This sounds, to me, like it's just the distinction between terminal and instrumental values. I don't terminally value eating licorice jelly beans, I just like the way they taste and the feeling of pleasure they give me. If you switched the tastes of buttered popcorn jelly beans (yuck indeed) and licorice jelly beans, that would be fine by me. Hell, it would be an improvement since no one else likes that flavor (more for me!). The situation is NOT the same for "autonomy of individuals" and "uniformity of individuals" before I really do have terminal values for these things, apart from the way they make me feel.
The situation is NOT the same for "autonomy of individuals" and "uniformity of individuals" before I really do have terminal values for these things, apart from the way they make me feel.
How do you know that?
What would you expect to experience if your preference for individual autonomy in fact derived from something else?
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.