There's a baby in front of me, and I say "Humans and Babykillers disagree about what to do next with this baby."
The one replies: "No, they don't. They aren't talking about the same subject when they debate what to do next; this is not a disagreement."
"Let me rephrase," I say. "Babykillers prefer that this baby be killed. Humans prefer that this baby have fun. Fun and babykilling can't both be implemented on the same baby: if it's killed, it's not having fun; if it's having fun, it hasn't been killed."
Have I left out anything of value in my restatement? If so, what have I left out?
More generally: given all the above, why should I care whether or not what humans and Babykillers have with respect to this baby is a disagreement? What difference does that make?
We previously debated the disagreements between those with different values here.
The dictionary apparently supports the idea that any conflict is a disagreement.
To understand the other side of the argument, I think it helps to look at this:
all disagreements are about facts. What else would you be talking about?
One side has redefined "disagreement" to mean "a difference of opinion over facts"!
I think that explains much of the sound and fury surrounding the issue.
A "difference of opinion over goals" is not a "differen...
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.