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April 24, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
31:16
207 Moral Reciprocity Part 1: Policy
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Good afternoon, everybody.
Hope you're doing well. It's Steph.
It is still the 24th of April 2006, but lo, it is time for the afternoon podcast.
So, I hope you're doing well.
I am actually publicly posting the Free Domain Radio chat number three.
If you want to see or hear the earlier versions, you can go to the boards and have a look for those topics.
But I think it's good enough.
Some of the sound was a little spotty, and I had to cut out a couple of really quiet things, but I think I try and repeat the question so you can get a sense of what's going on.
So just in case it sounds like I'm talking and not listening, it's because some people were so faint that you could barely hear them, and so I didn't want people to crank up their volume and then have me blast in with my oh-so-gentle multi-decimal voice.
So... It's an interesting chat.
Very smart people, of course.
Very enjoyable conversations.
So I think it might be interesting to hear somebody other than me.
So give that a listen if you like.
So I'd like to talk about a topic that is somewhat related to the argument for morality.
And we've talked about this in tangential ways off and on for the past couple of months.
But I thought I would try and give you some tools or some ammunition when you're talking with people about statism in particular and parenting to a smaller degree and religion to a smaller degree than that.
The concept of reciprocity is something that is very intuitive and very obvious and something that is well worth getting a handle on or getting used to becoming fluid with so that when these kinds of topics come up, you can have a discussion that hopefully can be productive.
It will be incendiary, but that's not always unproductive.
I think that incendiary insofar as you really are challenging people's moral suppositions.
And so one of the things that you can think of in terms of reciprocity is sort of very simple.
It's an extension and absolutizing of the golden rule.
The golden rule being not the one that says whoever has the gold makes the rules, but the one that says do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
And it's a Kantian imperative as well, what he called the categorical imperative, which is to act, that you should act in such a way that if a moral rule for everybody were to be created by your action, then you would still do it.
So if you're going to be a thief, then if by being a thief and stealing something, you then create a rule which says everyone should be a thief and steal everything, that you would not like that moral rule.
Then I think that you should not take that, or Kant says you should not take that as a moral approach.
So this idea of universality and reciprocity is pretty fundamental to moral rules, if you want to call them moral rules.
So, if, for instance, you steal, and you say, well, it's a state of nature, it sucks to be you, I feel like stealing, I like to steal, I don't like to work, but you all should keep working, and it's good for you that you keep working, so you create stuff for me to steal, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's all fine.
And then you're not appealing to morality, you're simply saying that it's a state of nature, I'm going to do what I want, and that's, I think, just fine.
It's not logical or moral, but it's got a certain kind of Kissingerian honesty to it, which you have to at least respect, or I guess you could say Churchill in his early days.
Because of course Churchill, as I mentioned before, in his early days he said we need a military and we need a navy because we are ruling most of the world and the inhabitants of the countries that we rule don't really like it and they want to strike back at us so we need to have a strong military and a strong navy.
That was his sort of approach and not moral but it has a kind of frankness to it.
And this, of course, would be natural from a man who started out his career going out, I think, I can't remember exactly where.
Was he involved in the charge of the Light Brigade or the Crimea or something like that?
But he went out someplace and shot a whole bunch of people on behalf of the Empire.
And he also, I think in South Africa for some reason, I think I remember that, he was captured in the Boer War.
No, it was the Boer War that he went to, sorry.
He was captured in the Boer War and then spent three days escaping, which was dutifully written up by a newspaper man who were friendly to his mother, Lady Randolph Churchill, and then he used that as the basis to start his own election rolls and so on.
So this guy's a guy who goes out and shoots people directly.
He is one of the politicians who's been on the front lines and has shot people directly and says in his memoirs, it is shockingly easy how easy it is.
It is shocking how easy it is to kill a man.
And that is really quite astounding.
And I don't know if he meant how easy it is in general or, even more frightening, how easy it is for me.
But, of course, he was a member of the ruling class and an aristocrat, and therefore killing was not something that was not exactly in his gene pool.
I speak as an ex-member of this class myself, or at least my family owned lands in Ireland and were royal and aristocratic, and I'm sure had many manners about how revolting the peasants were on the walls of the great manors, and I'm very glad to have not been born into that in any kind of real and I'm sure had many manners about how revolting the peasants were on the walls of the great manors, and I'm very glad to have not
But that kind of frankness that Churchill had early on in his career, where he said, we need a strong army and navy, both to keep the people of the world under our heel, and also because they're under our heel, they're going to bite and snap at us, so we need to have a strong military.
Later, of course, this was transmutated into the normal nonsense about bringing the light of civilization to the savages of the world, and so on.
But early on you get this frankness, which is nice, right?
This is before somebody has an eye to the history books.
Later on he revised his speeches for his memoirs and put all the stuff about bringing civilization to the savages and got rid of, well, we want the resources, we're keeping people down and they don't like us for it.
So, that early argument that Churchill made was one based on a kind of reciprocity, that we have the power, they don't like that we have the power, and the moment they can strike back at us, they will, so we need to have even more power to keep them down.
Now, he's not saying that he would be comfortable if the situation was reversed, but he is saying that whoever has the power better keep that power because they're provoking a lot of enemies.
So you better keep your stick handy and your bug spray handy if you start poking around in a hornet's nest because they're going to come after you.
And so you better keep swinging and keep backing away.
So there's a certain amount of honesty of a sort of realpolitik in that, which is not something that you hear a lot of, except from Henry Kissinger from time to time.
It's not something you hear a lot of in modern arguments about politics.
It's always about, you know, helping the poor and helping the drug addicts and keeping the streets safe and making the world safe for democracy and Wilson's points and all this kind of nonsense.
And it is a higher mission, idealistic foreign policy, you know, that, as Noam Chomsky points out about U.S. foreign policy, that the sort of discussions of it range from two not so very extreme viewpoints.
One is that America has this idealistic foreign policy and wants the world to be a wonderful place and should therefore pursue it.
Or, America has this idealistic foreign policy, wants the world to be a better place, but its reach Is sometimes too great and its execution is sometimes quite poor and therefore it should be restrained from being so idealistic, right? Which is just kind of funny.
There is no different species in the world.
All human beings have the same sort of moral constitution.
At least there's not been any sort of significant evidence to the contrary.
And so the idea that our leaders are somehow substantively morally different from people like Saddam Hussein and Adolf Hitler and Emperor Hirohito and Churchill and all of these sorts of people, to imagine that these people are somehow substantially different.
I don't mean different in terms of circumstances.
I mean different in terms of their basic human nature.
Well, it's nonsense. Basic human nature is everyone always one and the same.
And if the actions of political leaders are not as bad in some areas than others, it's simply because they have some sort of countervailing threat that limits their ability to perform evil against often their own citizens or overseas and so on.
So why has North Korea not been invaded?
Because it has a massive non-WMD style of...
Artillery lined up and pointing at the DMZ zone, where there's tens of thousands of US troops stationed.
So if you ever tried to touch North Korea, unless you simply nuke the whole country, you're going to have an extraordinary bloodbath on your hands.
These guns are pointed at capital cities, and there should be hundreds and hundreds of thousands dead, and possibly tens of thousands of Americans dead.
So, is the fact that Iraq had less than one quarter of one percent of the military budget of the United States, and had the whole world saying, and all the inspectors saying, no weapons of mass destruction, and that it had no credible way to protect itself in any way,
shape, or form, and the fact that years and years of sanctions had depleted the civilian population, which is where you need to draw your military from, to the point where it could barely walk upright, Is it that America had a noble, civilizing mission, or did it simply, like any bully, pick on the weakest and call it noble?
I mean, at least a bully doesn't say, when he takes your lunch money, to use a trivial example, you need to give me my lunch money so that I can bring humanity closer together.
He's just like, no, give me your lunch money or I'll thump you.
And yet you always find these endless justifications that need to come about.
Oh, it's self-defense. We were provoked.
We just want nothing but peace.
But sadly, everybody wants to attack us.
And oh, we're there to make the world safe democracy.
We want to liberalize the Middle East.
We want to, you know, we're there to free the Iraqi people.
We're liberators. We always, always, always, it's the same.
And it is this very appeal to morality in these kinds of situations that I think justly raises this question of reciprocity.
So the U.S., through the Bush Doctrine, and this came up many years before, through the Monroe Doctrine and through stuff that John Quincy Adams was talking about in relation to Cuba...
The U.S. has a long history as do most dominant powers, i.e.
powers where some capitalism has arisen to the point where wealth is thrown off to the rulers which allows them to create a vast and destructive military.
So they have some freedom which generates wealth, which allows taxes to rise, which allows the military to expand, which then causes foreign wars, which then destroys civilization.
It's just one of the ways in which governments destroy civilization and it's very common.
You will see that all Major economic powers start, it's not inevitable, but they start with freedom, with a rise of free markets which then translates into excessive wealth or extra wealth within society which is then grabbed by the government to fund military, which then grows until it destroys society.
In the 18th and 19th centuries, America was pursuing its horrible foreign policy in the domestic Americas, and now it's sort of gone worldwide since it got its first taste of worldwide conflicts in World War I. And now it's sort of all over the map with hundreds of bases and hundreds of thousands of people in arms all over these foreign countries,
and a combination of bribery and foreign aid and Agricultural subsidies and brute military power is sort of throwing its weight around the world.
And so this doctrine that the U.S. has the right to unilaterally decide, in this horrid phrase, at a time of our choosing, to unilaterally decide when to initiate the use of force is long-standing.
And the idea that we have now from Bush around pre-emptive war The idea that if you believe that a country is going to harm you in any way, shape, or form, then you have the right to initiate violence against that country.
And this is something that the UN Charter, which, I mean, don't get me wrong, I'm no fan of the UN, but the UN Charter does allow for this.
In the case of imminent aggression, armies massing at your border, navies sailing towards you, and so on, Then you do have the right for a pre-emptive strike.
And the gravest war crime recognized in international law, I don't sort of mean the UN, sort of international law, the international law that was set up by the Allies after the Second World War, during and after the Nuremberg Trials, the gravest international crime punishable by the death penalty is the crime of aggression.
And the crime of aggression is to attack a country that is not threatening you in any way, shape or form.
And this is punishable by the death penalty.
I mean, there's simply no question about this and it's exactly what the Allies did with all of the German and Japanese and Italian commanders at the end of the Second World War.
They accused them or tried them and found them guilty of aggression, which is the attack of another country.
And it didn't really matter whether they said they were there to liberate it or they were there to bring democracy and peace and freedom to Czechoslovakia or Poland or Yugoslavia or any of these countries.
The act of aggression, the act of unilaterally invading another country that is posing no imminent and verifiable threat to your own country...
It's a war crime that is guilty of, if found guilty, and there's absolutely no question that American and British leadership in this matter...
Are guilty of this genocidal war crime, of the international law crime of aggression, which is by its own standing, and also by an act of Congress, Republican Congress, I think was passed in 1996, that acts of war crimes are punishable by death.
I think this was put in for Milosevic.
But there's no question that, I mean, the documentary evidence, the paperwork, it's all right there.
I mean, just as when in the 60s, when Kennedy and Nixon both conspired and there's open evidence to bomb Cambodia and to simply extend this war to cause the death of millions of people, and of course Vietnam was in no way threatening the United States when it was invaded and when its citizens were destroyed by the millions of I mean, these war crimes of aggression are absolutely horrendous, pure genocide.
And, of course, I'm not saying that the governments of the countries that were invaded were any good, because I'm a guy who's into no state, but...
It is important to understand that the victors, of course, are the ones who set the laws, and the laws never apply to the victors, right?
So, if you look at this problem of the argument for morality, and we'll get to reciprocity in a second, then in the post-Second World War period, then the victors tried all of the losers for war crimes, and found them guilty of crimes of aggression, of attacking another country not imminently about to attack you, and put them all to death.
And it would then seem natural that the principle of reciprocity would occur.
Now, the Nuremberg trials are generally considered to be moral situations, that people were trying to define a moral situation.
It's a sort of post-Geneva convention, and after the atrocities of the Nazis and the Japanese had been figured out, although, of course, After the Allied atrocities had also been figured out, so for instance, directly targeting civilians is a war crime, and something that was absolutely carried out by the Allies, and in fact it was a criteria in the Nuremberg trial, so something very important to understand.
No person on the losing side, no person in the German, Italian or Japanese civilian or military elite, the leadership, none of them were ever convicted of a crime that it could be proven that the Allies also committed.
That, in fact, was one of the criteria for it being considered a valid war crime was something we never did.
So, of course, the Luftwaffe leaders were not convicted of war crimes for the deliberate bombing of civilians because this was something initiated by and extended to absolutely genocidal levels by the Allies.
So, the very principle of reciprocity was explicitly denied in the Nuremberg war trials.
If you could prove we did it, then we're never going to charge you with it, because then we lose our moral high ground.
Now, if we can sort of look at moral justifications for the actions of states and figure out that the principle of reciprocity is specifically denied, then we do get somewhere in terms of understanding the moral natures of the state, and it can be very useful.
In arguing with people just to get them to understand that this principle of reciprocity, if they're going to use an argument for morality, then the principle of universality or reciprocity must also be respected.
So, of course, the argument for morality says that what is moral to one is moral to all.
What is immoral to one is immoral to all.
If we look at this principle, the Bush Doctrine, that to initiate the use of force to invade a country, to attack a country, when you believe that it is posing some sort of danger to you, it is something that we can look at pretty obviously and pretty clearly, and we don't have to go that far back in history.
So it was pretty easy to understand that from certainly early 2002 onwards until the invasion in 2003, It's pretty easy to see that the drumbeats of war were going pretty heavy from the US towards Iraq.
There was no question that the war was going to occur.
There was no question that there was nothing that Saddam Hussein could do to avoid war, because they said, you have weapons of mass destruction.
And therefore, we're going to invade you.
And if he then said, oh, you're right, I do have weapons of mass destruction, then they were going to invade him.
And if he said, no, I don't have weapons of mass destruction, then they're going to say, and you're lying, so we're going to invade you.
There was simply no way out of this trap.
I mean, this has all been decided before 9-11 as a course of action that was worthwhile, and the U.S. wanted to get into the Middle East for a variety of reasons, and also wanted to just start a war so everyone could make a bunch of money And so picking on Iraq was the best way to do it because Iraq was weak.
You don't want to start picking on the Saudis because these Saudis have had hundreds of billions of dollars of military aid from America, which would be something you wouldn't really want, I think, to have that much out in the open.
That if you invaded Saudi Arabia, that America's own weapons would be used to kill American servicemen, and it would be pretty obvious then how horrifying the war machine was, so you wouldn't really want to do that.
But... If it's true that to invade a country or to attack a country that is posing an imminent threat to you, or even a threat of some kind that you can make up, we would also assume that the greater the threat, the greater the imminence of the threat, the greater the moral justification for self-defense would be.
So, if the US had the right to invade Iraq because Iraq may have had weapons of mass destruction and may have at some point considered, or there might be rumors that it might be considered to use it against the US, then surely Iraq had a far greater right to initiate force against the United States.
I mean, this simply just stands to reason.
The U.S. actually had and has, of course, weapons of mass destruction, some of which, according to some reports, in terms of phosphorus being sprayed upon insurgents and also civilians, that weapons of mass destruction are being used against the Iraqi citizens in Iraq.
There's some reports. I can't confirm them, of course.
But America has weapons of mass destruction, and America was openly threatening Iraq with invasion.
If criteria were to be met that simply could not be met, then invasion was going to occur, right?
So, surely by that standpoint, if a dirty bomb or if some sort of attack or some sort of terrorist attack had occurred in the United States or in England based upon the fact that the U.S. was openly threatening Iraq with destruction, Then it would seem to me that it would be entirely justified based on this logic.
I'm not saying the logic is correct, but if it was okay for the U.S. to invade Iraq based on this sense of threat, then it is absolutely and much more justified for Iraq to aggress against the United States.
I mean, that would just, or England, or any of the sort of coalition of the bribed, the willing, sorry.
That's sort of simple logic, right?
Now, if you look at Japan in the 1940s, America was talking trash to Japan continually and had an actual embargo going on around Japan and was provoking Japan and so on.
Therefore, it would seem entirely logical that Pearl Harbor, according to the Bush Doctrine, Would be a military assault that would be perfectly justified because there was not even an imminent threat from America.
There was a direct physical containment of Japan combined with a lot of statements from leaders that war was going to happen against Japan from America.
And so it seems hard to justify the non...
Approving the disapproval of Pearl Harbor with what the American Empire and the British are doing in Iraq.
So, if somebody's sort of very pro-war, and say, well, because Iraq might have been a threat, and Iraq could have done this and that, well, would you say that if Iraq had actually a perfect embargo around the United States, and was strangling off its oil supply, and was strangling off its food supply, that the U.S., that would be more of a threat than what Iraq was sort of supposed to have against the United States, right?
I mean, there was no credible threat.
Against the United States from Iraq.
No verbal threats.
No weapons, no confirmation of weapons of mass destruction or at least any kind of program and everything like these yellow cakes from uranium which are all completely false and all of the stuff that was made up by the British government.
So there was no credible threat at all from Iraq and certainly no verbal threats and no actual military action taking place from Iraq to the United States.
And so if there were, then that would be even more, I mean infinitely greater in terms of justification for a preemptive military attack.
And so if we don't like the fact that Pearl Harbor happened, and if we wouldn't like that Iraq would have detonated some sort of awful terrorist device in American soil, then we really can't justify what is going on against Iraq.
Now, you could also say, well, Saddam Hussein is a dictator, and so on, and that's all well and good, but of course, when it comes to causing death and suffering to the Iraqi people, I'm not sure that I would put George Bush in an entirely different camp.
I mean, I don't know the death toll of what occurred with Saddam Hussein.
I mean, of course, the man was an evil scumlord, but...
As far as death and suffering goes, for sure the Iraqi people would prefer that Saddam Hussein were in power rather than George Bush was sort of killing and bombing and so on.
As I've argued before, simply because they didn't do it themselves or when they did do it themselves at the end of the first Gulf War.
It was only because they were told they were going to get support, when in fact they didn't get so much of the support and ended up being rounded up and killed.
So, I mean, I haven't gone and killed any Iraqis.
I'm pretty sure you haven't gone and killed any Iraqis or authorized a war that has done so.
But for sure, George Bush and Saddam Hussein are responsible for the deaths of lots of Iraqis.
So, it does seem to me kind of hard to sort of understand the argument that says, well...
We had to go and get rid of Saddam Hussein.
Well, why? Because he was killing Iraqis.
And we do that, how?
By allowing a political leader to kill Iraqis.
So we replace one murderous political leader by allowing another one to start killing the Iraqi.
It just seems kind of like, maybe I'm missing something, but it seems kind of like that's not a very good logical argument.
So this idea that a preemptive strike is valid is also something that's worth having a look at just in terms of 9-11.
And of course, this is just to say, I'm not going to get into this whole debate again because I'm not competent to judge it, but let's just say that the official story is more or less true, and most of the people that you're talking to who are going to claim the Bush Doctrine as a valid moral entity or moral action...
The idea that American troops are all over the place in Saudi Arabia and are propping up this hideous regime, the House of Saud, and all over the Middle East and in other areas where Muslims like to have their, perhaps, autonomy respected.
Well, the governments.
I mean, there's no autonomy for the people.
But The fact that these troops are stationed in, American troops are stationed in the Middle East, are stationed particularly in Saudi Arabia, And have been there, I think, since the first Gulf War, could obviously be considered to be a hostile action.
To actually have troops stationed in Saudi Arabia could be viewed by many people who are Saudi Arabian to be a hostile action.
And, of course, knowing that your own government is participating doesn't really help.
All it means is that your own government is propped up by the U.S. troops.
And so if we would feel that it would be an invasion of sovereignty for, say, Saudi Arabia to station troops in America and to station a heck of a lot of troops in America and to prop up the policies of the government and therefore to have a huge amount of say in what our government did and so on,
if we viewed that... As a negative intervention in our sovereignty, as something that removed or reduced at least our sovereignty, then we would view that as a hostile military action.
Definitely stationing troops in somebody else's country ain't that peaceful.
And so if we look at this principle that if somebody is aggressing against you, you have the right to do whatever you can to strike back, and you can actually do it ahead of time, Then, even when the US troops were on their way over to Saudi Arabia,
then it could well be understood that this would be viewed by some people in Saudi Arabia as an aggressive action, and therefore 9-11 would be a reasonable and actually just, according to the Bush doctrine, a just response, because there wasn't...
Hundreds of thousands or tens of thousands of Iraqi troops sailing up the Hudson to land and go all the way out through American territory and do this, that, and the other.
So I don't really think that since that wasn't happening, our invasion of Iraq makes even less sense, just according to the basic principles of morality and reciprocity and universality.
And so... Given that America was stationing troops in Saudi Arabia and Iraq was not stationing troops in the U.S., then it seems to me that anybody who says that the Iraq war is justified and that the Afghanistan war is justified is also justifying 9-11, or at least the official story of 9-11, which they probably believe.
Again, correct me if I'm wrong, I'm just trying to sort of reason from the Bush doctrine, which doesn't say only the U.S., right?
It says, you know, countries reserve, we reserve the right, as every country should, to react against impending aggression.
And the impending aggression, not even so impending, the aggression that the United States and England and other countries as well, of course, throughout history, but the United States at the moment, The aggression that they have put forward and that they have deployed in other countries is far greater,
far greater, both verbally and in terms of actual tactics, far greater than anything that has ever occurred against the United States, perhaps with the exception of the War of 1812.
So this basic idea of reciprocity, it's something worth bringing up.
If countries do have the right to act violently and preemptively against those countries that are aggressing against them, or might aggress against them, or conceivably could aggress against them, then it's important to ask exactly which country Except for the nuclear powers, which country does not have the right to attack the United States?
Given that the United States has gone and attacked another country, actually two other countries now, and so on.
I've read the list of overthrows and so on, and the funding and the military sales that go on around the world.
It's hard for me to understand which non-nuclear country does not have the right to perform terrorist actions against the United States, according to the United States' own justification for Iraq.
I'm not saying any of that is moral, but just according to that justification itself, it's hard for me to understand exactly...
Exactly how it's not justified, and maybe somebody can explain it to me.
But if you're going to say this is a principle, then I think you need to say that it's a principle.
And if you're not going to say that it's a principle, that it's a mere exercise of power, then that's fine.
You can definitely say that, and then you have a whole bunch of other moral issues to deal with, but certainly from that standpoint you can get somewhere.
And we'll deal a little bit more with this tomorrow morning.
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