I think it would be more accurate to refer to it as the neuroscience of primate values
Sure. We do know a fair bit about specifically human values, too, but I haven't written much about that yet.
I'm curious to know why it is that you disagree with what I'll call Claim 1:
But whatever our intended meaning of 'ought' is, the same reasoning applies. Either our intended meaning of 'ought' refers (eventually) to the world of math and physics (in which case the is-ought gap is bridged), or else it doesn't (in which case it fails to refer).
...and what you think is wrong about Claim 2:
It suggests that there is no One True Theory of Morality. (We use moral terms in a variety of ways, and some of those ways refer to different sets of natural facts.)
Do you have the same objections as Vladimir?
My objections stem mainly from the feeling that when we use moral terms, we may be referring to a shared concept of "normativity", which is also referred to in sentences like:
This may well not be the case, but it is a possibility that I'm not willing to rule out, at least until we better understand what "right" in these sentences mean, and why they are not referring to the same thing as "right" in morality. (Of...
Recently a friend of mine told me that he and a few others were debating how likely it is that I've 'solved metaethics.' Others on this site have gotten the impression that I'm claiming to have made a fundamental breakthrough that I'm currently keeping a secret, and that's what my metaethics sequence is leading up to. Alas, it isn't the case. The first post in my sequence began:
The part I consider 'solved' is the part discussed in Conceptual Analysis and Moral Theory and Pluralistic Moral Reductionism. These posts represent an application of the lessons learned from Eliezer's free will sequence and his words sequence to the subject of metaethics.
I did this because Eliezer mostly skipped this step in his metaethics sequence, perhaps assuming that readers had already applied these lessons to metaethics to solve the easy problems of metaethics, so he could skip right to discussing the harder problems of metaethics. But I think this move was a source of confusion for many LWers, so I wanted to go back and work through the details of what it looks like to solve the easy parts of metaethics with lessons learned from Eliezer's sequences.
The next part of my metaethics sequence will be devoted to "bringing us all up to speed" on several lines of research that seem relevant to solving open problems in metaethics: the literature on how human values work (in brain and behavior), the literature on extracting preferences from what human brains actually do, and the literature on value extrapolation algorithms. For the most part, these literature sets haven't been discussed on Less Wrong despite their apparent relevance to metaethics, so I'm trying to share them with LW myself (e.g. A Crash Course in the Neuroscience of Human Motivation).
Technically, most of these posts will not be listed as being part of my metaethics sequence, but I will refer to them from posts that are technically part of my metaethics sequence, drawing lessons for metaethics from them.
After "bringing us all up to speed" on these topics and perhaps a couple others, I'll use my metaethics sequence to clarify the open problems in metaethics and suggest some places we can hack away at and perhaps make progress. Thus, my metaethics sequence aims to end with something like a Polymath Project set up for collaboratively solving metaethics problems.
I hope this clarifies my intentions for my metaethics sequence.