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July 7, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

22:23

318 Moral Experimentation

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	It's short podcast time in the city.
	It's deaf. It is, gosh, 6 o'clock on the 7th of the 7th of the 6th.
	And we're just going to do a short podcast.
	I am toodling home from a very interesting job interview I just had, which lasted two and a quarter hours.
	So just imagine how much fun that was for the guy interviewing me.
	I did let him ask a question, which was, would you like a glass of water?
	And after that, I launched, baby.
	I was all over him. So we're going to do a short podcast today.
	And what are we going to do?
	A short podcast on a topic that was raised by a fabulously brilliant board member who's been thrusting and parrying with me in a most enjoyable fashion.
	And Daniel?
	Anyway, he told me to use his name.
	I can't remember what his name is.
	So let's call him... Candy cane.
	Anyway, so he had a question around the verifiability of ethical theories.
	And yes, it's absolutely true that all ethical theories do need to be verified, but with the one exception of mine, because mine are just right because of my accent.
	And that's just something very important to understand from an epistemological standpoint.
	But no, of course, you absolutely have to verify.
	I'm, you know, trying to be king scientific method to the degree with which my arts brain will allow me to be.
	And so, of course, you absolutely have to verify moral theories.
	But I think that in the same way that you have to verify the efficacy of a certain medicine, you don't sort of try a whole bunch of things and see what their moral results are.
	And the reason for that is the same reason that you don't experiment.
	You come up with some drug you think is going to cure cancer.
	You don't just go get cancer yourself and then inject it to see if it's going to work.
	You sort of work it in a lab.
	You work it in just cells in a petri dish and then you work it maybe on some fruit flies and then maybe some mice.
	You scale it up a little bit.
	And you don't sort of go all whole hog and say, alright, well let's try communism and see what happens.
	Because you see, when you make a mistake with a moral system, it has the minor downside that hundreds of millions of people tend to get killed.
	So, a moral system, in terms of setting up communism, or fascism, or socialism, or capitalism, or whatever you want to set up, some sort of, I don't know, left-market, libertarian, anarchic commune society...
	Especially one that involves a state.
	Once you involve a state, then you have a monopoly of violence that has an enormously different degree of power between the state or the military and its citizens.
	If you've made a mistake, you really don't get to undo that.
	Yes, absolutely, moral systems should be validated.
	But you don't just sort of set up a totalitarian dictatorship and say, let's give it a shot and see if we are with the gulags or not so much with the gulags.
	Because once you set it up, you really have to just wait for it to run its course, which could be generations, and you will get tens of millions of people killed.
	So it's far more serious than medical experiments, right?
	Ethical experiments are far, far, far...
	More dangerous than medical experiments.
	In medical experiments, you can kill dozens of people, hundreds of people.
	Thalidomide, I think, killed or mutated a couple of hundred babies.
	Bad, bad, bad.
	But if you look at an ethical thing like Nazism, an ethical experiment like Nazism, a little bit more, 40 million people got killed, and pretty much a whole generation got wiped out, and my mother was turned into a raving, nasty person.
	And these effects go on for generations, right?
	You get some sort of cataclysmic event like what happened in Eastern Europe in the post-war period to the 1980s.
	You have the destruction of two generations, and this effect is going to go on for another couple of generations.
	So it is absolutely catastrophic.
	It is a cancerous plague along the world.
	When you're messing around with ethical theories, you are doing things far more dangerous than chemical, biological, and nuclear weapons.
	The ultimate weapon of mass destruction is the argument for morality.
	So you really have to be very careful in terms of your ethical experiments.
	So if you have an ethical experiment which says, say, for instance, let's have no property, right?
	The first thing that I would do is not campaign for communism.
	The first thing that I would do if I thought no property was the way to go, it's a sort of ethical thing, is I would stop using property myself and just, you know, see how it worked out for me.
	So as soon as you eat something, it becomes obviously you own your body, that much we'll accept, and even the people who are against property have to believe that you own your body, because otherwise they'd have to do this psychic puppet thing with other people, which as far as I understand it, It's not really available until the next version 1.2 of the psychic data helmet.
	I think we'll have to come out before that's possible.
	So we at least would have to accept that our own bodies are our property.
	Of course, every apple we eat becomes ingested into our bodies, becomes our property, fuels our property.
	So you'd have to sort of not use any property Which means maybe you could breathe because you're breathing out again, although you're keeping the oxygen, so it's sort of hard to say how that might work.
	But let's just say you could do the breathing, but then of course when you drink, you ingest water becomes your property, so maybe you can't drink, whatever, right?
	So you try and set this kind of thing up and see how it works.
	And then if that works out for you, what you can do is you can set up a commune.
	To say, okay, well, so there's no property things working out for me.
	I'm a little peckish. It's only been a couple of hours.
	But what I'm going to do is set up a commune.
	I'm going to set up a commune where there's going to be no property, and we're going to see how it works.
	And you sort of then get a whole bunch of people together.
	You get them to give up all their property, and you get them to live on a commune.
	And then you all get to, like, not drink and eat and see how well it works out for you.
	And then if you say, okay, well, that doesn't really work out, so we're going to have to have some property usage, right?
	So, in this commune, we're going to at least have to pretend that we own the fields around our house so we can grow some food.
	So, let's at least go with that.
	We're going to have to eat. We're going to have to drink.
	And so, we're going to have to have that stuff.
	We're going to have to have some kind of money.
	So, I guess we'll sell some vegetables.
	But only the house leader is the one who, like, everything comes to me, the house leader, and then I distribute it to other people based on their need.
	So you're sort of coming up with your own validation based on your own personal experience.
	This is how you work out moral theories.
	You start with localized experimentation.
	And you experiment on yourself first, right?
	Because if you're the one who came up with the ethical theory, you better experiment on yourself.
	It's different than medical. Medical stuff, you've got to find somebody with the illness and then cure them.
	But with moral theories, you can just get up in the morning and start to implement them as you see right away.
	And so you get your commune going.
	You say, okay, well, I'm the only one who can own property as the house leader.
	This is the equivalent to the Politburo or the inner party.
	In the sort of communist slash 1984 model.
	So I can own property and I can distribute property to those who I consider to be in need.
	And you see how well that works out for you, right?
	How do people enjoy being in your commune when you own everything and you hand out stuff to them based on your perception of their need?
	How does that work out?
	Does that seem to be very flourishing?
	Is it positive? Is everyone happy?
	Because if it works out, you see, and everyone's happy and it's all wonderful, then it's going to spread, right?
	Because people are going to go, wow, these people over there, they're just having the best time ever and...
	They're flourishing. They're healthy.
	They're happy. They're wealthy. It's all good stuff.
	I want me some of that. So your commune idea is going to spread naturally.
	You don't have to come up with a whole centralized revolution and have Lenin take over stuff and start shipping people off to gulags right away.
	That seems to be a bit of an irreversible experiment, so to speak.
	So it's like saying, well, I want to cure cancer, so I'm going to cut someone's head off, so now they're not suffering from cancer anymore.
	Well, you might want to work a little bit more on the whole curing mechanism before you do that.
	And so, you just start with your own life.
	Start to see how it works within your own life.
	So, if you feel that, for instance, you can invade Iraq based on the suspicion, so you think that it's valid to invade Iraq based on the suspicion of weapons of mass destruction, then...
	The next time anything goes missing in your house, you can suspect that your neighbor has stolen it, and then you can take your gun and go over there and demand that you get to search his house from top to bottom, and you're also going to shoot his dog, enslave one of his children, and maybe rape his wife.
	And you see how that works out for you, right?
	If you've got this moral theory about suspicion leads to invasion, leads to occupation, leads to rape and torture and murder, then suspicion is good enough.
	You just try it in your own life and see how well it works.
	Like if any money is missing from your company or you can't find something, a pen of yours, then you take a gun and you go and demand of everyone around you that you can search their purses and their cars and Whatever.
	You can't let them leave.
	You keep them there until you're satisfied and just see how it works out for you.
	Is that a productive way of doing things?
	There are lots of ways that you can experiment on moral things within your own life just to see how well they work out.
	The thing that you will have to deal with, though, as far as moral experimentation goes, though, If it's going to be a moral theory, it does have to kind of be consistent.
	So if you're doing this commune thing and I'm the only one, like I'm in charge of the commune, and that's not true because actually we're aiming more for a cult, but let's just pretend.
	So I'm in charge of the commune and Steph the Magnificent is the only one who gets to use property and everyone else I dispose of property if I think that they need it and then I take it back if I think that they don't and they better live with my decisions or I'm going to shoot them.
	You can set up communism in your own commune and sort of see how it works.
	But what you can't do then is call it a moral theory, right?
	Because if a moral theory is property rights are not valid, and you find that you can't live with that because you can't eat and drink, and then you say, well, some property rights are valid, but they're only valid for me, and they're blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
	Well, then you have to sort of say, well, what's different about you?
	Right? You can say, I prefer, in my commune, I prefer to have control of all the property, and you all better live with my decisions or I'm going to shoot you.
	Well, that's a description.
	That's a description of what's actually happening.
	That's not a prescription for universal preferred human behavior.
	So if universal preferred human behavior is only the one guy who's the oldest guy in the house can have property and nobody else can, Then you have a sort of logical problem on your hand, right?
	Because you're sort of like a geologist saying, okay, there are these piles of rocks that have all of these properties, but the oldest rock in the bunch has the exact opposite properties of everything else.
	Like where everything else is bound by gravity, it is repelled by gravity and flies up into the air.
	The oldest rock. Well, the geologist, I think, in conjunction with the physicist and possibly a competent psychiatrist, would have to unravel this in some manner.
	And it would have to be...
	First of all, you'd experiment.
	You'd say, okay, well, is this oldest rock...
	Does it have completely the opposite properties of the other rock?
	Well, no. Well, then how can it be subject to completely opposite rules of behavior?
	Well, I guess it can't.
	And so if you have an ethical theory which says the oldest guy in a commune controls all the property, then you're saying that some group of people have property rights and other people have the exact opposite of property rights.
	They have no property rights.
	In fact, they have negative property rights because they have to give up everything that would formerly be called property, like the produce of their own labor.
	They have to give that up to the central guy.
	So they actually have negative property rights.
	They have property obligations to other people.
	Well, to the leader, to me.
	Whereas I have pure property rights that I get to receive everything and dispose of it as I see fit.
	So then you have two people.
	Let's just take me, who's in charge of the commune, and somebody else down the chain in the commune, some guy who's, I don't know, two days younger than I am.
	And so I have perfect positive property rights, and this guy has perfect negative property rights.
	He has property obligations to hand over everything that he creates to me.
	So we have perfectly opposite characteristics, perfectly opposite obligations, perfectly opposite attributes.
	I have property rights, he has none, or the opposite of property rights.
	Okay, so that could be possible, right?
	A rock falls down, a helium balloon flies up, but they have distinctly obvious, sorry, they have distinctly opposite and measurable properties.
	One's, well, heavier than the air, the other one is a little lighter than the air, and you can objectively measure all of these things, and of course you can see that one of them falls down and the other one falls up.
	So if you look at me and some guy two days younger than me, why do I have perfect property rights and he has nothing but perfect property obligations or negative property rights?
	What's the difference between us that means that we have such opposite properties?
	Well, unless you can come up with some fantastical difference, which of course doesn't exist, then you have no logical reason to claim that two beings that are virtually identical, like as alike as one rock to another, are subject to perfectly different obligations and laws and properties.
	So if you're going to make an ethical theory, then it has to be binding on other people.
	It has to be universal. It has to be in general.
	It's perfectly optional, like the scientific method, but it still does have to be logical and universal in order to be binding.
	And so if you're going to say, well, everybody has property rights, then you can sort of work that out.
	Okay, I'm going to respect your property.
	You have to respect my property.
	And yeah, there'll be people who steal.
	And that doesn't matter, right?
	I mean, nutrition is you should eat healthy.
	It doesn't mean that everyone is going to eat healthy.
	It just means if you want to eat healthy, then you have to follow these nutritional guidelines.
	It doesn't guarantee that everyone's going to do it because of free will and so and so and so.
	But if you're going to have a theory which says, yes, there's such a thing as property rights, then everybody has property rights.
	And you say, well, do children have perfect property rights?
	Can they enter into contract?
	Well, no, certainly not when they're...
	18 months old, but there's measurable differences between an 18-month-old child and a mature adult.
	Size, brain capacity, capacity to reason, language skills, capacity to understand the consequences of actions.
	There's a difference between chimp and human beings, which is why you don't see a whole lot of contracts entered into with chimps.
	And there is, of course, a difference between Infants are children and adults, which is measurable and objective and scientific and blah, blah, blah.
	So we have the capacity to say that children have diminished rights relative to adults because there's measurable differences, and chimps have fewer rights, amoebas have fewer rights still, and so on.
	And using the word rights in a sort of loosey-goosey way, so I apologize for that before you start emailing me about animal rights.
	It's on the board. Go look it up.
	But yes, absolutely.
	Moral theories do need to be testable.
	Moral theories also need to be explanatory.
	So moral theories should explain some of the basics.
	They should explain the Holocaust.
	They should explain why governments tend to grow perpetually.
	They should explain why abuse leads to abuse.
	In certain 10% of the population that's abused will end up being abusers, which is about 600% higher than the general population.
	So you should have some luck explaining that.
	You should have a good and rational reason as explanation as to why murder is wrong and why, you know, the sort of the four basics, right?
	I mean, a moral theory should definitely encompass the four basics, right?
	It should encompass murder, theft, rape, and property slash contract, however you want to put the distribution of material goods or the ownership of material goods.
	Any ethical theory should deal with that pretty much to a fundamental degree that kind of makes sense, right?
	I mean, Aristotle said, and I sort of believe him on this, if you come up with a moral theory that can be then used to prove that rape is the most moral action in the universe, you know, I got to tell you, I think that you might have a problem with that theory.
	And even if you don't, you're going to have a problem getting anyone else to believe it, right?
	So if your moral theory proves that violence is wrong, proves that murder is wrong, rape is wrong, theft is wrong, violations of property rights are wrong, violations of contract are wrong, all of these kinds of things.
	If you have a moral theory that proves these things and explains things like war and how it comes about and why it's evil, And explains, you know, as I mentioned, the Holocaust, and explains the evils of child abuse, and, you know, then I think you've got something fairly decent cooking away there.
	Just sort of in my humble opinion, if you're able to explain the four biggies in ways that make sense, and if your theory is logical and consistent and rational, and if it also explains historical things and also can predict future events...
	If it works very successfully within your own life, and if due to it working successfully in your own life, you are then able to communicate it to others, right?
	Because if you're the only person who believes in a valid moral theory, it's nice, but it's not going to be too helpful, right?
	It's one of the reasons I do the podcast, right?
	I'd like to live in a world where more people believe in valid moral theories.
	So, yes, absolutely.
	Fully, fully keen and cognizant on the scientific method around proving ethics.
	Harry Brown used to say something that I found to be quite compelling.
	He used to say that...
	If people in Washington feel that we can march all over overseas and make the world so much of a better place and turn the world into a democracy of paradise and free markets everywhere and they can go all over with their troops and foreign policy and blah blah blah, he said, well, okay, great.
	Why don't they start with Washington, D.C.? Washington, D.C. has the highest murder rate of any U.S. capital, as far as I understand it.
	At least this was the case when he was doing his radio show.
	And so the question would then be, okay, well, if you guys are so great at bringing peace and democracy to Guatemala, to Haiti, to Grenada, to Iraq, to Cuba, if you're so great at sort of maneuvering and through the CIA having all of these machinations in foreign policy because you're so great,
	At bringing paradise and peace and prosperity to the world, and if you're so great at controlling all of the variables of human behavior and understanding all the consequences of violence that you can use violence but bring about peace, well, I would say that the first place that you would do that, if you were logical, would be within your own neighborhood.
	That would seem to me to be a logical place to start.
	I mean, if you want to prove that you have this incredible ability to turn violent societies into peaceful societies by blowing people up, then the first place that you would start, logically, would not be over in Iraq, where there's language barriers, where there's an insurgency, where you don't have total domination over the whole country in the way that you would domestically, where you don't have access to the obedience of patriotism.
	I mean, that's the last place.
	That you would go to prove your massive and fantastic ability to turn blood into peace by blowing people up.
	You would start in Washington, D.C., right?
	You'd go and you'd shoot a bunch of homeless people and then you'd blow up a bunch of people in a neighborhood because you missed who you were aiming at.
	And then you'd arrest a whole bunch of people and you'd put them in torture facilities.
	And through this...
	You would turn Washington, D.C. into a paradise on Earth, right?
	And that's how you would test your capacity to follow through in what you claim, right?
	What you claim is that you can do all these moral things.
	You would have this great proof, right?
	And, of course, if you were able to kill and torture and rape and blow up all these people and produce a heaven on Earth...
	Then everybody else would go, holy crap, what they're doing in Washington, D.C. is fantastic.
	Wow, I've got to get me some of that.
	You give me that rape, torture, kill, blow-up manual, and I'll go create paradise in my city.
	And this is how virtue will spread throughout the world, and peace and honor and decency and democracy and capitalism and all the good things that the violence of the state can provide us will spread throughout the world.
	But you don't need to go over to Iraq and do it.
	If you can do it, you start at home, and if you do it compellingly enough, Sooner or later, the people in Iraq are going to want some of that too, and they'll do it without you having to blow them all up to do it and all that kind of stuff.
	So this is sort of a way that I would approach these kinds of issues from a moral standpoint and say that, yeah, I think it does kind of make sense that you can do testing on moral theories.
	I just generally prefer that people start testing on themselves, which is why I've talked about Marx and some other people.
	Who didn't really follow that whole thing themselves, but didn't live by their own ethical guidelines, but expected other people to do it magically themselves.
	Thanks so much for listening.
	I'll talk to you soon.
	Thank you very much to the gentleman who sent me $3 today.
	I really appreciate that.
	Feel free to save up and maybe splurge and send $6 or $10.
	But I guess maybe he's somebody who listened to six podcasts and hated them.
	Who knows? But I appreciate that.
	Feel free to save up if you're going to do that.
	I don't think the quality of the podcast gets worse as you go along.
	I think they actually get a little better. Thank you so much.
	I set up this. Sorry, I forgot to post it.
	I posted it today.
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	We certainly appreciate the conversation.

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