The moral position involved in your example is that it's wrong to harm fetuses. If you learn that drinking harms fetuses, then you haven't changed your position by then concluding that's wrong behavior. You started off believing it was wrong to harm fetuses, and you ended up still believing that. You've just updated your opinion based on new information.

I've had new situations come to light that cause me to rethink my proper responses to moral questions, but I can't think of anything that changed my morality. For example I still think that it should be a woman's right to choose abortion, but I've come to believe that pro-life people have a point.

How have you changed your morality?

A person's morality is simply their sense of right and wrong behaviors. It doesn't matter if you have an algorithm or not. That would only let you be more consistent with your actions. My point is that you don't get to choose your morality any more than you get to choose your sexual orientation.

> How do they draw the line without using numbers on at least some level?

You can't use numbers to justify your morality. You can only optimize it if your morality happens to be purely utilitarian.

You can't solve moral problems with math. You can only express your moral beliefs in symbolic forms and manipulate them with the tools of mathematics. If you describe a moral problems in utilitarian terms, then you'll get utilitarian results. But who is to say that a moral problem requires a utilitarian result? That's just begging the question.

My wife and I once hiked into the Yosemite backcountry for a few days. On the way back out we overtook another couple who were also coming out after a horrible week. On their first night going in, a bear ate all their food. They still had their fishing gear and figured that once they made it to the lake they were headed for, they could catch all their food. Of course they caught nothing, and after a day or two had to hike all the way back out. So when we met them, they hadn't eaten in at least 3 or 4 days. They very politely asked if we had any leftover food, so we were happy to give them the half a bag of roasted peanuts in the shell we hadn't finished. They pounced on it and ravished it, all the while asking what kind of peanuts they were because they tasted way better than anything they'd ever had. We felt really sad for them because they were ordinary peanuts and it was hard to see such nice people in such distress.

We haven't traveled Mars either. That wasn't the question.

We've seen 100% of the ocean surface

No way is this a fair die. And that's a shame because it is possible.

That's why it's called a morass

Gas guns court rights? Vote oil, Republican states!

He saw the TV coverage the next day, so it didn't even interrupt their date. I think it's just the very common situation where the editor who writes the headline is not the person who reported on the story. They often bend the truth for a salacious headline.

Yeah, the article says he decided to join the insurrection when he saw it on his date's TV. He could just as well have seen it in a bar. Where he saw it isn't the point.

Have you read those songs?

Please see the other comment threads.

Speaking of tomes, that's quite the comment! I think it's fair to boil it down to easy vs hard books. That's sort of what I understood the rule to mean. IE it will turn people off to the book if they're not mature enough to make the effort needed. Personally I simply skipped all the expository sections on whaling as I found them both dry and disturbing, and not contributing much if anything to the story.

I also agree with your comparison to LOTR where I learned to simply skip over the songs. I thought they were terrible and didn't add to the story.

I think we're on the same page, which ironically supports the idea of not pushing heavy works onto young people who may reject them and then never discover those gems later.

Yeah, I thought it dragged unnecessarily with those long sections on all the details of whaling. I'm also vegetarian and really dislike that sort of thing so I simply skipped over those sections, and didn't feel like I missed anything important to the story. Same goes for all the songs in The Lord of the Rings books.

It's not like that, though the well-known rule is that it shouldn't be read by anyone under 40, and I kind of get that.

Same. They were pretty much just excited about killing whales, though they were rather concerned near the end.

Both are examples of protection rackets

Those are stunt boobies

You miss the point. I'm saying that not all physical objects expanded when heated, which you should have learned in high school physics or chemistry.

Warming ice makes it contract

Perhaps, but it could also simply be that without a fresh breeze, the oxygen in the room might be depleted enough from rebreathing to matter. Or perhaps more likely, the raised C2O causes problems with blood ph.

I once dropped a knife which stuck in the floor right next to my cat's tail. She was fine with it but I was kind of freaked.