If that’s your reaction, then it reinforces my notion Eliezer didn’t make his aliens alien enough (which, of course, is hard to do). The Babyeaters, IMO, aren’t supposed to come across as noble in any sense; their morality is supposed to look hideous and horrific to us, albeit with a strong inner logic to it. I think EY may have overestimated how much the baby-eating part would shock his audience†, and allowed his characters to come across as overreacting. The reader’s visceral reaction to the Superhappies, perhaps, is even more difficult to reconcile with the characters’ reactions.
Anyhow, the point I thought was most vital to this discussion from the Metaethics Sequence is that there’s (almost certainly) no universal fundamental that would privilege human morals above Pebblesorting or straight-up boring Paperclipping. Indeed, if we accept that the Pebblesorters stand to primality pretty much as we stand to morality, there doesn’t seem for there to be a place to posit a supervening “true Good” that interacts with our thinking but not with theirs. Our morality is something whose structure is found in human brains, not in the essence of the cosmos; but it doesn’t follow from this fact that we should stop caring about morality.
† After all, we belong to a tribe of sci-fi readers in which “being squeamish about weird alien acts” is a sin.
If that’s your reaction, then it reinforces my notion Eliezer didn’t make his aliens alien enough (which, of course, is hard to do). The Babyeaters, IMO, aren’t supposed to come across as noble in any sense; their morality is supposed to look hideous and horrific to us, albeit with a strong inner logic to it. I think EY may have overestimated how much the baby-eating part would shock his audience†, and allowed his characters to come across as overreacting. The reader’s visceral reaction to the Superhappies, perhaps, is even more difficult to reconcile with the characters’ reactions.
Anyhow, the point I thought was most vital to this discussion from the Metaethics Sequence is that there’s (almost certainly) no universal fundamental that would privilege human morals above Pebblesorting or straight-up boring Paperclipping. Indeed, if we accept that the Pebblesorters stand to primality pretty much as we stand to morality, there doesn’t seem for there to be a place to posit a supervening “true Good” that interacts with our thinking but not with theirs. Our morality is something whose structure is found in human brains, not in the essence of the cosmos; but it doesn’t follow from this fact that we should stop caring about morality.
† After all, we belong to a tribe of sci-fi readers in which “being squeamish about weird alien acts” is a sin.