(I'm putting this as a reply to your comment because your comment is what made me think of it.)
In my view, Eliezer's "metaethics" sequence, despite its name, argues for his ethical theory, roughly
(1) morality[humans] = CEV[humans]
(N.B.: this is my terminology; Eliezer would write "morality" where I write "morality[humans]") without ever arguing for his (implied) metaethical theory, which is something like
(2) for all X, morality[X] = CEV[X].
Worse, much of his effort is spent arguing against propositions like
(3) (1) => for all X, morality[X] = CEV[humans] (The Bedrock of Morality: Arbitrary?)
and
(4) (1) => morality[humans] = CEV["humans"] (No License To Be Human)
which, I feel, are beside the point.
Eliezer's "metaethics" sequence, despite its name, argues for his ethical theory
Yes; what else would you do in metaethics?
Isn't its job to point to ethical theories, while the job of ethics is to assume you have agreed on a theory (an often false assumption)?
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: