Waah? Of course there are universally compelling arguments in math and science. (Can you elaborate?)
For whatever reason, I feel like my morality changes under counterfactuals.
Can you elaborate?
It is easy for me to think of scenarios where any particular behavior might be moral. So that if someone asks me, "imagine that it is the inherently right thing to kill babies, " it seems rather immediate to answer that in that case, killing babies would be inherently right.
This is also part of the second problem, where there aren't so many things I consider inherently wrong or right ... I don't seem to have the same ugh fields as the intended audience. (One thing which seems inherently right to me is that there would be an objective morality, it just happens to be apparently false in this universe, for now.)
Of course there aren't. You can trivially imagine programming a computer to print, "2+2=5" and no verbal argument will persuade it to give the correct answer - this is basically Eliezer's example! He also says that, in principle, an argument might persuade all the people we care about.
While his point about evolution and 'psychological unity' seems less clear than I remembered, he does explicitly say elsewhere that moral arguments have a point. You should assign a high prior probability to a given human sharing enough of your values to make argume...
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: