metaethical negativism and ethical exhortation

In this post I want to consider whether something inconsistent is happening when someone simultaneously makes strong substantive ethical assertions – assertions about what they and other people ought to do in a specific scenario, what “the good” might be in general, whatever – and makes strong negative metaethical assertions. By a negative metaethical assertion I mean specifically one of four assertion types: non-cognitivist assertions that moral statements don’t express propositions; error-theoretical assertions that all moral statements are false; anti–realist assertions that there are no moral facts; and moral-skepticist assertions that there is no one knows anything about what’s right and wrong, and therefore that no one can justify any moral statements.

yudkowsky on free will

I want to start by noting that it has been hard to figure out exactly what view on free will the Sequences put forth, despite the fact that it is “one of the easiest” philosophical dilemmas, and is “fully and completely dissolved on LessWrong”; in fact, it is “about as easy as a philosophical problem in reductionism can get”, and is “a good exercise for aspiring reductionists”. I first looked in “Dissolving the Question”, but that was just a bunch of (ill-informed, in my view) blather about what philosophers tend to do. Then I looked in “Wrong Questions”, but there Yudkowsky seems to have assumed away the problem. I say this not just to express my frustration at navigating the site and my disapproval of offhand comments Yudkowsky makes but to demonstrate that I am reading things by Yudkowsky, which apparently was in doubt in some circles and puddles.

Let me start, then, by explaining the traditional class of problems of free will the way I learned them, and you can judge for yourself what sort of job the Sequences do, and whether they are right to make the sorts of sweeping statements in which they persistently indulge. In the end, my conclusion is that (a) Yudkowsky’s “requiredism” is not actually a theory of free will, i.e., it does not resolve the dilemma; and (b) the sort of compatibilism we can extract from Yudkowsky’s writing is naive and open to powerful counterexamples, which are raised and addressed in the professional philosophical literature.