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 facts".
Edith: you don't already? How do you stay out of jail?
Same as everyone else... by following laws when I might be arrested for violating them. I would do all of that even if there were no objective moral facts. Indeed, I've been known to avoid getting arrested under laws that, if they did reflect objective moral facts, would seem to imply mutually exclusive sets of objective moral facts.
Edith: If there are no moral facts, then the good things you like are not really good at all.
Perhaps. So what? Why should I care? What difference does it make, in that scenario?
For example, I prefer people not suffering to people suffering... that's a value of mine. If it turns out that there really are objective moral facts that are independent of my values, and that people suffering actually is objectively preferable to people not-suffering, and my values are simply objectively wrong... why should I care?
Yes, that's true. And?
And there is a way of guides-to-action to be objectively right (etc) that has nothing to with reflecting facts or predicting experience. Thus removing the "morality doesn't help me predict experience" objection.
I'll happily endorse morality on the grounds of its reliable observable benefits,
You have presupposed that there are Good Things (benefits) in that comment, and in your previous comment about science. You are already attaching truth values to propositions about what is good or not, I don't have to argue you in...
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: