Even if he can add nothing new at all, the metaethics sequence was less well understood than the other sequences; a new explanation of Eliezer’s position would be very useful.
I don’t really see how you can add anything more than relatively unimportant details to Eliezer’s metaethics sequence.
By way of contrast I think Eliezer’s sequence was good but stopped too soon. There was the foundation to take things further and, presumably, time constraints prohibited that. The interesting stuff starts a step or two on from where Eliezer left off and I hope Luke covers it. (Because then I can strike it off the rather long list of ‘posts that I would write if I was a post writing kind of guy’.)
I estimate a somewhat greater than 50% chance that you are right. However, I still think that this sequence will be worth following in case lukeprog does come up with something interesting that Eliezer and the rest of us missed.
If nothing else, I’m going to be thoroughly citing all the relevant science to back up the basic perspective, which Eliezer didn’t do. And I’ll be explaining directly how pluralistic moral reductionism answers or dissolves traditional questions in metaethics, and how it responds to mainstream metaethical views, which Eliezer mostly didn’t do. And I think I’ll be making it clearer than Eliezer did that rigid designation of value terms to the objects of (something like) second-order desires is not the only useful reduction of moral terms, and that it’s not too profitable to argue endlessly about where to draw the boundary. (We should be arguing about substance not symbol; the debate shouldn’t be about ‘the meaning of right.’) And I’ll be covering in more depth what the cognitive sciences tell us about how our intuitions about morality are generated. And… well, you’ll see.
I don’t really see how you can add anything more than relatively unimportant details to Eliezer’s metaethics sequence.
Even if he can add nothing new at all, the metaethics sequence was less well understood than the other sequences; a new explanation of Eliezer’s position would be very useful.
By way of contrast I think Eliezer’s sequence was good but stopped too soon. There was the foundation to take things further and, presumably, time constraints prohibited that. The interesting stuff starts a step or two on from where Eliezer left off and I hope Luke covers it. (Because then I can strike it off the rather long list of ‘posts that I would write if I was a post writing kind of guy’.)
I estimate a somewhat greater than 50% chance that you are right. However, I still think that this sequence will be worth following in case lukeprog does come up with something interesting that Eliezer and the rest of us missed.
If nothing else, I’m going to be thoroughly citing all the relevant science to back up the basic perspective, which Eliezer didn’t do. And I’ll be explaining directly how pluralistic moral reductionism answers or dissolves traditional questions in metaethics, and how it responds to mainstream metaethical views, which Eliezer mostly didn’t do. And I think I’ll be making it clearer than Eliezer did that rigid designation of value terms to the objects of (something like) second-order desires is not the only useful reduction of moral terms, and that it’s not too profitable to argue endlessly about where to draw the boundary. (We should be arguing about substance not symbol; the debate shouldn’t be about ‘the meaning of right.’) And I’ll be covering in more depth what the cognitive sciences tell us about how our intuitions about morality are generated. And… well, you’ll see.