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Good_Burning_Plastic comments on Subjective vs. normative offensiveness - Less Wrong Discussion
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Well, if you use a rigid-designator based definition of "ethical" like e.g. EY does, then "murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter" is like "a nine-pebble heap does not contain a prime number of pebbles, even when made by a human" -- they are both technically true, but (in absence of enforcement systems using ethics or primality as their Schelling points) not particularly useful for either predicting or affecting pebblesorters' or humans' actions respectively.
I've always felt that EY's wording ends up using words like "ethical" and "objective" in a different sense from most everyone else, which invariably confuses discussions more than it helps.
The sentence "murder is not ethical, even when committed by a pebblesorter" has two implicit assumptions.
First, that "ethical" means "human!ethical", which causes confusion because other people (not just me) would naively read the sentence as a claim of moral realism, which is a different thing.
And secondly, that "human!ethics" is a nontrivial set that contains such statements as "do not murder" - which is effectively a claim that all possible human cultures in the past or future (a hugely varied set!) share much the same ethics, or else that people who don't are "not human". I disagree with this empirical claim, and find the latter normative one pointless.