A few nitpicks of your descriptive picture.
1- There are inevitable conflicts between practically any two creatures on this planet as to what preferences they would have as to the world. If you narrow these down to the area classified by humans as "moral" the picture can be greatly simplified, but there will still be a large amount of difference. 2- I dispute that moral sentences ARE about the attitudes of people. Most people throughout history have had a concept of "Right" and "Wrong" as being objective. This naive conception is philosophically indefensible, but the best descriptor of what people throughout history, and even nowadays, have believed. It is hard to defend the idea that a person thinks they are referring to X and are in fact referring to Y when X and Y are drastically different things and the person is not thinking of Y on any level of their brain- the likely case for, say, a typical Stone Age man arguing a moral point.
1- There are inevitable conflicts between practically any two creatures on this planet as to what preferences they would have as to the world. If you narrow these down to the area classified by humans as "moral" the picture can be greatly simplified, but there will still be a large amount of difference.
Sure, as I said at the end, the "universality" of the whole thing is an open problem.
...I dispute that moral sentences ARE about the attitudes of people. Most people throughout history have had a concept of "Right" and "W
There seems to be a widespread impression that the metaethics sequence was not very successful as an explanation of Eliezer Yudkowsky's views. It even says so on the wiki. And frankly, I'm puzzled by this... hence the "apparently" in this post's title. When I read the metaethics sequence, it seemed to make perfect sense to me. I can think of a couple things that may have made me different from the average OB/LW reader in this regard: