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.
It's not plausible(RC, 7/1/2011 4:25 GMT), but it is plausible(LD, 7/1/2011 4:25 GMT).
It's not impossible for people to be confused in exactly such a way.
That's begging the question.
That intuition pump imagines intelligent people disagreeing, finds it plausible, notices that intelligent people disagreeing proves nothing, then replaces the label "intelligent" with "omniscient" (since that, if proven, would prove something) without showing the work that would make the replacement valid. If the work could be shown, the intuition pump wouldn't be very valuable, as one could just use the shown work for persuasion rather than the thought experiment with the disagreeing people. I strongly suspect that the reason the shown work is unavailable is because it does not exist.
Forget morality for one second. Doesn't the meaning of the word "hat" differ from person to person?
It's only sensible to say if/because context forestalls equivocation (or tries to, anyway). Retroactively removing the context by coming in the conversation with a different meaning of ought (even if the first meaning of "ought" was "objective values, as I think they are, as I think I want them to be, that are universally binding on all possible minds, and I would maintain under any coherent extrapolation of my values" where the first person is wrong about those facts and the second meaning of "ought" is the first person's extrapolated volition) introduces equivocation. It's really analogous to saying "No, I am not tall".
Where the first person says "X would make me happy, I want to feel like doing X, and others will be better off according to balancing equation Y if I do X, and the word "ought" encompasses when those things coincide according to objective English, so I ought to do X", and the second person says "X would make you happy, you want to feel like doing X, and others will not be better off according to balancing equation Z if you do X, and the word "ought" encompasses when those things coincide according to objective English, so you ought not do X", they are talking past each other. Purported debates about the true meaning of "ought" reveal that everyone has their own balancing equation, and the average person thinks all others are morally obliged by objective morality to follow his or her equation. In truth, the terms "make happy" and want to feel like doing" are rolled up into the balancing equation, but in it (for Westerners) terms for self and others seem as if they are of different kind.
You're confusing metaethics and first-order ethics. Ordinary moral debates aren't about the meaning of "ought". They're about the first-order question of which actions have the property of being what we ought to do. People disagree about which actions have this property. They posit different systematic theories (o... (read more)