In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.
Are you looking to have it summarized in the terminology of standard moral philosophy?
Are there any specific questions you could ask about it?
(The main thing I found to be insufficiently unpacked is the notion of moral arguments — it's not clear to me exactly what types of arguments would qualify, as he sees it — but other than that, I think I understand it well enough to answer questions about it.)
Sure, let me try some specific questions.
I'll start with what I think is clear to me about Eliezer's views:
(1) Whatever moral facts exist, they must be part of the natural world. (Moral naturalism.)
(2) Moral facts are not written into the "book" of the universe - values must be derived from a consideration of preferences. (In philosophical parlance, this would be something like the claim that "The only sources of normativity are relations between preferences and states of affairs.")
I'll propose a third claim that I'm not so sure Eliezer... (read more)