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Dec. 4, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
48:59
540 Testing Morality

Can you judge a moral theory by its effects?

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Good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
It's Jeff. It is the 4th of December 2006, 7.48 in the morning.
Had an interesting comment from a user on the board this morning.
Sorry about the board going down yesterday.
Something wacky happened with SQL Server, but we recited everything eventually, and it was fine.
So he says, this is a gentleman who's very interested in moral relativism, and he said, I noticed that in his article, Proving Libertarian Morality, Steph says a few things that seem to actually support what I have been saying about relative morality and that contradict his argument.
For example, quote, Morality is thus optional, but the effects of moral choices are measurable and objective.
This implies that to measure how good a moral code is, one has to measure the effect that it has.
This is exactly what I've been arguing, and what Steph has been arguing against this whole time.
He is being saying that the effect that a moral code has doesn't matter.
And yet here he says it himself.
Even more shocking, however, is that in his negative proof of morality, he offers the following.
If communism succeeds, theories based on the universal values of property rights are incorrect.
The implication here should be obvious.
But just to be sure, he is saying, or at least heavily implying, that if communism had succeeded, that its morality would have been correct, or it would have been a moral system.
But since it failed, it is an immoral system.
In other words, it is an immoral system because it had bad effects, and thus capitalism is a good system because it has good effects.
Even the fact that he refers to communism succeeding already contradicts itself.
Because in Podcast 517, I think, in his response to my post, he said something to the effect that a moral system cannot, quote, work any more than a logical or scientific method can work.
And yet here he says that communism is bad not because it is immoral, but because it doesn't work, which is not what I said.
And he says then, so much for moral absolutism, I guess he feels that he's demolished the argument.
Well, let's have a car alarm go off.
Sorry about that. Let's have a chat about his argument and sort of see.
And I'm willing to spend time, of course, on this question of moral relativism and measuring the effects because it's so fundamentally important to how we go about determining right and wrong and good and evil and so on.
So there are a couple of things about this post that I think are important.
First is that When you are debating a point with someone or arguing a point with someone, it generally is important to trace the logic.
This is before I read this post, but it's still true.
Quoting is not argument.
Right? Quoting is not argument.
There's this old thing that the Christians used to say that the Bible says there is no God, right?
And that's because in the Bible there is a quote that says, the fool has said in his heart there is no God.
And if all you do is you quote there is no God, then it makes the Bible sound like it is saying that there is no such thing as God, right?
So that's a rather obvious example, but you've got to be really careful when it comes to quoting.
This sort of, quoting another thinker and then saying, ah, he is implying here, blah-de-blah-de-blah, and there's lots of reasons why this is just not a good idea.
Because if you're right, then you're right accidentally.
Because even if I did contradict myself, a single quote out of context won't prove that.
All it will do is that I said, you know, these things that I said, but those aren't arguments, right?
So that's an important thing to understand.
I mean, unless if I say that a fish is a bird, then, of course, it's a self-contradictory statement.
But when you are looking at a long and reasoned argument of which both forget the argument from efficiency and proving libertarian morality...
Are fairly complicated, though not particularly lengthy, arguments, then you're going to have a lot of trouble if you're just going to quote someone.
And I say this not because, you know, that means I'm right, but all I'm saying is that you can't take a quote and then say, this quote...
First of all, it's one thing if the quote directly contradicts what it is that the argument is about, but the second thing is that if the quote implies...
Or if you say, he seems here to be saying, and therefore I have demolished his argument.
Like I've taken one sentence from a long series of arguments about the essence of morality, and he seems to be contradicting himself, and therefore his argument is demolished.
Or at least he seems to be contradicting my position, therefore his argument is demolished.
I'm just going to say that that's not a very good way to approach a debate.
And what it does is it shows quite clearly that you have an emotional reason for making this case, right?
And the emotional reason is probably something to do with the fact that if you accept the absolutism of morality, then you're going to have to make some difficult choices in your life.
I'm absolutely guaranteed that.
Or you're going to have to look in the mirror and say, you know, I've done things that are wrong.
And there's no way out of it, right?
I mean... So, if you accept, like this is the same thing with the prostitution argument, right?
Like if people then say, okay, well prostitution is always derived from rape victims or childhood rape victims or the leftovers of pedophilia.
If the institution of prostitution is simply the leftovers, the sort of smoking wreckage of a soul that's left over from these kinds of brutalizations, Then participating in it isn't the right thing.
People say, well, what will happen if there are no johns?
These people will starve to death.
It's like nonsense because the money they're spending on prostitution, they will spend on other things which will generate jobs and blah-de-blah-de-blah, right?
So we don't have to worry about that too much.
Or, of course, if they're so concerned, then they can, instead of spending a couple hundred bucks to bang a pedophile's leftovers, they can, in fact, donate it to a charity which will actually help these women rather than recreating their trauma.
So, when you get, everybody wants to find wriggle room.
Not everyone, but most people want to find wriggle room when it comes to their own souls.
So, we don't have a lot of wriggle room for the abstract DEA or the war against drugs or this sort of stuff.
We say there's no wiggle room there.
And I certainly don't say there's wiggle room for the government and it's bad and this and that and the other.
But when it comes to our own lives and the moral choices that we ourselves have made, Then we want some wiggle room.
We want to be able to say, well, there's one in a thousand wherein this is not the case, and I bet you I'm just a good enough guy, I'm a nice enough guy, I'm deep down decent enough a guy, but I'm that one in a thousand exception, right?
So, yes, maybe my brother did go to prostitutes, but, you know, there's a couple of happy ones out there, and therefore that must have been who he went to see because he's a nice guy, would never do anything, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, when you...
When you look at a quote, when you pull a quote and then do this big, Aha!
I've got him! You know, he's contradicting himself and so on and so on and so on.
Therefore, the argument for absolute morality is demolished.
Obviously, this is something that you have a very great personal stake in because you're not willing to approach the question...
And to examine it with the kind of rigor that it deserves, right?
So that's sort of the first thing I'd say.
Beware of the quote.
Beware of the quote and the seeming, especially when you can't even find a quote that says morality is subjective, and then say, well, this quote implies that morality is subjective, and there's Steph's entire body of philosophical podcasts and literature and all books, because I've got a fair amount in my novels.
And his articles and all that, it all falls to the ground because I found two quotes wherein it seems to be implied that blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
So, just be careful of that kind of stuff because that, it doesn't exactly indicate anything really about me, but it sure does indicate quite a lot about you, right?
I mean, just because it's just not very rigorous.
So, that having been said, let me sort of explain a little bit what I was trying to get at.
And, you know, with the caveat, of course, you know, remember when...
If I write four volumes on moral philosophy and I haven't answered something, then, by all means, you can get as mad at me as you want and you can say, gee, that's lazy or...
You know, he's obviously avoiding a question or he's trying to fudge something because, look, the man had four volumes.
He had 2,000 pages to make his point and he still hasn't made his point.
And if, however, you're reading a two-pager on the theory of morality on lewrockwell.com or on my blog, you might want to extend me the graciousness of asking for clarification rather than condemning me or saying that I'm contradicting myself or this or that, right? And again, that's just because...
It's two pages, right?
Or two and a half pages, or three pages, or whatever it is on proving libertarian morality.
It sure as heck isn't four volumes, right?
Now, moral philosophers have tried to make their case in multi-volume opuses, Magnum Opi.
And that, of course, is something that I have a fair amount of skepticism of.
It's the reason why you write so much.
So I try and boil it down a little bit more, both for ease of use and also because I think that the case can be made.
But, of course, you can't answer every objection about the elements of morality, which has been the greatest challenge of the human mind, I would say.
You can't answer every conceivable objection from 3,000 years of human history and philosophy and every conceivable objection that could come up.
You can't answer that.
In two or three pages of text while you're expounding your theory, which is pretty much contrary to not all of what has gone before.
So the only thing that I would also suggest is that if something seems unclear in a two or three page article on morality, that it might be worth writing to the author and saying, can you clarify this?
Because I can't reconcile this.
And of course, if the author then can't clarify it, or the author says, doops, typo, or yeah, I've changed my mind since then, or whatever, I'll go back and correct it, thank you so much.
Then good for you, right? You've helped somebody correct their thinking.
You've clarified and so on.
But if...
And anyway, so of course I also wrote something called Forget the Argument from Efficiency, which was a very strong article.
Strong. I shouldn't say that.
It's my own article. It was a concise, let's say, in the way that the podcast...
It was a concise article on how judging something or arguing for a change in policy...
Because there's a different effect.
Or defending libertarianism based on effect is both impractical and...
Actually, I think it mostly just went with impractical.
One sec. And if you wanted to, you know, if you wanted to reference, there's a reason I wrote that article, and if you wanted to reference it, then you could.
And, of course, I did a podcast on the problems with utilitarianism.
I've done several podcasts on them, and that might also be, I know it's a bit of a bitch to transcribe.
You don't have to do more than a point or two, or at least you can summarize the argument that I'm making in half a paragraph, usually, but Then that might be something worth looking into.
You know, if you want to rebut an argument, then you can either say, look, I don't, you know, this argument troubles me and I'm going to have to sort of mull it over.
But of course, the first thing you want to do is ask yourself, why are you arguing back, right?
That's sort of an important question.
This is part of the count to ten, sort of, have I experienced.
Is there any motive that I would have for fighting this idea of absolute morality?
Because, of course, you're saying that there's all the contradictions involved in relativistic morality, that there is no such thing as an absolute statement that there is no such thing as absolute good.
But, of course, when you say that relativistic morality is the ideal, then you're saying that there is a standard of value.
There's good and there's bad. There's right and there's wrong.
And that absolutist morality is absolutely incorrect because you can't have a superior value that is consistent.
But of course you've just created a superior value that is consistent called relativistic morality, which is itself an absolutist statement.
So I just wish people would stop trying to fight their way out of this conundrum.
You simply cannot logically state that there is such a thing as relativistic morality and that all arguments for absolute morality are incorrect.
You simply cannot state that.
And people will fuss and fight from now.
They won't believe me, and that's fine.
They will fuss and fight and waste time and twist and turn and they will do everything in their power to avoid the basic logical contradiction that is involved in that statement that there is no such thing as absolute morality.
And, you know, this will be just, you know, the people waste an enormous amount of time on pursuit of God and justifying the state and praising war and so on.
And people waste an enormous amount of time and energy trying to sort of prove with, you know, saying it's logically inconsistent that there is such a thing as logic and therefore there is no logic and I've proved it using, let's call it, bodgic.
Right? And it's the same thing with, you know, you have to stop arguing for absolute morality because it is absolutely true that there is no such thing as a universal standard.
And you have to believe that because it's a universal standard.
Like, I mean, I wish people would just stop wasting their time on this stuff, but you can't change people's minds logically where they have an emotional block to it, right?
Where it's going to cost them something emotionally.
Where it's going to cost them something emotionally.
They have to come to that themselves, and that isn't really to do with logic.
It is more to do with figuring out whatever the emotional block is that makes you resist that.
We all know this, and we see this when it comes to, let's just say, the Republicans who tune into Rush Limbaugh and so on.
And they're all like, yeah, go rush, right?
And he's all anti-war, anti-drugs, sorry, pro-drug war and anti-drugs.
And then he's caught getting his maid to buy drugs for him because, you know, they're like, well, he's in pain, man!
It's painkillers, you know?
And you just see this all happen, right?
Or the feminists who are so big and...
So big on Bill Clinton, and then when he turns out to be using one of his assistants as his own personal geisha, they're strangely silent, right?
I mean, we see this stuff all the time in the world where people take a fixed position based on pretty much emotional, some intellectual content, but it's mostly emotional history and family or reaction to family.
And then whatever news comes along, We're good to go.
Communism should fail. And for the communists, it's like, well, communism is a good ideal, but Stalin did it badly, or that structure did it badly, or human beings aren't good enough for...
You have this axiom, and whatever piece of information comes along, you just wrap around this particular axiom, and you can just explain anything away.
So, Stalin would promise massive wealth in overtaking the West.
And then if it didn't occur, it was because the West was sabotaging or there were spies or whatever.
And so this kind of stuff is just very common.
You have a proposition and then when you encounter information that is contrary to that proposition, you just make up a reason.
It's a fundamentally religious approach to thinking.
Here's my theory. If the evidence doesn't fit the theory, I'll just make up an adjunct to the theory.
I'll just promote another theory to be close to it.
And that will save my theory.
This is scholasticism.
This is the Ptolemaic astronomy theory.
And this is a lot of people's thinking.
Because you're not getting to the emotional core of why it is that you believe that you need to fight this or why it is you need to fight this.
So why would somebody need to fight absolute morality?
Because they're guilty about something.
And again, look, I know, I absolutely know that this sounds like, and I'll deal with this sort of right up front, this sounds like exactly what I'm criticizing others for doing and what I've been criticized countless times for doing, which is to say, well, somebody's disagreeing with me, therefore they have emotional problems, therefore Steph's premise is that to disagree with Steph is to have an emotional problem.
Which is obviously a pretty screwed up way of looking at truth, right?
So, I fully understand that, and I fully understand that people will feel that.
I would say, though, that if you feel that strongly about me, that you might want to look into something called projection.
And again, I know that people are going to say, oh, so if you have any questions about Steph, or if you criticize Steph at all, you're projecting your own blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, right?
Well... But the problem is that when you get a post which says, I've taken two quotes out of context, which seem to indicate and therefore your whole theory is demolished, clearly that's not somebody who's interested in a logical argument.
I'm sort of basing my theories on the reality of what I get.
right?
As the people just sort of, they fire from the hip, blindfolded, and, you know, think that they're rifle shooting something 2,000 miles away.
Well, of course, they're going to miss, right?
The question is, why do they not aim, right?
Why don't they take the time to aim?
Because if it's important to have a question to you that you feel the need to sit down and write a post, or, I mean, email or whatever, that's great.
I fully say, I think it's wonderful.
And, and I love to be corrected. If it's important enough to do that, but it's not important enough to understand the person's argument or to ask for clarification, Then, obviously, you don't want to win.
I mean, we'll just use some base sports things here.
You obviously don't want to beat me if you just shoot from the hip, right?
I mean, if we're in a shootout, we're in a logical shootout, and you've seen that I'm not too bad with a six-gun, a six-shooter?
A six-shooter! There you go.
Boy, haven't I watched a lot of Westerns.
And, you know...
We're sort of standing in the dusty street, and you've seen me take down 20 guys this morning, and then you're like, hey, I'm going to take this guy on.
I don't need to practice. I don't need to study his moves.
I don't need to whatever, right?
I'm going to go into the ring with Mike Tyson, and I'm not even going to work out beforehand.
I'm not going to study his moves.
I'm not going to build myself up.
I'm not going to practice. I'm just going to go, well, of course you're not going in to win, right?
This guy desperately wants me to free him from...
From this subjectivism, right?
Because it's illogical and because it's a false self absolute, right?
The false self can handle contradictions without any problem whatsoever because the false self is not empirical.
And problems with contradictions only come from empiricism and, of course, the resulting logic.
But if, you know, I've gone through the introduction to philosophy, at least sort of my take on it, and I've written, you know, I don't know, probably half a dozen articles with dealing with this.
There's at least a dozen podcasts.
So if somebody comes in and takes a quote or two and then says, I slammed you, right?
Well, this person does not want to win.
That's just empirical.
Because he's obviously an intelligent fellow, obviously a very intelligent fellow.
And he's obviously seen me deal with a lot of people before.
I've certainly dealt with him before.
So, he obviously doesn't want to win the argument because he's not running through my logic and saying, here's where you're at fault.
And fundamentally, he can't.
At least when it comes to, you can't point out that somebody else's argument is at fault and then say that there's no such thing as objective standards, right?
I mean, that's just a complete contradiction and people will, as I said, spend the rest of their lives twisting around this nonsense, right?
Because of their emotional things.
But either he's somebody who's, you know, maybe he's never been corrected before, or maybe he's like the smartest guy around, and he wins every argument, and maybe it's a vanity thing.
But I would say that most likely it's because there's either he himself or someone in his life has done something that is not so good, and they're having...
He's having trouble processing that and the consequences of not being able to evade that knowledge by recognizing a universal kind of morality.
I'm just working empirically.
I'm not making up reasons as to why this guy is posting like this.
This is not to pick on this guy.
This is just people who send me this.
I get these all the time.
Aha! You said this here and you said that there.
Well, how about an argument?
Rather than saying you have quotes that seem to contradict each other.
So anyway, enough of that. I'm sure you get the general idea that when I put this much work into the podcast and into articles and so on, if you want to take me on, and you're not taking me on because we're both brothers in pursuit of the truth, so if you want to take on an argument I put forward, fantastic.
But at least put one-tenth of one-thousandth of a percent of work into the rebuttal, as I have, into the argument.
That's sort of all I'm asking, really, which is to try and understand things a little bit more deeply than, here's some contradictory quotes, Steph is disproven, and do your dance of triumph, right?
Anyway, so let me sort of go a little bit more into, and sorry about that lengthy exposition, but the traffic was slow.
So let me go a little bit more into this topic in the content and the form of it rather than in the motivation behind it so that you can at least sort of understand where I'm coming from and then you can tell me whether it makes any sense.
So, of course, I say absolutely, and I fully stand behind it, that if communism worked beautifully, then the theory of property rights would be incorrect.
Absolutely. Absolutely.
That is how you test, you compare a theory to reality, without a doubt.
But I could have equally said, if communism worked well, then the theory of property would be contradictory, right?
Because contradictory theories don't work well, right?
In science, or particularly in morals, economics, and so on.
Contradictory theories don't work well, so it would mean that reality would be fundamentally different than what it is, which would mean that the communist theory of property...
Like, for communism to work, there would literally have to be two species...
Of human beings, one of whom was super intelligent and super virtuous who got to control all the property and the other of which was, you know, half retarded and drooling and unable to care for itself in the sort of philosopher king slash gold and silver of Plato's Republic.
For communism to work, there would have to be a vast majority of people who were unable to care for themselves and there would have to be a minority of people who were super intelligent and super virtuous.
And this would have to be something that would be testable, right?
You wouldn't put this communism into practice and then say, gee, I hope these people come out of the woodwork, because, boy, if they don't, this sucks a little.
You wouldn't do that, right?
That's not scientific. But if, yes, then saying everyone had absolute rights to property that were equal wouldn't make any sense because you've got these people who can't, you know, they can't brush their teeth, they can't tie their shoes, they can barely get out of bed.
Of course they need to be kept like cattle, you know, relative to the super intelligent, super virtuous people.
So, and there would have to be a biological difference between these Morlocks and whatever the other ones were from the time machine.
But this sort of stuff would have to be there, right?
And then you would be able to say, well, we can't, in the same way that we have between humans and animals, we don't have the same moral obligations, rights, and this and that and the other.
Then you don't have that.
You wouldn't have that same between two different objective classes of human beings.
And of course, since these classes of human beings don't exist, and there is a bell curve distribution of intelligence and ability and so on across the spectrum, then naturally it would be the case that you would have a different kind of society, without a doubt, right?
No question. But...
The fact that I say that if communism worked beautifully and capitalism didn't, that existing theories of property rights that I'm talking about would be incorrect, doesn't mean that you just throw whatever you want into a theory of property rights, three squirrels and a shrub, and say, that's my theory of property rights, let's see if it works.
Try it out for, you know, 20 or 30 or 40 or 50 years and then see what the effects are, right?
That would not be scientific at all, right?
I mean, there's a science called nutrition, of course, and exercise or health or whatever it is.
Eat well and exercise. But you don't sort of say to people, eat whatever you want and we'll check back with you in 30 years and see what your health is like.
And we'll put you on a diet of ball bearings and we'll put you on a diet of squirrel's tails and we'll put you on a diet of hair pieces and we'll put you on a diet of tires and you on a diet of asparagus only and so on.
You don't do that and then sort of randomly try anything and then see what the effects are and call it science.
That's not scientific at all.
I mean, that's like saying, I'm a writer trying to get published because I randomly type letters and then I hope that at some point I'm going to produce a novel that is great.
I mean, that would not be being a writer.
Being a writer would say, well, at least have a theme, an idea, characters, a plot, use grammatically correct sentences, use basic standard formatting so you can read it, or if you're not, you're doing some alternative thing, that's fine too, but it's a choice.
You wouldn't call somebody who randomly types and say, well, this person's a writer trying to get published.
It's like, no, this person is functionally not doing very well and probably needs to get some sort of professional care rather than continue to be provided with the illusion that he's a writer.
So... In the same way, when it comes to a moral theory, of course, I mean, you test your theories against reality.
More importantly, you can derive some of your theories or some of the initial impetus behind your theories from reality.
Right? Because there's not a lot of theories about why human beings have unicorn horns coming out of their foreheads.
People don't spend a whole lot of work.
I mean, you could spend a whole lot of work and say, well, gee, I wonder why these unicorn horns come out of people's foreheads and you could come up with all these possible calcium buildups and giraffe genes or whatever.
Who knows? But people don't do that.
And why? Well, because there's no evidence that any unicorn horns come out of people's foreheads, right?
So, if, on the other hand, you know, tomorrow, a million people woke up with unicorn horns sticking out of their forehead, it's quite likely that there would be some intellectual effort expended in trying to understand and explain that, right?
That would be a fairly sensible thing to do, because they would be like, wow, unicorn horns, A, cool.
B, what the hell is going on?
That would be what people would do, and it would sort of make sense to do that, because you would have new evidence which would provoke new theories.
However, if I put forward my unicorn horn theory, and I said, well, the reason why people are getting all these unicorn horns growing out of their heads is because invisible spaceships around the Earth are beaming down unicorn under people's foreheads using a technology of which we know nothing and can never describe.
Well, people might say, okay, how is it falsifiable?
Is it testable? No, it's not testable.
Okay, so it's not really a theory.
It's just a sort of insane opinion, right?
The devil made me do it.
It's the dance of the devil's hooves.
It's the impact of the devil's hooves as he dances across the foreheads of people that produces the unicorn horns.
Okay, we'll get right back to you for that lead page entry in Scientific American.
That wouldn't be a theory at all.
That would just be a nonsensical opinion that somebody would make up and it wouldn't mean anything.
It would be religious in context or in content.
So, of course, there's an interplay between theory and reality.
I mean, there's no question of that, which I went through, of course, in the introduction of philosophy, particularly metaphysics and epistemology.
There's no question that we know something is logical with comparison to reality.
Of course, I was talking about this yesterday in the Colin show.
Never denied it, certainly, absolutely part.
Like, it's not a gotcha to say, ah, you've said something that you have stood behind since the beginning, and so I've gotcha.
It's like, well, yeah, I did say that, and I continue to stand by that.
Because if you look at the alternative, right, if I say I have a moral theory that is completely untestable with relation to reality, right, then it is the devil's footprints create the unicorn horns that are appearing on people's foreheads.
How is it testable?
Well, it's not. It's not testable.
Well, then it's not a theory, right?
So this is basic science.
If you come up with something which cannot be tested, then it's not a theory.
It's just a nonsensical opinion.
And this is true even if it's consistent, right?
Even if you work out a whole Dungeons and Dragons fiend folio etymology and hierarchy of devils and you come up with their DNA and it all is perfectly logical and you work out the economics of hell and it all perfectly makes sense and it's a completely internally consistent theory, well, still, if there's no evidence for it whatsoever, then, you know, it's kind of problematic, right?
So, From that standpoint, yeah, of course moral theories need to be validated relative to reality.
There's no question. There's no question.
But the first thing that moral theories need to be is logical and consistent.
This is the first thing.
Before you go around testing stuff, you need to have your theory be logical and consistent.
This is what you do in the lab before you go out into the field.
This is what you do in your attic before you go present at a conference or before you go start gathering data.
What you do is you say, well, is this stuff logical?
Is what I'm putting forward as a theory logical and consistent?
That's the first thing that you need to do.
Now... If it's logical and consistent, then it should have predictive abilities vis-à-vis reality.
Of course, that's how you're going to test it.
It's exactly how Einstein tests the theory of relativity, right?
I mean, you put tests forward, and I've gone over these before, so I won't bore you with them again, but you put your tests forward as you would with anything, right?
These guys a couple of years ago said, oh, we've got fusion in a jar.
Well, fantastic. Let's test it.
Oh, it doesn't work. Sorry, even if your theory is totally consistent internally, it is not consistent relative to the actual behavior of matter.
So, it doesn't work, right?
So, when you're preparing a meal plan for someone, you ask them some questions.
And, of course, that meal plan is going to be different if they're diabetic and it's going to be different.
But the central goal of that always is health.
And the science of nutrition is still going to go through the same process.
And we also have this in the realm of morality because, of course, morality does require a certain amount of human responsibility and a certain amount of capacity to reason, which is why there's the insanity defense and why there's the non-capacity defense in a court trial.
Even DROs, if you're functionally retarded and you do something violent, you're assumed that you don't have the capacity to judge right and wrong and therefore your punishment is transferred to treatment or whatever.
So, There's going to be that kind of approach.
That doesn't mean that morality is subjective.
I've gone into this a number of times before.
So when it comes to something like property rights, well, the first thing that you would need, of course, is you, I mean, the way that I sort of started was to say, well, okay, well, communism doesn't work.
So there's a clue in there for additional theorizing.
That doesn't mean that we randomly keep trying variations of communism, and it doesn't mean that we randomly say, well, now...
All the leprechauns own the property and nobody else can touch it.
Let's see how that goes. Two weeks later, everyone's dead.
Actually, less, right? You've got to drink, right?
So three days later, everyone's dead.
Oh, bummer. Let's try another theory.
It's the fairies who own all the property rights.
And now, let's say it's Bob's cat who owns all the property.
That's not how you theorize, right?
I mean, obviously, I'm not saying that you're suggesting this if you're the one listening to this who wrote the post, but clearly that's not how you would theorize.
You would start with observed events, observed phenomena, and sometimes.
Sometimes. Not always.
Einstein didn't start with observed phenomenon for the theory of relativity.
He just said, what if the ether isn't real?
What if the ether isn't valid?
What if the speed of light is constant?
And he sort of worked from that.
And he didn't have any predictive stuff when he first started on his theory.
He didn't observe things and say, well, only this could explain it.
He was saying, well... There's kind of an inconsistency in this theory, right?
It's getting too messy, too complicated, too weird.
It's the same thing with the Ptolemaic theory and the Copernican Revolution.
He did obviously work with some observed facts, but even if he hadn't worked with the observed facts, he could certainly explain the basics, right?
The retrograde motion of Mars and so on, with an appeal to a heliocentric solar system, right?
So, Obviously, you're going to have to see that there's something wrong with the existing theories.
It's why I don't really argue with gravity, like theories of gravity that say, here's how far something's going to fall, because gravity seems to work, right?
It seems to be pretty consistent.
But if somebody said, you know, 12 million elves are the ones responsible for gravity, then, of course, the question is, why 12 million?
Why elves? What's the matter with leprechauns?
And so on. So when a theory gets sort of complicated and weird, then it's usually not something that needs to be questioned and overturned.
Now, and it's sort of one of the reasons why you didn't get a specifically libertarian argument with the exception of Spooner coming out.
We did the sort of first, you know, 50 to 75 years of the American Revolution because, you know, it seemed to work.
It seemed to be working. Right now, you're getting more libertarianism stuff coming out since the Great Society in the 50s and since the disasters in communism, Great Society in the 60s, sorry, and the disasters of communism that arose.
You're starting to get some more critical views of the state.
So, yeah, there's no question.
I'm not going to fall into the trap of saying you can't test theories against reality because that's scholasticism and that's religion.
So, yes, you do, of course, of course.
But the first hurdle that has to be cleared for any theory is that it has to be logical and consistent and universal and reversible and testable.
And testable, of course.
I've never said that you would...
I'm very much keen on the scientific method, right?
So if you want to jump all over my moral theory, the first thing you need to do is find weaknesses in the scientific method or weaknesses in the way that I've used the scientific method to work on moral questions.
I'm certainly happy to...
This is nothing that I want to get wrong, and I have no vanity associated with this, so please tell me if I'm wrong.
But a good way to sort of figure it out is to say, well, okay, if Steph says that theories should be testable...
Is that like the scientific method?
Yes. Well, do I think that things in the scientific method should be testable?
Well, yes. What does Steph think about untestable theories?
Well, there's no null hypothesis, so it's all nonsense.
So when Steph says that moral theory should be testable, is that inconsistent with his other opinions?
No. Okay, well, what could he mean then?
And if you can't figure it out, you can just ask me.
And if I say, gee, I've never noticed, that's a wild contradiction, then you'll get, you know, I guess full kudos and minion status with me praising your digging up of something that's really obvious that I missed, and that would be fantastic.
But, you know, if you just take a couple of quotes and then say, ah, I've beaten the entire argument of Steph, then obviously I'm going to start to question your motives, right?
Because this is not somebody who's really interested in truth.
This is somebody who's interested in doing two things, and I don't know what the variation of those is.
One is he's interested in...
In being right and triumphant and ha!
And the other is that he's interested in there being no such thing as absolute morality and people who are comfortable with their own virtue are not uncomfortable with absolute morality.
In fact, they view it as a kind of comfort, right?
Because it means that the trials of being a good person are sort of worth it because, you know, you're...
The same way that if prayer could get you a scientific answer, then scientists who went to get a graduate or postgraduate work in physics or biology or chemistry or something, they'd feel kind of stupid.
Because if you could just pray and get the answer to unified field theory, then it'd be kind of stupid to go to university for physics rather than, say, a seminary for theology.
So, yes, of course, there's no question theories have to be testable.
But that doesn't mean that theories are validated by testing.
Theories are not validated by testing.
Not all theories, right?
The first thing is that A, theories have to explain all prior phenomenon.
That's sort of a basic, right?
And, of course, it's the prior phenomenon.
That have a fair amount to do with which theories get picked under work.
And as I said, if there's a phenomenon of people growing unicorns, then there's going to be theories theorizing around that.
So you have, of course, all of history to work with when it comes to validating a theory.
But before you do any of that, Before you do any of that, you have to make sure that your theory is universal and consistent.
And theories of relative morality are inconsistent within the first 10 seconds, right?
It's like theories that deny the evidence of the senses are inconsistent because they use the senses to be transmitted.
You have to read or hear them.
Theories which argue for the lack of validity of the senses are inconsistent.
Theories which argue for the existence of God are inconsistent because there's no null hypothesis.
So, or irrelevant, right?
But definitely incorrect in that, you know, well, we've gone over this before.
So, the first thing that theories need to do, need to be, is consistent internally and logical.
That's the first thing that somebody works out, right?
So, there's an observed phenomenon, right?
They go, holy crap, you know, X is happening.
Okay. You don't just sort of randomly, you know, I'll toss a rubber boot in there and see if X still happens.
Okay, cross off rubber boots.
Let's try plastic boots, right?
Or something like that. You don't sort of go through that process.
You then go to try, you abstract from the immediate sensual evidence to the behavior of the thing itself, right?
Of the atoms or whatever, right?
So you work from observed phenomenon and then you abstract.
And when you abstract, it has to be consistent with all of the other observed phenomenon and with logic itself, which is derived from observed phenomenon and so on.
So you work that way and you try to extract a principle, right?
I mean, that's the work of theorizing, right?
And you say, well, it's happening because of this.
And then you test.
Of course, you work for the internal consistency, and yes, then of course you test it against reality.
But it's the step of making it universal, logical, consistent, and conforming with all prior observed information that This is why, like, 99.9% of ideas that people have don't work,
right? Including mine, right? And this is why, you know, like, one out of 10,000 ideas that a scientist has actually get through how you spend years doing the experimentation and trying to do the proof and then publishing it in peer-reviewed journals and so on, right? Once you...
Once you go through that process of filtering, then yes, you will apply your theory to reality.
You will test your theory relative to empirical reality, for sure.
But there's a massive weeding out process that goes on before that ever happens, right?
There's a massive weeding out process that occurs before that ever happens.
And that's the problem with the idea of relative morality, that people believe that you can just bypass that whole internal consistent and explaining all prior phenomenon and behavior before, and they say, well, let's test this theory.
Well, let's test that theory, right?
Because all the theories that are put forward by utilitarians and moral relativists are all nonsense, right?
Because the first one is that you just grab any theory and test it and see if it works or not.
Of course, You are kind of experimenting on life, human beings who only get to go through this life once.
So if you make a mistake, it's kind of dictatorial.
There's an implicit dictatorial element in it because you need a state in order to be able to put these things into effect, to enforce them and so on, right?
But, you know, the internal...
They're looking at the end result of the scientific method and saying that is the scientific method.
Well, look, they're testing their theory.
And the theory is not valid until it's tested.
And therefore, all moral theories must be tested.
But that's ridiculous, right?
That's like saying, whenever people deliver stuff to Walmart, they make a lot of money.
Whenever suppliers deliver stuff to Walmart, that's an observed phenomenon.
They make a lot of money. Therefore, I'm going to load up all the junk in my garage and deliver it to Walmart and make a lot of money, right?
Because you're looking at the final effect of a very long, complicated process of innovation, creation, marketing, packaging, negotiation.
I mean, you could go on and on, right?
And I do. But you don't want to look at the effect of a long process and say that's the only relevant aspect.
Right? I mean, I'm not even going to come up with more examples because you kind of get it, right?
But that's sort of the process.
And yes, of course, if I came up with a perfectly consistent moral theory...
And then tested it against reality, and it was perfectly like it didn't predict or explain anything, in fact it predicted and explained the exact opposite, then sure, I would be absolutely hesitant to put it out, and I would go back to work on my theory, just as a scientist would.
But that really is the fundamental aspect, right?
So the interesting thing is that the utilitarians and other people who put forward relativistic moral theories, they do say that a theory must be consistent with reality.
I mean, in a kind of argument-after-the-fact kind of way, that you just throw any shit to the wall and see if it sticks.
But... So they're very interested in consistency, which I think is a good thing.
Obviously, it's a good thing to be interested in the consistency of your theories.
Now, they're only interested, though, in the consistency of the theories relative to reality.
And therefore, they're uncomfortable with any universal predictive statements because they can always find exceptions to that predictive statement, or at least they believe they can.
And therefore, because they're merely empirical, And not conceptual and not rigorously logical.
Because they're merely empirical, they can find evidence.
To the contrary, and so they feel they can never be certain.
Right? Like if I say, well, everything falls to the ground at 9.8 meters per second per second, and then you say, well, have you tested everything?
Well, no, I haven't tested everything in the world.
I haven't tested you from the Leaning Tower of Pisa.
I haven't dropped you down.
So no, I haven't tested everything.
And then they say, well, how can you be sure?
Because it's merely empirical.
So in order for anything to be true, everything has to be tested.
But that's exactly what happens when you don't have a logical and consistent theory.
Then you say, well, I can't give you insulin because it does help everyone with diabetes, but I haven't tested you yet.
Well, no. It's because you understand the nature of human biology and the properties of insulin and the progress of diabetes.
And so, yeah, you do kind of get it, right?
I mean, you're not sort of stabbing blind here.
So if you're merely empirical, of course you're going to be forever uncertain.
And this is back to the prostitution debate.
People say, well, you can't prove that every single prostitute in the world was a victim of sexual abuse.
Well, that's certainly true.
Of course I can't prove that. I mean, that would be impossible.
But even if I could simultaneously test everyone magically and get honest and perfect and complete answers, by the time I'd collated the results, there'd be 1,000 new prostitutes or 10,000, so I'd have to go, right?
So this is just saying that you can't be certain of anything.
And that's fundamentally what I dislike so much about utilitarianism and these kinds of merely empirical things, where you say, well, you can't have a theory.
You can only test reality.
And that, of course, is not valid.
It's not valid at all.
It's not valid by their own criteria, because they have a theory about how you should test reality.
So if somebody comes and says, everything's relativistic, or utilitarianism is the ideal, then I would say, well, have you tested that in every conceivable instance?
And they would say no. And then I'd say, well, then by your own criteria, your theory is false, right?
If you say, well, you have to test every single moral theory, then I would say to the person, and see the effects, and that's how you know whether the moral theory is good or bad, I would say, well, that's great.
Have you yourself tested every moral theory and have empirical results, and thus have been able to prove this?
Well, no. Well, then, by your own theory, the idea that you should test moral theories, since you haven't done it, that theory is false.
So, again, this is the kind of stuff that is just so basic and obvious that...
The reason that I say that people have an emotional block is because I just genuinely can't believe that they're stupid.
This is my basic belief in humanity.
I mean, people get mad at me for ascribing emotional motives to people who disagree with me, and I understand that.
It's a lot kinder than the alternative, right?
To say to somebody, you're really smart, which of course is almost always the case with people who send me emails or posts or whatever.
You're really smart, but this part you haven't thought through because you've got an emotional block, right?
Because there has to be some reason why they haven't thought through this, right?
I mean, it can't just sort of be random, right?
Otherwise, they've got a brain injury, right?
So I like to say, and I do believe that it's worked out the majority of times that I've had this theory, I like to say, you're really smart, but you've got to block.
Because you've missed this kind of basic obvious thing.
You're putting my theory to the test and finding it wanting without ever having put your theory to the test and found it true.
So obviously somebody's either malevolent if they do that, or they're really stupid.
Or they have an emotional block.
Now, I don't believe that most people are malevolent.
I certainly don't believe that most people are stupid.
I think that the race is an untapped genius in general.
So the only thing that I can, sort of the third result, is that they have an emotional problem, right?
So they have an investment in some kind of theory that either has been inflicted on them or they use themselves to justify some sort of behavior that they're not fundamentally proud of and that they can't reconcile with With their sort of desire to be a good person, which of course we all have.
So it's not out of cruelty and it's certainly not out of defensiveness that I say that people have emotional blocks.
It's because the arguments are so easy to be falsified and they haven't put the work into it that naturally they have this kind of block.
And I will... Maybe I'll spend a little bit of time this afternoon talking about my experience this way, because I'm no more immune to this than I am immune to being carbon-based and a human being.
So I hope that that will help.
So it's not cruelty.
It's certainly not superiority. It actually rescues people from a much worse kind of condemnation to say that they have an emotional block, and that's why they're putting these silly arguments forward.
You know, you'll get to be a whole lot smarter and happier if you accept that.
Of course, if I've made mistakes as well, you can certainly try that.
But that would be my approach.
So thank you so much for listening.
I really appreciate it. I got some nice donations this weekend.
I massively appreciate that too.
And I will talk to you all this afternoon.
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