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Nov. 2, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:35
489 Moral Idiocy
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Don't panic. I'm not up to three podcasts today, just in case you were wondering.
It's Canada, so you get your outdoor time when you can.
So I'm going out for walks during the day.
And when I'm doing that, of course, I generally would listen to music or listen to an audio book, or heaven forbid myself, if there's something I need to double check.
But right now, all I'm going to do is have a little chat with my Zen Vision M and record a podcast or two.
And so I was looking on the board today at lunch while I was having a snack and a fine gentleman, long-time listener, has posted a chat that he's been having with someone else with regards to the argument for morality that we've been talking about here for the last 10 months or so.
And I think that the questions that he got We're sort of universal and instructive enough that they're worth having to go over in general so that you can see some of the fallacies involved in opposing the argument for morality.
So the quote goes something like this.
Guy says, now the podcaster, this is the enemy, the guy who doesn't accept the argument for morality, which is fine.
We'll sort of go over the logic of it.
Now the podcaster, he says, I don't know his name, perhaps another podcast poster could do that.
Public service as well makes a big deal about pointing this out.
And so... The Freedom and Radio listener then refers him to my Lou Rockwell article and also the podcast.
And he says, then goes on to talk about how if it's wrong for so-and-so to steal someone's property then it's wrong for the state to do it and so on using moral equivalency as the battering ram.
See already we've got the... We've already got the artistic language.
I mean, really artistic language to be kept out of.
You know, hyperbole is for novels and bad poetry.
It's not for philosophical argument.
But he talks about that I'm using moral equivalency as a battering ram.
I don't know what that means. I don't know whether a battering ram is philosophically true or false, but I do know that it's got negative connotations, that I'm sort of wielding some barbaric club to prove some idea about ethics.
So, then he quotes from my articles, what is bad for one must be bad for all.
I said, conversely, if it is wrong for me to go and steal money from somebody else, then it is wrong for anyone to go and steal money from anyone else.
If shooting a man who is not threatening you is evil in Atlanta, then it is also evil in Iraq.
If being paid to go and shoot someone is wrong for a hitman, it's also wrong for a soldier.
If breaking into a peaceful citizen's house, kidnapping him, holding him for prisoner is wrong for you and me, then it's also wrong for the agents of the Drug Enforcement Agency.
And here he says, note here that you said it is wrong for the state to do it.
The state cannot act.
Only people can act. So if moral rules exist for people's inactions, they must be universally applied.
And then the response comes back from this guy, the guy on the other side of the debate.
The problem is, since most morality is bunk, Isn't it even more important to apply it equivalently across the universe?
And again, here we have hyperbolic language because nobody's talking about applying it across the universe.
We're simply talking about, you know, good old planet Earth, although I'm sure you could apply it across the universe.
Let's start a little closer to home.
But here is something that's quite fascinating when you think about it.
And again, we're just so used to this kind of stuff in debates that it's very hard for us to sort of see how common it is.
That this guy says that an argument from universality is incorrect.
So the argument from morality, which is about the universality and reversibility of ethical propositions, he says that it's wrong and incorrect.
And then he says, if most morality is bunk, isn't it even more bunk to apply it equivalently across the universe?
Fascinating! Absolutely fascinating!
When you think about it, it's really funny.
It's heartbreaking as well, but it is really funny.
Because he's saying, here's a universal proposition, which is false.
And so we can't apply it, because you universally cannot apply invalid universal propositions.
Sorry, that's a little technical.
I think you know where I'm going with this, though, right?
Come on, we know where we're going with this one.
This guy says... Morality is bunk, therefore you can't apply it across the universe, right?
So I'm saying that morality is universally preferred behavior, and he says morality is bunk, in other words, there's no such thing as universally preferred behavior, and therefore it's absolutely incorrect to apply universally preferred behavior across the universe.
Therefore, it is universally preferred that we do not apply invalid or non-universally preferred behavior across the universe.
So, he is both denying universally preferred behavior in the form of morality and affirming universally preferred behavior in that we should not apply invalid concepts across the universe or inconsistent concepts across the universe.
So, do you see how impossible it is to escape universally preferred behavior the moment somebody...
Writes back to you and says that any universal moral theory is invalid, they just put forward a universally preferred set of behaviors, which is we should not apply invalid moral principles universally.
And to get to an even more absurd level, look at it this way.
This guy writes a sentence, the problem is, comma, since most morality is bunk, comma, isn't it even more bunk to apply it equivalently across the universe?
Now, no question mark, because he made a mistake there, but...
He's using subjects, predicates, pronouns, adjectives, nouns, adverbs, all of this kind of stuff.
He's got commas in the right places.
He's got a period at the end of the sentence.
The sentence is coherent and he's got a capitalized letter at the beginning of a sentence.
Well, what does that mean?
That means that he universally prefers that his sentences be coherent.
He universally prefers that he puts comments in the right place.
He doesn't sort of scrape them in on the edge of the page or put them in random places on the page.
So, this guy's saying, you know, universally preferred behavior is nonsense, right?
Morality, universally preferred behavior.
And I universally prefer to use good grammar.
So, I universally prefer to use good grammar, but universally preferred behavior is bunk.
It's absolutely impossible to escape it.
The moment somebody... Communicates to you in any semi-coherent way, then it doesn't really make any sense.
So, then a gentleman responds, the gentleman from the Freedom Main Radio side responds to this guy and says, moral claims are universal claims.
If it is bad to murder, then it's bad to murder for anyone from all times and all places.
When George Bush claims that one should preemptively attack a nation that holds WMDs, then he is making a universal claim.
Take a rubber boat and a stick to take over the United States who have WMDs and have used them on hundreds of thousands of civilians, and you will find that this previous universal claim is completely hypocritical.
Or point out this inconsistency at a press conference and be prepared to lose your job.
Quite right. Or let's take a look at theft.
When a man steals from someone else, he's doing so intending to keep the money.
If he were to allow somebody else to take that money from him, it would make no sense to do the initial theft.
So if theft were moral, then nobody would steal, even though one ought to.
Clearly, the robber doesn't intend to let someone else steal it from him, and thus he cannot make the claim that theft is moral.
And seeing That we cannot apply the act of theft consistently.
The robber makes a case of special pleading, which means he creates two classes of people, one who can, those who cannot steal.
It is a false morality. Does that clear things up?
And the other guy replies, yes, this clears up the content of the podcast very well.
The point I am trying to make in this thread is that AC, I think that's an arc of capitalism, must meet the universal application of morality itself if its proponents are going to argue against government from a moral standpoint, particularly an absolutist position.
And the response then comes back.
AC doesn't...
I'm sorry about the formatting a little.
I'm just trying to follow it. AC doesn't make any moral claims.
They simply make the case against the moral claims made by status.
The status says we should use violence.
The ACist anarcho-capitalist says that is a false moral claim.
So when the anarcho-capitalist argues against all forms of coercion, what is left is voluntarism, which is not a positive moral claim.
Yeah, I can understand that.
Makes sense. And then the guy responds, he says, in my stipulation, the government exists precisely because of the ethical conundrums, which an absolute statement, like, thou shalt not kill, runs up against.
Thou shalt not kill.
People don't want to have the moral guilt of having to kill under certain circumstances, like hanging a murderer, for instance, and therefore have created the state to be the responsible construct for carrying out those kinds of things.
Wow! Wow!
I mean, how wouldn't I love to live in the planet that these people live in?
Absolutely fantastic! I mean, gosh, oh, gosh, oh, gosh.
Can you imagine if on the age of 18, when you became eligible to vote, or maybe it's 21 in some areas, people came over to you and said, well, do you want to have to hang a murderer?
And you would say, no, I don't really want to have to hang a murderer.
And they say, okay, well, in order to have somebody else come and hang a murderer for you, You have to give up 50% of your income for the remainder of your days and be threatened with all kinds of punitive legislation and legal wrangling and immense amounts of rules and regulations subjected to the draft and to the war and terrorist attacks provoked by these governments' foreign policies.
Are you willing to submit to all of that, half of your income, massive amounts of laws and threat of jail time and draft and wars and so on?
Are you willing to submit to all of that so that you'll have someone who'll be willing to kill a murderer for you?
Right? So, this fantasy camp that these people live in, I don't know, I guess this is some sort of Hobbesian history that they have read and somehow magically believe in, but it's just astounding when you really think about it that somebody is seriously putting forward the proposition that governments are created voluntarily by people when, of course, there's no, no history whatsoever of any such contract, any such social contract ever have been put into place either in history or in the present.
Governments just take your stuff.
They don't ask permission.
There's no social contract.
It's completely ridiculous. Just once, I'd love someone to do something like this.
Go and buy a car on this guy's account and then just have him pay for it and say, no, no, this is a social contract.
You agree to it. It's like, no, I didn't.
Where's the contract? I never approved of this.
I'm going to sue you. And that these same idiots go around talking about how the state is constructed by the people and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
And so then he says, this baffles me, our guy says, you've admitted to understand that morality applies to actions carried out by people.
You've admitted to understand that the state cannot act, only people can.
So what you're saying now is that all actions done by the people who call themselves a state are inherently immoral.
How could this possibly be an argument in favor of the state?
I guess that's because the state is killing murderers and so on.
And then he adds a little more, what anarchists are in fact saying, by stating that anarcho-capitalism makes no moral claim, that the system called the state is immoral, therefore we should scrap it for this other system called anarcho-capitalism, which is just as immoral.
Does that make sense? And the response is, we observe the immorality of actions, so we call for the ending of those actions, and the ending of the support for those actions, that is it.
And anarcho-capitalists also...
We try to find creative and voluntary solutions for problems.
Note that it is not a system.
Anarcho-capitalism doesn't prescribe anything that should be done, hence it makes no moral claims.
What anarchists are in effect saying by stating anarcho-capitalism makes no moral claim, that it's not a positive moral system, that this system is, a system called the state is immoral, therefore we should scrap it.
Sorry. Tell me, tell us what moral claims we make and show how they can be consistently applied, invoking Of separate classes of people, etc.
Then you'll have something you can call immoral.
You know what? I'm so sorry. Let me just get this sorted out because I do find this is just a little bit hard to follow in terms of its formatting.
Ah, yes. Okay. So, our guy then quotes Hans Hoppe talking about the myth of the social contract, which of course is the purest nonsense that you can imagine no such thing ever has or will ever exist.
This guy says, woo, Hans Hoppe.
When I hear Hans Hoppe's philosophical theories being taught in courses around the world because the academic community thinks he's in the same league as Hobbes, then I'll pay attention.
Until then, he's a pretender to the throne searching for supporters of the course.
Now, this, of course, is just bitch-ass philosophy, right?
This idiot is out there putting forward statements which say, well, Hans Hoppe is a minor league philosopher, and Hans Hoppe is not respected and regarded within the academic community to the same degree that Hobbes is, and so when academics are not taking him seriously, then I will too, and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well, that's all the purest nonsense, of course.
What this guy's saying is that, gee, I really want other people to do my thinking for me.
I don't want to have the agony of evaluating something for myself, so I'm going to rely on the majority of state-paid academics to tell me who's a good philosopher, right?
I mean, that's really quite funny.
I mean, it's also something that could never...
It's a total second-hander thing in the Randian sense, but it's something that could never exist if it were a universal principle, right?
If... If the only way that philosophers could be considered great is if lots of other people thought they were great, then of course there would be no such thing as philosophy, because the first philosopher who came along, who said something different than the priest, everyone would have said, well, I've never heard of that before.
And of course the priest would never exist either, because people would say, well, I've never heard of that guy before, and so none of that would actually exist.
So this guy, somebody has at some point to evaluate a new philosophy and to figure out the rigor and the analytical power within that philosophy and the logic and the consistency and the evidence and so on.
Somebody's got to do that. And if nobody does that, then there's no such thing as new philosophy or philosophy or anything that exists.
And so for this guy to say, well, I'm not going to take Hobbes-Hoppy seriously because they teach Hobbes in universities, he's just saying, I want other people to discover who has good philosophy, who gives good philosophy, and I'm going to rely on other people to tell me.
What is good philosophy and what is not?
I'm not going to think for myself.
I'm just going to rely on the second-hand opinions of others.
Which is also kind of funny.
And then the last thing I'll sort of end up with here, which is that a pretender to the throne searching for supporters of the cause and so on.
It's not an argument, right?
It's not an argument. I mean, it's the exact equivalent of saying, the philosophy of Steph, what are you crazy?
He's bald. It's about as relevant.
Whether or not state-paid academics take an anarcho-capitalist serious or not is absolutely irrelevant, right?
And it's a pretty pitiful argument.
I would stop arguing with somebody like this, right?
So then the response comes back, I'm sorry to break it to you, but coercion and being coerced are implicit in many, many aspects of human relationships.
The larger the number of people there are, the more that goes on.
Now, this again, this is just bitch-ass philosophy.
I really hate this stuff.
Really, this makes me, like, fairly angry.
I hate to break it to you, right?
This idea that we're all dreamers living on cloud nine of Ancapistan, and we have no idea what the real world is like, and we're just utopians, and we have no clue, and we don't know, and we're just dreaming in sort of abstract worlds.
Complete projection. This guy's living in a fantasy camp of social contracts and state-paid professors being really excellent at determining who has valid philosophy from a moral standpoint, right?
Soldiers sold to the state doesn't equal very good at moral philosophy.
And so this guy's living in a total fantasy camp of imagined ideas and abstracts and stuff, no connection with the real world or history or anything.
And then he has the nerve to say to somebody, well, I hate to break it to you, but coercion and being coerced are implicit in many, many aspects of human relationships, thus mistaking.
The ideal for the fact, right?
So, if you're a Francis Bacon, and you're just coming up with a scientific method, I know it was more than him, but let's just pretend for a moment.
If you're Francis Bacon in the 16th century, coming up with the scientific method, somebody's going to write to you, and I guarantee you, buried it somewhere in Francis Bacon's papers is this statement, right?
Somebody's going to write to Francis Bacon and say, well, I hate to break it to you, but a lot of people are religious.
As if that has anything to do with what we're talking about here, right?
So when we say that violence is bad, and then people say, well, I hate to break it to you, but there's a lot of violence in the world, it's like, no shit, Sherlock.
Why the hell do you think we're talking about why violence is so bad?
If it wasn't really a bad thing, then we wouldn't really be talking about it now, would we?
Oh, it's just so annoying how these people just come up with this nonsense and fling it across.
It's just like a monkey flinging its own poo at you, frankly.
It's that level of projection and inner mental excrement.
But this is just pure nonsense.
Of course, anybody who's an anarcho-capitalist is much more sensitively aware.
Of the reality of violence in human institutions.
Because otherwise, I certainly wouldn't be spending my time on this.
Right? I mean, there's not a lot of doctors out there who are trying to come up with a cure for the bubonic plague.
It's not really that much of a problem anymore.
Not a whole lot of smallpox clinics in the Western world because it's mostly been eradicated.
So, of course, you spend your time working on the greatest problems that you can find.
I mean, and if you can get rid of the state and get rid of war and get rid of forced imprisonment and terrorizing human beings and foreign policies and bombs and embargoes and all this kind of stuff, yeah, I mean, that's a pretty good feather in your cap.
It's a pretty damn good way to spend your days on this earth.
And so for somebody to come along when you're spending your time fighting the greatest evil in the world to say, you know, I hate to break it to you.
But, you know, there's a little bit of evil in the world.
I don't mean to shock you. I don't mean to get you out of your glass tower.
I don't mean to mess up your little frock there, but there's some evil in the world.
I don't know. I just think it's kind of funny, right?
Of course, this is designed to be provocative and enraging.
This is somebody who's got this petty old womanish kind of temper, whoever this jerk is.
But I just sort of wanted to point out that you're going to get these kinds of objections quite a lot.
There's absolutely nothing wrong with letting rip with these people, in my opinion.
I mean, they're begging for it.
And I think it's fine.
I don't think you should feel bad.
I think that flaming somebody, just don't get involved in a flame debate, right?
Just say, look, I'm not going to debate with somebody who's, you know, not able to string a logical sentence together and who says that there's no such thing as university-preferred absolutes and therefore we shouldn't use them and that is a university-preferred absolute, somebody who can't think his way out of a wet paper bag who can't navigate a maze of a straight line.
I'm not going to bother wasting my time on best of luck.
And then just don't go back. Don't go back.
And I would establish this right up front.
Get this done, get this dealt with very quickly.
You know, you can sort of say up front, right?
Like there's this guy posting on the board at the moment, a real honest-to-goodness anarcho-capitalist Christian, this mythical beast that we've all heard so much of, finally coming to post on the board.
Fantastic. Certainly interested in having a chat with him.
And he's talking about how Jesus led a perfect life and so on, and that's how we know that Jesus is so good and this and that.
Fantastic. Then all you need to do is come up with the criteria for establishing that as a fact, right?
So obviously if he says Jesus is the most perfectly moral man who ever lived, then there's no problem with that.
All we do is we say, okay, so your thesis is we should worship Jesus because Jesus is the most perfectly moral man who ever lived.
And the way that we know what Jesus did and the way that we can judge him as being perfectly moral is to read what he did in the Gospels, right?
So that would be the thesis. Jesus is perfect and we know his actions are perfect by what occurs in the Gospels.
Because then you have something that's falsifiable, right?
And if this guy then says, no, Jesus is just perfect because I have faith and Jesus himself tells me, then obviously there's no rational debate going on.
But if this guy is trying to say Jesus is perfect, then you should believe it.
There's got to be some external standard of proof that can be appealed to, in which case we should be able to establish that in the Gospels.
If Jesus acts with perfect ethics, then at least that's a starting point.
Then we have to talk about the veracity of Gospels and so on.
At the very beginning, he says, Jesus is immoral, and I know it from reading in the Gospels.
Fantastic. As long as he's willing to set that out as a premise, then if we can find even one vaguely immoral action of Jesus in the Gospels, then his thesis falls, right?
And he'll run away and all that.
But at least from this standpoint, you've got a falsifiable proposition, right?
And it's worth establishing with these kinds of things, right?
So I would have banged right back at this guy when he said, morality is bunk, therefore it can't be applied universally.
It's like, oh, okay, so universally preferred behavior doesn't exist, and therefore it is universally preferred that we should not apply it, right?
So immediately it's universally preferred.
And also, it's universally preferred that if you wish to make a coherent statement, you should use good grammar and comprehensible language syntax and structures.
That's universally preferred, so it seems to me that you're shooting yourself in the foot when you're unholstering your gun to have a go at me, so maybe you want to take another run at that, my friend.
Anyway, I just wanted to have a little short chatty-boo with you while I was out here.
I was hoping to have a bit of a walk, but it's too windy and I didn't want to end up in the cyclone tunnel where it sounds like I'm Thank you so much for listening.
I hope this is helpful. Talk to you soon.
Oh, and thank you so much. Got a nice donation this morning.
I appreciate that. The world's a little dry at the moment, so if you could send some more in, I'd absolutely appreciate it.
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