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:
- I read Three Worlds Collide before doing my systematic read-through of the sequences.
- I have a background in academic philosophy, so I had a similar thought to Richard Chapell's linking of Eliezer's metaethics to rigid designators independently of Richard.
Reading the comments on the metaethics sequence, though, hasn't enlightened me about what exactly people had a problem with, aside from a lot of arguing about definitions over whether Eliezer counts as a relativist.
What's going on here? I ask mainly because I'm thinking of trying to write a post (or sequence?) explaining the metaethics sequence, and I'm wondering what points I should address, what issues I should look out for, etc.
I think my confusion is less about understanding the view (assuming the Richard's rigid designator interpretation is accurate) and more everyone's insistence on calling it a moral realist view. It feels like everyone is playing word games to avoid being moral subjectivists. I don't know if it was all the arguing with theists or being annoyed with moral relativist social-justice types but somewhere along the way much of the Less Wrong crowd developed strong negative associations with the words used to describe varieties of moral anti-realism.
As far as I can tell most everyone here has the same descriptive picture of what is going on with ethics. There is this animal on planet Earth that has semi-ordered preferences about how the world should be and how things similar to that animal should act. Those of this species which speak the language called "English" write inscriptions like "morality" and "right and wrong" to describe these preferences. These preferences are the result of evolved instincts and cultural norms. Many members of this species have very similar preferences.
This seems like a straightforward description of ethical subjectivism -- the position that moral sentences are about the attitudes of people (notice that isn't the same as saying they are relative). But people don't seem to like calling themselves ethical subjectivists-- or maybe they don't like that the theory doesn't tell them what to do? I don't understand this. I'd love for someone to explain it. In any case, then we start doing philosophy to try to shoehorn this description into something we can call moral realism.
And it definitely is true that much of our moral language function like rigid designators, which hides the causal history of our moral beliefs. This explains why people don't feel like morality changes under counterfactuals-- i.e. if you imagine a world in which you have a preference for innocent children being murdered you don't believe that murdering children is therefore moral in that world. I outlined this in more detail here. I didn't use the term 'rigid designator' in that post, but the point is that what we think is moral is invariant in counterfacturals.
I don't see how this isn't a straightforward example of moral subjectivism. And that is reflected in the fact that there are no universally compelling arguments. I can see how you can sort of structure the arguments and questions and get it to output "moral realism" if you really had to. You say that the word "right" designates particular facts about worlds such that worlds can be objectively evaluated according to that concept. But to me, it is weird and confusing to ignore the fact that the rule uniting those facts about the world is determined by our attitudes-- especially since we can't right now enumerate the rigid contents of our moral language and have to apply the rule in most circumstances.
Whether you call it moral subjectivism or not, it seems like the next step is examining our preferences to see how much they can overlap, and what constitutes an ethical and effective way of reconciling them so that they are consistent with each other. In other words, we need to know how we ought to resolve moral disagreements, 'reflective equilibrium', that kind of stuff. This is how we determine how universal our morality is. And that's what actually matters, not whether or not it exists independently of human attitudes.
Except that's not Eliezer's view. The mistake you're making here is the equivalent of thinking that, because the meaning of the word "water" is determined by how English speakers use it, therefore sentences about water are sentences about the behavior of English speakers.