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So8res comments on Criticisms of the Metaethics - Less Wrong
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Comments (31)
We seem to be talking past each other. I'm not entirely sure where the misunderstading lies, but I'll give it one more shot.
Nobody's arguing for consequentialism. Nobody's saying that agent A "should" do the thing that makes A feel guilty. Nobody's saying that A should self-modify to remove the guilt.
You seem to have misconstrued my claim that rational agents should strive to be self-modifying. I made no claim that agents "should" self-modify to eliminate "problematic parts of their metaethics". Rather, I point out that many agents will find themselves inconsistent and can often benefit from making themselves consistent. Note that I explicitly acknowledge the existence of agents whose values prevent them from making themselves consistent, and acknowledge that such agents will be frustrated.
All of this seems obvious. Nobody's trying to convince you otherwise. It's still not metaethics.
Perhaps this is the root of the misunderstanding. I posit that the metaethics sequence makes no such assumption, and that you are fighting a phantom.
Other people on this website seem to think I'm not fighting a phantom and that the Metaethics sequence really does seem to talk of an ethics universial to almost all humans, with psycopaths being a rare exception.
One of my attacks on Eliezer is for inconsistency- he argues for consequentialism and a Metaethics of which the logical conclusion is deontology.
How can you describe somebody as "benefiting" unless you define the set of values the perspective of which they benefit from? If it is their own, this is probably not correct. Besides, inconsistency is a kind of problematic metaethics.
And how is it not metaethics?
Feel free to take it up with them :-)
Metaethics is about the status of moral claims. It's about where "should", "good", "right", "wrong" etc. come from, their validity, and so on. What a person should do in any given scenario (as in your questions above) is pure ethics.