I can't interpret your post as a reply to my post. Did you perhaps mean to post it somewhere else?
My fundamental question was, how is a desire to help others fundamentally different from a desire to eat pizza?
You seem to be defining a broken version of the zero ethical system that arbitrarily disregards the former. That's a strawman.
If you want to say that the zero ethical system is broken, you have to say that something breaks when people try to enact their desires, including the desires to help others.
What matters is that the people are helped.
Sorry, that's incoherent. Someone is helped if they get things they desire. If your entire set of desires is to help others, then the solution is that your desires (such as eating pizza) don't matter and theirs do. I don't think you can really do that. If you can do that, then I hope that few people do that, since somebody has to actually want something for themselves in order for this concept of helping others to make any sense.
(I do believe that this morality-is-selfless statement probably lets you get positive regard from some in-group you desire. Apparently I don't desire to have that in-group.)
I can't interpret your post as a reply to my post. Did you perhaps mean to post it somewhere else?
I did intend to reply to you, but I can see I was ineffective. I'll try harder.
My fundamental question was, how is a desire to help others fundamentally different from a desire to eat pizza?
Fundamentally, it's not.
You seem to be defining a broken version of the zero ethical system that arbitrarily disregards the former. That's a strawman.
I'm saying that there's three versions here:
The strawman where there's no desire to help others. Does not descr
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.