Recently Robin Hanson posted about the difference between fighting along the frontier vs. expanding the frontier. It’s a well known point, but given I was recently reminded of it it’s salient to me, and it seems quite relevant here.
When we ask if human values have “improved” or “degenerated” over time we have to have some way of judging increase or decrease. One way to understand this is to check if humans get to realize more value, as judged by each individual and then normalized and aggregated, along certain dimensions within the multidimensional space of values. To take your example of “engagement with extended family”, most moderns have less of this than ancients did both on average and it seems at maximum, i.e. modern systems preclude as much engagement as was possible in the past, such that a modern person maximally engaged with their extended family is less engaged than was maximally possible in the past. This seems to be traded-off, though, against greater freedom from need to engage with extended family because alternative systems allow a person to fulfill other values without reliance on extended family. As a result this looks much like a “fight”, i.e. a trade-off along the value frontier of one value to another.
You give the example of reduced slavery being a general benefit, but I think we can tell a similar story that it is a trade-off. We trade-off individual choice of labour use, living conditions, etc. for the right of the powerful to make those decisions for the less powerful. In this sense the reduction in slavery takes away something of value from someone—the would be slaveholders—to give it to someone else—the would be slaves. We may judge this to be an expansion or value efficiency improvement under two conditions (which change slightly what we mean by expansion):
(1) there is more value overall, i.e. we traded less value away than we got back in return
(2) there is more value overall along all dimensions
I would argue that case (1) is really still a fight though because we are still making a tradeoff, we are just moving to somewhere more efficient along the frontier. From this perspective the end of slavery was not an expansion of values, but it was a trade-off for more value.
But if we are so strict, is anything truly a pure expansion? This seems quite tricky, because humans can value arbitrary things, and so for every action that increases some value it would seem that we are necessarily decreasing the ability the realize some counter-value. For example, it might seem that something like “greater availability of calories” would result in pure value expansion, assuming we can screen off all the complicated details of how we make more calories available to humans and how that process will affect values. But suppose you value scarcity of calories, maybe even directly, then for you this will be a fight and we must interpret an increase in the availability of calories as a trade-off rather than as a pure expansion in values.
This is potentially troubling because it means there’s no universal way to judge moral progress if there can be no expansion without some contraction somewhere. It would seem that there must always be contraction of something, even if it is an efficient contraction that generates more value than it gives up.
So in the end I guess I am forced to (mostly) agree with your assessment even though you frame it in a way that seem foreign to me. It feels foreign to me because it seems every improvement is also a degeneration and vice versa, and the relevant question of improvement is mostly whether or not we are generating more value in aggregate (an efficiency improvement) if we want to be neutral on which value dimensions to optimize along.
I actually don’t love the idea of making aggregate value something we optimize for, though, because I worry about degenerate cases like highly optimizing along a single value dimension at the expense of all others such that it results in an overall increase in value but in a way we wouldn’t want, even though arguably if we were measuring value correctly in this system such a situation would be impossible because it would be factored in by a decrease in whatever value we had that was being traded off against that made us dislike the “optimization”.
I instead continue to think that value is a confused concept that we need to break apart and reunderstand, but I’m still working on deconfusing myself on this, so I have nothing additional to report in that direction for now.
Recently Robin Hanson posted about the difference between fighting along the frontier vs. expanding the frontier. It’s a well known point, but given I was recently reminded of it it’s salient to me, and it seems quite relevant here.
When we ask if human values have “improved” or “degenerated” over time we have to have some way of judging increase or decrease. One way to understand this is to check if humans get to realize more value, as judged by each individual and then normalized and aggregated, along certain dimensions within the multidimensional space of values. To take your example of “engagement with extended family”, most moderns have less of this than ancients did both on average and it seems at maximum, i.e. modern systems preclude as much engagement as was possible in the past, such that a modern person maximally engaged with their extended family is less engaged than was maximally possible in the past. This seems to be traded-off, though, against greater freedom from need to engage with extended family because alternative systems allow a person to fulfill other values without reliance on extended family. As a result this looks much like a “fight”, i.e. a trade-off along the value frontier of one value to another.
You give the example of reduced slavery being a general benefit, but I think we can tell a similar story that it is a trade-off. We trade-off individual choice of labour use, living conditions, etc. for the right of the powerful to make those decisions for the less powerful. In this sense the reduction in slavery takes away something of value from someone—the would be slaveholders—to give it to someone else—the would be slaves. We may judge this to be an expansion or value efficiency improvement under two conditions (which change slightly what we mean by expansion):
(1) there is more value overall, i.e. we traded less value away than we got back in return
(2) there is more value overall along all dimensions
I would argue that case (1) is really still a fight though because we are still making a tradeoff, we are just moving to somewhere more efficient along the frontier. From this perspective the end of slavery was not an expansion of values, but it was a trade-off for more value.
But if we are so strict, is anything truly a pure expansion? This seems quite tricky, because humans can value arbitrary things, and so for every action that increases some value it would seem that we are necessarily decreasing the ability the realize some counter-value. For example, it might seem that something like “greater availability of calories” would result in pure value expansion, assuming we can screen off all the complicated details of how we make more calories available to humans and how that process will affect values. But suppose you value scarcity of calories, maybe even directly, then for you this will be a fight and we must interpret an increase in the availability of calories as a trade-off rather than as a pure expansion in values.
This is potentially troubling because it means there’s no universal way to judge moral progress if there can be no expansion without some contraction somewhere. It would seem that there must always be contraction of something, even if it is an efficient contraction that generates more value than it gives up.
So in the end I guess I am forced to (mostly) agree with your assessment even though you frame it in a way that seem foreign to me. It feels foreign to me because it seems every improvement is also a degeneration and vice versa, and the relevant question of improvement is mostly whether or not we are generating more value in aggregate (an efficiency improvement) if we want to be neutral on which value dimensions to optimize along.
I actually don’t love the idea of making aggregate value something we optimize for, though, because I worry about degenerate cases like highly optimizing along a single value dimension at the expense of all others such that it results in an overall increase in value but in a way we wouldn’t want, even though arguably if we were measuring value correctly in this system such a situation would be impossible because it would be factored in by a decrease in whatever value we had that was being traded off against that made us dislike the “optimization”.
I instead continue to think that value is a confused concept that we need to break apart and reunderstand, but I’m still working on deconfusing myself on this, so I have nothing additional to report in that direction for now.