Depends on how the question is asked. Does the paperclip maximizer have the definition of the word right stored in its memory? If so, it just consults the memory. Otherwise, the questioner would have to either define the word or explain how to arrive at a definition.
This may seem like cheating, but consider the analogous case where we are discussing prime numbers. You must either already know what a prime number is, or I must tell you, or I must tell you about mathematicians, and you must observe them.
As long as a human and a paperclip maximizer both have the same information about humans, they will both come to the same conclusions about human brains, which happen to encode what is right, thus allowing both the human and the paperclip maximizer to learn about morality. If this paperclip maximizer then chooses to wipe out humanity in order to get more raw materials, it will knows that its actions are wrong; it just has no term in its utility function for morality.
Sure, agreed: if I tell the PM that thus-and-such is labeled "right," or "moral," or "fleabag," then it will know these things, and it won't care.
I have entirely lost track of why this is important.
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.