Waah? Of course there are universally compelling arguments in math and science. (Can you elaborate?)
Okay... I need to write a post about that.
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.
Are you really imagining a coherent possibility, though? I mean, you could also say, "If someone tells me, 'imagine that p & ~p,' it seems that in that case, p & ~p."
Are you really imagining a coherent possibility, though?
I am. It's so easy to do I can't begin to guess what the inferential distance is.
Wouldn't it be inherently right to kill babies if they were going to suffer? Wouldn't it be inherently right to kill babies if they had negative moral value to me, such as baby mosquitoes carrying malaria?
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: