Update: I said above that Eliezer is a moral antirealist but upon further reflection I think I was wrong. (I’m still not confident though.) This post in particular strikes me as moral realist:
It may be that humans argue about what’s right, and Pebblesorters do what’s prime. But this doesn’t change what’s right, and it doesn’t make what’s right vary from planet to planet, and it doesn’t mean that the things we do are right in mere virtue of our deciding on them—any more than Pebblesorters make a heap prime or not prime by deciding that it’s “correct”.
The Pebblesorters aren’t trying to do what’s p-prime any more than humans are trying to do what’s h-prime. The Pebblesorters are trying to do what’s prime. And the humans are arguing about, and occasionally even really trying to do, what’s right.
I think he treats “what’s right” as having a status similar to “what’s provable from Axiom Set Y”. He thinks there are (something akin to) axioms for morality, and these axioms are downstream of random facts about human evolution; but he bundles those human-specific axioms into the definition of the word “right”.
In other words, Eliezer could have talked about “what’s righthuman brains” instead of “what’s right” (with the same definition, i.e. “what’s righthuman brains” is something like the limit of idealized human moral reflection, definitely not “what actual humans say is right today”), in which case he would have been a moral antirealist. In fact, I think he could have done that with almost no substantive change to anything he wrote in the metaethics sequence. But as written, I think Eliezer is closer to moral realist.
I’m not a philosopher and might be misunderstanding the terminology here. I’m also not Eliezer :)
Update: I said above that Eliezer is a moral antirealist but upon further reflection I think I was wrong. (I’m still not confident though.) This post in particular strikes me as moral realist:
I think he treats “what’s right” as having a status similar to “what’s provable from Axiom Set Y”. He thinks there are (something akin to) axioms for morality, and these axioms are downstream of random facts about human evolution; but he bundles those human-specific axioms into the definition of the word “right”.
In other words, Eliezer could have talked about “what’s righthuman brains” instead of “what’s right” (with the same definition, i.e. “what’s righthuman brains” is something like the limit of idealized human moral reflection, definitely not “what actual humans say is right today”), in which case he would have been a moral antirealist. In fact, I think he could have done that with almost no substantive change to anything he wrote in the metaethics sequence. But as written, I think Eliezer is closer to moral realist.
I’m not a philosopher and might be misunderstanding the terminology here. I’m also not Eliezer :)