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joaolkf comments on A confusion about deontology and consequentialism - Less Wrong Discussion
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Just got bashed several times, while presenting the fragility of values idea in Oxford, for using the term "descriptive morality". I was almost certain Eliezer used the term, hence, I was blaming him for my bashing. But it seems he doesn't, and the above comment is the solely instance of the term I could find. I'm blaming you them! Not really though, it seems I've invented this term on my own - and I'm not proud of it. So far, I've failed to find a correlated term either in meta-ethics or in the Sequences. In my head, I was using it to mean what would be the 0 step for CEV. It could be seen as the object of study of descriptive ethics (a term that does exist), but it seems descriptive ethics uses a pluralistic or relativistic view, while I needed a term to describe the morality shared by all humans.
So it's even worse than I thought? When ethicists do any "descriptive" research, they are studying morality, whether they care to admit it or not. The problem with calling such things "ethics" is not so much that it implies a pluralist/relativist view - if anything, it makes the very opposite mistake: it does not take moralities seriously enough, as they exist in the real world. In common usage, the term "ethics" is only appropriate for very broadly-shared values (of course, whether such values exist after all is an empirical question), or else for the kind of consensus-based interplay of values or dispute resolution that we all do when we engage in ethical (or even moral!) reasoning in the real world.