Errh, could you reduce/taboo/refactor "instrumental concerns" here?

If I am morally prompted to put money in the collecting tin, I lose its instrumental value As before, I am thinking in "near" (or "real") mode.

If I act in an instrumentally-moral manner, I bring about more total moral good than if I act in a manner that is just "considered moral now" but would result in lots of moral bad later.

Huh? I don't think "instrumental" means "actually will work form an omniscicent PoV". What we think of as instrumental is just an approximation, and so is what we think of as moral.. Given our limitations, "don't kill unless there are serious extenuating circumsntaces" is both "what is considered moral now" and as instrumental as we can achieve.

One weird example here is making computer programs. Isn't it rather a moral good to make computer programs that are useful to at least some people?

I don't see why. Is it moral for trees to grow fruit that people can eat? Morality involves choices,and it involves ends. You can choose to drive a nail in with a hammer, or to kill someone with it. Likewise software.

I'm not sure I understand your line of reasoning for that last part of your comment.

It's what I say at the top: If I am morally prompted to put money in the collecting tin, I lose its instrumental value

On another note, I agree that I was using "reduction" in the sense of describing a system according to its ultimate elements and rules, rather than...

You may have been "using" in the sense of connoting, or intending that, but you cannot have been using it in the sense of denoting or referencing that, since no such reduction exists (in the sense that a reduction of heat to molecular motion exists as a theory).

"understandable in terms of"? What do you even mean?

Eg:"All the phenomena associated with heat are understandable in terms of the disorganised motion of the molecules making up a substance".

How is this substantially different? The wikipedia article's "an approach to understanding the nature of complex things by reducing them to the interactions of their parts" definition seems close to the sense LW uses.

That needs tabooing. It explains "reduction" in terms of "reducing".

"In the real world, my only algorithm for evaluating morality is the instrumentality of something towards bringing about more desirable world-states."

Says who? if the non-cognitivists are right, you have an inaccessible black-box source of moral insights. If the opponents of hedonism are right, morality cannot be conceptually equated with desirabililty. (What a world of heroin addicts desire is not necessaruly what is good).

The desirability of a world-state is a black-box process

Or an algorithm that can be understood and written down, like the "description" you mention above? That is a rather important distinction.

that compares the world-state to "ideal" world-states in an abstract manner, where the ideal worldstates are those most instrumental towards having more instrumental worldstates,

How does that ground out? The whole point of instrumental values is that they are instrumental for something.

the recursive stack being most easily described as "worldstates that these genetics prefer, given that these genetics prefer worldstates where more of these genetics exist, given that these genetics have (historically) caused worldstates that these genetics preferred", etc. etc. and then you get the standard Evolution Theory statements.

There's not strong reason to think that something actually is good just because our genes say so. It's a form of Euthyphro. As EY has noted.