Thoughts on moral philosophy
Whenever I acquire new information or investigate a new field of knowledge, I value it on the basis of to what extent the description of it can be used to explain and predict other phenomena in my worldview. How to manipulate, use, or apply said system description is a different and postcursory category of thoughts.
That is to say, that there is a difference between how the world behaves and how an observer of the system thinks it ought to behave to cater to their self-interest.
As soon find that the origin of a thought - most often a person - has these concepts heavily mixed, I immediately grow suspicious. It betrays that the individual is looking for a specific question to a set answer instead of considering both question and answer as subject to potential changes should a contradiction occur.
When a scholar say they want to learn in order to improve society, it sounds admirable. I think they should phrase it a bit more accurately: they want to make society more fit for themselves and their type. Of this we are all guilty, but people with a good sense of hygiene generally want to keep obvious moral convictions out of their descriptive models.
As is custom, I give examples. First statement: I would not exist if not for the advances of modern medicine. My mother would have been dead from type 1 diabetes. Second statement: modern medicine has a degenerative effect on any population subject to it. Keeping something that should die alive makes the species less adapted and prone to suffering.
Having said this, do I endorse the abolition of modern medicine? Do I condemn my own existence? What does it reveal about my political motives?
To constantly evaluate — or even worse, construct — every systematic description against this moral ruler inevitably produces low accuracy or contradictory models, as some worldly phenomena are bound to be against our individual self-interest, just as some other ones affirm it.
When a child questions the mechanics of their environment, it is driven by fascination and appreciation. The answer to the question "why is the sky blue" has no immediate practical uses, the child simply has a beautiful inclination to understand the nature of their surroundings. Then, as the child grows older and gradually undergoes the sad transform into a grumpy old human with a distaste for life, this "knowing for the sake of understanding something fascinating" finally turns into "knowing for the sake of coping with an evil world". And in this final version of knowledge, any fact that could somehow be interpreted to be affirming an evil world must be false.