Dave: Behaving as though objective scientific facts exist has made it possible for me to talk to people all over the world, for the people I care about to be warm in the winter, cool in the summer, have potable water to drink and plenty of food to eat, and routinely survive incidents that would have killed us in pre-scientific cultures, and more generally has alleviated an enormous amount of potential suffering and enabled an enormous amount of value-satisfaction.
Edith: A lot of good stuff, then?
Fred: Those facts didn't fall off a tree, they were arrived at by following a true..right..effective..call it what you will...set of methods.
Dave:Why should anyone care about truth in that hypothetical scenario?
Edith: You care about science because it leads to things that are good. Morality does too.
Dave: Similarly, if behaving as though objective moral facts exist has some benefit, then I might be convinced to behave as though objective moral facts exist
Edith: you don't already? How do you stay out of jail?
Dave: But if it's just more talking about truth-values divorced from even theoretical benefits..
Edith: If there are no moral facts, then the good things you like are not really good at all.
Edith: A lot of good stuff, then?
I'm not sure what you mean to express by that word.
A lot of stuff I value, certainly.
Fred: Those facts didn't fall off a tree, they were arrived at by following a true..right..effective..call it what you will...set of methods.
Yes, that's true. And?
Edith: You care about science because it leads to things that are good. Morality does too.
Great! Wonderful! I'll happily endorse morality on the grounds of its reliable observable benefits, then, and we can drop all this irrelevant talk about "objective moral fact...
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: