Rejecting “Goodness” Does Not Mean Hammering The Defect Button

• AI News Team
• November 11, 2025

​Published on November 11, 2025 6:50 AM GMTBack in the day when debates about religion were fashionable, one of the standard back-and-forths went roughly like this…Theist: If we reject God, then what’s to stop us from stealing and murdering each other?Atheist: Well, mostly people don’t want to hurt other people that much, and also at the societal level we all benefit from laws against theft and murder and the like so we can just enforce those regardless of this whole “God” business.Unusually Smart Theist: But low-trust societies are a thing. They have the laws against theft and murder, but they still suck. Empirically, a society just works way better if the large majority of its members subscribe to e.g. Christianity, and therefore generally don’t try to screw each other over even when they could get away with it.Unusually Smart Atheist: Ok, but that doesn’t mean we need to accept e.g. the Bible as a package deal. It gets some things right, it gets some things wrong. But more importantly it’s a whole memetic egregore, and you can’t really get rid of the bad parts without rejecting the whole egregore. And you can get the good parts without most of the egregore; one certainly doesn’t need to claim that it was good and righteous for the ancient Israelites to kill every man, woman and child in Jericho, in order to get the parts we want.[… and then the discussion would continue for several hundred rounds.]Today, the religious egregores are not so dominant. But their niche is still filled by the memetic egregore Goodness – the egregore whose constituent memes are claims about what is Good.The memetic egregore Goodness is the same type of thing as the older religious egregores. It feeds on the same feelings and instincts, and fills the same niche. And one can have basically the same arguments about it.Goodist: If we reject Good, then what’s to stop us from stealing and murdering each other?Agoodist: Well, mostly people don’t want to hurt other people that much, and also at the societal level we all benefit from laws against theft and murder and the like so we can just enforce those regardless of this whole “Good” business.Unusually Smart Goodist: But low-trust societies are a thing. They have the laws against theft and murder, but they still suck. Empirically, a society just works way better if the large majority of its members subscribe to the modern Western memeplex of Goodness, and therefore generally don’t try to screw each other over even when they could get away with it.Unusually Smart Agoodist: Ok, but that doesn’t mean we need to accept the memetic egregore Goodness as a package deal. It gets some things right, it gets some things wrong. But more importantly it’s a whole memetic egregore, and you can’t really get rid of the bad parts without rejecting the whole egregore. And you can get the good parts without most of the egregore; one certainly doesn’t need to e.g. buy into the Virtue Theory of Metabolism in order to get the parts we want.[…]Discuss ​Read More