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.
What is objection (1) saying? That asserting there are moral facts is incompatible with the fact that people disagree about what they are? Specifically, when people agree that there is such a thing as a reason that applies to both of them, they disagree about how the reason is caused by reality?
Do we not then say they are both wrong about there being one "reason"?
I speak English(LD). You speak English(RC). The difference between our languages is of the same character as that between a speaker of Spanish and a speaker of French. I say "I" and you correctly read it as referring to lessdazed. You say "I" and I correctly read it as referring to RichardChapell. I have reasons(LD). You have reasons(RC). Do you think that were we perfect at monitoring what we each meant when we said anything and knew the relevant consequences of actions, the two of us would be capable of disagreeing when one of us asserted something in a sentence using the word "moral"? Why?
Or have I misread things?
No, I think there are moral facts and that people disagree about what they are. But such substantive disagreement is incompatible with Eliezer's reductive view on which the very meaning of 'morality' differs from person to person. It treats 'morality' like an indexical (e.g. "I", "here", "now"), which obviously doesn't allow for real disagreement.
Compare: "I am tall." "No, I am not tall!" Such ... (read more)