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?
I think it's fair, principle of charity and all, to assume "babies" means "baby humans" specifically. A lot of things people say about babies becomes at best false, at worst profoundly incoherent, without this assumption.
But you're right of course, that there are many scenarios in which killing human babies leads to better solutions than not killing them. Every time I consider pointing this out when this question comes up, I decide that the phrase "inherently right" is trying to do some extra work here that somehow or other ex...
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: