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.
In a nutshell, Eliezer's metaethics says you should maximize your preferences whatever they may be, or rather, you should_you maximize your preferences, but of course you should_me maximize my preferences. (Note that I said preferences and not utility function. There is no assumption that your preferences HAVE to be a utility function, or at least I don't think so. Eliezer might have a different view). So ethics is reduced to decision theory. In addition, according to Eliezer, human have tremendous value uncertainty. That is, we don't really know what our terminal values are, so we don't really know what we should be maximizing. The last part, and the most controversial around here I think, is that Eliezer thinks that human preferences are similar enough across humans that it makes sense to think about should_human.
There are some further details, but that's the nutshell description. The big break from many philosophers, I think, is considering edit ones own /edit preferences the foundation of ethics. But really, this is in Hume (on one interpretation).
edit: I should add that the language I'm using to describe EY's theory is NOT the language that he uses himself. Some people find my language more enlightening (me, for one), others find EY's more enlightening. Your mileage may vary.
There is a way of testing metaethical theories, which is to compare their predictions or suggestions again common first-level ethical intuitions. It isnt watertight as the recalcitrant meatethicist can always say that the intuitions are wrong... anyway, trying it out n EY-metaethics, as you have stated it, doesn't wash too well, since there is an implication that those who value murder should murder, those who value paperclips should maximise paperclips, etc.
Some will recognise that as a form of the well known and widely rejected theory of ethical egoism.... (read more)