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 describe people's actual desires, but is a self-consistent and coherent approach. It's just that it wouldn't work for most people.
Has a desire to help others, but this manifests in behaviour more compatible with guilt-aversion than actually helping people. This is not self-consistent. If the aim is actually guilt-aversion, this collapses back to position 1), because the person must admit to themselves that other people's desires are only a correlate of what they want (which is to not feel guilty).
Has a desire to help others, and pursues it in good faith, using some definition of which universes are preferable that does not weight their own desires over the desires of others. There's self-reference here, because the person's desires do refer to other people's desires. But you can still maximise the measure even with the self-reference.
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.
But you do have other desires. You've got a desire for pizza, but you've also got a desire to help others. So if a 10% income sacrifice meant you get 10% less pizza, but someone else gets 300% more pizza, maybe that works out. But you don't give up 100% of your income and live in a sack-cloth.
Thanks, I think I understand better. We have some progress here:
We agree that the naive model of a selfish person who doesn't have any interest in helping others hardly ever describes real people .
We seem to agree that guilt-aversion as a desire doesn't make sense, but maybe for different reasons.
I think it doesn't make sense because when I say someone desires X, I mean that they prefer worlds with property X over worlds lacking that property, and I'm only interested in X's that describe the part of the world outside of their own thought process....
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.