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.
No, I think there are moral facts and that people disagree about what they are. But such substantive disagreement is incompatible with Eliezer's reductive view on which the very meaning of 'morality' differs from person to person. It treats 'morality' like an indexical (e.g. "I", "here", "now"), which obviously doesn't allow for real disagreement.
Compare: "I am tall." "No, I am not tall!" Such an exchange would be absurd -- the people are clearly just talking past each other, since there is no common referent for 'I'. But moral language doesn't plausibly function like this. It's perfectly sensible for one person to say, "I ought to have an abortion", and another to disagree: "No, you ought not to have an abortion". (Even if both are logically omniscient.) They aren't talking past each other. Rather, they're disagreeing about the morality of abortion.
It's not plausible(RC, 7/1/2011 4:25 GMT), but it is plausible(LD, 7/1/2011 4:25 GMT).
It's not impossible for people to be confused in exactly such a way.
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