There are some good thoughts here, but I don’t think the story is a correct and complete account of metamorality (or as the rest of the world calls it: metaethics). I imagine that there will be more posts on Eliezer’s theory later and more opportunities to voice concerns, but for now I just want to take issue with the account of ‘shouldness’ flowing back through the causal links.
‘Shouldness’ doesn’t always flow backwards in the way Eliezer mentioned. e.g. Suppose that in order to push the button, you need to shoot someone who will fall down on it. This would make the whole thing impermissible. If we started by judging saving the child as something we should do, then the backwards chain prematurely terminates when we come to the only way to achieve this involving killing someone. Obviously, we would really want to consider not just the end state of the chain when working out whether we should save the child, but to evaluate the whole sequence in the first place. For if the end state is only possible given something that is impermissible then it wasn’t something we should bring about in the first place. Indeed, I think the following back from ‘should’ is a rather useless description. It is true that if we should (all things considered) do X, then we should do all the things necessary for X, but we can only know whether we should do X (all things considered) if we have already evaluated the other actions in the chain. It is a much more fruitful account to look forward, searching the available paths and then selecting the best one. This is how it is described by many philosophers, including a particularly precise treatment by Fred Feldman in his paper World Utilitarianism and his book Doing the Best We Can.
(Note also that this does not assume consequentialism is true: deontologists can define the goodness of paths in a way that involves things other than the goodness of the consequences of the path.)
There are some good thoughts here, but I don’t think the story is a correct and complete account of metamorality (or as the rest of the world calls it: metaethics). I imagine that there will be more posts on Eliezer’s theory later and more opportunities to voice concerns, but for now I just want to take issue with the account of ‘shouldness’ flowing back through the causal links.
‘Shouldness’ doesn’t always flow backwards in the way Eliezer mentioned. e.g. Suppose that in order to push the button, you need to shoot someone who will fall down on it. This would make the whole thing impermissible. If we started by judging saving the child as something we should do, then the backwards chain prematurely terminates when we come to the only way to achieve this involving killing someone. Obviously, we would really want to consider not just the end state of the chain when working out whether we should save the child, but to evaluate the whole sequence in the first place. For if the end state is only possible given something that is impermissible then it wasn’t something we should bring about in the first place. Indeed, I think the following back from ‘should’ is a rather useless description. It is true that if we should (all things considered) do X, then we should do all the things necessary for X, but we can only know whether we should do X (all things considered) if we have already evaluated the other actions in the chain. It is a much more fruitful account to look forward, searching the available paths and then selecting the best one. This is how it is described by many philosophers, including a particularly precise treatment by Fred Feldman in his paper World Utilitarianism and his book Doing the Best We Can.
(Note also that this does not assume consequentialism is true: deontologists can define the goodness of paths in a way that involves things other than the goodness of the consequences of the path.)