I was also predicting that those specific examples will be found.

So why haven’t I updated my moral values (much) yet? And, more importantly, why hasn’t the world?

I think it’s because of the urge to make moral values systematic. I can (claim to) see the direction moral values will takes, but I prefer to stay with the current more coherent morality than to move towards a vaguer, more random (and probably hence biased) position.

Once the future is here, and all the brilliant minds have taken the (future) conclusions of science on board and come up with a coherent, strong system, I’ll be ready to embrace it (completely or in part).

Stuart, I have been talking about predicting the direction of changes to moral opinion relative to current opinion. Yes of course we can predict new info might produce some changes, and so predict a variance of opinion relative to current opinion.

Let’s try two future prediction, one of each type. And I’ll try and argue that both of them allow us to predict future moral trends that will depend on information we don’t have.
1) Future discoveries on the brain causes us to reassess our understanding of free will and freedom,
2) Better meat substitutes will push us more towards vegetarianism

The second prediction is the least interesting – it changes our morality only in practical ways, so probably doesn’t meet Robin’s criteria (though it is an example of how today we try and predict future changes based on future info).

The first case is more challenging. The current philosophy that seems to come out of neuroscience is that we have no free will – a useless position, since it isn’t testable. It’s also useless philosophically, since just saying “you have no free will” doesn’t provide any guidance on how to behave, and is so absolute it’s generally ignored.

But we will soon be able to show in precisely which areas we have little or no free will, and a better understanding of what substitutes for free will in those cases (character, impulses, outside manipulation). Since so much of our morality is dependent on the free will assumption, I can confidently predict that this future info will change our morality in these specific areas to a large extent – and since free will is a rather absolutist concept, it will be undermined by these specific examples, and this will result in a general moral change.

Would these examples mitigate against The ability to substantially predict the future of morality would be a strong argument against morality changes being due to info we learn?

Past increases in population size had an effect. For example, a city state with a few thousand citizens could handle politics by town meetings. A bigger society can’t. Central planning tends to break down in bigger societies.

At present, in a world of a few billion humans, there are plausible-sounding calls for the currently most-powerful nation to right every wrong (e.g., “We can stop the Darfur famine.”) and plausible-sounding claims that picking and choosing between wrongs to right is hypocritical. I suspect that in a Dyson sphere similar ideas would be regarded as obvious nonsense.

Info has no trend only among those who know that info has no trend. Here we are, looking at the trend of moral shifts and trying to anticipate them – that’s why info should have no trend for us. If the majority hasn’t gotten that far in their reasoning, they may end up with moral trends.