"Universalist" and "Subjectivist" aren't opposed or conflicting terms. "Subjective" simply says that moral statements are really statements about the attitudes or opinions of people (or something else with a mind). The opposing term is "objective". "Universalist" and "relativist" are on a different dimension from subjective and objective. Universal vs. relative is about how variable or not variable morality is.
You could have a metaethical theory that morality is both objective and relative. For example, you could define morality as what the law says and it will be relative from country to country as laws differ. You could also have a subjective and universal meta-ethics. Morality judgments could be statements about the attitudes of people but all people could have the same attitudes.
I take Eliezer to hold something like the latter-- moral judgments aren't about people's attitudes simpliciter: they're about what they would be if people were perfectly rational and had perfect information (he's hardly the first among philosophers, here). It is possible that the outcome of that would be more or less universal among humans or even a larger group. Or at least it some subset of attitudes might be universal. But I could be wrong about his view: I feel like I just end up reading my view into it whenever I try to describe his.
"Universalist" and "Subjectivist" aren't opposed or conflicting terms. "Subjective" simply says that moral statements are really statements about the attitudes or opinions of people (or something else with a mind). The opposing term is "objective". "Universalist" and "relativist" are on a different dimension from subjective and objective. Universal vs. relative is about how variable or not variable morality is.
If morality varies with individuals, as required by subjectivism, it is not at all un...
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: