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RolfAndreassen comments on Rationality Quotes July 2012 - Less Wrong
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While this is in some sense true, it doesn't add up to normality; it is an excuse for avoiding the actual moral issues. Humans are chemical processes; humans are morally significant; therefore at least some chemical processes have moral significance even if we don't, currently, understand how it arises, and you cannot dismiss a moral question by saying "Chemistry!" any more than you can do so by saying "God says so!"
I don't think it's an excuse - it's an aside from the rest of the quote. If you take out that sentence, the quote still makes sense. I think the moral question (from a consequentialist point of view, at least) is put aside when he assumes (accurately, in my opinion) that the tool is "useful". It's usefulness to humans is all that matters, which is his point.
In-game, Yang does view it as an excuse, though, because he's more or less a totalitarian, nihilistic sociopath.
Moral significance is not a fact about morally significant humans. It's a fact about the other humans who view them as morally significant.
Our brains' moral reasoning doesn't know about, or depend on, the chemical implementations of morally significant humans' bodies. Therefore there are no moral questions about chemistry, including human biochemistry.
The original quote is correct: DNA should not be held sacred; DNA-related therapy is a tool like any biological or medical procedure. It has no moral status, and should not be assigned qualities like sacredness. Only specific applications of tools have moral status.
As I said, morality is in the eye of the beholder; one might therefore think it's possible to assign moral status to anything one wishes. However, assigning moral status to tools, methods, nonspecific operations, generally leads to repugnant conclusions and/or contradictions. Some people nevertheless say certain tools are immoral in their eyes. Other people value e.g. logical consistency higher than moral instincts. It's a matter of choice.
I suspect that, if I propose to drip an unknown liquid into your eyes, you will find the question of its chemistry very morally significant indeed.
Since our morality is embedded in, and arises from, physics, the moral questions are indeed at some level about chemistry even if the current black-box reasoning we use has no idea how to deal with information expressed in chemical terms. When we fully understand morality, we will be able to take apart the high-level reasoning that our brains implement into reasoning about the moral significance of individual atoms.
As I said: "Only specific applications of tools have moral status." The action of dripping liquid into my eyes has moral status. The chemical formula of the liquid, whatever it may be, does not. The only chemistry really relevant to morality is the chemistry of our brains that assign moral status to other things.
I know other formulations of "what is morally significant" are possible and sometimes seem useful, but they also seem to lead to the conclusion that everything is morally significant - e.g. assigning moral value to entire universe-states - which does away with the useful concept of some smaller thing being morally significant vs. amoral.
Right. Which is the same as the point I was originally making: At least one chemical process has moral significance.
That's true. It seems I've been arguing past you or at a strawman. Sorry.