All Episodes
Previous Next
March 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:52
148 The 'Ought To' Challenge - Morality does not exist in reality

The journey from the 'ought' to the 'is'

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good morning, everybody.
It's Steph.
I hope you're doing well.
It is 8.40 a.m.
on March the 20th, 2006.
Thank you so much for listening, as always.
Well, I lost a couple of song recommendations when I lost my podcast the other morning, so I'm going to repeat them here for your pleasure.
The first thing I'd like to say is that I'm a particular fan of slow blues, so if you like that kind of stuff or want to explore it, a song that I would recommend is John Lee Hooker's I Cover the Waterfront, which you can find on his Greatest Hits CD.
Also, you can find a very, very good version with Van Morrison on one of Van Morrison's CDs where he teams up with all these sort of other Singers, and it's very, very good.
Very, very well done.
You also might want to try Decoration Day by John Lee Hooker, and also Serves You Right to Suffer, which is a great song.
Well, I appreciate everybody's feedback.
This weekend I did check in on the board a couple of times, and some wonderful conversations going on.
Can I tell you again just how enormously impressed I am by everybody's intelligence, commitment, writing skills.
Fantastic!
So, if you haven't gone past the boards, please do go by.
I think it's a pretty friendly and inviting place.
a way of trying to get people to be more civilized, and I believe that people are already pretty civilized to begin with, but I think that the tenor of the board will continue to increase its momentum towards even further civility as we explore the truth, which is, I do believe, the greatest pursuit in life.
As Socrates said, the unexamined life is not worth living.
I did check this morning, and there was a comment about this question that, of course, Ayn Rand raised, and which I've raised in my own way, my own small way.
And the question is really, why?
Why morality?
Why morality?
Why should it be?
Now, the traditional answer in the objectivist camp is that human beings require rationality in order to live.
And therefore, since life is a value, and human beings require rationality to live, then human beings should be, must be allowed to exercise rationality because Life is the highest value, and that which serves life is the greatest value.
Rationality is the greatest value.
Rationality requires free will and an absence of violence, and therefore you should allow others to be rational, and if you don't, you're acting against the highest value of life, and this and that and the other.
Now, one gentleman posted a comment this morning which I heartily agree with, and of course I have an enormous amount of respect for Ayn Rand.
I think emotionally she was a bit of a basket case at times, but as far as philosophy goes, you don't listen to a singer for his philosophy, and you don't necessarily read a philosopher for her personal life.
And I think that I would have had a very hard time even learning how to think without sitting at Ayn Rand's knee and learning as much as I humanly could in my teens.
So all praise to her.
Any critiques that I have of Randian philosophy are put forwards with great humility, of course, because she was a towering intellect, and also with great gratitude, right, sort of tweaks.
But I never was able to make it to this, past this problem of getting an ought from an is.
And this is something that you, if you start arguing with people who've taken philosophy, you know, past sort of the first year, this will come up as quite a common thing.
and it's particularly strong in Judaism, Judaistic philosophy.
And this issue is very important, because the whole question of why should human beings be moral is absolutely essential.
And I don't mean sort of should at an individual level, you know, as a self-interest or whatever, but as I've argued in one of my essays on LewRockwell.com and also on my blog called Proving Libertarian Morality, You really can't get the ought from the is.
And the ought is, you should do such and such.
And the is is, you're a human being and blah blah blah.
And so with the Randian argument, she was going, she says that life is the highest value.
Rationality serves life the best.
Therefore, you should be rational.
And if you should be rational, it means you should allow other people to be rational.
You should not use violence, this, that, and the other.
Now, I've made that argument countless times in my life to people, and I've always had a little demon sitting on my shoulder, and if you've had any trust in me through the last 150 podcasts, this should evaporate it for you completely.
But I've always had, and I spell that sort of D-A-E-M-O-N, which means sort of like a small area of psychic entity, like your conscience or whatever, right?
And by psychic, I don't mean, well, I think, you know, whatever.
Let me go where I'm going with this and hopefully I'll bring back your shattered trust in me.
Socrates when he was older and when he was I think after he'd been tried by the Athenian court and put to death for corrupting the young and forced to drink hemlock and Plato made an offer to get him out of Athens and to get him spirited away as Aristotle took advantage of some years later and Socrates said you know what Plato I'm not going to leave I'm not going to flee and he had lots of reasons for it like I've accepted the
Protection of Athens, and I've accepted and found valuable the laws of Athens, and now I'm not going to break them, all of which I found kind of nonsensical.
The real reason that he gave that were compelling to me, there were two reasons Socrates gave for accepting the capital punishment of the Athenian court, that sort of resonated with me.
And one was said, he said, ever since I was a child I've had a sort of daemon on my shoulder, or an imp.
I can't remember.
It's tough to translate from the ancient Greek, and it's certainly tougher for me, because I don't... I can't, so... But it's something like, I've had a little imp on my shoulder.
Now, whenever I have been doing the right thing, that imp has been quiet, and whenever I have been doing or saying the wrong thing, that imp has been restive, that imp has been nagging at me, and I've felt discomfort and so on.
And I absolutely confess to the same thing.
I mean, wouldn't it be wonderful if I had inherited Socrates' imp?
I'm sure it's just a minor variety of the same psychological configuration, but he also said, when I die, sacrifice a cock to... and I can't remember the name of the god, but as I sort of read further, this is a gratitude for a deed well done all gratitude for something that has come about that you have wanted and i think that's in my heart of hearts and there's no way to prove this of course but i think that socrates
himself had grown weary of being among the Athenians.
I think that in his heart of hearts he knew where the culture and the society was going.
And I think in his heart of hearts he was not that dissatisfied to be leaving the world.
And of course he believed, at least according to Plato, believed in an afterlife and so on.
And so I think that he had a certain amount of gratitude for the exit that had been arranged for him because I think he had grown weary of debating with people who were growing less and less intelligent within a culture that was growing more and more corrupt.
And he wasn't able to make the case strong enough or powerful enough to sway his fellow Athenians away from the path that they were on.
And of course my goal, in my normal humble way, is to try and go that extra little distance.
And one of the things that messed Socrates up, of course, was His belief in the gods, his belief in the afterlife, and his belief in the validity of the state, and that argument that you should obey laws that are bad if you accept their protection at any time, has been a real cancer running through Western political thought, and it's something which people will fall back on in political theories as something that is valid.
Socrates has turned into one of these people where everything he says is right.
It's sort of like Einstein, right?
Because Socrates is so revered as the founder of syllogistic debating reasoning styles, That he's just turned into one of these people.
Everything he says is right.
Which, I mean, if there was an afterlife, then Socrates would come back from the dead and smack everybody upside the head.
Who did that?
Because he vehemently rejected the argument from authority.
Because he argued with people who believed in certain silly things that the gods prescribed.
So he argued vehemently against the argument from authority.
and for syllogistical reasoning and, to some degree, empirical observation.
So I do to some degree understand his frustration.
I think that he wasn't able to get that last distance to be able to reject the state, to reject mysticism, to reject the afterlife completely, and to reason from first principles in a way that did not divvy up human beings into the living and the dead and the state and the non-state and the priests and the non-priests, and I think that's where he foundered.
In my own humble opinion, that's where Socrates founded, because he wasn't able to go through and break through to that last place of pure reasoning and pure reality.
And I don't mean by that anything that's not part of existing reality, but something which is purely consistent, right?
So this argument for morality that I humbly put forward, I believe, has a kind of consistency to it in terms of the argument for morality.
I haven't seen it before.
It doesn't mean that I'm the first one to come up with it, but It does mean that I haven't seen it before, so I can claim originality even if it's just because I've never read the book.
But I think that that's sort of one of the reasons why we're able to go a little bit further than those who've come before, because we do have a launch pad.
And the launchpad that I was never quite successful with, and the reason that I was talking about Socrates, was because with Ayn Rand I would be making this argument to people.
I made this argument to Christina's uncle in Florida when we were out for dinner, and the rest of his family, because he was a religious man and was talking all this sort of stuff about religion.
And so of course he posed the challenge to me, how could you have morality without God?
And I was just mature enough to not say, well, how can you have maturity with God?
Genocidal maniac!
But I did go through the Randian argument.
This is a couple of years ago.
And as always, I felt like I had this really deep emotional sense, as I always have had with that argument, that when you get to the life is the highest value, therefore you should live.
I feel emotionally like I'm selling a fake Rolex or I'm passing along something that looks good and seems compelling but fundamentally doesn't hang together as an argument and it's not something that I was able to ever really reconcile and it's one of the reasons why I went off in hot pursuit of the argument for morality.
Because I just couldn't get the ought from the is, and I just couldn't say to people, because you can live, you must live.
And because you must live, you must use rationality.
I just couldn't see that.
There are certain biological strategies that are amazing, absolutely amazing, in terms of getting people resources without them having to be rational.
In fact, quite the opposite.
They do have to be rational in terms of getting the argument for morality across to other people.
So, you know, some horrible old mom or dad who says, you should take care of me because you want to be a good son and you'll regret it when I'm gone and I was good to you.
So they attempt to create in your mind, as they age and require more resources, they will attempt to recreate in your mind a sense of voluntary or just obligation that you must pay off.
And so they're very rational in terms, these kinds of people, in terms of they know what they need to get across to you in order to get you to give them resources.
And they know how powerful the argument for morality is.
And they take all the necessary steps to achieve it.
And so that, to me, is a pretty rational way of getting resources.
Now, is it moral?
Well, no, of course not, because it's not applicable to all times, at all people, all places, blah, blah, blah.
Of course, for parents, the fundamental contradiction for these kinds of parents, these manipulative parents, is they say, you should serve my needs because I want you to, but of course, when the child had needs, Genuine needs of their own.
His or her own.
They did not serve their child's needs.
And I don't mean that in terms of license.
I mean that just in terms of what would you like for dinner?
What's your preference?
What would you like to do with your weekend?
Helping the child develop a sense of self and negotiation through negotiation.
And this is of course what the child really needed and not what the parents generally provided in these kinds of environments.
They were either kind of screechy or passive or overindulgent or over harsh but they don't actually look at what the child requires so I mean I don't want to get into that whole debate because I've talked about it before but the argument for morality and the argument that is brought to bear and to some degree the argument from effect which is you'll you'll be sorry when I'm dead that great song from the old police album you'll be sorry when I'm dead and all this guilt will be on your head
So, these people are using logic and they are furthering their own lives.
We can assume that a parent who unjustly gets resources through manipulation and guilt and a false argument for morality from their adult children is going to live longer or do better or whatever.
Somebody who is dumb but brutal might have a better life from an individual standpoint, a more successful life from a biological standpoint, if they go around raping women.
I mean, in terms of spreading the seed and getting the seed out there and getting the genes passed along, that's not too bad, right?
Or even if you feel that's too harsh, and it certainly may be, if he just knocks up women and leaves them, you know, again, all of these impulses were developed long before things like abortion and birth control, So, that's another way that life can be successful.
It's the old problem with the Golden Rule.
The do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which I've mentioned before.
If you're a sadist, then you want to torture people.
And if you're a masochist, you want to be tortured.
So there's ways of undermining the golden rule because it's certainly not the case that you would want people to do unto others always.
And that's a golden rule that you would do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
So as I mentioned before, a guy who's really strong would want all of society's Debates to be settled by arm wrestling and that would put him pretty much in charge of all the little old ladies in Pasadena and That sort of a do unto others as you would have them do unto you Yes, I would absolutely be happy if you suggested to me that we settle all contest by strength and so on so there's problems with those kinds of rules and there's problems with the Randian position on why be moral and
The problem is basically that you can't get an Oort from an ears.
So the ears is just the biology, the brain, the physics, the physical laws, the gravitation, everything that goes on in the world at a material level.
is what is, and you can't get a should, you can't get an ought out of that.
There's nothing and nowhere inscribed in the nature of things, as I've mentioned before, that you should or should not do something.
You have to or have to not do something.
And so I was always terrified of looking at that question deeply, because I was really terrified that it was going to be false, right?
And if it was going to be false, then I was going to have to accept and live within this world that I violently, emotionally and intellectually rebelled against.
This world of shifting sand and trying to nail jello to a wall and this world of justified violence and this world of subjectivism and mysticism and this world of people believe in gods and read tarot cards and astrology sections and This world of human goo where nothing is defined and there is no such thing as morality but everybody talks about it but then they back away from it and this world of swirling fog of what I felt disgusted with mentally.
And so I was very, I was really terrified that that was actually going to be the world that I was going to have to live in.
Which made me, you know, double plus unhappy.
And I couldn't get my way clear mentally To accepting that as a world that was, because I just couldn't quite relate it to the world of the physical, the physical world, which is, you know, completely consistent.
You know, I drive the same route to work every day, and there's nothing that changes, really, except the seasons, which I can predict, and my own aging, which I can experience.
Actually, I haven't really experienced it yet, but I'm sure it's coming.
So I just couldn't reconcile the soupy world of morality as sort of the postmodern and subjectivist philosophers and those who adhere to that school of philosophy put it forth.
I could not reconcile that with the physical world.
I also could not reconcile it with the strong sense of moral disgust and horror that I experience in the face of evil.
And I did not want to look upon that as mere emotional reactive scar tissue from a somewhat challenging childhood.
So I did not want to look at what I considered some of my greatest intellectual attributes, which was a pretty clear way of perceiving tangible reality and accepting that as objective and real and factual, and my moral sensitivity or my moral horror that I experience when I see or understand violence is occurring.
I mean, I can't even watch violent movies anymore.
I stopped around about the time I went to see Casino.
That was about the last violent movie I went to see because I just found it absolutely overwhelming to see that level of violence perpetrated in any way, shape, or form.
I really have a strong sensitivity towards violence and can't stomach it.
And I did not want to look upon that as something that was subjective.
I really do think that violence is a complete horror show and it is a complete evil.
And the last thing in the world that you ever want is any situation where violence is being perpetrated upon you.
It will destroy your soul almost as badly as it destroys the soul of the person perpetrating violence.
So I just could not see my way clear to saying, well, okay, you can't get it all from an ears and therefore it's just a matter of what people prefer and maybe a little bit of expediency and utilitarianism and the sort of emotional hot points of the local culture.
So the moral horror that I see it watching somebody get beaten up Would be sort of similar to the moral horror that somebody in the Muslim world sees with a woman coming out uncovered.
So, like, without the burqa, the little portable prison tent, then I just couldn't accept that that was the same thing because it just felt so wrong.
Again, it was not something that I could argue intellectually, but it was something that I understood emotionally.
Now, of course, Ayn Rand was 99% of the way to the answer when she talked about, in Atlas Shrugged and in her non-fiction works, the fact that people use the argument for morality all the time and it only works on people who naturally have integrity and who will respect an argument based on morality.
And my answer, which I'm not going to repeat here because I'm sure you've heard it already, my answer was simply to say that there is no ought whatsoever.
There is preferred behavior.
That exists in reality.
I've put the arguments forward in Approving Libertarian Morality.
There is such a thing as preferred behavior.
And preferred behavior, if we accept that it exists, if it doesn't exist, no problem, then you can't open your mouth and talk about shoulds, right?
So shoulds don't exist for you, but you can't talk about them being bound upon everyone else, so you're out of the moral sphere of arguing for right or wrong, preferred behavior or anything.
In fact, you really can't get out of bed, right?
So anyone who's sort of brushed their teeth and has gotten out of bed and has come to talk to you about morality has already exhibited preferred behavior and therefore can't argue that it doesn't exist.
In other words, the only people who will ever argue that preferred behavior does not exist will never argue it, so they don't really count.
Like, I don't have to practice playing tennis against people who are never going to show up, right?
I don't have to try and beat them.
However, if preferred behavior does exist, then it must be common to all mankind, as I've talked about.
And therefore, any moral rules which make reference to preferred behavior must be common to all mankind.
And that's it.
I mean, that's the sum total of my contribution in this area.
And I think it really gets out of the problem of saying that you can derive an ought from an is, because you can't.
You can't derive an ought from an is, or at least if there is a way to do it.
I've never thought of it, and I've never read of anyone who has.
And if you can do it, man, fantastic.
Put your best foot forward and let's talk it out.
So the problem that I could never get by with Ayn Rand is, she said, because life is the highest value and rationality is required for life, you should be rational.
And by rational she meant not sort of rational in the way that I talked about before with sort of elderly parasitic parents or whatever, but rational in the way that she meant, which was sort of objectivist rational.
Not sort of rational in terms of narrow self-interest and base resource reallocation through guilt calculations, all of which is rational.
But it's not what Ayn Rand meant when she was talking about rationality.
And so the reason that I think that she was unable to get rid of things like the state was that there was a fundamental weakness.
And I think this troubled her emotionally, but I think she was too trapped by this point, by her own fantasies of being the sort of all-knowing, all-master, most rational human being ever in the universe.
And of course she had the acolytes, right?
She was narcissistic enough to want People who she came over and instructed.
And I know that sounds a little funny from a guy who's cranked out 150 podcasts in four months, but I hope that people understand my humility in this area, my absolute willingness eternally to be corrected in this area, and that if there are people who find it useful to chat with me or to send me back and forth emails, I think that's great.
I think that if I was trying to be Any kind of guru, I'm doing an extraordinarily bad job, because all I seem to get are emails from people who want to correct me.
so if I'm trying to come across as any kind of absolutist with all the answers I must say that I'm not quite achieving my stated goal because I'm certainly not intimidating or getting people's emotional reactions to the point where they actually sort of respect my viewpoints but all everybody does and I don't mean this so much on the board of course but when I get emails generally all I get are corrections from people which are pretty flimsy and incorrect but so I'm really not as far as guru goes I've got some work to do
let's say I'm not going to find myself a mountaintop a little prayer mat and some less rational arguments I think but that problem I think is one of the reasons why objectivism collapsed I mean, I think that that fundamental problem that you can't derive an ought from an is is why it didn't work.
It's why I think this might work, right?
I think, you know, it takes a couple of swings at the bat to get things right.
And I love that statement of Newton's where he says, if I have seen further, it's only because I've stood on the shoulder of giants.
And that is absolutely true.
I am an imp on a giant as far as that goes.
I think that's why objectivism and libertarianism have not worked, because they have not been fully consistent, and you cannot win against a prevailing orthodoxy with anything other than pure consistency.
If you think of how the Copernican system of the sun-centered universe beat out the Ptolemaic system of sort of circles within circles with the earth at the center, it only beat it out because it was perfectly consistent.
And if you look at how relativism beat out the sort of ether-based model of the universe prior, that only worked, Einstein's theories only worked, because they were perfectly consistent.
And they were, you know, they perfectly predicted, and they perfectly figured out, and they, you know, and also because Einstein himself was very humble.
So people would say, wow, this is a work of genius before they did all the tests to prove relativism.
And he said, well, you know, could be, maybe, but, you know, it doesn't really matter until it gets proven, right?
I mean, it doesn't accept anything as true.
And of course, this is one of the reasons why people love Einstein so much, because compared to nutty ideologues like Marx and Engels and so on, he was actually doubtful.
He was actually humble, because he had the intellectual maturity to subject himself to a higher power, which is reality and empiricism and logic.
Which I'll talk about at some point when I get to it on my list.
But this humility in the face of doubt, this humility in the face of problems, the lack of that is one of the reasons why libertarians don't engage those outside the libertarian movement.
And I'm starting to get some trickles.
Some trickles, and I have no idea whether this is going to spread or not.
But I'm getting some trickles of people coming over to Free Domain Radio from Do I think that it could be a flood?
I think that it's certainly possible.
I think it's certainly we're at the point in the culture where everybody recognizes that the existing system is just no way is going to work.
And I think that the humility that I've always tried to bring to bear, which I genuinely feel is not an act, the humility in the realm of ideas, I think, I've always felt is more inviting for other people.
I'm very happy, of course, that people write in and correct me on everything, even if they're wrong, and generally they are wrong, simply because I've had 20 years experience in this and they're just starting out, and so they've got all the cockiness of people who don't know how difficult it is.
But I'm very happy that people write in to correct me because it means they're engaging in the debate.
It means that they are coming up with ideas of their own.
And that's exactly what you want.
It's exactly what you want.
Like when you, um, when you were teaching someone how to play a sport, the good coach doesn't just hammer the balls in, you know, if you're, I mean, I'm a quite a long-term tennis player.
And if, if you are teaching someone how to play tennis, you don't just smash the balls in so that they basically get bruised and beaten and can't return anything.
Right.
You're, You lob it easily and then you get progressively more difficult and you let them get a couple of points off you to get them enthusiastic.
I mean, that's how you coach people, right?
That's how you coach people.
And that's never been a strong facet of libertarianism and objectivism.
And I think that's because there's this fundamental problem, which is this doubt, which is wallpapered over and which I wallpapered over for 18 or so years.
There's this doubt about the validity of the moral arguments.
Because of that fundamental problem, you can't get an ought from an is.
And so saying you should do this is fundamentally false.
And that's why I'm very much into the philosophy, as I've talked about when my friend's mother died, that there is no shoulds.
There's no have-tos.
There's nothing that you have to do.
If you bring an argument up for morality, you better be consistent.
You better know what you're talking about.
Because if you're going to say people should do stuff, that's fine.
As long as it's universal for everyone, then that's great.
But if it's not, then you've got to stop talking about it and figure out what the truth is.
Just as in physics, right?
If you want to come up with a physical law, you have to say it's true for all entities.
Gravity works for everything except the car in front of me.
That's not a very logical thing, right?
So I think that fundamental problem at the heart of these philosophies is why the government has still been required, and also why religion is often not axed in the end, right?
Because there is this doubt.
There is this doubt about whether human beings can be moral.
Because although it's said, well, human beings should, then there's always the problem that human beings won't.
And so you need a state for if you have that sort of materialistic bent, and you need religion, if you are that kind of spiritual bent.
And that is why, because you can't convince people that they should be good.
You need to be good.
You need to be good.
You need You can't get the ought from the ears.
You can't force people to be good.
And so the state and religion have always been kept in the back burner, just in case.
I mean, we want more freedom because too much state is bad, and we want separation of church and state because too much religion is bad.
But if we get rid of the state completely, there'll be mayhem, And if we get rid of religion completely, there'll be moral mayhem and thus physical mayhem.
So you always need to keep the state and the religion, whichever your bent is, in the back pocket.
Right now, for Ayn Rand, who was basically raised as a Jew in a communist dictatorship, Hers was of course more materialistic, whereas other people, I would guess Lou Rockwell among them, who are raised in a Catholic tradition, their bent is more to keep religion in the back pocket, because they just don't believe that people will be good.
And the reason they don't believe people will be good is because they think that people should be good, but they can't prove it.
And, of course, my solution is, I don't know, elegant or whatever you want to call it, which is that, of course, people might not be good.
Absolutely.
But the best way of ensuring that they won't be good is to give them a false argument for morality.
So what we need to do is keep chipping away at arguments about morality until we get something consistent and pure.
And that way, human beings will at least have no excuses if they're bad.
And there's no evil in the world like human beings on the false warpath of a false argument for morality.
So, my sort of argument is to say that human beings are healthy, innately, and we know that because people spend so much effort, authorities spend so much time and energy and effort on the argument for morality and creating and disseminating a false argument for morality on people.
And that's because there is an innate logic and kindness to human beings simply by our very natures and the fact that it is the most productive and effective and efficient way to interact with other people is to be kind and to be rational, to the kind and rational.
And if we look at something like capitalism we can see that human beings are pretty kind and pretty rational when they're free to do so and there are rewards for them to do it.
So the only way to get that state in the world, the only way to raise the rewards of integrity and to punish a lack of integrity is to create a free society which does not teach people falsely and has property rights and has political freedom and no state and no religion is at least not an official one and certainly as much as possible no conceptual one.
That's the best way to make people be good.
It won't guarantee that everyone's good, but so what?
That doesn't really matter.
I mean, if you improve sanitation, it doesn't mean that nobody gets sick, but it's a heck of a lot better than what you have when people are taking dumps in the street and so on.
You know, just because there's no such thing as pure water doesn't mean that there's no difference between Evian and seawater.
I mean, well, there's no such thing as pure water, but if you're thirsty, I generally would rather have a bottle of Evian than swig some seawater.
And so looking for that complete purity where you can prove to people that they must do this and they must do that, I think, is entirely incorrect.
I think it's a fool's quest.
I don't mean that everyone who's pursued it is a fool, because, as I mentioned before, I did it for almost 20 years.
But it's not going to achieve what we want to achieve, and it's going to ensure that there's a slight desperation and a slight emotional weirdness about what we're doing, because we are wallpapering over a basic problem, which is that you cannot get the ought from the is.
So I hope that my particular approach to it is a little more helpful, a little more relaxed, a little less sort of insistent, a little less sort of wild-eyed, a little less desperate, which is something that I generally got out of the objectivist movement.
A little wild-eyed, a little desperate.
And so I generally prefer to say that human beings are only corrupted and only made evil in general through false arguments for morality, and that's what we need to attack.
And we just need to tell people to stop talking about morality until they can be consistent in the same way that we as scientists would also do that as well.
And stop making up theories where sometimes rocks fall up and sometimes they fall down and sometimes they spin around and sometimes they turn into an ostrich.
That's not a scientific theory.
Anything more than we need a state, we need religion and so on is part of a moral theory.
So that's sort of my approach.
I hope that's helpful to you.
That's a sort of brief overview of the journey that I took to try and get out of this problem.
And so, of course, as always, I highly look forward to your responses.
▲
Export Selection