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 right; if you don't, it isn't.
My own response to EY's claim is "How do you know that? What would you expect to observe if it weren't true?" I'm not clear what his answer to that is.
My response to your claim is "If that's true, so what? Why is right and wrong worth caring about, on that model... why not just say you feel like killing puppies?"
My response to your claim is "If that's true, so what? Why is right and wrong worth caring about, on that model... why not just say you feel like killing puppies?"
I don't think those terms are useless, that moral doesn't exist. But you have to use those words with great care, because on its own they are meaningless. If I know what you want, I can approach the conditions that would be right for you. If I know how you define morality, I can act morally according to you. But I will do so only if I care about your preferences. If part of my prefer...
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.