Eliezer,

I've just reread your article and was wondering if this is a good quick summary of your position (leaving apart how you got to it):

'I should X' means that I would attempt to X were I fully informed.

Here 'fully informed' is supposed to include complete relevant empirical information and also access to all the best relevant philosophical arguments.

If there's a standard alternative term in moral philosophy then do please let me know.

As far as I know, there is not. In moral philosophy, when deontologists talk about morality, they are typically talking about things that are for the benefit of others. Indeed, they even have conversations about how to balance between self-interest and the demands of morality. In contrast, consequentialists have a theory that already accounts for the benefit of the agent who is doing the decision making: it counts just as much as anyone else. Thus for consequentialists, there is typically no separate conflict between self-interest and morality: morality for them already takes this into account. So in summary, many moral philosophers are aware of the distinction, but I don't know of any pre-existing terms for it.

By the way, don't worry too much about explaining all pre-requisites before making a post. Explaining some of them afterwards in response to comments can be a more engaging way to do it. In particular, it means that us readers can see which parts we are skeptical of and then just focus our attention on posts which defend that aspect, skimming the ones that we already agree with. Even when it comes to the book, it will probably be worth giving a sketch of where you want to end up early on, with forward references to the appropriate later chapters as needed. This will let the readers read the pre-requisite chapters in a more focused way.

wrongness flows backward from the shooting, as rightness flows backward from the button, and the wrongness outweighs the rightness.

I suppose you could say this, but if I understand you correctly, then it goes against common usage. Usually those who study ethics would say that rightness is not the type of thing that can add with wrongness to get net wrongness (or net rightness for that matter). That is, if they were talking about that kind of thing, they wouldn't use the word 'rightness'. The same goes for 'should' or 'ought'. Terms used for this kind of stuff that can add together: [goodness / badness], [pro tanto reason for / pro tanto reason against].

If you merely meant that any wrong act on the chain trumps any right act further in the future, then I suppose these words would be (almost) normal usage, but in this case it doesn't deal with ethical examples very well. For instance, in the consequentialist case above, we need to know the degree of goodness and badness in the two events to know whether the child-saving event outweighs the person-shooting event. Wrongness trumping rightness is not a useful explanation of what is going on if a consequentialist agent was considering whether to shoot the person. If you want the kind of additivity of value that is relevant in such a case, then call it goodness, not rightness/shouldness. And if this is the type of thing you are talking about, then why not just look at each path and sum the goodness in it, choosing the path with the highest sum. Why say that we sum the goodness in a path in reverse chronological order? How does this help?

Regarding the terms 'ethics' and 'morality', philosophers use them to mean the same thing. Thus, 'metamorality' would mean the same thing as 'metaethics', it is just that no-one else uses the former term (overcoming bias is the top page on google for that term). There is nothing stopping you from using 'ethics' and 'morality' to mean different things, but since it is not standard usage and it would lead to a lot of confusion when trying to explain your views.

There are some good thoughts here, but I don't think the story is a correct and complete account of metamorality (or as the rest of the world calls it: metaethics). I imagine that there will be more posts on Eliezer's theory later and more opportunities to voice concerns, but for now I just want to take issue with the account of 'shouldness' flowing back through the causal links.

'Shouldness' doesn't always flow backwards in the way Eliezer mentioned. e.g. Suppose that in order to push the button, you need to shoot someone who will fall down on it. This would make the whole thing impermissible. If we started by judging saving the child as something we should do, then the backwards chain prematurely terminates when we come to the only way to achieve this involving killing someone. Obviously, we would really want to consider not just the end state of the chain when working out whether we should save the child, but to evaluate the whole sequence in the first place. For if the end state is only possible given something that is impermissible then it wasn't something we should bring about in the first place. Indeed, I think the following back from 'should' is a rather useless description. It is true that if we should (all things considered) do X, then we should do all the things necessary for X, but we can only know whether we should do X (all things considered) if we have already evaluated the other actions in the chain. It is a much more fruitful account to look forward, searching the available paths and then selecting the best one. This is how it is described by many philosophers, including a particularly precise treatment by Fred Feldman in his paper World Utilitarianism and his book Doing the Best We Can.

(Note also that this does not assume consequentialism is true: deontologists can define the goodness of paths in a way that involves things other than the goodness of the consequences of the path.)

One thing to be aware of when considering logical fallacies is that there are two ways in which people consider something to be a fallacy. On the strict account, it is a form of argumentation that doesn't rule out all cases in which the conclusion is false. Appeals to authority and considerations of the history of a claim are obviously fallacious in this sense. The loose account is a form of argumentation that is deeply flawed. It is in this sense that appeal to authority and considerations of the history of a claim may not be fallacious, for they sometimes give us some useful reasons to believe or disbelieve in the claim. Certain considerations don't give deductive (logical) validity, but do give Bayesian support.

Well said.

It all adds up to normality, in all the worlds.

Eliezer, you say this, and similar things a number of times here. They are, of course, untrue. There are uncountably many instances where, for example, all coins in history flip tails every time. You mean that it almost always adds up to normality and this is true. For very high abnormality, the measure of worlds where it happens is equal to the associated small probability.

Regarding average utilitarianism, I also think this is a highly suspect conclusion from this evidence (and this is coming from a utilitarian philosopher). We can talk about this when you are in Oxford if you want: perhaps you have additional reasons that you haven't given here.

>> Suppose I take two atoms of helium-4 in a balloon, and swap their locations via teleportation.

For a book version, you will definitely want to be more precise here. I assumed they were in different quantum states (this seems a very reasonable assumption failing a specification to the contrary). Perhaps they had different spins, energies, momenta, etc. This means that the swapping *did* make sense.

Eliezer,

Very minor quibble/question. I assume you mean 2^Aleph_0 rather than Aleph_1. Unless one is doing something with the cardinals/ordinals themselves, it is almost always the numbers Aleph_0, 2^Aleph_0, 2^2^Aleph_0... that come up rather than Aleph_n. You may therefore like the convenient Beth numbers instead, where:

Beth_0 = Aleph_0 Beth_n+1 = 2^Beth_n

I think Anonymous, Unknown and Eliezer have been very helpful so far. Following on from them, here is my take:

There are many ways Omega could be doing the prediction/placement and it may well matter exactly how the problem is set up. For example, you might be deterministic and he is precalculating your choice (much like we might be able to do with an insect or computer program), or he might be using a quantum suicide method, (quantum) randomizing whether the million goes in and then destroying the world iff you pick the wrong option (This will lead to us observing him being correct 100/100 times assuming a many worlds interpretation of QM). Or he could have just got lucky with the last 100 people he tried it on.

If it is the deterministic option, then what do the counterfactuals about choosing the other box even mean? My approach is to say that 'You could choose X' means that if you had desired to choose X, then you would have. This is a standard way of understanding 'could' in a deterministic universe. Then the answer depends on how we suppose the world to be different to give you counterfactual desires. If we do it with a miracle near the moment of choice (history is the same, but then your desires change non-physically), then you ought two-box as Omega can't have predicted this. If we do it with an earlier miracle, or with a change to the initial conditions of the universe (the Tannsjo interpretation of counterfactuals) then you ought one-box as Omega would have predicted your choice. Thus, if we are understanding Omega as extrapolating your deterministic thinking, then the answer will depend on how we understand the counterfactuals. One-boxers and Two-boxers would be people who interpret the natural counterfactual in the example in different (and equally valid) ways.

If we understand it as Omega using a quantum suicide method, then the objectively right choice depends on his initial probabilities of putting the million in the box. If he does it with a 50% chance, then take just one box. There is a 50% chance the world will end either choice, but this way, in the case where it doesn't, you will have a million rather than a thousand. If, however, he uses a 99% chance of putting nothing in the box, then one-boxing has a 99% chance of destroying the world which dominates the value of the extra money, so instead two-box, take the thousand and live.

If he just got lucky a hundred times, then you are best off two-boxing.

If he time travels, then it depends on the nature of time-travel...

Thus the answer depends on key details not told to us at the outset. Some people accuse all philosophical examples (like the trolley problems) of not giving enough information, but in those cases it is fairly obvious how we are expected to fill in the details. This is not true here. I don't think the Newcomb problem has a single correct answer. The value of it is to show us the different possibilities that could lead to the situation as specified and to see how they give different answers, hopefully illuminating the topic of free-will, counterfactuals and prediction.