This is a linkpost for https://atheistkit.wordpress.com/ethics/
Without commenting on whether this presentation matches the original metaethics sequence (with which I disagree), this summary argument seems both unsupported and unfalsifiable.
Would this be an accurate summary of what you think is the meta-ethics sequence? I feel that you captured the important bits but I also feel that we disagree on some aspects:
V(Elves, ) = Christmas spirity
V(Pebblesorters, ) = primality
V(Humans, _ ) = morality
If V(Humans, Alice) =/= V(Humans, ) that doesn't make morality subjective, it is rather i...
Unpacking "should" as " morally obligated to" is potentially helpful, so inasmuch as you can give separate accounts of "moral" and "obligatory".
The elves are not moral. Not just because I, and humans like me happen to disagree with them, no, certainly not. The elves aren’t even trying to be moral. They don’t even claim to be moral. They don’t care about morality. They care about “The Christmas Spirit,” which is about eggnog and stuff
That doesn't generalise to the point that non humans have no morality. You have m...
Morality binds and blinds. People derive moral claims from emotional and intuitive notions. It can feel good and moral to do amoral things. Objective morality has to be tied to evidence what really is human wellbeing; not to moral intuitions that are adaptions to the benefit of ones ingroup; or post hoc thought experiments about knowledge.
"It sounds like you're saying that you personally value sentient beings fulfilling their fundamental desires." Yes.
"Do you also value a sentient being fulfilling its fundamental desire to eliminate sentient beings that value sentient beings that fulfill their fundamental desires?"
No sentient being has, or can have (at least in a normal way) that desire as a "fundamental desire." It should be obvious why such a value cannot evolve, if you consider the matter physically. Considered from my point of view, it cannot evolve precisely because it is an evil desire.
Also, it is important here that we are speaking of "fundamental" desires, in that a particular sentient being sometimes has a particular desire for something bad, due to some kind of mistake or bad situation. (E.g. a murderer has the desire to kill someone, but that desire is not fundamental.)
"You have some members of a species who want to eat their innocent, thinking children, and you have some innocent, thinking children who don't want to be eaten. On what grounds do you side with the eaters?"
As I said in another comment, the babyeater situation is contrived, and most likely it is impossible for those values to evolve in reality. But stipulating that they do, then the desires of the babies are not fundamental, because if the baby grows up and learns more about reality, it will say, "it would have been right to eat me."
I am pretty sure that people even in the original context brought attention to the fact that there are a great many ways that we treat children in which they do not want to be treated, to which no one at all objects (e.g. no one objects if you prevent a child from running out into the street, even if it wants to. And that is because the desires are not fundamental.)
Your objection is really something like, "but that desire must be fundamental because everything has the fundamental desire not to be eaten." Perhaps. But as I said, that simply means that the situation is contrived and false.
The situation can happen with an intelligent species and a non-intelligent species, and has happened on earth -- e.g. people kill and eat other animals. And although I do not object to people doing this, and I think it is morally right, I do not take "sides," because I would change the values neither of the people nor of the animals. Both desires are good, and the behavior on both sides is right (although technically we should not be speaking of right and wrong in respect to non-rational creatures.)
It probably could not happen with two intelligent species, if only for economic reasons.
I don't know. I wonder if some extra visualization would help.
Would you help catch the children so that their parents could eat them? If they pleaded with you, would you really think "if you were to live, you would one day agree this was good, therefore it is good, even though you don't currently believe it to be?"
Why say the important desire is the one the child will one day have, instead of the one that the adult used to have?