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June 1, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
14:26
261 Is' and 'Ought' and Ethics

Anyone who argues ethics agrees with ethics

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Good morning all, hope you're doing well.
Pinch Punch, it's the first day of the month.
It is June the 1st, 2006, 8.32 in the morning.
I am going to be podcasting for just a short while this morning because I'm going to a conference, which is only a few minutes from my house, so we'll make this quick.
Oh my god, I can feel the stress, the pressure already!
Oh my god, I'm going to keep it short!
Okay, just breathe. Alright, we can do this.
We can keep it short. Alright, so I'll just have to go faster.
So, there was a post on the board this morning based on my discussion yesterday on this argument for the existence of preferred behavior, and to some degree, universal preferred behavior.
And so, a long-time poster and a very, very smart fellow said, Aha!
I've got it! And then another very smart fellow said, Well, wait a minute.
Aren't you getting an ought from an is?
And for those who don't know the conundrum of that problem, very briefly, it is that there is nothing exists in the world that says you ought to do something based on what is.
So the fact that a human being needs food to live in no way commands or demands that a human being has to eat food to live.
So that's something that's important.
And this is the big, I guess you could say, the big difference that I have with the objectivist approach to ethics.
In the objectivist approach, life is the highest value and everything which serves life is good.
Rationality serves life and therefore rationality is the highest value and blah, blah, blah.
But, unfortunately, there are lots of people who don't want to live.
Lots of people who choose a value higher than life.
I mean, so there's people who get conscripted.
They could run off and live in the woods, but they don't.
They choose to go and wage war.
And so it's hard to understand what could be possibly meant by that idea that life is the highest value to those people.
There are people who kill themselves.
There are people who put themselves voluntarily in risky situations.
There are people who take large amounts of drugs and die from that.
There are anorexics.
There are bulimics. There are people who engage in sexually risky behavior.
Michael Hutchins, the singer from NXS, died because he was trying to do that asphyxiation orgasm thing.
And of course, sorry, if you're under 16 and listening to this, just go ask your parents.
Anyway, so...
There's lots of people who don't treat their life as the highest value, so it's, to me, logically impossible to say that life is the highest value.
However, my approach to solving this problem is that my argument is not that preferred behavior absolutely and inevitably exists independently of human thoughts, human consciousness, human choice.
There is no objective There's no existence of universally preferred human behavior, but there is endless evidence for universally preferred human behavior.
And that's, of course, how we get a lot of truth in life is through inference, through evidence, not through direct evidence.
Yeah, I think.
that it exists because of its effect.
And so that is something that's sort of the way that I'm saying that we don't look at ethical rules directly and look at atoms of ethical rules, right?
There aren't atoms of gravity.
And isn't it nice for me to use a scientific method that isn't about rocks falling?
Isn't that just lovely?
But there is no atom of morality or universally preferred behavior, but we know that universally preferred behavior exists because just about everyone is alive.
In the same way that we know that man is a rational animal, because people are alive and use reason to a much larger degree than any other species, and not always, well actually really to a perfect degree, I put myself in that category, but Now, there are, of course,
people who are completely irrational, people who are deranged, people who are insane, and so on, but that doesn't particularly matter because, as I mentioned before, it's biological accuracy that we need for ethics, not the ethics of physics, right, because of free will, environment, and mutation, and mutation output in sort of mental illness as well.
So if you destroy your brain with PCPs, then you are not somebody who can be rational anymore, but that doesn't mean that man is not a rational animal.
And you could be born without a frontal lobe and have the intelligence of a chimp, but that does not mean that man is a rational animal.
It just means that biology is messy and not as tidy as physics, but it doesn't mean that the general categories don't exist or don't work.
So I'm not saying that there is an ought that is automatically derived from an is.
A human being's desire to live is optional.
Our desire to live is fairly programmed and takes a lot of harm to become self-destructive.
But our desire to live is kind of innate to us.
And what I am saying, though, is that everyone that you're arguing with has unconditionally accepted universal preferred behavior.
Even if we just say that that universal preferred behavior is getting out of bed in the morning and having something to eat, and then having something to drink.
You know, a scotch.
So... There's just no conceivable way that any human being could possibly remotely argue that universal preferred behavior...
Well, you could just start with preferred behavior, but of course it is universal because our need for oxygen is not up to us, right?
It's up to good old Mother Nature.
So there's no conceivable way that a human being could argue against preferred behavior, because both by being alive and by arguing with you, they are accepting preferred behavior.
Now, by arguing with you, they are also saying that there is universally preferred behavior, or at least preferred behavior, that exists independently of your consciousness.
This is also pretty important.
So if somebody says to you, oh, there's no such thing as morality, the amount of package dealing, as Rand used to call it, that is embedded into that very concept is really quite astounding.
Because they're saying that a standard of truth exists independently of your consciousness and hopefully you would think independently of their consciousness too because otherwise what they'd be saying is they'd be saying you should believe what I believe for no reason you should just change your mind and believe what I believe because I'm saying it well nobody says that what they're saying is there's no such thing as universal morality and what they're doing by that Is they're saying that,
objectively, there is no such thing as universal morality, or there is no such thing as ethics.
Fine. But then they're saying that there's a standard of truth that exists independently of consciousness, which should be pursued.
You should stop believing in ethics.
But if there's a standard of truth that exists independently of consciousness that is preferred, then it's universal preferred behavior.
So there's no logical, possible, conceivable way that any human being alive who opens his mouth or her mouth to flap it at you that you should be an nihilist or that universal preferred behavior does not exist.
There is no way that a human being can open his mouth and tell you that without coating himself in the most ghastly kind of contradiction imaginable.
And this is true of so much of the debates that we're having.
So, you know, as I mentioned in the article that was on Lou Rockwell yesterday, it's called Life Without a Government, It's Closer Than You Think, it's absolutely the same as a panting man telling you that human beings do not require oxygen.
It's like, but you're panting!
It's just funny.
I mean, it's one of these, like, you're kidding, right?
So you're telling me, if you tell me that there's no such thing as morality, or that morality is completely subjective, but if you're telling me that morality is completely subjective, then you're absolutely breaking the rule, because obviously I believe morality is subjective and universal, And so the problem exists that if you're telling me that morality is not objective and universal, then you're not saying it's subjective.
Because you're saying that my subjective belief that it is universal is incorrect.
So it's kind of like they're not being serious.
I'm kind of joking, right? I mean, there's just no way that you can ever take that seriously.
I mean, in any way, shape, or form.
It's like somebody saying to you that money has no value whatsoever, and then, you know, in the same breath, asking you to borrow $5,000, asking you to lend $5,000 to them, because they've got to pay rent.
I mean, the level of disconnect is just jaw-dropping, really.
It's just jaw-dropping.
And, I mean, of course, the fact that nobody notices this kind of stuff that's just completely obvious is just...
Propaganda. I mean, it's just because we're all raised with this complete, naughty, ridiculous mess of thought that baffles everybody and gets us to not notice the most obvious and ridiculous contradictions and to get all confused by them.
And I was confused by them for like 20 years, too.
So, again, I'm not saying...
It's just that once you get it, it's the most obvious thing in the world.
So, just back to this question of ought from an is.
Yeah, absolutely. You cannot derive an ought from an is.
There is nothing in material reality that forces anyone to do anything.
Every choice has consequences.
I don't have to eat. Right?
That's my choice. But if I don't eat, I can't choose to live.
That's not my choice.
Right? I mean, so there are things which we can choose, and there are things which we cannot choose.
We can choose our choices.
We can choose our options.
We can choose our behavior. We cannot choose the consequences of that behavior.
Right? I can't choose to cut my arm off and be a great juggler, or a knitter, or I can't choose to cut my arm off and then want to go and applaud my favorite musical act or something.
I mean, these are things that can't occur.
So there is no ought from an is, but there are always iron consequences.
And so there is no violation of the rule that you can't derive an ought from an is, but there is no capacity that anyone can open their mouth to argue against universal preferred behavior without displaying universal preferred behavior.
In fact, if they're breathing, they're displaying universal preferred behavior.
There's simply no way around this issue.
I mean, if they're taking in a breath to talk to you, to change your mind about universal preferred behavior, then they're breathing in, which everybody prefers to do if they want to talk.
It's a little tough to talk when you've run out of air.
That was for choir.
But there's just no way in God's greedacre that any human being can take a breath in, activate their vocal cords, phrase...
The words so that they come out, there is no such thing as ethics, rather than or something equally coherent.
So they're preferring to breathe, they're preferring to talk, they're preferring to shape their sentence into something grammatically correct and understandable.
And so, how could they conceivably say that there's no such thing as preferred behavior when they've just displayed about a thousand instances of preferred behavior that is universal, right?
Because they don't make up their own language and just try and communicate with you through that, right?
Some sort of set of hand signals and belly slaps and nipple tweaks that communicates exactly what they're saying.
They're using language, which is an objective, and to the degree of those who speak it, and to a large degree, of course, to a biological degree, it is universal.
So if they say there's no such thing as ethics, you don't interpret that as, go bring coal to Newcastle.
So that's just something to understand and to appreciate that anybody who says ethics don't exist is kind of joking.
It's like a test, right?
I mean, they're yelling at you that the human beings have no capacity to process sound.
Right? Or they're telling you that language is incomprehensible using language.
I mean, it's just not serious.
It's not a serious...
I've never, since I've sort of gotten this in a talk with people, I can't really take it as any kind of serious proposition.
It's kind of like it's a con man.
It's a slate of hand. It's a It's propaganda.
I mean, they're asking you simply to disbelieve everything that is totally obvious in the interaction.
And the last sort of way I'll put it is it's exactly like telling you that if somebody comes up to you and says, I don't exist.
I need you to believe that I don't exist.
Well, if you're noticing them talking, then obviously they exist.
So it's just one of these kinds of situations.
So I just think that's important to understand that people aren't really being serious when they argue against ethics.
I mean, it's just incomprehensible.
So anyway, I've got to find my conference, and I'm off the highway now.
So, oh my goodness, it's a 15-minute podcast.
I hope you're doing well. Have yourselves a great day.
And please come by and donate.
I would appreciate that as well.
Freedomainradio.com. Just click on the donate button.
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