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Nov. 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:40
517 Emails of the Week

God, biodiversity and agnosticism

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Time Text
Here is the listener email.
This is a gentleman who wrote to me sort of recently.
It's Stefan. I said I wasn't going to pester you with questions as I went along, but I have to ask this one before I forget it.
It relates to your argument for morality, which even though I have a quibble with it, I loved it and remembered from reading it on the Lou Rockwell site.
First, a very brief bit of background.
Now, when people say a very brief bit of background, what does that usually mean?
Long background, that's right.
And they want to give you an excuse.
And they want to give me an excuse, which we will see.
I haven't read this in great detail, so we'll see.
I am a little like you in that I've spent a lot of time trying to develop a fully rationalized theory of God, religion, spirituality.
I have tried being an atheist and I just can't pull it off.
Intellectually, I mean, sorry, intellectually, I mean, I was raised Catholic, which I'm beginning to suspect as I listen to your podcast that you were too.
Do I sound guilty in my podcast?
No? No? Intellectually, I dumped that at 13 and became an atheist.
I mellowed out of that into agnosticism at 19 until a logical argument showed profound agnosticism to be illogical.
I said, you can't know anything, my friend Curtis said, how do you know?
After a number of good drug experiences, a bad one sent me scurrying to Protestant fundamentalism.
After three years, I mellowed into a fuzzy, liberal, vague, Unitarian Universalism, and then spent a number of years folding some Buddhism into that.
Do you say after a drug?
Oh, yeah. After a number of good drug experiences, a bad one sent me scurrying to Protestant fundamentalism.
I'm almost as surprised as you are.
But this is what he says.
The universe seems too fantastic to just be here by chance, and for that and other reasons I can't seem to get away from God, from a God concept.
I look forward to your religion podcast with bated breath.
He says that now.
But for me, any faith must be as thoroughly rational as possible.
So thinking about all that, I came up with the idea that morality must apply to God if it applies to humans.
If it's wrong for us to kill, it's wrong for God to kill too, very much like one of your argument for morality tenets, if it's wrong for me to force someone at gunpoint to do whatever I want.
It's wrong for the president to also...
So when I read your rational morality tenets, I exulted.
I hope he cleaned up.
Background over. Sorry to bore you with it.
Just as the fundamentalists claim to be in favor of absolute morality and decry liberals, theologically speaking, for being moral relativists, you seem to frame things in a way that implies to me that you are a moral absolutist, though with a rational basis instead of a revelational basis.
Theological liberals are always posing situational or circumstantial questions to the fundies and I'm going to do the same to you now.
There may be some acts that are right for one person to perform while wrong for another because of differences in knowledge or perhaps even wisdom.
Example that is just plain wrong in all cases.
Yes, I'll be absolute here as I am as much a pacifist as you for me to plunge a knife into anyone's chest.
I don't agree with that. Oh, and he goes on to say, But to say a man, known by his doctor to have severe heart disease, collapses at a dinner table where his doctor is present and goes unconscious, it is not wrong for his doctor to rush him to the emergency room, plunge a scalper into his chest, and perform some quick bypass surgery that he already knew needed to be done fairly soon.
The doctor's greater knowledge and curative intent make the act right for him that would be wrong for me, even in identical circumstances, i.e.
I should not try to do bypass surgery on the man even with the best of curative intent, because I simply don't have the skills.
Now, this is only one little contrived example, but it does prove that acts can be right for some people while being wrong for others.
Might it be extendable to more complex examples and ultimately become the basis for justifying a state, perhaps like the one Plato recommended, ruled by wise philosophers?
Just for the record, when I read Plato's ideas, I am almost...
When I read Plato's ideas, I am almost always appalled.
I like the cave analogy, though.
I'm not going to try to justify the state, Though I admit I am on the fence there and waiting for you to convince me.
But here is a more complex example where it seems that at least collective behavior is called for.
Let me first say that you are the first libertarian I have seen give credence to environmental problems in my two or three years of reading articles.
You mentioned pollution in one of the podcasts and gave a very reasonable description of how it could be handled, though my dealings with insurance companies, which I admit are not yet full-fledged DROs, make me feel about as good as the U.S. government usually makes me feel.
That said, let's consider another environmental problem, and this highlights another area where I suspect you and I fundamentally disagree.
You feel all human beings are free beings and should be treated as such.
I question why this should be limited to humans.
In my view, any being who can suffer should be treated as a free being as far as that is possible, even if it makes my life harder.
One area that as far as I can see is becoming a real problem is the loss of biodiversity.
I have really looked into this as a layperson and read arguments from all sides, but the best I can come up with is that the combination of human population and human consumption is destroying so much habitat for other species that we're in danger of wiping out by the end of this century as many species as the famed asteroid collision near the Yucatan 65 million years ago did.
One authority who seems to me very knowledgeable and wise in this area is Harvard biologist E.O. Wilson.
Wilson's proposed solution to the problem is interestingly not the expected preaching for us to cut population and consumption, but for about 35 global species hotspots to be preserved at a cost he estimates to be US $35 trillion.
He has helped establish an organization, Conservation International, which tries to raise funds towards this end from individual and corporate donors, but Wilson thinks it will require governments to come up with this total amount needed.
I am sure you would be able to frame the problem and its solution in a libertarian way, and I look forward to a podcast on it at some point.
Maybe you've already done one.
Ha! With 520, it's usually a fair bet at this point.
And Wilson is not arguing against libertarianism.
He just sees the current order of things.
People like to reproduce and consume.
Governments exist. And tries to frame a solution that takes those realities into account.
But what I'm saying, since I'm still on the libertarian fence, is that if we all act as individuals seeking what we perceive to be our own interests, very few of us might see the big picture and we'll end up wiping out a lot of beautiful species that took hundreds of millions of years to evolve.
Species made up of individual beings who have Their own interests and desire freedom, but don't have the power to resist human development.
Our descendants may well regret the loss of these species and the world may be a far less beautiful and more dangerous place, even for humans.
What seems to be needed, as far as I can see, is for us to act in some sort of concert with all of us setting aside some of our individual aspirations for wealth and prolific progeny, living lower on the hog, reproducing only after great forethought so that species can be preserved and we as a species can make it through the bottleneck reasonably well until our numbers are reproducing only after great forethought so that species can be preserved and we as a species can make it through the bottleneck reasonably well until our numbers are low Can we all act in concert along these lines without someone wise to guide us?
I suspect it will take some wisdom and some force, I reluctantly suppose.
If we would all just wake up, I often tell myself, but you know how hard it is for most people to wake up and I'm sure they wish I would wake up to their concerns.
Where is my reasoning going awry here?
It's a very, very interesting and very good letter.
It's obviously a good writer. Very interesting, smart, and good letter.
And the question around the surgeon, I have a feeling, and this is not something I've totally reasoned out, I have a feeling that one of the differences that occurs is, and this is a dangerously subjective area, unless we can sort of work something out, but one of the things that I think I would take into account, all right, one second.
Would be whether or not we would feel grateful afterwards to this sort of situation, right?
So if somebody comes and steals your wallet or punches you in the face, you just don't feel grateful afterwards.
Thank you. You just don't.
No. Absolutely not.
But if somebody...
I don't know...
If you're drowning and somebody who can't swim...
Hooks you with their fishing rod and reels you to land, you end up with a gash, but you're still going to thank that person afterwards.
Right, now there is a certain amount of subjectivity involved in that, and there's still some grey areas, but that to me would be a pretty important test.
The issue with morality and practice is not so much the principles of who does what, which is all well and good, and we should not have a state, but the principles of morality and practice I think would have something to do with Would somebody bring charges against you?
Like, if somebody comes and steals my wallet, I'm going to call up my DRO and say, hey, my wallet was stolen, you go get that guy.
And so that's when it would go, you know, the sort of, the justice system would leap into action.
But if it was the case that someone had...
You know, my surgeon had cut open my chest when I was unconscious and had saved my life, or at least an independent panel had confirmed that, right?
Right, and of course, you have stipulations for that.
If I'm dying, what do I want someone to do?
Right, right. Right?
You would have a living will.
The justice system, you should be free to pursue courses against someone, and you should be free not to pursue courses against them, and there is going to be a balance found in these gray areas by a free society, right?
So the balance is always found in a free society between costs and benefits, and it changes over time.
So you could have it where...
A surgeon gives them a tracheotomy.
Obviously, cutting open someone's throat when they're healthy is an act of aggression, but if they're choking to death and the tracheotomy is the only thing that will save them, You know, then you go for the tracheotomy.
And maybe this happens, and then what happens is a bunch of people pretend to be choking to death, and then surgeons cut them open, and then they sue the surgeons for everything they've got, and then surgeons stop cutting people open, or whatever, right?
I mean, this stuff will be worked out by the free market, but everyone has the right.
You know, certainly if I go up to a stranger on a beach and I drip hot wax onto their nipples, Right?
Then I could be, you know, accused of a fairly kinky assault.
But if, on the other hand, you know, I'm involved in a very mild S&M relationship, and that's something that gets us off or whatever, then, you know, going to pee on someone, pretty bad idea.
If I'm into golden showers, maybe it's good, right?
But the whole point...
Yes, my love. It's a little concerning.
I read it on a bathroom stall?
In a woman's washroom?
Wait. I've never heard that.
There's lots of euphemisms that make horrible things stand more pleasant.
Can I read these? Yeah. So, yeah, we certainly do have the right to be free of the violence of a state, and we do have the right to be free of the initiation of the use of force, but we also have the right to either bring charges or not bring charges,
and certainly if someone had saved my life with a tracheotomy or through rushing me into surgery when I was unconscious, I would thank that person and pay them enormous amounts of money, because what would the use of my money be if I were dead?
Correct. But of course, I would want that to be independently established by some sort of tribunal so that it wasn't just somebody out to practice their surgical skills by...
Right, you want verification that this person is a surgeon, you want That I was genuinely unconscious, and also it would be nice to know, if I was really paranoid, that the surgeon hadn't drugged me to practice his surgical skills.
I'd also like to know that the surgeon actually found a problem, right?
So, I mean, these kinds, the universal morality is not specifically around every particular action.
But it's the initiation of the use of force that is against the will of the individual, that is against what their preference is.
Because the initiation of the use of force in a sadomasochistic relationship, if dripping the wax on their nipples or whatever, or piercings, is the initiation of the use of force.
I remember seeing my mom get her ear pierced.
It was really painful. Now, this wasn't the guy acting in self-defense, but it was acting with the consent, right?
So the non-aggression principle, I think, is worthwhile expanding to include without consent.
Now, where consent is impossible...
Then you have to act with the best of your knowledge.
If I'm going to dive in and drag someone to shore, who's kicking and screaming, I may have to restrain them, they may get bruised, and I'm going to just assume that they're drowning.
Now, if they're trying to drown themselves, and I've just screwed up their whole suicide attempt, then yeah, they might get mad at me, they might sue me for, you know, but it doesn't seem very likely that any justice system would act against me.
Because, you know, nobody has perfect knowledge.
You have to act with the best of intention, right?
I mean, the guy who swallowed the shrimp sideways might be trying to kill himself because his blind date is going really badly, but you don't generally assume that.
You assume that somebody in distress, if they can't communicate, wants your help.
And so it really is the right to freedom from the initiation of violence.
Unless that's what you want, right?
And if you're unconscious and somebody cuts open your chest and gives you a tracheotomy, that is the initiation of a kind of violence, but it's what you want.
Right. That's why I said, I mean, you would have...
These things would all be... These things would be...
They would be worked out.
They would be worked out in a way that you just can't work them out with the government.
You can't work these things out with the government at all.
Now, the other question about biodiversity...
I mean, I always feel odd about doing this, but going up against a Harvard biologist, the moment I hear a Harvard biologist and a $35 trillion plan, I immediately become suspicious that the science is bad.
Now, this whole question of overpopulation, which was a huge issue in the 70s when I was a kid, zero population growth, I don't know if you remember those guys.
Oh, God, yes, they were offering people money in Quebec to procreate.
No, zero population growth, so they didn't want people to procreate.
The world is distinctly not overpopulated.
If you took the whole population of the planet, 6 billion people, and you gave them all a house the size of this and a sort of land slice the size of this, the entire world's population, even with roads and all that, would fit in Texas.
I mean, the world is really not over- because so much of the world is not populated at all.
The United States is only populated two or three percent.
So the world is really not over-populated.
Now, there is certainly an issue with biodiversity and so on, but the real question as to why biodiversity is being destroyed It's because of public ownership of lands and because government,
for instance, the Amazon is being destroyed because governments keep granting rights to take the timber away because there's a great deal of profit in temporary ownership, right?
So like if you and I, like when you and I are going to go, if I'm thinking of going on a business trip, And this would occur even when I was running my own business and couldn't really expense a car because it was just coming in one pocket and out of the other, and I knew I needed to drive to New York and back, I would rent a car because temporary ownership leads to overuse.
And the reason that I would rent a car is because I didn't want to put 2,000 kilometers on my own car.
But I would rent a car And use it.
Whereas if I just have to drive to work and back, I'm not going to rent a car.
So temporary ownership is only really valid when there's an overuse scenario, a high use scenario.
So when you look at land, if you buy land, then you have to make it sustainable.
Because whoever can make it the most sustainable is going to be able to bid the most for that land.
So if I can only bid land based on cutting down all the trees and selling them, I'm only going to be able to bid a certain amount for that land.
If I can bid for land knowing that I can replant and re-harvest and it's going to be a sustainable resource for like hundreds and hundreds of years, then I can bid more for that land because I'm going to get repeated use out of it.
Now, this is also the case with parks and people who buy land for the natural beauty of it.
There is actually a fairly little-known history of Yellowstone National Park, which was almost completely destroyed by government planners introducing species and destroying things and so on, because it's all temporary use, so people don't have any real desire to maintain its biodiversity.
The issue, of course, that this guy is pointing out is that, given that we have governments, there's no way we can get an anarcho-capitalist system put in place around the world quickly enough to save all these species.
And that's obviously true.
And that's a shame, but that shouldn't blind us as to what the real solution is.
What about natural selection?
I mean, is it our job to protect all the species in the world?
No, of course it's not anybody's job to protect any species at all.
But there are lots of people who like the idea of biodiversity, and there is...
What was it?
There's some film with Sean Connery, Medicine Man, where they find a cure for cancer in a rare beetle, or some insect, or some animal in the...
In the rainforest, it's about to get, you know, logged out of existence, so we're letting go.
So basically, it's an argument from self-interest that we should limit our consumption and limit our reproduction, because otherwise, in this Malthusian idea, we're going to destroy the planet, and it's like a virus, right?
We're like a tumor or a cancer.
Now, I think that that's all very interesting and very important stuff to talk about, I don't believe a single word that comes out of government scientists or government subsidized scientists, which is almost all the scientists that you see these days.
I simply don't believe a word that they say.
Because they're, you know, people follow incentives, the basic principle of life, and these people are heavily paid to come up with panic after panic that result in additional money that is going on, right?
And So when it comes to biodiversity, I think it's just important that people don't have these weird illusions about, well, we'll just use a bit of government now, and we'll get rid of it later.
It's such an extremity that let's use the government now to save biodiversity, and then later we'll talk about getting rid of the government.
Well, of course, all that's going to happen is that the government's going to keep inventing crises to eliminate getting rid of the government.
As an idea. So if the crisis, even if we accept that it's biodiversity now that we need to use the government for and we'll get rid of it later, then the government is just going to invent global warming and then overpopulation.
The government is just going to invent a series of crises that means we'll never get rid of the government.
At some point you have to draw the line in the sand and say...
And to me it's always been sort of like, this is sort of the approach that I take.
Let me know if you think it makes any sense.
So the way that I try to work with this kind of idea, tell me if this is a metaphor that you think might work.
The way it sort of seems to me is that there's a truck that's going down a very steep hill.
And the brakes are cut.
And at the bottom of the hill is a canyon or a gully or a brick wall, whatever is going to be a bad thing for the truck to hit.
And if you stay in the truck, then for sure, It's going to get.
You're going to die. So if you stay in the truck, you're going to die.
You're bouncing down.
You've got your heads bleeding.
You're jarred all up.
Your kidneys are bruised.
Because you're bouncing down this rocky or stumpy kind of hill towards certain death.
And... People sort of say to me, or they say, you know, there's just one more thing we need the state for.
You know, as soon as we get this biodiversity thing, or this global warming thing, or as soon as poverty is eliminated, or as soon as, you know, now it's the war on terror, I agree with you that we shouldn't have the state, but now that the Muslims are trying to kill us, we need the state for whatever, right?
And so people are basically saying to me, we need to stay in the truck going down the hill a little longer.
And why? Because now, jumping out is a really bad idea.
Right. Right, and that hill never...
You never seem to reach the bottom.
You're always going for it, right?
Well, yeah, and of course, given the nature of gravity and rolling the laws of objects, of rolling motion, there's never a better time than now.
Yes, of course there's going to be danger jumping out of the truck right now, but if we wait, it's only going to get worse.
Like there's never going to be a time, given the logic of the accumulation of state power, there's never going to be a time where it's a good time.
To get out. Because it's just going to get worse.
And of course, people say stay in the truck because it's dangerous to jump out right now.
But of course, the only reason why it's more dangerous now is because we didn't jump out at the top of the hill.
Or we didn't jump out two minutes ago, when it would have been even easier and safer.
And so people are, you know, maybe it's like being trapped on a balloon, you know, a hot air balloon, and you, you know, you're sort of stuck on the outside and you've got to jump off.
Well, of course, the longer you wait, the more likely it is to end badly.
So, for me, people saying, well, we need the state just for now, and then we'll get rid of it later, but there's this extreme danger.
Well, of course, for me, the extreme danger is always created by the state.
And even if we do accept that biodiversity or some environmental catastrophe or the war on terror or, you know, crazy Islamics, well of course these things have all come about because of the existence of the state.
So saying let's just use the state to get rid of these problems that the state has solved, when of course there is no evidence of the state solving these problems.
We just heard on the radio the other day that the whole Kyoto talks have completely broken down into pure nonsense and no one's doing anything about it anyway.
So, even if people did think that the state could solve it, they have lots of empirical evidence.
Even if they didn't believe the state created it, that state's never going to solve it.
It's sort of like, maybe you have this with your patients, where they say, well, yes, my husband is beating me, but, you know, it's Christmas.
So, I can't leave him.
You know, after Christmas, maybe.
Or... Yeah, but you're depressed because you're not doing these things.
It's a vicious circle. And it's only going to get worse the longer you postpone it.
Yeah, the longer you don't do these things.
So, part of getting better is, you know, even if you don't feel like it, even if you're exhausted.
Yeah, there's just a certain amount of willpower that you have to put in.
And so I think people want to defer just making that decision to advocate and go for a stateless society because there's all these great dangers and blah blah blah.
So, you know, if he's really concerned about biodiversity, which I don't think he is, sort of psychologically, but if he was, then he would absolutely be saying, look, let's just say we go for a stateless society right now and we achieve it in 20 years.
We're going to lose 50,000 species.
Let's just say, whatever number he's got, 10,000 species, I don't know what.
But if we don't do it, there'll be no species at all.
Because getting out of the idea that the government will ever solve your problems is a very difficult thing to do.
But once you accept that idea, then it really is like I can jump out of the truck now and get away with scrapes and bruises, or I can wait for a minute and then get a broken arm, or I can wait for two minutes and go up in a ball of flames and die.
Correct. I don't want to sound overly dramatic, but that's the way it's always sort of meant to me.
And people say, well, it's dangerous to jump out of the truck right now, so let's wait until later.
That seems to me entirely the wrong approach, right?
That it is the very failure to leap out of the truck that is increasing the danger all the time.
I was sort of interested in his whole thing about religion, right?
That he's been unable to get rid of religion.
And I would say that...
You know, this may be a stretch, and let me know what you think, but this idea of biodiversity, of a flourishing of various things, of an ecosystem, to me, knowledge is only really varied when you have reason.
Knowledge is not varied when you have faith, because you're just slamming down this conclusion.
What do you mean by varied? Knowledge is only really varied when you have reason.
What does varied mean?
I would say that if you look at something like art, you only have really a variety in art when you don't have a centralization of censorship.
So in the Soviet model of ultimate dictatorial censorship, you don't get a real flourishing of art, because it's just one thing.
It only flourishes when you have no central censorship, right?
And so for me, faith is the ultimate censorship, right?
Because faith says, I'm just going to believe something because of X. And it's never your own religion.
It's always someone else's. Like he's talking about Buddhism and Protestantism and so on.
It's always somebody else's ideas or imagination that's being imposed upon you.
And... It's not your own thoughts, really.
You're not working with first principles to reason your way into a wide variety of conclusions and constantly double-checking them and so on.
You already have a conclusion that's irrational and you then are constantly at war with reason in a fundamental way and you almost can't think Outside of the concept of faith because you've already accepted the concept of faith and it doesn't really give you any flexibility to, you know, it's like the people who say, but I love him, right?
The people who say about their, like the wives who will say about their husbands, you know, you say, well, he's a bad guy and they say, but I love him.
It's like, but if you love him, it's the conclusion.
You can't think about the relationship in any kind of sensible way.
Right. The relationship is not alive.
If loving someone is just taken as an axiom, that they just, I do love them, and that's virtuous, and that's the right thing, every discussion has to occur within that context, then you can't really discuss much, can you?
No, and what I was going to say, though, is he said he was atheist for six years, and then he sort of went back to it.
He went to agnosticism, and then he went away from agnosticism towards a kind of spirituality.
Protestantism. Yes.
Yes. And then after some...
So what does that mean? What does that do for your theory?
Because he did let go of it.
Well, I don't know what his atheism meant, though.
Was it a form of nihilism?
I would say because he graduated from atheism as a 13-year-old to nihilism, to radical skepticism as a 19-year-old, that his atheism was more a rejection of the perceived value of religion rather than the acceptance of a rational value.
Of rational values, or the value of reason.
Atheism, of course, is not a positive philosophy.
It's just a negation of God.
I have some things that I like to watch.
So, we'll pause. So, for me, the faith is...
Like, this guy has an illusion that the state is going to maintain diversity.
That the top-down hierarchy is going to maintain diversity.
Which is the same illusion.
And that the diversity can't be maintained without it.
Which is the same illusion that socialists have about a government promoting stability and economic growth within a society.
Which is the same fantasy that parents have that if they control their children, their children will be happier.
And so on, right?
And of course there is this belief that faith...
is something to do with enjoying the richness of the universe and the beauty of the universe and so on.
And that's not true at all.
Faith is just a conclusion that destroys your personality.
Faith is just an argument for morality about the existence of a higher being that totally conditions and undermines your capacity to think creatively, to have curiosity.
It puts a big line in the sand saying after here you can't go anywhere.
So I would say that Faith as a concept destroys the diversity of thought, right?
Because he's sort of going from glomming on from Catholicism to a kind of nihilism to an agnosticism to a Pentecostalism to a Buddhism to an environmentalism and so on.
And I get a sense of great pain and a great sense of absence of a particularly important aspect of the personality called the, you know, the reality processing ego or whatever, where you sort of think for yourself rather than run for, and I'm not saying this guy doesn't think for himself, but just in terms of this letter, that he's running from structure to structure.
Imagining that by believing other people's opinions or by having faith in that which is not proven and is not rational or is anti-proof and anti-rational that he's going to end up with a diversity of thought and that's how his wonder of the universe is going to be preserved but I would say that it's quite the opposite.
It's the self-destructive behavior that is sort of like somebody who feels unlovable sleeping around thinking that that's going to make them feel more loved.
It's the pursuit of the solution that is the problem.
And so I wonder the degree to which...
I wonder the...
I mean, sort of fundamentally, I wonder the degree to which people, when they think about biodiversity and the global warming and so on, I wonder the degree to which it's not just an emotional projection.
And that's why I always look, when people have these kinds of beliefs, like we need the government because of X, and this guy, you know, I need God to sort of keep myself structured, when of course it's God that's keeping him fragmented, right?
And people say, well, we need a state to keep us organized and to reduce conflict, and of course it's the state that creates and causes all this conflict.
And... We need the state to protect the environment when it's the state and the lack of private property that is causing the environment to get screwed up to begin with.
This addiction to the solution, which is in fact the problem, just seems very common.
So I just wonder what in the personality is Is causing that.
And I think for this guy, it's this addiction to faith that he thinks...
So he's very interested in protecting diversity, and so he wants to turn to the state.
And in the same way, I would say that he probably, within his own heart, wants to be more alive and free to think based on his own conclusions, his own processing of reality, his own sensual evidence, his own rationality, his own ego strength.
And in order to do that, he runs to religion, which destroys all of those things.
So, I just, you know, this idea that we need this solution to protect X when X is only a problem because of a prior preference for this solution.
We need to stay in the truck going down the hill, even though it's accelerating and bursting into flames and, you know, like there's spikes at the bottom and the tigers in the back are getting looser.
We need to stay, because we've already stayed in the truck so long, we need to stay in just a little bit longer and then I bet you it'll coast to a stop and we can get out gracefully.
And getting people out of that When you see somebody who's a real victim of domestic violence, you have to say to them, you will die.
You will get killed if you stay here.
Or you'll kill yourself.
It's like a drug addict or something.
You have to say to them, it's life or death.
You will die if you continue down this path.
There is no graceful exit from where we are.
So, that's what I was...
I mean, this is a very non-sologistic way of putting it, but I think that that is...
This idea that you protect what is most precious to you by that which is killing what is most precious to you seems to be very common in human nature.
I have no comment. All right.
Let me read you another letter then.
If that's okay. Sure, go ahead.
Now, he actually starts this out Good afternoon, ladies and gentlemen.
Do you think he's trying to...
Yeah, it's a deja vu of some kind.
Good afternoon everybody, it's Steph!
I think I'm squeakier than that.
He said, I have been busy, but I finally got a chance to go over and over.
Sorry, to go over the podcast where you, Steph, went over my post about the nature of morality.
This is one where I was talking about how morality is not designed to make you happy, but to eliminate barriers to unhappiness.
Oh, so to eliminate barriers to happiness, right?
Like a doctor doesn't make you happy, he just makes you not sick, right?
So... Now, in your podcast, you basically just criticized the idea of morality being about happiness.
That's fine, because obviously if the fundamental principle that I give is wrong, then it isn't really necessary to go over the conclusions that follow.
However, although much of what you said was true, I don't think your comments really disprove my argument.
And I think that what you said was just beating around the bush.
Shocking. Let me explain.
In your podcast, you argued that to say that the purpose of morality is to increase happiness is flawed, and that rather the purpose of morality is to eliminate the barriers that stand which stop people from achieving happiness, right?
So, the non-aggression principle is like, don't use force against other people.
That's not going to make them happy.
I mean, but if you're using force against them, they sure as hell aren't going to be happy, right?
But if you stop, they have the possibility, right?
Like, nobody's rich in the Middle Ages because there's no free market.
But when there's a free market, it doesn't mean that everyone gets rich.
It just means if you want to, you're free to pursue it.
So in other words, you were arguing that the purpose of morality is to create individual freedom.
It's one way of putting it.
But I would even say that there's such a thing as the purpose of morality.
What's the purpose of the scientific method?
To validate truth statements about it?
Reality. And I would say the purpose of morality, of philosophy, is to validate truth statements about reality.
You did a paper on it.
Sorry? You did a whole paper.
I did a whole number of papers on it.
And people, they always want to use morality to get something.
Like, the purpose of the scientific method is to make everybody wealthy.
And the purpose of capitalism is to make everybody rich.
Because none of these things are true.
All we're saying is don't shoot and hit people.
I mean, that's really all it comes down to.
Whether that makes people happy or wealthy, who knows?
Who cares? Fundamentally, because you can't change, you can't make other people happy.
You can strap down and inject, I don't know, morphine directly into their brain or something, but you can't make people happy, right?
So the answer to this is obviously that freedom lets people find their own path to happiness, which just brings us back to the idea that the purpose of morality is to increase happiness again.
Not true. I just don't believe morality is universally preferred behavior, which means that any proposition you put forward about what people should do should be reversible, up, down, backwards, should apply everywhere across.
Does that increase happiness?
I have no idea. The purpose of mathematics is to validate the proposition of numerical calculations.
Does that mean it's going to make people happy?
I don't know or frankly care.
I just think, for sure, people are going to be unhappy if you're pointing guns at their heads.
The same goes for your medical metaphor.
No, a doctor doesn't directly make you happy, but by curing your disease or whatever, he is eliminating a barrier that stood in the way of your happiness.
So ultimately, he is increasing your happiness.
He's decreasing your unhappiness.
At least increasing the probability that you will be happy.
Well, yeah, I mean, if you get your tooth pulled because it's killing you, but the dentist doesn't make you happy, you're going to feel relief because you don't feel unhappy anymore, but that's not the same as happiness.
There is little debate, however...
Sorry, this little debate, however, is really just semantics, which I don't agree with, but maybe saying that the purpose of morality is to increase happiness is an oversimplification.
But whether we say that morality should increase happiness, freedom, the freedom to pursue happiness, or whatever, the point still remains.
We have a moral code because we want to achieve a certain effect.
Again, I don't really believe that that's true.
We don't have the scientific method because we want to achieve a certain effect.
There is a certain effect that follows from capitalism and the scientific method, rationality and so on, which is truth and You know, whatever wealth follows often, but not for, you know, in general, but not for everyone.
Some people are worse off under capitalism, right?
I mean, the aristocracy, you know, for the time period, like, let's just say you're some aristocracy and then you get thrown out because there's capitalism, right?
You know, is George Bush going to do better under a free market society than he is where he is right now?
Of course, under a free market society, he's going to be like a used car salesman and probably not a very good one.
Certainly, he's going to be ruler of the known universe with all the nukes in the world at his command.
So I don't see how it matters, the individual effects of freedom or the non-aggression principle doesn't matter at all, because that's, again, it's saying that you should judge a proposition by its effects.
You know, it's like, 2 plus 2 is 5, so what if it makes people happy to believe that?
It doesn't matter whether it makes them happy or unhappy, it's just true, right?
And so, the point of...
So, why morality, which is a set of behavior rules, must be relative or situational.
For those who haven't been following...
Okay, sorry. The phrase universally preferred behavior is thus very misleading.
There is actually no such thing.
There is, however, such a thing as universally preferred effect, or at least effect that is virtually universally preferred.
This, I always find, why people have such a challenge with this universally preferred behavior thing, I have no idea.
I mean, other than the fact that it took me 23 years of thinking to come up with it, other than that minor hurdle, I can't imagine for the life of me why people have such a challenge, such a problem with this idea.
Since you've identified it? Yeah, since I've identified it.
So he says here, it's quite wonderful, right?
He says, there is no such thing as universally preferred behavior, right?
So he is saying that it is not preferable, in a universal sense, because it's false, it is not preferable to believe in universally preferred behavior.
I'm sorry, say that again.
It is universally not preferable to believe in universally preferred behavior.
Okay. So it is universally preferred to reject that there is universally preferred behavior.
This is the paradox that people just seem to have a tough time with.
Nobody can argue to me about anything to do with universally preferred behavior and expect me to not just take it as a silly opinion or even a serious opinion like I like jazz or whatever.
If somebody's trying to argue with me about a particular proposition and want me to change my mind, it's because they're appealing to something that is external to both of us, that it's universal.
So, whatever people say about universally preferred behavior requires, if they want me to change my mind, or want anyone to change their minds, requires the existence of universally preferred behavior.
And I also count for the life of me where he says, there's no such thing as universally preferred behavior, but there is such a thing as a universally preferred effect.
In other words, there is no such thing as a universally preferred cause, But there is such a thing as a universally preferred effect.
But I have no idea how you get an effect without a cause.
How do you get effect without behavior?
So if there's no such thing as a universally preferred behavior, but there is such a thing as a universally preferred effect, where is that effect coming from?
Is it magic? Is it God?
Is it a spirit? Is it whatever?
You can't have an effect without a cause.
Human behavior results in an effect that is morally judgeable.
And so I don't know how he's going to have a preferred effect or anything.
One poster wrote that I was confusing personal preference with morality.
Interestingly, however, morality is just an example of personal preference.
Now, this is wonderful, right?
What makes it special is that it is based on personal preferences that are virtually universal, such as the preference of life to death, happiness to suffering, and so on.
Interestingly, he says, however, morality is just an example of personal preference.
Right? So he's saying it's incorrect to view morality as anything other than personal preference, and that it is universally incorrect to view morality as anything other than personal preference.
But since morality is defined as universally preferred behavior, You can't say that it is universally preferred to believe that universal behavior is merely personal.
You simply can't escape this.
People keep trying to. What I'm trying to say here, to sum up my initial point, is that to say that a system is moral is to say that it works, plain and simple, which of course is not the case at all.
A system can't work.
The scientific method...
It doesn't work. It doesn't get up in the morning, take a shower and go fix your road, right?
It doesn't work. It does not work.
It's a methodology for determining truth from falsehood relative to reality.
Finally, let me just clarify that my argument does not disprove the morality of anarcho-capitalism, per se.
And, of course, there is no such thing as the morality of anarcho-capitalism.
That's like saying the scientific method of Einsteinian physics.
There is no scientific method of Einsteinian physics.
There is the scientific method, which is relative to reality, not relative to somebody's ideas, my ideas, other people's ideas.
So there's no such thing as the morality of anarcho-capitalism.
There is morality, which then results in an advocacy of anarcho-capitalism, blah, blah, blah.
So he says that my argument does not disprove the morality of an arc of capitalism per se, though I do believe it will logically lead you to that conclusion, but rather attempts to disprove the ideas outlined in the argument for morality argument.
That article implies that one can come to the conclusion that Anahu capitalism is the most moral system without even looking at what the effects of adopting that system would be.
This kind of thinking is dangerous, and is dangerous ironically for similar reasons that religious thinking is dangerous, but I won't get into that at the moment.
So he's saying that you can't possibly say that Anahu capitalism is the most moral system without judging the effects of that system.
Is it going to make people happier, right?
Because his morality is all about utilitarianism.
It's all about the increase of happiness, right?
But your goal, you know, in therapy is, you know, somebody says, should I leave my drunken, beating, drug-smoking husband?
And they say, can you guarantee me that I'm going to be richer and happier after I leave?
Well, you say yes, because you're a private practitioner, but when you were at the hospital, you wouldn't say that.
No, I can't say yes. Because you want them to come back and so on and so on, right?
But you don't say that your therapy is going to make you healthier, wealthier, and wise.
And you're not even going to say that in any measurable time frame it's going to make you happier, right?
No. In fact, it's going to make them decidedly less happy for quite some time.
Yes. So you can't judge therapy and say, well, therapy to be efficacious has to make everyone happy.
Of course, it's going to make some people very unhappy.
And, you know, if they get hit by a bus before they've completed the whole progress of therapy, then it was a bad idea, right?
It was definitely a very bad idea.
It's like you don't quit heroin if you're going to be dead in three days, right?
I mean, it's not a very good use of resources.
So this idea that we're going to judge a system based on the effects, you know, it's like, do we say, well, we're going to get rid of slavery, but first, before we get rid of slavery, we have to make sure that every single slave is going to be better off without slavery.
Or we have to be sure that slavery is going to lead to increased happiness in society overall.
First of all, who's going to choose that?
It's going to be self-reported.
Who is going to determine?
Again, it's the God perspective.
How do we know? Like, we live on the street.
How on earth do we know whether our neighbors are happy?
We have no idea.
Okay, we have a little bit of an idea, but not much.
Certainly not in any level of detail.
But we don't know whether our neighbors were happy or not.
We don't know. And even if we did, how on earth would we know what should be done to eat?
I mean, therapy and philosophy and so on.
But I'm talking about the average person, right?
We wouldn't know exactly what the cost balance, sorry, cost-benefit calculations would be to make them happy.
If we say, well, we can't put a new system in place until we figure out whether it's going to make people happier or not, all it means is that That you can never put any system in place.
The other thing that's amazing, too, is that if he says, well, we shouldn't put a system in place until we figure out whether it makes people happy or not, then he should be totally opposed to the existing system, to the government.
Because the government sure as hell wasn't put in place with the idea that it's going to make everyone happier.
It just grew out of a bunch of warlords and a bunch of people who managed to get control of the army.
So it's amazing to me that somebody who says, well, a system should maximize people's happiness, Is then saying, well, we should be cautious about this new system, which is based on rational morality, because we don't know the degree to which it's going to promote people's happiness or not.
And, of course, they don't say, well, the existing system fails my test, too, so we should definitely get rid of that.
And these two letters, I think, are very related, in that people always want an out.
They always, always, always want an out.
So this guy's like, yeah, I'm a libertarian, but what about biodiversity?
And this guy's like, yeah, I like libertarianism, I'm interested in anarcho-capitalism, but will it make everyone happier?
And so people are always trying to create this exit strategy, this exit scenario.
How am I going to not have to just...
Shut up and accept these ideas.
And I speak from experience, right?
I mean, I spend a lot of time thinking that the government could do X, Y, and Z. But they always want an out.
They always want to create some wriggle room, some escape clause from reality, from a rational argument.
Okay, I agree with you, but the state isn't really violent because when I break the laws, I go speeding, I don't get shot.
There's always some escape clause that people are trying to create.
It's the same thing in therapy.
People want a solution without going through the process first.
Tell me more. Well, just essentially, people define a problem and they want to immediately fix it.
And sometimes the solution is not to fix it, but to feel the emotions and to work through what is creating the problem to begin with, rather than putting a band-aid solution on something.
But tell me even more. That's it.
Come on, now I feel bad.
I have a 48-minute monologue, and you can do it in 20 seconds.
But at least I wasn't interrupting you.
If we jump to find conclusions, we often miss a lot of the important underpinnings of the problem that are essential.
The solution we may come up with in the end will be very, very different than the impulse we have to fix it right away.
Can you think of a non-patient specific example?
My mind is otherwise cluttered with the food that is about to be ready.
Alright, so we'll stop and we'll talk about this another time?
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