To those who say "Nothing is real," I once replied, "That's great, but how does the nothing work?"
Suppose you learned, suddenly and definitively, that nothing is moral and nothing is right; that everything is permissible and nothing is forbidden.
Devastating news, to be sure—and no, I am not telling you this in real life. But suppose I did tell it to you. Suppose that, whatever you think is the basis of your moral philosophy, I convincingly tore it apart, and moreover showed you that nothing could fill its place. Suppose I proved that all utilities equaled zero.
I know that Your-Moral-Philosophy is as true and undisprovable as 2 + 2 = 4. But still, I ask that you do your best to perform the thought experiment, and concretely envision the possibilities even if they seem painful, or pointless, or logically incapable of any good reply.
Would you still tip cabdrivers? Would you cheat on your Significant Other? If a child lay fainted on the train tracks, would you still drag them off?
Would you still eat the same kinds of foods—or would you only eat the cheapest food, since there's no reason you should have fun—or would you eat very expensive food, since there's no reason you should save money for tomorrow?
Would you wear black and write gloomy poetry and denounce all altruists as fools? But there's no reason you should do that—it's just a cached thought.
Would you stay in bed because there was no reason to get up? What about when you finally got hungry and stumbled into the kitchen—what would you do after you were done eating?
Would you go on reading Overcoming Bias, and if not, what would you read instead? Would you still try to be rational, and if not, what would you think instead?
Close your eyes, take as long as necessary to answer:
What would you do, if nothing were right?
It seems people are interpreting the question in two different ways, one that we don't have any desires any more, and therefore no actions, and the other in the more natural way, namely that "moral philosophy" and "moral claims" have no meaning or are all false. The first way of interpreting the question is useless, and I guess Eliezer intended the second.
Most commenters are saying that it would make no difference to them. My suspicion is that this is true, but mainly because they already believe that moral claims are meaningless or false.
Possibly (I am not sure of this) Eliezer hopes that everyone will answer in this way, so that he can say that morality is unnecessary.
Personally, I agree with Dynamically Linked. I would start out by stealing wallets and purses, and it would just go downhill from there. In other words, if I didn't believe that such things were wrong, the bad feeling that results from doing them, and the idea that it hurts people, wouldn't be strong enough to stop me, and once I got started, the feeling would go away too-- this much I know from the experience of doing wrong. And once I had changed the way I feel about these things, the way I feel about other things (too horrible to mention at the moment) would begin to change too. So I can't really tell where it would end, but it would be bad (according to my present judgment).
There are others who would follow or have followed the same course. TGGP says that over time his life did change after he ceased to believe in morality, and at one point he said that he would torture a stranger to avoid stubbing his toe, which presumably he would not have done when he believed in morality.
So if it is the case that Eliezer hoped that morality is unnecessary to prevent such things, his hope is in vain.