You, the human, might say we really should pursue beauty and laughter and love (which is clearly very important), and that we p-should sort pebbles (but that doesn't really matter). And that our way of life is really better than the Pebblesorters, although their way of life has the utterly irrelevant property of being p-better.
But the Pebblesorters would say we h-should pursue beauty and laughter and love (boring!), and that we really should sort pebbles (which is the self-evident meaning of life). Further, they will say their way of life is really better ...
It seems to me that moral non-realism has come a long way since Nietzsche. I am not sure whether Nietzsche has much substance to add to today's metaethics discourse, though admittedly I've only read one of his books. It was The Genealogy of Morals, which I found entertaining and thought-provoking, but unhelpful to the moral realism vs. non-realism debate.
I agree with the concerns of AndyWood and others who have made similar comments, and I'll be paying attention to see whether the later installments of the metaethics sequence have answered them. Before I read them, here is my own summarized set of concerns. (I apologize if responding to a given part of a sequence before reading the later parts is bad form; please let me know if this is the case.)
Eliezer seems to assume that any two neurologically normal humans would agree on the right function if they were fully rational and sufficiently informed, citing t...
It is sometimes argued that happiness is good and suffering is bad. (This is tentatively my own view, but explaining the meaning of "good" and "bad," defending its truth, and expanding the view to account for the additional categories of "right" and "wrong" is beyond the scope of this comment.)
If this is true, then depending on what kind of truth it is, it may also be true in all possible worlds--and a fortiori, on all possible planets in this universe. Furthermore, if it is true on all possible planets that happines...
A great post. It captured a lot of intriguing questions I currently have about ethics. One question I have, which I am curious to see addressed in further posts in this sequence, is: Once we dissolve the question of "fairness" (or "morality" or any other such term) and taboo the term, is there a common referent that all parties are really discussing, or do the parties have fundamentally different and irreconcilable ideas of what fairness (or morality, etc.) is? Is Xannon's "fairness" merely a homonym for Yancy's "fairness...
Ozy Frantz wrote a thoughtful response to the idea of weirdness points. Not necessarily disagreeing, but pointing out serious limitations in the idea. Peter Hurford, I think you'll appreciate their insights whether you agree or not.
https://thingofthings.wordpress.com/2015/04/14/on-weird-points/