I am increasingly getting the perception that morality/ethics is useless hogwash. I already believed that to be the case before Less Wrong and I am not sure why I ever bothered to take it seriously again. I guess I was impressed that people who are concerned with 'refining the art of rationality' talk about it and concluded that after all there must be something to it. But I have yet to come across a single argument that would warrant the use of any terminology related to moral philosophy.

The article Say Not "Complexity" should have been about morality. Say not "morality"...

Consider the following questions:

• Do moral judgements express beliefs?
• Do judgements express beliefs?
• How do we evaluate evidence in the making of a decision?

All questions ask for the same, yet each one is less vague than the previous one.

It is as obvious as it can get that there is no single argument against deliberately building a paperclip maximizer if I want to build one and are aware of the consequences. It is not a question about morality but solely a question about wants.

The whole talk about morality seems to be nothing more than a signaling game.

The only reasons we care about other people is either to survive, i.e. get what we want, or because it is part of our preferences to see other people being happy. Accordingly, trying to maximize happiness for everybody can be framed in the language of volition rather than morality.

Once we get rid of the moral garbage, thought experiments like the trolley problem are no more than a question about one's preferences.