Stefan Molyneux:You are doing an excellent dance around actually disproving my arguments - do you seriously think that anyone does not notice this?
Up until recently this was a conversation about slavery, not about your book. And for that topic, I've given very specific thoughts. As for your book, I hadn't even finished reading it; why would I be trying to disprove its contents? All I've said so far is that I wasn't optimistic about the claims made in the beginning. As you yourself have admitted, they're grandiose.
What I said about philosophical depth is true, however. Your book, whether you find this a problem or not, cites no references on the most common ethical positions in modern philosophy. That by itself isn't damning, but it's a big warning sign for anyone who picks up your text. And once one reads it, it becomes clear that you aren't referencing the concepts either. So it's not, as someone below claimed, that you're just trying to make the book more readable by leaving out jargon; it's pretty obvious that you don't have any real familiarity with significant positions such as non-cognitivism, error theory, realism and anti-realism, contractualism, etc. Where you do reference contemporary ethical theories (like relativism), you show no knowledge of its legitimate theory. You caricature it, or you speak about it as if it were a dirty word (e.g. "rank subjectivism"). If this were a term paper, it would be failed purely for a lack of research.
You, and others here, are free to claim that this just isn't a problem at all. You can claim that your work is correct in spite of its lack of connection to or acknowledgement of any major philosophical work in the past 100 years. You can even claim that it is better because of that insularity, that it's unfettered by the luggage of modern philosophy. All of this is possible, of course; it's just not likely. Having said that, you will still naturally ask me what it is that I find objectionable about your book, so I will oblige you as best I can.
When reading your book, I had trouble trying to determine exactly what sort of a theory you were putting forward. Even if it was an entirely new theory, I should be able to understand exactly what the theory is, but I had a very difficult time actually teasing it out. For all your claims, you seem to avoid coming right out and saying what it is that you mean within the book. There is an over-reliance on metaphors, analogies, and examples which are stretched to the limit. Again, if this were a term paper it would be failed, this time for having no clearly stated thesis and for meandering. That's kind of important. I'm not suggesting that you don't have any thesis at all; just that it seems to be hidden within the contents of your book. Usually that indicates that the author has tackled a subject that is too broad for their expertise, and certainly the subjects you are tackling are nothing if not broad.
UPB: My goal in this book is to define a methodology for validating moral theories that is objective, consistent, clear, rational, empirical – and true.
That's a start, but it's not really a thesis. This is in the Forward, though, so it's understandable, but it means that whatever else this book does, it has promised to offer this methodology. What I don't understand, however, is why this is stated as the explicit goal of the book. The sub-title indicates that it's a "rational proof of secular ethics", which I understand to mean that the book will put forth its own moral theory, not a methodology for verifying one. You might argue that it is intended to contain both, but the point here is that before I had finished reading the Forward I was already facing two conflicting ideas about what the point of this book was supposed to be.
UPB: Valid theories must be both logically consistent and empirically verifiable
This could be your thesis, or one of them. It's a theory which fulfills (at least conceptually) the promise that's made in the Forward. It's also a theory which you didn't come up with. It was devised by the Vienna Circle in the 1920s, based on Ludwig Wittgenstein's work in his Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus. It was taken up by A.J. Ayer in his book Language, Truth and Logic, and is the basis for logical positivism, the first major philosophical movement to come out of Britain in the 20th century. If I give you the benefit of the doubt, and assume you already knew that, then I'm left feeling that you have intentionally not acknowledged this major school of thought. Or instead, if I assume that you didn't know about positivism, then I can only reiterate that you have not done any research at all into the topics of your own book.
In either case the most important point I can make about your above thesis is that it fails catastrophically. Your book is poorer for your ignorance/neglect of philosophical history. Karl Popper's Logik der Forschung was, I believe, the first work to illustrate that logical positivism (and your method for identical reasons) entirely fails to meet its own requirements.
Your theory, as I quoted it above, is not empirically verifiable. In other words, by your own claims it cannot be a valid theory. And because of that paradox it's also not logically consistent. It fails on both counts. This is really quite critical. Not only is it a philosophical failure, but it's also embarrassingly hypocritical; your book contains a section entitled, Self-Defeating Arguments.
There are arguments against the position that I've just laid out, but they're not widely accepted. Even Ayer himself eventually stopped promoting positivism, although he did attempt to defend it. You have not even tried, however, because you've shown no awareness that there is any problem in the first place. It's a problem that, frankly, a second-year philosophy student would pick up on immediately. In a work of philosophy, you typically need to show that there is only a single problem with a theory in order to discount the rest of it. This problem, which I've chosen as one of the most stark I have encountered thus far, can be found within the first ten pages of the Part 1.
If you would like, I will stop doing my "excellent dance" now, and I will finish reading your book. And when I'm done, if you are still interested, I will post a more comprehensive review.