I'm asking why you decided that "choose the theory that best satisfies my intuitive desiderata" was the best method of choosing a theory. What justifies that method of "choosing a theory", if there is a justification and you did in fact think about it beforehand? If you did think about it, presumably you decided that was the best method of choosing a theory for some reason(s), and I'm asking what those reasons might be.
One alternative, for example, might be for me to critically analyze my intuitions beforehand and be skeptical that all my intuitions are good for me (in the sense that acting on those intuitions best furthers all my interests weighted accordingly), and I might then choose to disgard some of my intuitive desiderata or weight them in some way before proceeding with whatever else I've decided on as a method of choosing. I might decide to just accept the theory that is most respected by my parents, or my priest, or the ethics professors that I most admire. I might decide to accept a theory on the basis of anticipating the results that believing in the theory will have on me and choosing the theory with the best anticipated effect. I haven't given the justifications here, because these are just examples, but if I were to follow one of those strategies, I would almost certainly have reasons for thinking that strategy was better than others I considered. Those reasons are what I was asking you about. Just to head off another potential misunderstanding, I'm not suggesting that you should have considered any of these or that any of these are better strategies. They're just given as evidence of the fact that your strategy is not the only one.
I'm very curious what was so vague or poorly expressed or confusing in my original post if you (or anybody else) can identify something in particular.
Are you looking for a causal history or a theoretical justification...? Meh, I'll just summarize both together.
Trying to unite my desiderata into a single theory that doesn't eat itself proved a good means of reconciling or prioritizing my intuitions where they conflicted. (For instance, I had warring intuitions over whether to privilege the null action or commit myself to moral luck, and chose the former because my intuition against moral luck was stronger than my wariness of the doing-allowing distinction.) I find having reconciled/prioritized desider...
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.