I think that there’s something interesting here. One of the people I talked about this with asked me why children seem exceptionally wholesome (it’s certainly not because they’re unusually good at tracking the whole of things), and I thought the answer was about them being a part of the world where it may be especially important to avoid doing accidental harm, so our feelings of harms-to-children have an increased sense of unwholesomeness. But I’m now thinking that something like “robustly not evil” may be an important part of it.
Now we can trace out some of the links between wholesomeness1 and wholesomeness2. If evil is something like “consciously disregarding the impacts of your actions on (certain) others”, then wholesomeness1 should robustly avoid it. And failures of wholesomeness1 which aren’t evil might still be failures of wholesomeness2 -- because they involve a failure to attend to some impacts of actions, while observers may not be able to tell whether that failure to attend was accidental or deliberate.
A couple more notes:
I don’t think that wholesomeness2 is a crisp thing—it’s dependent on the audience, and how much they get to observe. Someone could have wholesomeness2 in a strong way with respect to one audience, and really not with respect to another audience.
I think in expectation / in the long run / as your audiences get smarter (or something), pursuing wholesomeness1 may be a good proxy for wholesomeness2. Basically for the kind of reasons discussed in Integrity for consequentialists
I think that there’s something interesting here. One of the people I talked about this with asked me why children seem exceptionally wholesome (it’s certainly not because they’re unusually good at tracking the whole of things), and I thought the answer was about them being a part of the world where it may be especially important to avoid doing accidental harm, so our feelings of harms-to-children have an increased sense of unwholesomeness. But I’m now thinking that something like “robustly not evil” may be an important part of it.
Now we can trace out some of the links between wholesomeness1 and wholesomeness2. If evil is something like “consciously disregarding the impacts of your actions on (certain) others”, then wholesomeness1 should robustly avoid it. And failures of wholesomeness1 which aren’t evil might still be failures of wholesomeness2 -- because they involve a failure to attend to some impacts of actions, while observers may not be able to tell whether that failure to attend was accidental or deliberate.
A couple more notes:
I don’t think that wholesomeness2 is a crisp thing—it’s dependent on the audience, and how much they get to observe. Someone could have wholesomeness2 in a strong way with respect to one audience, and really not with respect to another audience.
I think in expectation / in the long run / as your audiences get smarter (or something), pursuing wholesomeness1 may be a good proxy for wholesomeness2. Basically for the kind of reasons discussed in Integrity for consequentialists