot of cognitive functions, and had no significant effect on other personality traits? Or some other uncompromisingly positive effect?

I don't know how that would happen, but I don't really know much about having gay parents anyway. The point is that science would help me have a better opinion than whatever I have so far.

I may act in accordance with different values without resulting in undirected floppyness.

For instance, I could value both animal life and wearing traditional Bavarian lederhosn, and act on these values by producing, buying and wearing lederhosn while donating money to a save-the-cows fund. But I guess I could just donate an amount relative to how much I value the cows over/under lederhosn. Hm. Okay.

I'd rather arrange for there to be no further children to teach after the current generation.

At this point, the only new open threads are in the discussion section. On the other hand, there's nothing stopping people from starting a top-level open thread to see what happens.