I recall not being able to identify with the premises... some of them were really quite significant.
I now recall, it was with "The Moral Void, in which apparently I had different answers than expected.
"Would you kill babies if it was inherently the right thing to do?"
The post did discuss morality on/off switches later in the context of religion, as an argument against (wishing for / wanting to find) universally compelling arguments.
The post doesn't work for me because it seems there is an argument against the value of universally compelling arguments with the implicit assumption that since universally compelling argument don't exist, any universally compelling argument would be false.
I happen to (mostly) agree that there aren't universally compelling arguments, but I still wish there were. The metaethics sequence failed to talk me out of valuing this.
Also, there were some particular examples that didn't work for me, since I didn't have a spontaneous 'ugh' field around some of the things that were supposed to be bad.
I see Jack expressed this concept here:
And it definitely is true that much of our moral language function like rigid designators, which hides the causal history of our moral beliefs. This explains why people don't feel like morality changes under counterfactuals-- i.e. if you imagine a world in which you have a preference for innocent children being murdered you don't believe that murdering children is therefore moral in that world. I outlined this in more detail here. I didn't use the term 'rigid designator' in that post, but the point is that what we think is moral is invariant in counterfacturals.
For whatever reason, I feel like my morality changes under counterfactuals.
I happen to (mostly) agree that there aren't universally compelling arguments, but I still wish there were. The metaethics sequence failed to talk me out of valuing this.
But you realize that Eliezer is arguing that there aren't universally compelling arguments in any domain, including mathematics or science? So if that doesn't threaten the objectivity of mathematics or science, why should that threaten the objectivity of morality?
For whatever reason, I feel like my morality changes under counterfactuals.
Can you elaborate?
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: