cutelyaware

cutelyaware t1_iyomja5 wrote

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.

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cutelyaware t1_iyokehg wrote

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?

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cutelyaware t1_iylax98 wrote

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.

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cutelyaware t1_iygoxgx wrote

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.

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cutelyaware t1_ix0ziov wrote

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.

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cutelyaware t1_ix0xqq5 wrote

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.

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cutelyaware t1_iubwfo0 wrote

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.

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