And you can get the good parts
The good parts? Are you throwing Good out the front door, only to find it still in the house, without even needing to climb back through the window?
1Can you define Goodness here? It feels very subjective, and therefore a weak egregore at best. Maybe this is because of my moral relativist philosophical commitments.
Do you mean “goodness” as a moral objectivist might describe it? If so, isn’t this essay mostly an argument against moral objectivity?
To me “goodness” is a loose collection of goals and practices that differs by culture centered around the wellbeing of others. There are obvious Schelling points, like the aforementioned prohibition or murder, theft, etc., but the details vary by culture—ideas of hospitality are extremely culture-specific.
I don’t know if I’m a Goodist or Agoodist. 😆 I am a compatibilist regarding deontology and consequentialism: intent matters, but we’re also responsible for our action when they cause harm, regardless of intent.
Often the sort of arguments that you describe above seem to be about definitions than substance. (and here I am asking you to define the word in question. 😅) Call it goodness, honor, ethical philosophy, or fleeb. Taboo the word and double-crux it, and the disagreements often dissolve.
I’m not sure that is what you mean though.
Meta: I've been trying to keep up inkhaven's "write a post every day in November" assignment. And for this particular post, that meant writing with a fever of 101.1F, with my whole body sore and exhausted, and a nasty headache. So, uh... this post is perhaps not the best possible version of itself.
7
1But more importantly it’s a whole memetic egregore, and you can’t really get rid of the bad parts without rejecting the whole egregore. And you can get the good parts without most of the egregore
Can you say more to about why you believe this second part? It's not at all straightforward to me how you pick and choose the good parts of an egregore to "get" them.
The dominant egregores are selected, so if you want to beat them, you need to out-compete them, which means you can't just select on "goodness" as a criteria, you have to have a cohesive package that outcompetes the existing egregore.
Is this type of goodness about memetic bullshit value claims or something else? Funnily enough, when I thought I had an example of this with washing vegetables it was somewhat controversial.
1
Back in the day when debates about religion were fashionable, one of the standard back-and-forths went roughly like this…
Theist: If we reject God, then what’s to stop us from stealing and murdering each other?
Atheist: Well, mostly people don’t want to hurt other people that much, and also at the societal level we all benefit from laws against theft and murder and the like so we can just enforce those regardless of this whole “God” business.
Unusually Smart Theist: But low-trust societies are a thing. They have the laws against theft and murder, but they still suck. Empirically, a society just works way better if the large majority of its members subscribe to e.g. Christianity, and therefore generally don’t try to screw each other over even when they could get away with it.
Unusually Smart Atheist: Ok, but that doesn’t mean we need to accept e.g. the Bible as a package deal. It gets some things right, it gets some things wrong. But more importantly it’s a whole memetic egregore, and you can’t really get rid of the bad parts without rejecting the whole egregore. And you can get the good parts without most of the egregore; one certainly doesn’t need to claim that it was good and righteous for the ancient Israelites to kill every man, woman and child in Jericho, in order to get the parts we want.
[... and then the discussion would continue for several hundred rounds.]
Today, the religious egregores are not so dominant. But their niche is still filled by the memetic egregore Goodness - the egregore whose constituent memes are claims about what is Good.
The memetic egregore Goodness is the same type of thing as the older religious egregores. It feeds on the same feelings and instincts, and fills the same niche. And one can have basically the same arguments about it.
Goodist: If we reject Good, then what’s to stop us from stealing and murdering each other?
Agoodist: Well, mostly people don’t want to hurt other people that much, and also at the societal level we all benefit from laws against theft and murder and the like so we can just enforce those regardless of this whole “Good” business.
Unusually Smart Goodist: But low-trust societies are a thing. They have the laws against theft and murder, but they still suck. Empirically, a society just works way better if the large majority of its members subscribe to the modern Western memeplex of Goodness, and therefore generally don’t try to screw each other over even when they could get away with it.
Unusually Smart Agoodist: Ok, but that doesn’t mean we need to accept the memetic egregore Goodness as a package deal. It gets some things right, it gets some things wrong. But more importantly it’s a whole memetic egregore, and you can’t really get rid of the bad parts without rejecting the whole egregore. And you can get the good parts without most of the egregore; one certainly doesn’t need to e.g. buy into the Virtue Theory of Metabolism in order to get the parts we want.
[...]