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 preferences is to see other human beings happy then I have to account for your preferences to some extent, which makes them a subset of my preferences. All those different values are then weighted accordingly. Do you disagree with that understanding?
I agree with you that your preferences account for your actions, and that my preferences account for my actions, and that your preferences can include a preference for my preferences being satisfied.
But I think it's a mistake to use the labels "morality" and "preferences" as though they are interchangeable.
If you have only one referent -- which it sounds like you do -- then I would recommend picking one label and using it consistently, and not use the other at all. If you have two referents, I would recommend getting clear about the di...
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.