Which alignment is "gooder" - lawful good or chaotic good?

For some reason, all the characters I create seem to end up being chaotic good.  So I started to wonder why, to me at least, chaotic good characters seem more compelling.

Often, while reading and hearing  various different opinions about D&D alignments, a lot of people take lawful good to be the alignment that is the "goodest".  I don't mean best, because what is best is subjective and entirely depends on what you are going for in a character.  I mean the alignment that has the greatest amount of the quality that we call "good".  It's easy to see why people would think like this.  We've been trained since infancy that following the rules equals "being good", and chaotic good characters don't follow the rules, so lawful good characters must be "gooder" right?

Not everyone would agree.  A common example of how it doesn't work like this, is what if the leader of a country was an evil person, oppressing their citizens and waging wars for stealing land and resources?  A chaotic good character would stand against such a leader, following only their moral compass, disobeying orders and not submitting to social pressure to go along with it.  But the counter argument to this is that a lawful good character would not obey an oppressive leader either.  It would be lawful neutral to unquestioningly follow orders, regardless of the nature of the orders or the moral character of the person giving them.  A lawful good character would stand up against the corrupt leader, perhaps employing more lawful methods of doing so, such as speaking out via official channels, standing against them in a lawful process such as an election, or changing allegience to support a good leader who's fighting against oppression.  Or maybe even becoming a leader of an opposition group.

However, I don't think that is the reason why I find chaotic good characters more compelling.  Since my background is in evolutionary biology, I looked at it from that point of view.  In order to investigate how some species evolve to co-operate or even be altruistic occasionally, biologists tend categorise behavior in ways similar to this:

altruistic: when there's benefit to the other individual, but a cost to you, e.g. facing danger to save someone's life 

co-operative: when there's a benefit to you and the other individual, e.g. helping a friend to get food, which you both share

selfish: when there's a benefit to you and a cost to the other individual, e.g. stealing someone's food

spiteful: when there's a cost to you and the other person, e.g. punching someone in the face (you hurt your fist and their face)

Back to the question of lawful good versus chaotic good:  Which one is more altruistic?  The lawful good character follows the rules and gets along in society, choosing both co-operation and altruism, and taking a moral stance against those who behave in selfish and spiteful ways - perhaps by enforcing laws designed to punish theives and violent people.  However, the chaotic good person faces a greater cost to themselves through actions that although good, may go against social norms or break the rules.  Where laws are not perfect and the right thing to do in a situation is illegal, the chaotic good character will do the right thing anyway, regardless if it lands them in jail.  Looking at it this way, the chaotic good character is more altruistic than the lawful good character, because of their greater willingness to accept the costs of doing the right thing.  In other words, chaotic good is "gooder" than lawful good.

That got me thinking further: which is more evil, lawful evil or chaotic evil?  You could argue that a chaotic evil character is not constrained by the rules and so no evil acts are out of bounds.  But on the other hand, a lawful evil character can subvert entire nations and build systems that force people to obey their evil orders; their ability to organise hoards of minions gives them so much more power to do evil on a much grander scale.

Of course, this is just one opinion thrown out there to provoke thought and discussion.  Even the very definitions of each alignment can vary depending on who you ask.  The important thing is developing a character that's fun to play, and that involves thinking about alignments and where you want your character to go with it.  Sometimes, you need to start to play a character before you really get a feel for how they react in different situations, and therefore what their alignment is.  Don't let your character be constrained by alignments, but they can be a very helpful and thought provoking aspect of character development.