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Oct. 20, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:58
467 Moral Empiricism and You...

A metaphor for judging personal morality...

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Good morning, everybody. I hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. It is Friday, the 19th or so-ish of October 2006.
And I'd like to ask you a very, very important question this morning that was asked of me about five or six years ago.
And just sort of to see what you think about this question.
Five or six years ago, I was dating a woman who was very intelligent, very, very perceptive, taught me a lot about instinctual understanding, but not so much with the rationality.
And enjoyed her company very much.
Wonderful woman in many ways, but just couldn't quite get round to...
And she had a kind of macho streak to her that was not overly compatible with...
My fey nature, I guess you could say.
But I was talking to her one day about ethics or rationality or some such philosophical talk as I occasionally want to do.
And I said to her, and I'm very rational.
Which seemed like a sort of axiom for me.
I study reason.
I understand a lot about logical argument.
I've been a debater. I'm very logical.
I work from first principles.
I'm very logical. I think I may have mentioned that I was very logical.
And she kind of narrowed her eyes, not in a hostile way.
She kind of narrowed her eyes at me, looked at me and said, How do you know?
And you know, I can never even consider the question.
I actually stole this for a line from the God of Atheists.
And by the way, if you're still listening to it, I'm not done, but let me know when you get to the end so I know how to pace my time.
And it really was an incredible shock to me, right, to be asked, how do I know that I'm logical?
And that's a very, very fascinating question to ask of yourself.
And not just about logic, but perhaps it's even more important to ask it about ethics.
You know, if you think you're a very good person, the question is, how do you know?
How do you know? In other words, if somebody did not hear your protestations, About your own ethics and your own virtue and your own logic and your own intelligence, though I don't really think that's an issue for people who are listening to this.
But the real question is how do you know?
So I say I'm a virtuous man.
The question is how do I know?
Just saying it is the easiest thing in the world, right?
As we all know from our families.
Just saying it is the easiest thing in the world.
What is much more of a challenge is to actually have some proof for it.
So I'll talk a little bit about sort of what this question did to me.
Was I kind of got the feeling, and I started with a sort of silent movie, a sort of silent movie of looking at my life.
And I imagined...
That I couldn't speak.
This is the great challenge of examining somebody's life.
It's to imagine a silent movie of that person's life where you could not hear their protestations about their own virtue and their own rationality and their own devotion and their own, I do everything for my kids and this and that and the other.
So imagine there's this silent movie of your life that is rolling through the projector and some extraordinarily wise and truly logical and moral people are watching the movie of your life.
But they can't hear you speak and they can't even read any of the books that you're reading.
They can't read the titles. They don't know.
They don't really know what courses you're taking.
All they're doing is looking at your life with no language.
I mean, they have language.
They speak, I don't know, Mud Swallop Esperanto or something, but they don't speak what you speak, which I assume has something to do with English, unless you simply like the lilting tones and occasional bursts of song of my voice.
So... If this committee, and there's a funny movie, a movie that's funny in parts, but very sentimental towards the end, called Defending Your Life with Albert Brooks and Meryl Streep, well worth a look.
We love the Brooks. And...
Sorry, where this is going on after your life, they have a look at your life and try to evaluate whether you move on to the next plane or not.
And... Think about this with regards to your own life.
And you can ask yourself, I think reasonably and logically so, you can ask yourself and say, well, how would somebody know if I was logical or moral or whatever it is that I claim to be?
Now, there's some things, of course, that could be told from a silent movie of your life, that could be culled from that, without the distractions of language and, in my case, extraordinary levels of self-protestation about virtue and logic, for exactly the same reasons as I talked about, when I talked about my oh-so-courageous stance about the Iraq War, because I lacked them.
Well, what would somebody be able to tell about my life?
Well, He likes to read.
He likes to date.
He goes to school.
He's got a good job.
He travels. He argues.
But without any content, without any language content where they know what I'm arguing for or anything like that, They would have said, yeah, and he seems a little tortured relative to a lot of the people around him.
I would say, you know, he sighs, he can't sleep at times, he's full of stress and storms and so on.
And there's a lot of unease, a lot of tension in this young man.
And some passive aggression, for sure.
And certainly, pardon me.
See, this is what happens when I have one hand driving and one hand on the microphone.
I can't get at my coffee.
You know, I think along with the show, Free Domain Radio show set up in my car, I think there's no way to avoid the absolute need for an IV drip just to make it all the more exciting when said officer, said constabulary of the law finally pulls me over and asks me what the hell I'm doing in my car.
I lose my license and then I get to work on this stuff full time while devoting at least three quarters of the podcast to begging for money.
Yeah, so they would come up with some stuff.
He likes to write. He likes to read.
He likes to argue. He's intelligent.
He went to school.
He argued a lot at school.
And he started a company.
And he sold products and made some money.
And then he took a year and a half off and he wrote and so on.
They would be able to see all of this.
Somewhat, in the big picture, in the long view, not of my life, but of the world, somewhat inconsequential characteristics of a particular person.
And that's sort of very, very interesting.
When you think about it, like, if they didn't know that I was arguing about ethics, They wouldn't really have a very strong idea that I was heavily devoted to ethics.
I would say in the past, maybe a little bit more now, but hopefully quite a bit more now.
But they wouldn't really know, these people who are watching the silent movie of my life.
They wouldn't know what I was so all fired up about.
They would look at my girlfriends and my family and my work partners and they would say, yeah, this is a guy who...
You know, kind of aims to get by.
He's not particularly all fired up about the integrity of those around him, and he certainly is willing to sacrifice his soul for a pretty face.
So no, we wouldn't say that this is a man who is climbing the high peaks of integrity with fingernails, ice picks, and a prayer.
Actually, maybe a prayer.
But they wouldn't look at my life and say, this guy is really head and shoulders above the crowd in terms of stuttering.
No, in terms of ethics and integrity and rationality and so on.
Really, really quite fascinating.
Now, if they were then, if a separate group were to hear my protestations about my own identity, who it is that I said I was, rather than who I empirically was.
Your soul is empirical.
Your false self is verbal.
This is the great danger of language, one that I've always tried to I'm trying to not fall into with honesty and self-disclosure and emotional connection.
A trap that I've tried not to fall into with free domain radio is I'm trying to use language for empiricism.
I'm not trying to use language for effect.
Which is a false self.
I'm not trying to use language to manipulate, which is, it seems, almost, except for certain hard sciences, the entire purpose of language is to bamboozle, manipulate, and steal from people and to lie about who you are.
I certainly know that from my own experience.
So I'm trying to use some fairly exquisite language here to connect to empiricism or the true self, physical, tangible, material reality, rather than use language to convince you some attitudinal thing about myself, how tough I am, how smart I am, how strong I am, how wise I am, and all these kinds of things.
Because that would be, A, it would be guruistic, and I certainly would neither have the stomach nor the talents for that.
But also, it would be hierarchical.
It would be me talking about how all-fired wise I am and how, you know, by implication, you're not and this and that.
It's sort of like there's this gentleman on the board who's very keen on action, which I certainly respect.
I'm very much about doing things.
A podcast is an action, but...
He says that, you know, I'm asking him, I think he's a younger gentleman, I can't remember, but I'm sort of asking him, well, is everything in your own personal life sorted out, right?
I mean, because very, very often action can be a way of distracting yourself from the need to actually live and act with integrity in a very personal way.
Just as for me, words and arguments throughout writings and readings throughout my life have been a sort of A way of portraying myself first and foremost to myself and secondarily to others as a rebel, renegade, kind of rational philosopher of the new millennium or something.
And so I asked him, you know, have you sorted everything out in your life?
And he's like, yeah, my personal relationships are amazing.
I am chomping at the bit, waiting to go for actually achieving freedom.
There's nothing more that I can do in my personal life.
And without wanting to sound like the skeptical guy who looks for the cloud in every silver lining, part of me was like, huh?
Really? You as a younger guy have found a way to clean up all of your personal relationships.
And I assume by that he didn't mean that he had become purely solitary because that brings with it its own challenges.
But, you know, you as a guy has figured out a way to sort out all of the complexity of the corrupt relationships we all inherit in this anti-philosophical age, not because everyone around us is bad, it's just that they're not taught anything and they just go on.
But they have to teach us ethics, but nobody ever taught them ethics, so they just go off this random grab bag of bullying and supplication and manipulation and call it ethical instruction.
So he'd found a way to bring all of this about, to achieve freedom, the freedom that took me close to 20 years to figure out.
And $20,000 worth of therapy, he was able to do it.
And with some skepticism, but with genuine curiosity, I posted and said, is there...
Is there a way to do this that I haven't thought of that's a whole lot easier than what I'm talking about?
Because I sure as heck don't want to give people the long route, right?
I mean, if there's a subway, I don't want them to have to crawl on their belly using their teeth for leverage, which is sometimes what it feels like when you're actually becoming a good person rather than just talking about it.
I haven't heard back from him yet, but I eagerly await the simple recipe to the ultimate cake.
But, is it going to merge?
No, he's not going to merge.
Ooh, there's a nasty exit.
Oh, you can't see. What do you care?
So, if another group could listen to my protestations about myself...
My story about myself, that I am rational and I'm philosophical and I'm moral and I'm all about the integrity and so on.
If they could listen to those speeches and then compare notes with the people who'd watched the silent language-free movie of my life, what would they say?
Would they both say the same things?
Would they both say, oh yeah, this guy, you know, everyone who's in his life is virtuous.
He regularly gets rid of people who are not virtuous.
He doesn't associate with non-virtuous women.
He doesn't date them.
And he lives his values, right?
Oh, those are his values. Well, I can totally see that showing up in the silent language-free movie of his life.
And that is something that is a very powerful conceptual approach to your life.
Forget about what you say.
Forget about what other people say.
The only thing that's really important when it comes to figuring out whether you're a good person or not is what you do.
Excuse me.
All right, I've got to put the bike down and grab a coffee.
You might want to get one yourself.
Yeah, that should do it.
One sip of coffee should chase it all away.
And so in the comparison of your actions and your words, it's just so important to ditch your words.
Now, the one thing that would be, I think, ironic, or perhaps they would find it funny, or perhaps they wouldn't, whoever is reviewing my life...
They would find it, I think, interesting, though perhaps not wildly unusual, but I think I'd be a bit more of an extreme case than most.
I think they would find it interesting, the degree of moral conformity in my actions, because I was moral in books, I was moral in argument, I was moral in language, I was moral in this split world of virtue.
The virtue being something for myself internally as I talked about in a recent podcast.
That's the sort of platonic world of language that I was virtuous in because I fought tooth and nail for real virtue.
While of course undermining in totality, undermining the arguments that I was making for morality by continuing to associate with people who by any standards of morality were pretty corrupt.
So, I was arguing for morality while trapped.
Oh, good heavens, I must be running low on oxygen this morning.
So... I was undermining my arguments for ethics by not living a life that was ethical.
So it looked ridiculous.
And it looked sort of, I think, faintly embarrassing and faintly like, yeah, yeah, yeah.
It's like somebody who tells you, I'm a really excellent singer.
I'm a great singer. Boy, can I ever hit those notes?
I have a very pleasing tone in my voice.
I'm a great singer and blah, blah, blah.
And finally you hear them at karaoke and they suck.
I mean, not only do they not have a pleasing voice, but they can't even sing in tune.
That is indicative of a fairly, let's just be charitable and say, a fairly fragmented personality.
So, I think from that standpoint, I definitely was not someone who could look at my life and say, oh, I am rational because of X, Y, and Z. Because the first thing I would have to do is lean over and say, oh, irrational creature, I'm afraid that we shall no longer be an item.
Because you're right. I do need to be rational, and this would be an example of not achieving that.
So one of the things that I would have to do would be along those lines.
So this is an interesting question.
Now, it's a powerful thing to ask of yourself Though I don't for a moment...
I won't for a moment tell you that it's as easy as I'm portraying it here.
It's become easier for me because I try to speak with the true self.
And what that means for me is to be honest about failings, shortcomings, pretensions, and so on to continually deflate the false self, right?
Because... There's so many avenues into the false self that you have to keep deflating it.
It's not a sort of one-time thing where it's like, whoop, done.
If the demons are out, they'll never return.
And so...
For me, I can talk about my failings, and I can talk about my hypocrisies, and I can talk about my pretensions without feeling like I have to sort of flinch and hide, I'm going to cease to exist, and, you know, thunderbolts are going to rend me from the sky gods of pure integrity who I falsely worshipped,
lo, those many years. But I would certainly suggest to you That when you do start to look into your own capacity and actions which are corrupt and which do not even remotely match the virtues that you protest so much, that it's going to be horrible.
It's particularly horrible for people who are very interested in morality to realize that they haven't been so much with the ethics.
So, I'd like to just sort of invite you to look at that in your own life.
It's going to be scary. It's going to make you angry.
It's going to make you angry at me, for sure.
But it's probably going to make you a lot more angry at yourself.
So, I'd certainly invite you to look at that, sort of just to do that mental exercise of imagining...
The people who speak, you know, mudflap Esperanto and can't read or hear what you're saying.
You can't read what you're reading, the titles or hear what you're saying.
Those people looking at your life and then other people not hearing everything, right?
But hearing the select protestations of your own virtue and integrity and imagining those people comparing notes and what would really come out of that.
Now, that's a very powerful exercise to do for yourself, right?
And you know the answer.
I mean, I'll give you that right away, right?
Because you know the answer, right?
And the reason you know the answer is that if you were at all like me and you protesteth your virtue to a great degree while enacting it to a much lesser degree, Then your protestations are exactly there because you know that you're not living your values.
This is empirical.
How do you know? Well, you have evidence.
You have lived your values. Not that you just had arguments with people, but you lived them in a very fundamental way.
That's how you know that you're moral.
We're trying to be scientific at all times here.
So we're trying to find out how we know something.
Well, we don't know something is true because someone says so.
If Einstein said in 1905 or 1912, the theory of relativity is really, really, really, really true.
We wouldn't just say, okay, sure, right?
No, we have to put it to the test, right?
No matter what his intentions are, error is always capable.
The consciousness is always capable of error, and it's corrected by looking at the rational world, as we talked about in the epistemology series, or the knowledge series of the Introduction to Philosophy.
So, how do you know that you're moral, or rational, or good, or whatever?
Are you... You look for the evidence, right?
You look for the evidence in your life, and the evidence is not you saying over and over, I'm moral, I'm rational, I'm so on, right?
The evidence is that you actually do these things, and those things can, to a large degree, be determined independently of language.
Morality is inaction.
Sorry, morality was inaction in the sense of it being one word in my 20s.
Morality in my early to mid-30s began to be action, and I think I'm a little bit more on the ball now.
And so that's a very powerful question to ask yourself, I think.
It's also a very powerful question to ask other people.
So I know a lot of people are going through some exciting times with their family of origins in various processes of examining the moral nature and dumping the irrational absolutes of the virtue of family.
And that's an interesting question, right?
So your mom says, you know, well, we're all about our children.
We would do anything for our children.
We love you, right?
Well, when your mother says, I love you, The real question, I think, is, you know, you can say, well, how would I know that?
Well, I make you lunches.
I cleaned your room. I bought you clothing.
I did this.
I did that. It's like, well, I could pay people to do that for me.
Surely love should be something that's a little bit more.
Like, I can buy lunch, so you making lunch for me is not really quite the same as loving me, right?
Love should really be something otherwise, you know, Prostitution and marriage are the same thing, right?
Because you can pay a woman to spend time with you and to have sex with you, or you can woo a woman and provide value to her and so on and get it all that way.
And I would say that you probably wouldn't want to be in the realm of doing this kind of stuff, of conflating these two kind of situations or approaches.
And to say, equally, that...
Sorry, I'm just trying to figure out whether I... No, I don't want to take the exit.
I don't want to not take the exit.
Just keeping you up to date on the little decisions I make while I drive.
Because I know that the philosophy is merely a stuffer for my little observations about tiny things that I'm deciding.
So... Oh, hookers, yeah.
I lost it on the hookers, gentlemen and ladies.
Good. Maybe this is a...
Sorry to keep you waiting.
Because, you know, we're all about the professional show status here.
But let me just change lanes, have a coffee, regain my train of thought, and continue.
Wow, I'm quick to work today.
Okay.
So yeah, you want to say, well, what is it that you do that is unique, right?
This is one of the real questions around love.
Right, so your mother, she baked you food, or she made you food, but a restaurant will do that for you.
And your mother bought you clothing, but you can hire a personal shopper to do that for you.
And your mother made you lunch, but you can buy lunch.
And your mother put you up in a home, and she gave you a place to sleep, and she gave you food and shelter and clothing.
But prison does that as well, but nobody's saying that you should check up with your guard because he is doing that, or the governor, or anything like that.
And yes, I am still watching Prison Break.
So those kinds of questions are sort of important to ask, right?
And people get very threatened by it, right?
America is virtuous, right?
America is a good country. It's like, well, how do we know?
How do we know? What evidence is there other than people just angrily asserting it?
And they know that it's not true because they assert it angrily.
Nobody angrily asserts that gravity exists.
Nobody angrily asserts that 2 plus 2 is 4.
There's a Freudian, I guess one of the briefer Freudian analyses of a woman who was asked, you know, I can't remember, there's something like, are you attracted to this man?
And she's like, no, no, no, no, no, no.
Right? And Freud said, you know, one no would have been sufficient.
And no. Right?
But because she's emphatic about it, it's because she knows that she's lying.
And she has to sort of, there's no stability in the world to false it, right?
That's why people have to get so sentimental and emotional about things.
So when you ask your, you know, you ask this question of yourself, and don't just ask this question of others, because that will turn you into a bit of a tokamata, right?
A bit of a sort of moral tyrant of the logical inquisition type of thumbscrew standpoint.
So you want to ask this question of yourself, how do I know that I, how would I know?
What evidence is there that I am what I say I am?
But you also want to spend time, I think, or I would suggest that it's a valuable thing to do, to spend time asking it of other people as well.
Very, very important. Very, very important to ask this of other people.
Because you don't want to get trapped in the world of language, right?
You don't want to get trapped in the manipulative world of language.
You want to live in reality.
Because that's really where virtue and happiness and all these kinds of good things live and exist, is in reality.
And reality is not, as we all know, if reality was just listening to people who say, I mean, we know this sort of in our gut, right?
There was this funny bit somebody posted, Richard Dawkins was on Stephen Colbert.
And Stephen Colbert was saying that, oh, so 90 percent, no, 95 percent of Americans believe in a higher God, believe in God, and you don't.
So you're against democracy, right?
I mean, it's pretty funny, right?
And it was a funny argument. Richard Dawkins said that he often gets, people expect the guy, Stephen Hawking, the guy in a wheelchair who can't speak to show up.
And he's like, oh yeah, Stephen Colbert's like, oh yeah, he's going to hell too, because God hates black holes.
Right? Which I thought was just great.
But, of course, if we believed in what people said, or if we believed that what people said was a prime criteria for truth, then we would all be religious, right?
I mean, we don't listen to people.
We look at reality. We don't listen to what people say or what they want.
I mean, we do, but we don't hold it up as a criteria of truth.
It's just psychologically interesting.
But we actually look at reality, and, you know, it's very, very important to turn that impressive apparatus of the scientific method of philosophy and so on, of empiricism, and to really turn it on ourselves, right?
This is a very, very important thing.
We don't want to, because it leads to hypocrisy, as I can talk about from a very personal experience.
It leads to hypocrisy to only use this impressive approach Intellectual array that we have, these impressive intellectual tools, to only use them to analyze and to tear down the hypocrisies of others is, you know, kind of gross, right? What's that line from Silence of the Lambs?
Maybe, doctor, if you turned that impressive perception on yourself or something like that, when Jodie Foster is talking to Fava Bean dude.
But I would say that it is an important thing.
You do want to take this empiricism and first and foremost really apply it to your own life.
Apply it to your own self.
Are you somebody who lives a virtuous life that it could be shown that you were virtuous or you would see that you were virtuous from a silent movie where nobody could hear you talk about yourself?
And what is the status of other people in your life as well?
Thank you so much for listening as always.
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