Thank you for holding up a mirror to my thoughts. I agree these are my views/solutions and I iterated them here.
My Less-Wrong-Story is that sometime in the first year I gave up on an external/objective morality because the arguments here were compelling that there couldn't be one.
I had been clinging to the idea of the existence of objective morality because without it, value would be 'arbitrary'. By this I include determined (e.g., by evolution), complex, and potentially spontaneous and beautiful but not instrinsically "correct". Also, not deducible or reducible or necessarily logical like things embedded in physical reality must be. (Morality is technically embedded in physical reality in the way that it actually objectively exists, but describing this entity would describe how a person feels about X, not how they should feel about X.)
I spent a lot of time worrying that my brain wanted to give reasons for every value. I want to break this egg because I want to make a cake. I want to make a cake because I want the birthday party to be fun. I want it to be fun because I want to be happy. I want to be happy because ... because why? The terminal values aren't pinned to anything, but my brain expects them to be. In theory, religious people should pin the terminal values to God, but I don't believe the mapping is very thorough or accurate.
Ah, yep! There's a fact of the matter regarding how a person feels about X, and about how a person feels they should feel about X, and how a person feels they should feel they should feel... and so on. And the recursion continues forever.
But you can only ask why someone wants X a few times before we have to stop, or we go in a circle, or we get confused.
Abortion is one of the most politically-charged debates in the world today - possibly the most politically charged, though that's the subject for another thread. It's an excellent way of advertising whether you are Green or Blue. As a sceptical atheist who thinks guns should be banned and gay marriage should be legalised, I naturally take a stance against abortion. It's easy to see why: a woman's freedom is less important than another human's right to live.
Wait... that sounds off.
I really am an atheist, with good reasons to support gun bans and gay marriage. But while pondering matters today, I realised that my position on abortion was a lot more shaky than it had previously seemed. I'm not sure one way or the other whether a mother's right to make decisions that can change her life trumps the life of a human embryo or fetus. On the one hand, a fetus isn't quite a person. It has very little intelligence or personality, and no existence independent of its mother, to the point where I am comfortable using the pronoun "it" to describe one. On the other hand, as little as it is, it still represents a human life, and I consider preservation of human life a terminal goal as opposed to the intermediate goal that is personal freedom. The relative utilities are staggering: I wouldn't allow a mob of 100,000 to kill another human no matter how much they wanted to and even if their quality of life was improved (up to a point). So: verify my beliefs, LessWrong.
If possible, I'd like this thread to be not only a discussion about abortion and the banning or legalisation thereof, but also about why I didn't notice this before. For all my talk about examining my beliefs, I wasn't doing very well. I only believed verifying my beliefs was good; I wasn't doing it on any lower level.
This post can't go on the front page, for obvious reasons: it's highly inflammatory, and changing it so as not to refer to a particular example would result in one of the posts I linked to above.