Acting Wholesomely

I think it would be better not to use the word "wholesome".  Using it is cheating, by letting us pretend at the same time that (A) we're explaining a new kind of ethics, which we name "wholesome", and (B) that we already know what "wholesome" means.  This is a common and severe epistemological failure mode which traces back to the writings of Plato.

If you replace every instance of "wholesome" with the word "frobby", does the essay clearly define "frobby"?

It seems to me to be a way to try to smuggle virtue ethics into the consequentialist rationality community by disguising it with a different word.  If you replace every instance of "wholesome" with the word "virtuous", does the essay's meaning change?

Pretty good essay. On first pass, I don’t feel like this post manages to communicate the concept of wholesomeness well enough to pin it down for someone who didn’t already know what this post was trying to communicate. I shall give it a quick go.

When I am choosing an action and justifying it as wholesome, what it often feels like is that I am trying to track all the obvious considerations, but some (be it internal or external) force is pushing me to ignore one of them. Not merely to trade off against it, but to look away from it in my mind. And agains that force I’m trying to defend a particular action as the best one call all things considered - the “wholesome” action.

I am having a hard time thinking of examples, in part because I think I’ve been doing better on this axis in recent years, but I think one of the most tempting versions of this to me has been to ignore people’s feelings and my impacts on them when I have a mission that is very important. For instance, I might think someone has done terribly at some work that they’re doing on a project I’m leading. Now, I think it’s good to be straight with people and it’s good communication to give feedback early and clearly. So I want to let them know that the work has been worse than useless and I regret handing it off to them. This will likely cause them some fear and feel destabilizing to their social status and that will cause them stress and who knows how they deal with that. It is tempting here for me to choose not to pay attention to that when I decide to give them feedback, and as I do so, and after. And I have a great justification - because the work is exceedingly important! And if they say “Ben I feel like you’re being hurtful and not caring about my feelings” I can say “But this is what I have to do for the mission! It’s important! We all agree on that!” And nobody around will disagree because it’s often been the core conceit of my social groups that the only reason we’re here, the only reason we do what we do, is because we think it’s important. And your feelings don’t weigh on the scales of making the project hurt.

(That all may be true, but it doesn’t justify me avoiding seeing the direct impacts of my actions. When I notice this, sometimes I have impulses to do other things too - like reassure them in other ways, or show that I still respect them for other things they’ve done, or pick a time and place that is less likely to be embarrassing, or a dozen other things depending on the context. Admitting what's happening to myself and acting on the subsequent impulses feels more “wholesome” to me.)

Anyway, I used to be much more willing to stop caring about the impact of my behavior directly on people if I felt that it would distract from getting the important things done. Now I aim to be fully aware, even though it’s actually hard and often quite painful to still go ahead with it while doing that.

Writing this out now I even notice a way I’ve not been very wholesome in my interactions with some individuals I’ve interacted with of late. Noticing why, is not sufficient to solve it, alas, because I am quite allergic to some aspects of the relationship and I think it would be counterproductive to just have it naively be present in our interactions, I might easily act poorly and just make things worse. (I want to think on this more.)

Once you look at the whole of your impact on someone, then you can decide for yourself whether or not to do it. Of course, often you will choose to hurt someone. Reporting a violent crime or theft to the police is often the better decision even though it hurts the individual who broke a law. Even if you look directly at the costs it imposes on them (and the benefits it imposes on their future victims as well as the benefits of maintaining a shared rule of law) I typically do not change my mind about whether I will choose to do something that hurts them.

Overall I would ask yourself “What parts of life and the world do I instinctively turn my attention away from when it comes up?”, and then try to expand the things you can look directly at when making decisions. But I think this is probably assuming already a high level of self-awareness that has some other pre-requisites^[1].

Perhaps an easier question is “What decisions have I made that really hurt me to a surprising degree and what did information I turn my attention away from when I made those decisions that could have guided me better and why did I ignore it?” And then use that to notice when you’re susceptible from making less wholesome decisions in your life.

(…having now finished reading the post I see you do talk about this aspect of wholesomeness later on, in the section “Wholesome vs virtuous vs right?”)

1. ^{^}

   Added: A pre-requisite being that, when I ask what parts of the world you instinctively turn your attention away from when it comes up, you go "Oh yes, I can think of examples of this I've noticed in myself" rather than going "I dunno, I don't think I do?" or "How could I know that in-principle, surely I'm avoiding thinking about it?". This requires skills I have not pointed to in this comment.

Promoted to curated: I think this post feels like it's in some important respects failing at the kind of standard that I normally hold LessWrong posts to. My guess is this is partially the result of the territory and partially something that I think can just be done better and this post didn't succeed at. More concretely, I feel like this post keeps trying to poetically point at a concept, by using it and making statements about it, without really acknowledging the degree to which the post fails to give a clear and mechanistic definition of what it is talking about. 

This makes it likely that readers walk away think with an inflated sense of understanding, and I think also gives rise to a bunch of "conflationary alliances [LW · GW]" where people build a shared identity around a definition of "wholesomeness" that is framed in a way that avoid falsification (since falsification would threaten the alliance).

Despite that, I have found the concept handle of "wholesomeness" quite useful and have used it a bunch, though I've so far only felt comfortable using it with a bunch of disclaimers about the concept feeling kind of trap-like. Ben's restated definition of the concept gets the closest to how I use it internally: 

When I am choosing an action and justifying it as wholesome, what it often feels like is that I am trying to track all the obvious considerations, but some (be it internal or external) force is pushing me to ignore one of them. Not merely to trade off against it, but to look away from it in my mind.

I associate "unwholesemeness" with a specific mental motion where in order to either get some kind of social buy in, or to stop feeling overwhelmed with a decision, or want to avoid blameability for the consequence of a decision of mine by not thinking about it (ala Copenhagen Interpretation of ethics [LW · GW]), where I rewrite my map to not include some part of reality, or assert that that part of reality is "unimportant" so that the resulting decision is "obvious". And "wholesomeness" with a kind of courage of instead confronting and owning the difficulty of getting buy-in, or the ambiguity of the decision. I like having a pointer to it, which I didn't have before this post, though I already had a concept for this, so I might be projecting what this post is about too much into my preconceptions. 

This overall does make me want to curate this, though I do think a rewrite that tackles this concept from a more reductionistic angle (of course recognizing the limits of such an approach), or just another post, is something that seems likely worth it to me.  

This post feels to me in some ways like the first chapter of a religious teaching. The post keeps talking about wholesomeness in a way where I have a (perhaps unjustified) sense the post is pretending or expecting me to know what it means, and talking like it has successfully explained it, but I’m not sure it succeeds (e.g. the circular definition for how to make wholesome decisions), and that feels common for religious texts about how to live a good life.

Thanks, Owen. What a nourishing post. The evocative images help.

"what is good and right and comfortable?" - mh, I would switch 'comfortable' for 'at ease' (to include consciously preferred discomfort, which is ok). 

It could appear a sazen, to some. Also, a bit cordially funny-sad, how the explanation has underperformed in seducing some of those who may benefit from it. Would need to refine the teaching. 

I'll try to add my very subjective take, since I have not noticed this understanding in the comments yet:

'Wholesomeness' is used as a an evocative label (and as such the label is more assotiative art than definition - which is good in case of trying to tap into mental blockages one might be in denial about). It points to a certain, subjectively interpreted inner state. It marks a moral epistemic (!) quality - how I go about believing to have gained assurance that my considered course of action or option is the one to go forward with.

It's akin to an integral check-in, where you connect to not only your cognition, but in turn also your feelings, your body sensations, and your imagined relation to personal spirituality. (here, I guess, focus is on the feelings).

The key to getting it is to not do it (mostly) cognitively. The choice of verbs of 'feel' vs. 'think' is not arbitrary. As long as attention is focused on explaining, understanding, and other mental activities, the mind is leaning forward to examine a certain piece of information, or doing a meticulous systematic inventory, bit by bit, very focused. But all the while the tapped emotions are those associated with those pieces and/or the general inquiry mode, e.g., could be anxious, curious.

By contrast, checking in with one's feeling in a way of unwinding calmness and observing and seeing if there is any remaining discomfort to be sensed and where that discomfort might take me to (potentially unwholesome bits, subconsciously registered caveats) - is a way to bring up challenges that the consciousness had ignored or even pushed away. 

So it's like a sort of intuition, or unfixation. If we think of a metaphor from eyesight, it's not looking at any one specific object, but resting the eye in a semi-unfocus, as the room perception settles into one picture of everything in its place.

Emotionally, it also has a quality of accepting things as they are (appreciating unwholesomeness).

Ok, so this is how to do the inquiry. The end state I am checking for is not so much calmness, but more of a deep joy. This comes when I have not just accepted, but indeed appreciated the options - from my intuitively best known stance, unrelated to the current case. I.e., I might come up with a completely different option, based on a much more fulfilling experience I've had before, that I therefore knew was possible (although I only remembered it as a feeling), and which got remembered as a personal standard of how awesome things can be in terms of relational quality. So, it's a subconscious check against one's experienced optimal solution or at least slightly above acceptable or good solutions from the past (the feeling one had). 

The advantage is that, likely, different kinds of information, i.e., 'relational', are encoded in the emotion, and a feeling overlap check allows for more efficient processing than bit by bit. Maybe similar to the experience of tasting a dish to see if it is fully satisfying or needs anything else.

The difference with virtues or rightness, may be that we encode different emotions with these (based on our experiences with the terms in their experienced contexts), and that both of these appear to strive only for the good side and to discriminate the bad side, whereas wholesomeness has an acceptance of the imperfect, as well (albeit appropriately deprioritized under the more comprehensive view). 'Unwholesomeness' might accordingly be a misleading terms, as it's not an opposite, but a sensed subpar option. I'd opt for something like 'not-yet-wholesomeness'. Hence, wholesomeness might be the name for a heuristic check of completeness and optimality.

It sounds similar to holistic or ideal - though includes a bit less striving and more sensing for ease. It's not meant to evoke complacency, if I can tell.

The content of the judgment is not objectively informative, but a guidepost for an internal inquiry or check-in against one's individual experience base. If a lack is sensed, this can be investigated to find it, explicate it, and then share. If an OK option is sensed, one might still proceed to try and make it a great option. Someone sensing unease in the other, might invite them to share what would be a more wholesome option.

Still, as a generalizable rule, it seems to call for a relaxation before sharing one's judgment or course of action, and might lead to more balanced, less edgy choices.

...

Trying to cautiously apply this to my interpretation of the case of Ben's example. He chose to prioritize the mission over others' feelings. Now this seems perfectly fine, in terms of priorities. Still it seems to contain a regret about having been unable to optimize for both. The question here is, is it possible to do both? For Ben, it sounds it was mentally demanding to do both at the time, or maybe to cushion the rejection (which is a kind of practice, once I have mastered one, then to layer the other on top). So, here, applying wholesomeness can point to the wish to communicate a necessary rejection in a more caring way (to also preserve the relationship or strengthen the colleague after a blow - in a sincere way), but without significantly more effort (which supposes a bit of tryout). This legitimate wish seems easily confoundable in this example with the agreed upon irrelevance of bringing up feelings altogether as an uninformative complaint (which may or may not be the case). Feelings shouldn't be interpreted as being possible to be hurt under a mission or growth mindset at all, but expectations might be disappointed, trust eroded, and in essence some real issue might be hiding there, but most likely insecurity around exposure of perceived incompetence and fear or stress around workplace consequences, (resentment not yet overcome as a mode of meaning making) which may be addressed with a policy of emotional safety climate or constructive error culture. In turn, Ben might wonder, besides venting frustration, if he could, what positive effect would he like to have as an outcome of the communication (e.g., invite a learning, better coordination, better focus on the project) - and then try and explicitly boost this main purpose in the explanation, just as a bonus. With leisure and for extended collaboration, one might decide to explore expectations, failures to meet them, and optimal signaling. Or not, if it's too much effort. It's not a must, if one optimizes for mission only, one can, e.g., awkwardly ignore or rely on the local version of 'I know it appears harsh at first, now deal with it' or 'kids, will grow out of it'. If one also optimizes for swifter recovery and extended functioning of the 'missionaries', it might be worth a try. To me it seems, both choices are fine from an observer's perspective, but for Ben's individual preference set likely only one of them or an altogether different one might align best. Wholesomeness is then the check of being satisfied and/or holding oneself to highest desired standard.

Here, experienced lack of wholesomeness might point to either ignoring one's highest priority, or if it is met, a longing to meet the lower priorities, as well.

I wish I had a good way of teaching this... maybe the practice of breathing and putting down current surface emotions to settle and note any tensions underneath. what they might tel us. and then any wishes for improvement. Together with having good reasons for doing it in the first place, i.e., not ignoring the problem, but to uncover subconsciously stored information, optimal choice with less effort, invite creativity and wellbeing, have richness of experience in interaction, touch base with moral values when deciding. 

For a seasoned or even 'compulsive' rationality user, it might seem irritating, 1) as the unfocus is like taking a break at the wrong time or giving up altogether, but it actually helps synthesizing. 2) one has to admit that actually one has overlooked a whole strand of available information, 3) it reminds of arrogance (but isn't actually), rather lack of practice in remembering to come from a place of compassion, gratitude, generosity. 4) The resulting higher-level symmetry or alignment can be annoying.

Given the subjectivity, I don't see how to adopt it for AI.

@owencb [LW · GW] : I'm curious if this overlaps with your experience. Again, big respect for the post. The examples and connections shown are possibly outcomes of applying an idea of wholesomeness, and as a result not going against one's moral compass, in terms of relations to others and self, and examples are key to recognizing sources of tension. I'm trying to think of a good-to-wholesome example.

If it's 1950, is having gay sex unwholesome?

Sorry, I’ll be doing multiple unwholesome things in this comment.

For one, I’m commenting without reading the whole post. I was expecting it to be about something else and was disappointed. The conception of wholesomeness as “considering a wider perspective for your actions” is not very interesting. Everyone considers a wider perspective to be valuable, and nobody takes that more seriously already than EAs.

The conception of wholesomeness I was hoping you’d write about (let’s call it wholesomeness2 for distinction from your wholesomeness) is a type of prestige. Prestige is high status freely conferred by the beneficiaries of the prestigious. Contrast with dominance, which is demanded with force.

It’s hard to pin down, but I think I’d say that Wholesomeness2 is a reputation for not being evil. Clearly, it would be good for EA’s ability to do good if they had wholesomeness2. On top of that, if actions that are not wholesome2 tend to be bad and actions that are wholesome2 tend to be good, then wholesome2 is a good heuristic. (Although the tails come apart, as they always do. https://slatestarcodex.com/2018/09/25/the-tails-coming-apart-as-metaphor-for-life/ ).

If someone has wholesomeness2, then people will assume mistakes rather than malice, will defend the wholesome2 person from attack, and help the wholesome2 when they are in need.

I was hoping your post would be about how to be wholesome2. Here are my thoughts:

Incapable of plotting: dogs and children are wholesome because they don’t have the capacity to be evil.

Wholesomeness2 chains, so since candy is associated with children who are wholesome2, associating yourself with candy can increase your wholesomeness2.

Generating warm-fuzzies: the Make a Wish Foundation is extremely wholesome2, while deworming is not. When someone (like an EA) “attacks” Make a Wish by saying it doesn’t spend its funds in a way that helps many people much compared to alternatives, everyone will come to Make a Wish‘s defense.

Vibes: “wholesome2 goths” feels like an oxymoron. The goth aesthetic is contrary to the idea of being not evil, even though the goths themselves are usually nice people. If you call one “wholesome”, they might even get upset at you.

Actually being not evil: It doesn’t matter how wholesome2 he was before; Bill Cosby lost all his wholesome2 when the world found out he was evil. Don’t be Bill Cosby.

I’d appreciate comments elaborating and adding to this list.

….

By analyzing the concept like this, I lost some wholesomeness2, because I have shown that I have the capacity and willingness to gain wholesomeness2 independent of whether I’m really plotting something evil. I’d argue that I’m just not very willing to self-censor, so you should trust me more instead of less… but that is exactly what an unwholesome2 individual would do.

EA will have some trouble gaining wholesomeness2 because it tends to seek power and has the intelligence and agency needed to be evil.

I don't think it's coherent to define this idea of wholesomeness as paying attention to the whole system.

"Paying attention to the whole system" isn't a thing that can be done. There aren't a finite number of things to consider. And even as you consider each marginal thing, the effort spent considering trades off against actually getting anything done. (Getting things done is also a thing to consider.)

All of these examples of "unwholesomeness" are just examples of someone making a tradeoff; disregarding one thing to benefit another thing. You could call any of these tradeoff decisions bad, but "bad" is only coherent relative to a set of values. 

So it sounds to me like this concept of wholesomeness is reasonably summarized as "consciously optimized for a vague set of traditional values." 

I think it's reasonable to advocate for shared values. If 95% of people in a town like neat square buildings, then should probably plan their construction accordingly. 

But putting a set of values behind the vague curtain of "wholesomeness" implies that these values are somehow objective and universal. Which of course they aren't, as evidenced by the way they change across cultures and over time.

I have the same reaction as Ben Pace's shorter comment [LW(p) · GW(p)]. Especially given the section entitled "Wholesome vs virtuous vs right". These three words could be permuted throughout without changing any of the meaning, including in that section. For example:

That stopping-giving-it-attention is a looking-away-from-the-whole-of-things. It cuts one off from the ability to recognise what is virtuous. Perhaps a bullet was worth biting in one case, but if it’s learned just as “that was the wholesome thing to do”, we may come to forget that there was a bullet to be bitten there at all, and start biting it at times when it’s decidedly wrong to do so.

I think if we keep on asking ourselves “what is virtuous?” rather than “what is wholesome?”, we are less likely to fall into this trap of not looking at big swathes of issues. Another question that might work is “what is good and wholesome and comfortable?”. We may feel that something unvirtuous is right, but it’s hard to feel entirely comfortable about that. When we truly feel ourselves to be acting virtuously, we are aligned — both internally, and with the whole we are a part of.

Or:

That stopping-giving-it-attention is a looking-away-from-the-whole-of-things. It cuts one off from the ability to recognise what is right. Perhaps a bullet was worth biting in one case, but if it’s learned just as “that was the virtuous thing to do”, we may come to forget that there was a bullet to be bitten there at all, and start biting it at times when it’s decidedly wrong to do so.

I think if we keep on asking ourselves “what is right?” rather than “what is virtuous?”, we are less likely to fall into this trap of not looking at big swathes of issues. Another question that might work is “what is good and virtuous and comfortable?”. We may feel that something wrong is wholesome, but it’s hard to feel entirely comfortable about that. When we truly feel ourselves to be acting rightly, we are aligned — both internally, and with the whole we are a part of.

Just looking at the list of "subtle cases of unwholesomeness" makes me not want to adopt the model of wholesomeness in my behaviour. All of these things, except the second one, seem reasonable to me. Not "sometimes", but as a concept of available actions. Model of wholesomeness feels very restrictive and ineffective. I'm not sure I understand why wholesomeness should be implemented when we have other common ideologies of morality that would condemn all of the things on the first list (list of extreme cases) as "bad" (and I think those should be considered bad) without restricting us in a way this system would. The text mentions that sometimes unwholesomeness should be accepted as a "necessary cost", but I'm not sure I even see some of these things as negatives in first place, depending on the context. I think its OK to be harsh and its OK to hurt feelings when situations call for it. It may not only be necessary, but beneficial. As well as gaming a poorly designed system to get ahead of everyone else - it all depends on what the system is, what you do with the gains, and what the public reaction will be.

I understand I may sound a bit cynical here, but this is something I have accepted as part and parcel of society. There are some specific cases of unwholesomeness that I think need to be addressed and removed, and there are other cases where I would personally keep them in place or even add them in where they are missing.

The central problem with the ethical system that you have outlined here is that it does not allow for challenge to the prevailing cultural norms.

Acting wholesomely means paying attention to the whole system around us, and contributing well as a part of that whole without introducing unnecessary friction or pain points

is fine in a system which is working well, but entirely inappropriate in a system which needs radical reform, which your ethical framework does not allow for.

Allow me to adopt some of your examples to demonstrate when "unwholesome" activity is, I would argue, morally appropriate or indeed praiseworthy.

You write that

Skirting the law for convenience

and

Disregarding rules for personal benefit

are both unwholesome and therefore not permitted under this ethical system. Rosa Parks refusing to sit in the right seat on the bus was doing both of these things. Was she acting unwholesomely?

If you define wholesomeness as conformity with the whole system around her then she was indeed being unwholesome. But was she acting unethically? I would argue no, because the system around her was broken and in need of radical reform, and therefore acting "wholesomely" within that system is not morally required.

There are many other problematic examples I could give:

• "Disregarding rules for personal benefit" describes everyone who had a homosexual relationship before they were legal.
• Slaves who escaped from their captors were "disregarding rules for personal benefit".
• "Gaming systems that others have established, in ways that aren’t aligned with the intent of the creators" does indeed sound problematic, unless the "creators" of the system are, for instance, the German Nazi government. In that case I would argue the French resistance should feel entirely morally able to game the Nazi systems if that's the best way to smuggle Jewish refugees out of occupied France.
• "Insincere flattery, to get someone to think well of you" does feel kind of yuck, but what if the ends outweigh the means? Is my theoretical French resistance fighter really not allowed to charm a Nazi border guard because it's not wholesome?

Aligning morality with "wholesomeness" works, I think, if you are happy with the outline of the world in which one lives^[1]. But a central tenet of meta-ethics is that ethical systems should be universalisable. They have to work as well in 2023 (or another world in which you approve of the prevailing systems) as they would in 1950s Alabama or 1930s Nazi Germany.

Conformity with the system around us fails this test.

1. ^{^}

   Although I would note that it becomes unworkable when you consider that being "happy with the world" is an entirely subjective perspective. It really just becomes an appeal to "follow the status quo".

Am I understanding correctly that this idea of wholesomeness is purely definitory/axiomatic (like mathematics) containing no (extraordinary) claims at all, so it doesn't make sense to ask "Is this true?" but rather "Is it useful?", and whether "to act wholesomely is good" is just hypothesis you are even actually testing?

Because then I see its great advantage over religious moral systems, that do contain such claims that actually might be false, but people are demanded to believe them.

Could someone, please, confirm or disprove my impression that this idea might be not falsifiable at all? And if it is not, could someone, please, explain to me what reasons to apply this idea are still there (I am skeptical and curious, not completely denying)? 

However, I appreciate this attempt to offer such an interesting moral idea/hypothesis/theory like this.

When it comes to soul-related stuff like this, I'd rather want to keep in mind who the author is... https://forum.effectivealtruism.org/posts/QMee23Evryqzthcvn/a-statement-and-an-apology [EA · GW]