I’m by no means schooled in academic philosophy, so I could also be wrong about this.
I tend to think about e.g. consequentialism, hedonistic utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, lesswrongian ‘we should keep all the complexities of human value around’-ism, deontology, and virtue ethics as ethical theories. (This is backed up somewhat by the fact that these theories’ wikipedia pages name them ethical theories.) When I think about meta-ethics, I mainly think about moral realism vs moral anti-realism and their varieties, though the field contains quite a few other things, like cole_haus mentions.
My impression is that HLI endorses (roughly) hedonistic utilitarianism, and you said that you don’t, which would be an ethical disagreement. The borderlines aren’t very sharp though. If HLI would have asserted that hedonistic utilitarianism was objectively correct, then you could certainly have made a metaethical argument that no ethical theory is objectively correct. Alternatively, you might be able to bring metaethics into it if you think that there is an ethical truth that isn’t hedonistic utilitarianism.
(I saw you quoting Nate’s post in another thread. I think you could say that it makes a meta-ethical argument that it’s possible to care about things outside yourself, but that it doesn’t make the ethical argument that you ought to do so. Of course, HLI does care about things outside themselves, since they care about other people’s experiences.)
I’m by no means schooled in academic philosophy, so I could also be wrong about this.
I tend to think about e.g. consequentialism, hedonistic utilitarianism, preference utilitarianism, lesswrongian ‘we should keep all the complexities of human value around’-ism, deontology, and virtue ethics as ethical theories. (This is backed up somewhat by the fact that these theories’ wikipedia pages name them ethical theories.) When I think about meta-ethics, I mainly think about moral realism vs moral anti-realism and their varieties, though the field contains quite a few other things, like cole_haus mentions.
My impression is that HLI endorses (roughly) hedonistic utilitarianism, and you said that you don’t, which would be an ethical disagreement. The borderlines aren’t very sharp though. If HLI would have asserted that hedonistic utilitarianism was objectively correct, then you could certainly have made a metaethical argument that no ethical theory is objectively correct. Alternatively, you might be able to bring metaethics into it if you think that there is an ethical truth that isn’t hedonistic utilitarianism.
(I saw you quoting Nate’s post in another thread. I think you could say that it makes a meta-ethical argument that it’s possible to care about things outside yourself, but that it doesn’t make the ethical argument that you ought to do so. Of course, HLI does care about things outside themselves, since they care about other people’s experiences.)
This seems reasonable. I changed it to say “ethical”.