The pleasure is irrelevant for this purpose; we could just as easily imagine humans being wireheaded to feel pain, but to desire continuing to feel pain. The point is that what is right should be pursued because it is right, not because people desire it.
That's expressed very clearly, thanks. I don't want to sound rude, I honestly want to understand this. I'm reading your comment and can't help but think that you are arguing about some kind of universal right. I still can't pinpoint the argument. Why isn't it completely arbitrary if we desire to feel pain or pleasure? Is the right answer implied by our evolutionary history? That's a guess, I'm confused.
People's desires are useful as a way of determining what is right, but if it is known that people desires were altered in some way, they stop providing evidence as to what is right.
Aren't our desires altered constantly by mutation, nurture, culture and what we experience and learn? Where can you find the purity of human desire?
I get that you are having trouble understanding this; it is hard and I am much worse at explaining thing in text than in person.
What is right is universal in the sense that what is right would not change if our brains were different. The fact that we care about what is right is caused by our evolutionary history. If we evolved differently, we would have different values, wanting what is gleerp rather than what is right. The differences would be arbitrary to most minds, but not to us. One of the problems of friendliness is ensuring that it is not arbitrary ...
In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.