# In Defense of Goodness

This is a reaction to John Wentworth's post [Human Values ≠ Goodness](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9X7MPbut5feBzNFcG/human-values-goodness). In the post, John argues that the human concept of goodness comes apart from human values, and (perhaps more to John's point) *your* values. I agree with this distinction. Nor am I disagreeing with John when he calls goodness a "memetic egregore".

Where I disagree with John is in his desire to cast aside goodness, to wriggle out from under its thumb. John does provide some words of caution in this regard, essentially saying that goodness is too useful a coordination tool to discard recklessly, but once we've accounted for that instrumental value, we should discard the rest.

My argument here will be somewhat similar in flavor to ***The Abolition of Man*** by C.S. Lewis. 

John identifies values as yumminess, and calls upon the reader to notice the difference between these yummy things and what society calls "good". John's yumminess sounds like what C.S. Lewis calls "appetite". C.S. Lewis refers to those who govern decisions by appetite alone "men without chests" or "trousered apes". In contrast, C.S. Lewis recommends participating in what he calls the "Tao", which I understand as the 300-mellinnia-long dialogue amongst humans about norms. I identify this with John's concept of good.[^q3dwqe3e14q]

Before I get into my argument, I would like to note some nuance in identifying personal values with yumminess.

Even Values are Aggregate
=========================

I don't think the human brain really contains a single unified reinforcement learning (RL) system, with one signal that can be appropriately called "value" (or even "value estimate") for that person. I'm also skeptical that there's a singular "yumminess" in human experience. There are multiple different flavors of yumminess, and some of them are borderline (harder to pin down whether it is a good or bad flavor).

First, I think it is plausible that there are multiple independent RL subsystems within the brain. For example, there could be separate model-free and model-based RL subsystems. (For example, model-free: basal ganglia. Model-based: cortex and hippocampus.)

Second, these systems are split into left-brain and right-brain, which may get different rewards which don't effectively aggregate into one reward function. (For example, maybe left-brain learns approach/exploit behavior, more rewarded for things going better than expected; right-brain learns avoid/explore behavior, more punished for things going worse than expected.)

Third, in the extreme, it might be that every brain region that learns should be modeled as an independent subagent, with the learning signal being its individual variety of reinforcement. 

All three ideas provide some reason to suspect that we should model the human brain as containing multiple agents with different reinforcement signals. These need not precisely unify together into one agent with one yumminess. (Obviously, they do *approximately* unify.)

We also don't pursue yumminess single-mindedly. Even if there is a unified yum, we don't do everything we can to get it. For example, a person might avoid heroin even though they're quite confident that they'll get yumminess from it. I doubt John disagrees with this point; I think he's pointing at the yum/yuck we feel *now* when thinking of something, not the *projected yum* we expect we'd feel later. What I want to point out is that this can be seen as an example of reward hacking: deliberately avoiding specific reinforcement events in order to avoid our values being shaped in a specific way. This allows us to deliberately shape our feeling of yumminess.

It is also worth pointing out, [as Steve Byrnes did in a comment on John's piece](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/9X7MPbut5feBzNFcG/human-values-goodness?commentId=Ku3HEuX9Cc6boRrgD), that some feelings of yumminess are more intrinsically generated, while others are socially absorbed.

The overall point I'm making here is that when we look hard at "personal values", we see something like a complex negotiated aggregation of different forces, rather than a centralized source. My argument will be that "goodness" is like this as well, but aggregating over many individuals.

Goodness as Negotiated Aggregation
==================================

The word "good" is *in some ways* merely a word used by individuals to state their preferences: a central use of the word "good" is to say "X is good" when you like X. However, *unlike* a statement of preference, "X is good" invites disagreement from others who disprefer X.

This is often seen as a bug of language, I think; a [confusion between 1-place and 2-place predicates](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eDpPnT7wdBwWPGvo5/2-place-and-1-place-words). And sure, it can be a bug in cases when people don't see the distinction between individual preferences and collective good. Distinguishing individual preferences is an important [3rd-person-perspective tool](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/eqzbXmqGqXiyjX3TP/elk-thought-dump-1), helping us to construct shared maps of the world rather than needing to translate between all of our individual maps all the time. However, I argue that "good" is also an important 3rd-person-perspective tool.

A coalition of cooperating agents needs words to track individual preferences, but it also needs a word to track the [aggregate preferences optimized by the collective policy.](https://www.lesswrong.com/posts/sZuw6SGfmZHvcAAEP/complete-class-consequentialist-foundations) 

Since a claim "X is good" can spring forth from an individual preference, but invites disagreements in case of dissenting preferences, goodness becomes an objective-by-construction compromise between competing preferences.

This might sound like a relativist notion of "good", with a different "good" for each coalition, but not precisely so: if two different coalitions come into conflict, then they should (normatively) try to bargain their way out of the conflict, forming a broader coalition.[^v8xss8m25tl] They can argue about what is good as part of this process, just as they do within-coalition.[^fhl7jde6vis]

In order to maintain a realist position about goodness, we can see this negotiation as a process of discovery, rather than a change in goodness itself. 

Goodness ≠ Human Values
-----------------------

Still, goodness does not equal human values -- not even aggregated human values. This is because goodness includes care for others already included in our coalition (such as animal welfare), as well as implicitly including care for others who may later be added to our coalition (such as extraterrestrials, or artificial intelligences).[^t0mfj6b4u69]

[^q3dwqe3e14q]: I suppose that C.S. Lewis used "Tao" instead of "good" because the eastern concept of Tao was less familiar to his western readership, and therefore, acted as more of an empty variable that he could imbue with his own intended meaning. This avoids a direct argument over the meaning of "good". 

[^v8xss8m25tl]: Of course, it isn't always possible for conflicting coalitions to settle disputes and merge into a larger coalition. From the realist standpoint, this is a persistent disagreement about what is good. 

[^fhl7jde6vis]: An alternate linguistic convention would be to keep coining new words for each "level" -- Tribe A pursues "peachy-ness" and Tribe B pursues "keen-ness" and the coalition including tribe A and B together pursue "peachy-keen-ness" etc. However, "good" seems like a notion which more naturally "floats to the top" rather than getting stuck at one level. 

[^t0mfj6b4u69]: On the other hand, once a cooperative coalition has been formed and the coalition members are effectively pursuing the collective good, it can become difficult to distinguish individual preferences from the collective preferences; behaviorally, everyone is now pursuing the collective preferences. Since humans do show some care for animals, can we really say that caring for animals isn't part of human values?