I arrived at the same conclusion when I tried to make sense of the Metaethics Sequence. My summary of Eliezer’s writings is: “morality is a bunch of mental computations shared between most human beings”. Morality thus grew out of our evolutive history, and it should not be surprising that in extreme situations it might be incoherent or maladaptive.
Only if you believe that morality should be like systematic and universal and coherent, then you can say that extreme examples are uncovering something interesting about peoples’ morality.
Otherwise, extreme situations are as interesting as saying that people cannot mentally factor long numbers.
I arrived at the same conclusion when I tried to make sense of the Metaethics Sequence. My summary of Eliezer’s writings is: “morality is a bunch of mental computations shared between most human beings”. Morality thus grew out of our evolutive history, and it should not be surprising that in extreme situations it might be incoherent or maladaptive.
Only if you believe that morality should be like systematic and universal and coherent, then you can say that extreme examples are uncovering something interesting about peoples’ morality.
Otherwise, extreme situations are as interesting as saying that people cannot mentally factor long numbers.