What do the baby eaters tell us about ethics?

I liked the story, but could never relate to its Eliezer-imposed "universal morality" of forcing others to conform to your own norms. To me the message of the story is "expansive metaethics leads to trouble, stick to your own and let others live the way they are used to, while being open to learning about each other's ways non-judgmentally".

If you're religious and talking to an atheist about God, both of you will look like baby eaters to the other. Likewise if you watch Fox News everyone on CNN or MSNBC will look like baby eaters but the same is true in reverse, everyone watching CNN will think Fox News are the baby eaters.

This seems like a lack of imagination how the aliens could be truly different from us. Narcissism of small differences, on a cosmic scale.

In the sequence introduction Eliezer says it makes points about "naturalistic metaethics" but I wonder what points are these specifically, since after reading the SEP page on moral naturalism https://plato.stanford.edu/entries/naturalism-moral/ I can't really figure out what the mind-independent moral facts are in the story.

I wouldn't necessarily expect Eliezer's usage to be consistent with Stanford's entry. LW in general and Eliezer in particular are not great at using words from academic philosophy in the same way that philosophers do (see e.g. "utilitarianism").

Eliezer has written a sequence on meta-ethics. I wonder if you're aware of it? (If you are, my next question is why you don't consider it an answer to your question.)

Another thought I've had since I read the story is that it seems like a lot of human-human interactions are really human-babyeater interactions.

I think Under-acknowledged Value Differences [LW · GW] makes the same point.

You're playing chess. You're white, so it's your move first. It's a big board, and there's a lot of pieces, so you're not quite sure what to do.

Luckily for you, there definitely exists a rule that tells you the best possible move to play for every given configuration of pieces—the rule that tells you the move that maximizes the probability of victory (or since draws exist and may be acceptable, the move that minimizes the probability of defeat. Or maximizes the points you gain, 1 for a win and 0.5 for a draw, over an infinite number of games against the opponent in question—whatever.).

But many of these configurations of pieces will have more than one possible move to play, so it's not like this rule is just a given. You have to figure it out.

So what is a rule? It's something that tells you what move to play in any and every given position. Two rules are equal when, for every possible position, they tell you to play the same move.

When two rules are equal, we just merge them into one rule—they're literally the same, after all. So let's consider the list of all unequal rules—rules that differ in at least one move recommendation for at least one position from every other rule.

How many of these rules are there? Mathematically speaking, the answer is "a super-huge amount that would literally cause your mind to explode if you tried to hold them all in your head." After all, there is a universe-eating number of possible chess positions (remember, this is a rule that works for all possible chess positions, even ones that would never happen in a real game). And in every chess position, the number of possible ways that rules can be distinguished is equal to the number of possible moves in that position.

So imagine each rule as a black ball, each attached to this really big wall in this vast infinite array. Out of this huge infinity of black balls, one of these balls gets a little pink dot placed on its backside, so you can't see that it's there.

Now, out of this huge infinite array, you have to find the one ball with the little pink dot on it. That is the challenge of finding the rule that tells you the best chess move for each position.

Is ethics just as hard? No! Ethics is insanely harder. Because ethics tells you a most ethical move possible for each chess position, which includes illegal moves and therefore there are more black balls corresponding to just the subset of ethical choices for chess positions!

Now consider that also Go exists, and checkers, and, Fortnite, and situations that aren't even games at all, like most of everything in the universe.

There's a ball for each way a rule can be distinguished from all other rules over the full list of all possible situations, including but hardly limited to chess situations.

One of them has a little pink dot on its backside. Go find it.

That is the challenge of ethics.

Yes, people disagree about which ball has the little pink dot on it! Yes, you can search your heart and soul and still not know which ball has the little pink dot on it! That does not mean there is not a ball with a little pink dot on it!

The pink-dotted ball exists!

Alas, the Babyeaters were looking for the ball with the little red dot on it, and the Super Happy people looking for the ball with the little blue dot on it. Looking for different colored dots, or disagreeing about which ball has the pink/red/blue dot on it, is the stuff that wars and trade are made of.

Two things:

1. The babyeaters were supposed to be weird - they were supposed to be alien. In my opinion, to the extent that they have something in common (w.r.t that extreme) with humans, it should not be "I disagree with this person politically this is what it's like meeting an alien" but rather the observation that the word "cannibals" exists.

2. What everyone had in common was - Everyone wanted everyone else to change.* That was the source of conflict. (They also all had spaceships, and the more "loving" the species, the more advanced the tech.)

*Sort of. Was less clear with the humans, but more detail was available. Wouldn't have been an issue (to that extent) if they were all the same.

a deeper message about ethical systems

Maybe the assertion that they evolved?