Yes -- and the important thing to remember is that the second view, which all of us here agree is silly, is the naive, common-sense human view. It's what people are automatically going to think you're talking about if you go around shouting "Yes Virginia, there are moral facts after all!"
Agreed that this is important. (ETA: I now think Eliezer is right about this.)
Meanwhile, the general public has a term for the view that you and I share: they call it "moral relativism".
We believe (a) that there is no separable essence of goodness, but also (b) that there are moral facts that people can be wrong about. I think the general public understands "moral relativism" to exclude (b), and I don't think there's any short term in common (not philosophical) usage that includes the conjunction of (a) and (b).
What makes the theory relativist is simply the fact that it refers explicitly to particular agents -- humans.
Eliezer doesn't define morality in terms of humans; he defines it (as I understand) in terms of an objective computation that happens to be instantiated by humans. See No License to be Human.
We believe (a) that there is no separable essence of goodness, but also (b) that there are moral facts that people can be wrong about. I think the general public understands "moral relativism" to exclude (b)
I think that's uncharitable to the public: surely everyone should admit that people can be mistaken, on occasion, about what they themselves think. A view that holds that nothing that comes out of a person's mouth can ever be wrong is scarcely worth discussing.
...Eliezer doesn't define morality in terms of humans; he defines it (as I unders
On Wei_Dai's complexity of values post, Toby Ord writes:
The kind of moral realist positions that apply Occam's razor to moral beliefs are a lot more extreme than most philosophers in the cited survey would sign up to, methinks. One such position that I used to have some degree of belief in is:
Strong Moral Realism: All (or perhaps just almost all) beings, human, alien or AI, when given sufficient computing power and the ability to learn science and get an accurate map-territory morphism, will agree on what physical state the universe ought to be transformed into, and therefore they will assist you in transforming it into this state.
But most modern philosophers who call themselves "realists" don't mean anything nearly this strong. They mean that that there are moral "facts", for varying definitions of "fact" that typically fade away into meaninglessness on closer examination, and actually make the same empirical predictions as antirealism.
Suppose you take up Eliezer's "realist" position. Arrangements of spacetime, matter and energy can be "good" in the sense that Eliezer has a "long-list" style definition of goodness up his sleeve, one that decides even contested object-level moral questions like whether abortion should be allowed or not, and then tests any arrangement of spacetime, matter and energy and notes to what extent it fits the criteria in Eliezer's long list, and then decrees goodness or not (possibly with a scalar rather than binary value).
This kind of "moral realism" behaves, to all extents and purposes, like antirealism.
I might compare the situation to Eliezer's blegg post: it may be that moral philosophers have a mental category for "fact" that seems to be allowed to have a value even once all of the empirically grounded surrounding concepts have been fixed. These might be concepts such as "would aliens also think this thing?", "Can it be discovered by an independent agent who hasn't communicated with you?", "Do we apply Occam's razor?", etc.
Moral beliefs might work better when they have a Grand Badge Of Authority attached to them. Once all the empirically falsifiable candidates for the Grand Badge Of Authority have been falsified, the only one left is the ungrounded category marker itself, and some people like to stick this on their object level morals and call themselves "realists".
Personally, I prefer to call a spade a spade, but I don't want to get into an argument about the value of an ungrounded category marker. Suffice it to say that for any practical matter, the only parts of the map we should argue about are parts that map-onto a part of the territory.