So I’ve been trying to get a clearer picture of what you mean by wholesomeness. So far I have: * Make an attempt to pay attention to the whole system, but stop at whatever point feels reasonable. * Don’t exclude any important domains from things you care about. * Make these judgements based on your own values, and also the values that are felt-to-be-important by a good number of other people. * Wholesomeness is subjective to individual interpretation, so there aren’t definitive right answers. * Certain tradeoffs of values are objectively unwholesome. There are definitive wrong answers.
I don’t think this is a useful model. The devil of all of this is in the interpretations of “reasonable” and “important” and “good.”
You say it’s unwholesome when someone ignores what you think is important by saying “I don’t value this”. But this is exactly what your model is encouraging: consider everything, but stop whenever you personally feel like you’ve considered everything you value. The only safeguard against this is just biasing the status quo by labeling things unwholesome if enough people disagree.
I definitely agree that this fails as a complete formula for assessing what’s good or bad. My feeling is that it offers an orientation that can be helpful for people aggregating stuff they think into all-things-considered judgements (and e.g. I would in retrospect have preferred to have had more of this orientation in the past).
If someone were using this framework to stop thinking about things that I thought they ought to consider, I couldn’t be confident that they weren’t making a good faith effort to act wholesomely, but I at least would think that their actions weren’t wholesome by my lights.
So I’ve been trying to get a clearer picture of what you mean by wholesomeness. So far I have:
* Make an attempt to pay attention to the whole system, but stop at whatever point feels reasonable.
* Don’t exclude any important domains from things you care about.
* Make these judgements based on your own values, and also the values that are felt-to-be-important by a good number of other people.
* Wholesomeness is subjective to individual interpretation, so there aren’t definitive right answers.
* Certain tradeoffs of values are objectively unwholesome. There are definitive wrong answers.
I don’t think this is a useful model. The devil of all of this is in the interpretations of “reasonable” and “important” and “good.”
You say it’s unwholesome when someone ignores what you think is important by saying “I don’t value this”. But this is exactly what your model is encouraging: consider everything, but stop whenever you personally feel like you’ve considered everything you value. The only safeguard against this is just biasing the status quo by labeling things unwholesome if enough people disagree.
I definitely agree that this fails as a complete formula for assessing what’s good or bad. My feeling is that it offers an orientation that can be helpful for people aggregating stuff they think into all-things-considered judgements (and e.g. I would in retrospect have preferred to have had more of this orientation in the past).
If someone were using this framework to stop thinking about things that I thought they ought to consider, I couldn’t be confident that they weren’t making a good faith effort to act wholesomely, but I at least would think that their actions weren’t wholesome by my lights.