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Sept. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
34:15
412 Nit Picky City

Get out of the lifeboat! Detonating the 'gray areas' of morality

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. I am going to be a most naughty boy this morning.
It's ten past nine on Thursday, September the 14th.
Thanks, honey. Christine is driving.
We're heading into Hamilton for a little bit of time.
And I had promised in my last podcast to get to the dreams of the listeners.
And I am going to betray you all and not do that.
And the reason for that is that I want to do it in the video camera, not because I think it's so gripping to watch me analyze a dream, but I would like to lure some of the people who are currently, we've had almost 3,000 viewings of the Free Domain Radio videos on YouTube.
And I don't know how many on Google Video.
I don't think there's any way to check.
But I'm hoping to lure the people who are watching the podcast series on philosophy over to listen to the podcasts in general.
And I hope to lure them by providing something quite different from what it is that they've been listening to.
And that is going to be a dream analysis.
So I was going to actually bring the dream analyses that Christine and I have been working on I was going to bring those here in the car and do the podcast that way, but that's not so much with the video, so I'm going to do that.
So what I'm going to do instead, and I'll do that today, so sorry about that delay, but I wanted to talk this morning about...
Some thoughts that I've had about libertarian addictions.
And as somebody who is a recovering libertarian addict, in one particular sphere, I've noticed recently in a discussion group, I speak without any sense of not having gone through this crack house myself.
But I just thought I'd talk a little bit about it and see if you've had the same experience and so on.
Now, one of the things that I've noticed, and I've not had an enormous amount of exposure to libertarians or objectivists or anarchists or any of this sort of stuff.
I've never really been involved in discussion groups, I guess, about...
Oh, heavens. Over 20 years ago, or maybe around 20 years ago, I went to one libertarian conference, and other than that, I really haven't had much debate with libertarians.
And so I've recently joined a discussion group, and I've really enjoyed it, and there's been some very stimulating ideas.
But there's one sort of peccadillo, or addiction, that I've noticed that I think is worth talking about.
I certainly am susceptible to it myself, so...
What I've noticed is that there is, as in most intellectual discussions, a tendency towards atomic-level hair-splitting about the inevitable grey areas of moral philosophy.
And that is a great, great temptation.
This is the crack of the libertarian movement and something which I do believe that we need to stage a self-intervention in order to find our way out of the darkness of this bottomless hole.
And what I mean by that is that you'll get involved in a discussion with somebody about property rights, okay?
And then somebody will say, okay, well, you fall off the top of a building and you grab a flagpole outside of somebody's apartment and then you want to, you're Your hands are gripping the flagpole and you're slipping and you want to go through their window and walk out through their apartment so that you don't fall to your death, you know, 20 stories below.
Do they have the right to say to you, no, you can't use my property, you have to fall to your death?
I mean, there's sort of one example.
There's a lot of these sort of lifeboat scenarios, you know, like, does the shortest guy in the boat get eaten first?
You know, that sort of stuff. The plumpest guy and so on.
And that's sort of one example.
And another one that's been discussed is sort of around this idea of vigilantism or retributive justice that is self-created.
So one example was somebody whose son was kidnapped by a pedophile and who then lay in wait when that pedophile returned through the airport and shot him in the head and then he only got...
I think a five-year suspended sentence or something like that.
Is that fine?
Is that okay? And there were other examples where people had taken sort of, quote, justice into their own hands and were focusing on retribution and should they be imprisoned and is it an initiation of violence if it's after the fact and on behalf of someone else and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. And I think this is a mad quest, frankly.
And I think that there's reasons for it, psychologically, and we'll talk about those in a little bit.
But... I think that it's a huge mistake to spend an enormous amount of time on this issue, and that may not be the case, of course, once the world has become free, that it may be worth splitting hairs down at this level, but there is an inevitable gray area around moral philosophy.
You can't get around it.
You can't define everything to everyone's satisfaction.
You can't Solve all of the problems that could conceivably arise in human interaction ahead of time and to everyone's satisfaction.
It's absolutely, completely, totally and utterly impossible.
It's absolutely impossible and attempting to do it is...
In the state that the world is in, attempting to do it, I think, is a huge discredit to...
Sort of the movement as a whole to the idea of trying to free the world as a whole.
And I'll use a metaphor here, which is sort of, as I've used before, that philosophers are somewhat akin to biologists and also to nutritionists, of course.
And if all that biologists wanted to do was, instead of doing things that were useful to humanity, such as, you know, creating crops that were more hardy and resisted bugs and creating healthier livestock, I don't know what the heck biologists do,
creating vaccines or whatever biologists do that is of service to the planet, If, instead of doing that, biologists decided to sort of drag the bottom of the Mariana Trench and pull up all of the weird, freaky fish down there and try and figure out, well, this fish is slightly different from this fish.
Is it a new species? Is it the same species but a slight mutation?
Is it not a mutation at all but a different species?
And had conferences where they spent an enormous amount of time arguing over minute differences between two species that human beings will never see or will very rarely see unless you've got a really long fishing line.
And this was the sum total of, and I'm not saying that this is, but if this was the sum total of And I think that you would actually find it reasonable to look at it sort of like, you know, how some people learn Klingon.
And learn how to speak and write Klingon.
I guess it's an intellectual achievement of some kind, but one has to wonder about the purpose and point of it all.
Somebody, in fact, I believe, has translated Hamlet into Klingon, and I guess you could call that a psychological or intellectual feat of some kind, but I'm not sure that you would say it does a huge amount of good to humanity.
So, of course, when you start talking about any kind of ethical proposition, you always get the question about...
Abortion, right? I've talked about this sort of briefly before.
The first thing that you have to do in order to get a clear-eyed view of moral propositions or moral problems is you have to take the subjective craziness out of it.
You have to take things like a belief in the Bible out of your moral propositions in the same way that if you want to have any kind of real understanding of physics, you have to take out of the equation looking up the physics that are written about in the Bible.
In the same way that if you want to have any kind of clear-eyed understanding about ethics, you have to get rid of the ethics that are written about in the Bible.
Because the Bible has no more relevance to ethics than it does to physics or biology or any sort of science or any kind of regular expression of human knowledge.
And so you have to get rid of things like faith.
You have to get rid of the appeal to authority, the appeal to God.
You have to get rid of the appeal to culture because, of course, cultural things are quite different between people.
So if you want to start talking about things like abortion or any of the sort of gray area, and there will be gray areas in abortion no matter what, then you're going to have to first of all get rid of the things that people believe that make no sense and don't add anything productive or constructive to the debate but merely cloud it with a sort of species of irrational bigotry.
So, that's sort of the first thing that you need to do.
And then, once you look at it, and most people will follow me here, once you look at something like abortion without the eyes of religiosity and the fantasy of the human soul that pops into existence at conception and then magically splits when the twins are created and so on, once you get rid of this idea of the soul, then you will look at humanity We're good to go.
Otherwise, a woman becomes a sort of species of chattel designed simply to reproduce like a photocopier owned by somebody who's got no problem running out of toner, so to speak.
So, few people would have any problem preventing conception.
A few more people, but still very few, would have any problem preventing a fertilized egg from implanting.
We have this diminishing curve of people who would find it acceptable to have an abortion.
Obviously, it's certainly not bad to prevent pregnancy.
It's not really that bad to prevent a fertilized egg from implanting.
It's certainly not too bad a week into it to have an abortion for whatever reason.
And yet, right before a baby is born, while it's still inside the mother's body, if you then abort the baby, there's very few people who would think that was okay.
We're going to have consensus on that.
And there's lots of complicated, horrible reasons for all of that, which we won't get into right now.
But society will have a general kind of consensus.
Once you get rid of religiosity and appeals to culture, and appeals to magic holy books of the past, right?
I mean, we might as well look up in Lord of the Rings and see what Frodo has to say about abortion, as go and ask what Jesus has to say about it.
And so, once you get rid of that kind of stuff, then you're going to be able to come up with some things which people accept, prevention or very early termination of pregnancy, like the morning-after pill.
And then we're going to come up with stuff that very few people would ever accept, and of course, very few doctors would ever perform, which would be the abortion of a child, of a baby, that is just about to be born.
I mean, unless there's some absolutely ghastly thing that's occurring for the mother that requires it.
So, from that standpoint, there's going to be, yeah, there's a gray area in between.
There's a gray area that you cannot define objectively any more than you can objectively define in a universal way when a child actually becomes a morally conscious and responsible agent.
Right? Most people will fix it At some age, right, with the enormous retardation of human personal evolution that occurs with public schools, we sort of stick it around the age of 18.
And I guess 14 for going to movies, 19 or 21 for drinking, but 18 for being able to sign yourself up into the army and go and kill people.
But, you know, it's important to have that right, but not to have the right to have a glass of wine.
And so, there is a time, very few people who are sane would say that a four-year-old is totally morally responsible, and very few people who are sane would say that a sort of normal, mentally functioning A 40-year-old is not morally responsible, and somewhere in between, there's a transition.
And you can't define that transition objectively.
You simply can't, to everyone's satisfaction.
You will find people who are 20 who are sort of emotionally retarded.
I mean, that's sort of in not so much a biological sense.
You will find those people, and you will find people who are 12 who are wise and perfectly capable of making moral decisions for themselves.
It's individual, it's subjective, it's relative to intelligence, to how you're raised, to personal preference, and to some degree to one's innate sense of integrity, which I believe that libertarians have sometimes an excess of, but certainly not a deficiency of.
So you simply can't define these things.
You can't define the future possibilities and rules for every single possible circumstance.
The one thing that we do know and do desperately need in the realm of freedom is a lot of people working on this problem who have self-interest in the outcome.
That's very, very important.
You have to have some sort of self-interest in the outcome in order for you to make rational decisions, which is why we know that central planning doesn't really work so well.
You have discussions that go on on the board about how do we prevent child abuse in a sort of free society.
And, yeah, I've fallen down this hole too, so I'm sort of yelling up from the bottom of the well here as well.
But when it comes to something like child abuse, to me the answer is, you know, sort of fairly simple.
We don't know. It'll be worked out.
You know, one possibility could be that...
If you do enough studies and you find out that 50% of people who are savagely beaten become criminals and cause a million dollars worth of damage and lost opportunity or 10 million or whatever number it is over their lifetime, If that is the case, then the private protection agencies, the dispute resolution organizations, they will intervene.
And if 50% of children cause a million dollars of damage, then most of these DROs would find it economically productive to pay the parents up to $450,000 to take the children away and place them with a better family.
Once you've got economic incentive and once the objective measures of a bad childhood are...
And you have to have them to be objective to make sure that a bad childhood isn't then defined as somebody who's brought up in a non-religious environment or something, right?
I mean, you have to make sure that a bad childhood is measured by some sort of objective standard.
Otherwise, we're back into cultural impositions and...
You know, because you're not taught to believe in some sort of God, that's child abuse and you have to be taken away.
There has to be some sort of objective measure.
And, yeah, nobody has a right to a happy childhood, but if you can find that there are economically disadvantageous It doesn't matter.
It doesn't matter. I'll give you sort of an example that I think will maybe make it slightly clearer.
If you're in Russia in 1980 and you're saying, we should privatize everything, we should get rid of state control and the government and all that, then people will say, well, how will the trains run?
And you say, well, I mean, obviously people have to get to work by 9, so we'll set up trains to leave the station at 8.
I mean, that would make sense.
It's like, well, yeah, but, you know, 10% of people...
Have to get to work by 8.
And you say, okay, well, I guess 10% of trains will then leave the station at 7.
It's like, well, yes, but 5% of people need to be to work by 10.
It's like, oh, okay, well, then it would be 15 or 85%.
And that shifts in the summer when the children are off school.
And then what would you do? And you sort of can go down this road of trying to set up a train schedule for a future free market society.
And it's absolutely a hole with no bottom.
You can never, ever...
Solve the problem to other people's satisfaction.
And then people will say, well, how much will the trains cost?
And people will say, well, what kind of trains will they be?
And what happens when the price goes up?
Are you then going to raise the price?
And what if people have bought tickets in advance?
You can simply go absolutely insane.
And it's really absolutely mad.
It's like... It's like creating those incredibly detailed maps to Middle Earth.
It doesn't really mean anything.
It has no objective value.
And actually, these questions are not asked by people who are interested in solving the problems of freedom.
Because the problems of freedom are actually pretty simple to solve.
Let's stop people pointing guns at each other.
Let's stop the state from pointing guns at each other.
And let's stop parents bullying children with false ideas like religion and patriotism and the virtue of family.
And, you know, we're kind of there, right?
And then whatever happens after that is great, but the problems of liberty in a fundamental sense are easy to understand and to solve, right?
Stop shooting people or stop pointing guns at people or stop threatening people, and in an institutional sense, and the rest is pretty much gravy.
So... If you get this sort of problem where you're supposed to come up with how an entire functioning railroad is going to work, it's sort of like saying in 1970 when you say, well, we should get rid of the evil mercantilist monopoly that Bell has on telecommunications and someone saying, well... How would poor people have phones?
And how would phones be divvied up?
And who would buy them? And what would happen?
And what would the phones look like?
How will the phones exist? How will they look like in 20 years?
And so on, right? It's a fool's game, right?
The reason that you get rid of monopolies is because they're initiations of the use of violence against the innocent.
You know, what happens after that doesn't matter.
If we had a system wherein the government chose your marital partner...
And you suggested that that might be kind of evil and actually sort of pimping and organized rape.
And then people said, well, how would people's marriage partners be chosen afterwards?
And what about the people who couldn't get married?
And what about the people who were ugly?
And what about the people who blah, blah, blah?
What about the people who were too old to get married?
And, you know, I think that the logical answer is I don't care.
And it's absolutely unimportant.
Getting rid of the evil is an important thing to do.
Figuring out exactly how the good is going to work is absolutely unimportant.
Absolutely, completely and totally unimportant.
And I think that it is a huge waste of time and energy to focus on it at that level and to the exclusion of a lot of other more productive debates, which, for instance, would be, I would say, keep pointing out the gun in the room and talk about the argument for morality.
That, to me, I think would be a good way to do it.
Because the real answer, if we get rid of a system where the government chooses your spouse, the real answer when somebody says, well, how will it happen after freedom?
You simply say, however people want it to.
Right? How do marriages occur when the government doesn't assign you a spouse?
However people want them to.
And yes, there will be mistakes and people will marry the wrong person and so on, but it doesn't really matter how it works after people are free.
It absolutely doesn't matter how it works after people are free.
It will work however people want it to.
So that perennial question that libertarians get asked, well, how will the poor be helped in the absence of a welfare state?
However people want them to be helped.
However people choose to help.
And the funny thing is, like the ironic thing about this, in my view, is that libertarians who use the argument from effect, or who use economics arguments, and this of course all praise to von Mises in the early 1920s for coming up with this theory about socialism, It's that the calculation problem with socialism means that you can't have a planned economy, right?
Because there are no prices, you can't allocate resources, and so on.
And so, to me, the funny thing about libertarians who try to come up with how the economy is going to work after freedom comes about is that if libertarians were actually able We're good to go.
And so coming up with predictions about how things are going to work in a free market is completely contradictory to the basic principles of libertarianism.
Going down that road is really ceding a basic premise to those who oppose freedom.
Those who oppose freedom... Say that freedom won't work from a practical sense and then we try and run around saying that freedom will work from a practical sense and here's how it's going to work.
And basically what we're saying is that somebody can predict and manage how the economy should work which means that central planning might be valid and thus the requirements for freedom from an economic efficiency standpoint go down considerably.
So that's the what.
Now what about the why?
And this sort of scholastic nitpicking that goes on in libertarian circles, and not just libertarian circles, but most intellectual circles, this scholastic nitpicking that goes on, which is very similar to the theological debates in the Middle Ages, where in People would say, does Adam have a belly button, as I mentioned before?
How many angels can dance on the head of a pin?
The question of human beings are made in God's image.
God doesn't have a belly button, so the fact that human beings have a belly button makes no sense, and blah blah blah.
Well, all of that stuff results from, in my opinion, It results from people who have obviously a great deal of fear about being wrong.
So they want to hair-split and define everything so they have an answer.
For people who come up with the opposition, hey, oh yeah, how's it going to work in the absence of a government?
You know, you tell me how every single slave is going to get a job and maybe then I'll support the end of slavery.
Well, of course, that's got nothing to do with supporting the end of slavery.
What it is to do with is basically commanding you to run off and think yourself into a white-hot mental futile inferno so that you won't come back and ask the basic question of should guns be pointed at people and should they be forced to be slaves?
And so mistaking how will freedom work for I'm interested in supporting freedom, making that mistake is a huge error, and an error that the libertarian movement has spent, you know, I guess the modern one, at least 80 years, running around trying to prove, filling up volumes and volumes and volumes and shelves and shelves and shelves of unread books, trying to answer this question of how will freedom work, and it's gotten us precisely nowhere.
Frankly, I'm glad that people have done it because it's been interesting for me, but as far as having an effect in the real world, it's gotten us precisely nowhere.
And people prefer to talk about how the trains will run in a free market and who will pay for the roads and how this or that will work.
People prefer doing that rather than doing the much more emotionally volatile thing of pointing out that there's a gun in the room, of pointing out that the state uses violence against the innocent, of pointing out the rape rooms filled by 2 million American citizens run by the government for mostly non-violent non-crimes.
People don't want to point out the child abuse that is public education.
People would rather nitpick about how things might work in some fantasy world of the future.
It's like a bunch of Star Trek conventioneers arguing about how taxes would work in Star Trek.
That's a lot of the relevance that these debates have.
And I think it comes from a great fear of being wrong and not having the answer.
It comes from Feeling that the opposition to the advancement of freedom is that the person is not convinced how freedom would work, that people feel that that's the objection that is valid and that's what they need to solve in order to get people to understand and advocate for freedom, but of course it hasn't happened.
I advocated the alternate society.
I'm not saying it's a bad thing to do, but I think that what you need to do, and I've sort of tried to do this during the debates that have gone on over the last couple of weeks with an intelligent outsider on the call-in shows, is to keep pointing out the violence, to keep pointing out the gun in the room.
And yes, it makes me look crazy to this guy, and yes, it makes me look extremist, but that doesn't matter, because if he doesn't understand that there's a gun in the room, then it's a purely intellectual exercise.
If he doesn't understand that violence is wrong and that no human being has the right to initiate the use of force against another human being, then there really is no problem to be solved.
It's like an abstract mathematical question.
There's no actual problem to be solved.
It's just a, well, you know, if we were writing a novel about a different kind of society, how might that society work?
It's got nothing to do with people who are then going out to actively advocate and courageously put forward the proposition that violence is wrong and we need to get rid of it.
That there is a great evil in the world perpetrated upon adults in the form of taxation, on children in the form of propaganda and state schooling.
There's a great evil that is destroying the soul of the species and corrupting the very pleasure of life that is called the state and organized religion and its relationship to children.
And that is a huge, massive evil which we need to focus on to get rid of it.
And what comes after and how society works once that great evil is gone is absolutely irrelevant.
The question of whether slaves should be freed does not hinge on whether they're going to get jobs and what their income is going to be and where they're going to live and how their children are going to be educated.
None of that matters whatsoever.
What needs to occur is that people are free.
What occurs after that is irrelevant because how it's going to work is however the hell people want it to work.
Right now, the way it works is you shut up, you sit down, and you obey the people with the guns.
And muttering among ourselves about how it might work without those guns is sort of missing the point that we need to keep pointing out that those guns are there and that's a great evil.
And forget about how it's going to work in the future and how many DROs there are going to be and what happens if you try to do business with some foreign DRO that doesn't have a direct economic interest in sorting out your issues and this and that and the other.
How's it going to work? It's going to work however the hell people want it to work.
And that's good enough.
And again, I'm saying this as much to myself as to other people because I poured a lot of energy into figuring this stuff out.
And I'm kind of glad that I did insofar as it's been a useful exercise for me.
But what I have seen in debates that I have observed in the libertarian arena...
It's that it is a lot of internal debating about hair-splitting in the inevitable grey areas of ethics.
And it's not a whole lot of, how are we going to communicate to other people?
How are we going to keep reinforcing in people's minds this fact that there is a gun in the room, which seems to be so elusive to people?
And I would guess, going out on an enormous limb here, I would guess that people who have this scholastic, hair-splitting approach to dealing with the problems of ethics and property rights and integrity and virtue and so on, that in general, they come from families where either their ideas were ignored or were opposed in this kind of, show me how physics will work in this alternate universe.
Or people who have been heavily, heavily, heavily criticized for having any kind of opinions at all.
And if this is the case for you, if you grew up in a family where there was a fair amount of contempt for your thoughts, either explicitly in terms of heavy, heavy criticism, or implicitly in terms of not having any voice or having people who were willing to listen to you about what it is that you thought, then you need to recognize that this hair-splitting that you're doing at the moment, this mad...
Impulsive, inevitable desire to have an answer for every conceivable question that's going to satisfy everyone is actually just a manifestation of historical trauma.
It's not the pursuit of truth in an objective manner.
It is actually just the attempting to deal with family trauma by dealing with extensive or excessive criticism.
By coming up with an answer for everything is not dealing with the trauma of excessive and destructive criticism that you probably grew up with.
So I just sort of want to point out that that is not a productive way to deal with it.
It does a lot of discredit and wastes a lot of time to and within the movement, and it's certainly not going to do anything to advance human freedom, as I've mentioned previously.
I doubt it anyway.
We're not going to write better books than von Mises or Rothbard or Hayek or Friedman or Rand.
We're not going to do that.
And we're not going to be able to come up with any kind of magic words that are going to satisfy everyone in the realm of abortion or lifeboat scenarios or extreme property rights situations or whatever.
And trying to come up with solutions to events that are almost never going to exist.
I mean, can you imagine if you're hanging from a flagpole outside someone's window?
They would do anything to help you, right?
They would do, I mean, the idea that they're going to say, you can't come into my house, I mean, that's never going to happen.
Because anybody who's that insane and irrational is never going to end up with property that you can invade anyway, sort of invade, so to speak.
That's never going to happen. It's like having an entire medical school not focused on the kind of common complaints of humanity, but focused on, okay, you know, you spend eight years studying.
Here's what happens if someone gets hit by a bus, has diabetes, is overweight, has a heart attack, and is possessed by Tourette's syndrome, and is currently speaking in tongues.
How are we going to deal with that?
Go! Right? I mean, that's not what doctors face, right?
That person's kind of screwed, frankly.
You know, there's not much you can do for that person.
Maybe you can pray. But that is not what you do in medical school.
What you do in medical school is you have, you know, the bell curve of common complaints that people need to deal with.
And common doesn't mean inconsequential, right?
Cancer and heart disease are very common, and certainly not inconsequential.
But you focus on that.
In the same way that a nutritionist is not going to spend all of her time studying how do you deal with somebody who's got both epilepsy and a compulsive eating disorder and is a deaf-mute as well.
A nutritionist is not going to spend 10 years studying that because that person is so rare that it's pretty irrelevant.
So, putting an enormous amount of energy into these lifeboat scenarios and what happens and what happens and this and that and the other is a complete waste of time.
And it's worse than a waste of time because it's time that you could be spending talking to people outside the libertarian movement about the gun in the room and how important it is to stop the evil that is the state of organized religion and the cult of the family and all this kind of stuff.
And so my particular approach is to say, examine your childhood.
If you went through a childhood of being ignored or having excessive criticism, don't take it out on the libertarian movement by coming up with hair-splitting, but instead deal with your issues from an emotional standpoint and then spend your time doing productive things to actually help freedom.
Or if you don't want to do that, if you find out after you've dealt with your emotional issues that you don't want to do that, that's fine too.
But the amount of energy and time that gets spent and the amount of confusion that then is displayed to outsiders, right?
So people come into the movement and they say, oh, they look at the movement and they say, oh, okay, well, if I join this...
I can argue about hanging from a flagpole and not being allowed into someone's apartment, which is going to happen like once every 10,000 years.
Thanks. I think that I won't end up learning Klingon and translating Hamlet into Klingon.
I instead will go and do something productive with my life.
So I think it keeps a lot of people out of the movement, as well as failing to move the movement forward at all.
So I hope that this is helpful.
Thank you so much for listening.
Thank you for the few donations I've received lately.
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