Thanks for the reply -- I find this a very interesting topic. One thing I should clarify is that my view doesn't entail giving aliens "veto powers", as you put it; an alternative response is to take them to be unreasonable to intrinsically desire the eating of babies. That isn't an intrinsically desirable outcome (I take it), i.e. there is no reason to desire such a thing. Stronger still, we may think it intrinsically undesirable, so that insofar as an agent has such desires they are contrary to reason. (This requires a substantive notion of reason that goes beyond mere instrumental rationality, of course.)
In any case, I'd put the crux of my argument slightly differently. The core intuition is just that it's possible to have irresolvable moral disagreements. We can imagine a case where Bob is stubbornly opposed to abortion, and Jane is just as stubbornly in favour of it, and neither agent is disposed to change their mind in light of any additional information. EY's view would seem to imply that the two agents mustn't really disagree. And that just seems a mistake: it's part of our concept of morality that this very concept could be shared by someone who fundamentally (and irresolvably) disagrees with us about what the substantive moral facts are. This is because we're aspiring to conform our judgments to a standard that is outside of ourselves. (If you don't think there are any such objective standards, then that's just to say that there are no normative facts, given my concept of normativity.)
Richard, hello.
Human beings are analogous to computers. Morality and other aspects of behavior and cognition are analogous to programs. It is a type error to ask whether a program "really exists" somewhere outside a computer, or is "intrinsic" to a computer, or is "contingent", or something like that. Such questions don't correspond to observations within the world that could turn out one way or the other. You see a computer running a certain program and that's the end of the story.
Your mind is a program too, and your moral in...
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.