Yes. It is morally bankrupt. (or would you not mind turning into paperclips if that's what the Paperclip Maximizer wanted?)
Yes, but that is a matter of taste.
BTW, your current position is more-or-less what theists mean when they say atheists are amoral.
Why would I ever change my current position? If Yudkowsky told me there was some moral laws written into the fabric of reality, what difference would that make? Either such laws are imperative, so that I am unable to escape them, or I simply ignore them if they are opposing my preferences.
Assume all I wanted to do is to kill puppies. Now Yudkowsky told me that this is prohibited and I will suffer disutility because of it. The crucial question would be, does the disutility outweigh the utility I assign to killing puppies? If it doesn't, why should I care?
Perhaps you assign net utility to killing puppies. If you do, you do. What EY tells you, what I tell you, what is prohibited, etc., has nothing to do with it. Nothing forces you to care about any of that.
If I understand EY's position, it's that it cuts both ways: whether killing puppies is right or wrong doesn't force you to care, but whether or not you care doesn't change whether it's right or wrong.
If I understand your position, it's that what's right and wrong depends on the agent's preferences: if you prefer killing puppies, then killing puppies is r...
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.