Not "anything goes, do what you will", so much as "all X go, X is such that we want X before we do it, we value doing X while we are doing it, and we retrospectively approve of X after doing it".
We humans have future-focused, hypothetical-focused, present-focused, and past-focused motivations that don't always agree. CEV (and, to a great extent, moral rationality as a broader field) is about finding moral reasoning strategies and taking actions such that all those motivational systems will agree that we Did a Good Job.
That said, being able to demonstrate that the set of Coherently Extrapolated Volitions exists is not a construction showing how to find members of that set.
Not "anything goes, do what you will", so much as "all X go, X is such that we want X before we do it, we value doing X while we are doing it, and we retrospectively approve of X after doing it".
As with a number of previous responses, that is ambiguous between the individual and the collective. If I could get some utility by killing you, then should I kill you? If the "we" above is interpreted individually, I should: if it is interpreted collectively, I shouldn't.
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: