In You Provably Can't Trust Yourself, Eliezer tried to figured out why his audience didn't understand his meta-ethics sequence even after they had followed him through philosophy of language and quantum physics. Meta-ethics is my specialty, and I can't figure out what Eliezer's meta-ethical position is. And at least at this point, professionals like Robin Hanson and Toby Ord couldn't figure it out, either.
Part of the problem is that because Eliezer has gotten little value from professional philosophy, he writes about morality in a highly idiosyncratic way, using terms that would require reading hundreds of posts to understand. I might understand Eliezer's meta-ethics better if he would just cough up his positions on standard meta-ethical debates like cognitivism, motivation, the sources of normativity, moral epistemology, and so on. Nick Beckstead recently told me he thinks Eliezer's meta-ethical views are similar to those of Michael Smith, but I'm not seeing it.
If you think you can help me (and others) understand Eliezer's meta-ethical theory, please leave a comment!
Update: This comment by Richard Chappell made sense of Eliezer's meta-ethics for me.
An off-topic question:
In a sense should always implies if. Can anyone point me to a "should" assertion without an implied if? If humans implicitly assume an if whenever they say should then the term is never used to propose a moral imperative but to indicate an instrumental goal.
You shall not kill if:
It seems nobody would suggest there to be an imperative that killing is generally wrong. So where does moral realism come from?
That is a way you can translate the use of should into a convenient logical model. But it isn't the way humans instinctively use the verbal symbol.