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CronoDAS comments on A Less Wrong singularity article? - Less Wrong
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Correct. I'm a moral cognitivist; "should" statements have truth-conditions. It's just that very few possible minds care whether should-statements are true or not; most possible minds care about whether alien statements (like "leads-to-maximum-paperclips") are true or not. They would agree with us on what should be done; they just wouldn't care, because they aren't built to do what they should. They would similarly agree with us that their morals are pointless, but would be concerned with whether their morals are justified-by-paperclip-production, not whether their morals are pointless. And under ordinary circumstances, of course, they would never formulate - let alone bother to compute - the function we name "should" (or the closely related functions "justifiable" or "arbitrary").
Here's a very short unraveling of "should":
"Should" means "is such so as to fulfill the desires in question." For example, "If you want to avoid being identified while robbing a convenience store, you should wear a mask."
In the context of morality, the desires in question are all desires that exist. "You shouldn't rob convenience stores" means, roughly, "People in general have many and strong reasons to ensure that individuals don't want to rob convenience stores."
For the long version, see http://atheistethicist.blogspot.com/2005/12/meaning-of-ought.html .