All Episodes
Previous Next
Dec. 14, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
38:51
557 Testing Ethics
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Good afternoon, everybody. It's Steph.
Hope you're doing well. It's one o'clock.
I lost my recording again this morning.
I didn't lose it.
It was kind of weird. I have never had this before.
But I was using...
I decided to do a YouTuber.
And so I put my...
I put my...
Good...
Good microphone to work on the...
I went by my webcam and I got this weird crackling all the way through it.
And I was sort of half and half about whether to keep it or not, but I decided to ditch it.
I'm not sure exactly why we're having some technical snafus lately.
I'm guessing they're just clustering in the way that these gremlins tend to do in the technical world.
But a fine listener sent me a nice donation today with the express intent that I use it to buy better recording software, which I will absolutely do.
We are a slave to the listeners.
So, it's time for my lunchtime stroll and cappuccino.
And let's have a little chat about, to continue the conversation from yesterday, the chat about the kinds of criteria which moral theories, I think, can be reasonably subjected to.
Now, I've yet to have anybody who says, who sort of everyone agrees that logic is a good thing, right?
So far, we've had pretty general agreement on that principle.
And, of course, I would do nothing but agree with that.
Logic is a good thing.
People seem to be fairly keen on evidence.
So, we don't have a whole lot of people who come into a debate on ethics and say, well, logic and evidence are nonsense, and we shouldn't use it for anything.
What people do is they say, well, sure, logic and evidence and consistency and so on are important, but...
They are not something that can be applied to morality.
Now, that's quite fascinating, really, when you think about it.
I've never really quite understood why you can apply logic and evidence and have the requirement for internal consistency and so on, while you can have all of that for every theory except the most important one.
And I have a theory about that, as you can imagine, which I'll talk about a little bit more this afternoon.
But the first thing, this is sort of the sequence that I suggest that we look at as far as ethics goes, just to sort of work on the theory and work on the approach and work on the methodology so that we're not sort of talking at sixes and sevens or going past each other at high speed, yelling out imprecations out the window.
And I'm going to use an example from history wherein, in the sort of pre-scientific world, There was an approach to understanding certain material aspects or material elements and see if this is a good or useful metaphor to use in relation to this.
The current state of moral understanding or moral examination in the world is pitiful.
It's pitiful. And this is no disrespect to anyone on the board or anyone who's ever written me.
This is just an observation.
I've spent 20 years talking about ethics with people.
From top to bottom, educated to not educated, old to young, everyone in between.
The state of moral knowledge is pitiful.
Have you ever seen the film Terminator 2, I think it is?
That snotty little kid in the parking lot with the Terminator.
So, Schwartzy just pops some guy in the leg with a bullet, and the kid says, you can't just go around shooting people.
And he says, why not?
He says, well, it's just not right.
Why not? You just can't do it, okay?
Just don't do it. I mean, that's really where we are as far as ethics go.
We really don't have a clue.
We have a lot of gut feelings about ethics.
We have a lot of strong opinions about ethics.
But we don't have any consistent theory of ethics.
I mean, there's the golden rule, which, you know, has done nothing to stem the tide of evil throughout history, which we talked about before on the board.
There are some significant problems with the golden rule, the do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
It's not a scientific theory, and it requires very much on subjective preference.
The strongest man in the village would like all contests to be decided by arm wrestling.
So he's perfectly willing to make it a universal standard.
He just tends to benefit from it.
It's not a valid thing.
A masochist would like people to hurt him.
A sadist would like to hurt others.
It's a completely subjective scale.
So that doesn't do us any good.
And of course, we don't need nutrition to those who are naturally drawn to eating fruits and vegetables and grains and all that.
We need... The science of nutrition for people who are not drawn.
If everybody ate in a perfectly healthy or at least a reasonably healthy manner, the science of nutrition would be much less required.
But the fact is that people, myself included, we like the sugar, we like the fat, we like the chocolate.
And so we have to be instructed on these so we can avoid things like diabetes and so on.
Which, you know, I hear is not so good.
This do unto others as you would have them do unto you is one of these things that basically the entire science of nutrition is dedicated to dealing with those who eat well.
So the do unto others as you would have them do unto you only works with people who have empathy.
If you're not so down with the whole empathy thing, then that commandment or that imprecation is going to mean nothing to you.
Or you're just going to be seriously misinterpreting everything.
And of course it's the people without empathy who are the greatest source of danger in the moral realm.
So do unto others as you would have them do unto you is perfectly fine if you've got empathy and so on.
But if you've got empathy and so on, then you really don't need those kinds of moral commandments.
The moral commandments are for those who...
Who are not naturally good, right?
Or who have those sort of natural habits.
So, it's a pretty weak approach.
So, we really don't know what the hell's going on.
We've got a whole bunch of theories that superficially make sense.
That Stephen can call their truthiness thing, right?
We have a whole bunch of theories that sort of, in a general sense, feel right.
But, of course, the challenge is that throughout history, I mean, people believed a whole bunch of nonsense that felt right, which was completely wrong.
I mean, people felt that slavery was right.
People felt that the subjugation of women and children was right.
People felt that aristocracy was right.
People felt that there was a divine right of kings.
People felt a whole bunch of nonsense.
And just because something sort of feels generally right, all it means is that the wiring of your conditioning is going...
The electricity of, quote, facts is traveling along the wiring of your conditioning in a generally not too offensive kind of way.
I mean, there's patriots, right?
Patriotism is considered a virtue.
Which is a slave to a ruler.
To be a slave to a ruler is a virtue.
Killing heretics. Killing unbelievers.
Not only in the past in Christendom, but in the present in Islamabad.
This is all considered to be perfectly reasonable.
So feelings, of course, don't help that much in the realm of morality any more than they help that much in the realm of nutrition.
Or health in general. Who really wants to go and sort of sump on the treadmill for half an hour?
Yee! So, if we understand that we don't know anything about ethics, and that our feelings are a really bad guide, then we have a certain kind of humility that we can approach, and then the general truthiness of certain propositions no longer appeals to us that much, no longer is a sufficient criteria for us to say, well, that sure seems right, so let's go with that.
So I'll give you sort of an example from history.
This is back in the sort of Aristotelian world of physics.
They had this belief that there were these four elements, and they were sort of stacked on top of each other, like layers of a cake.
And on the top was air, and under air was fire, and under fire was earth, and under earth was water.
It's too windy here. Let me turn around.
So they went through this...
I can't remember if it was Aristotle who came up with this, but this was how this approach was taken in terms of ancient Greek physics.
And so it's sort of purported to explain a number of things, right?
So air was above the ground and floated above the ground, and bubbles in water would seek to rise up through the water to rejoin the air, because air was the highest element, the lightest element, and all Elements that were air-based, balloons, I don't think I had them back then, but you sort of get the idea, would try to rejoin the air, so bubbles would rise up from water and so on.
Now, fire was above the ground but below the air, so when you had a fire, Crackle, in a way, you would see the flames leaping up into the air because they were trying to rejoin and sort of were naturally attracted to their similar or their own constituent elements.
So fire would leap up and try and achieve union with the fire, the plane of fire.
And, you know, a volcano would spew up to this kind of thing, right?
And then Earth was below air and below fire, right?
So air was up, the fire went up, bubbles rise, and...
Earth was just a little bit different, right?
Because Earth was, if you take a clod of Earth to the top of a mountain and throw it off, then it arcs back down, because Earth is naturally attracted to Earth, right?
It's not gravity, exactly.
And then, of course, water was the lowest element, because water is always lower than Earth, right?
You pour water into the ground, it sinks into the Earth.
Sea level is usually lower than land level.
And if you pour a bucket of water at the top of a cairn of stones, then the water trickles down to try and rejoin.
So water was at the bottom, right?
Now, of course, this explains a bunch of things.
It doesn't explain them particularly well, but it certainly does explain a bunch of things.
It has a superficial kind of reasonableness to it, if that makes any sense.
And... This was considered to be gospel for quite some time.
Of course, one of the major reasons was that the Christian church would kind of kill you if you suggested that the earth moved, because somewhere in the Bible it says that the earth is a fixed point, an unmoved mover or something like that.
No, not an unmoved mover.
The earth is fixed and does not move, saith the Lord, and therefore the heliocentric model of the solar system was double plus ungood and tended to get people rather fried.
So, there's a kind of superficial truthiness to it.
Now, if you think, and look, this is not to diss any of the people who were thinking back then.
God knows it's a hard thing to come up with the kind of physics that we've got now.
But, it's important to understand that a superficial plausibility is not the same as a rigorous proof, right?
So, what happened is people just observed a bunch of things, extrapolated to a completely unverified general statement about the nature of the elements and so on.
And ignored all of the countervailing tendencies, right?
So, if fire is below air, then why is the sun so high in the sky, right?
Kind of hard to explain.
So, there's lots of things that...
And, of course, the why, why would these things naturally be drawn to each other, that was never explained either.
So, I mean, you could come up with tons of exceptions, but they were generally ignored because of the general plausibility, the sort of fairytale plausibility of the approach to physics.
And this was similar in medicine.
They were considered to be the humorists.
Choleric and... I can't remember.
These sort of bile ducts are supposed to secrete all these hormones that made people happy or unhappy or, you know, it was an excess of particular humors that would cause ailments and so on.
It's all just, you know, no disrespect to the thinkers back then, right?
I mean, it's not like I would have been able to come up with any of this stuff, but it's a sort of reasonable thing that sort of makes sense.
The only problem being there's no direct correlating evidence and, of course, There is no capacity to integrate opposing data.
And this, of course, is a pretty big problem.
This is not something to be sneezed at, in a way.
It's a pretty big problem when you have data which countervails the general theory.
And really, in science, it only takes one exception for the theory to be relatively toasted.
So, from that standpoint, this really wasn't very rigorous at all.
It was, you know, a fairly considerable problem.
The same thing with the Ptolemaic system of astronomy, circles within circles.
Circles are good because of God, and, you know, the fact that Mars has a retrograde motion was sort of thrown out the window, and more circles within circles, and so on.
And so when things get overly complex, and people start getting offended, right, then you know that at the core, there's a lot of nonsense.
When things get overly complex and people start getting offended, then you know at the core of the proposition or the belief system there's just a whole lot of nonsense.
So, as you know, there's blastocysts or very early fetuses that grow and then split into twins.
And there's also, I think it's called a...
Chimera, the two blastocysts that originally are twins, then merge into one person.
And, of course, since religious people believe that the soul is created at conception, how does a soul divide between two, and how do two souls unite into one, and should that person get two votes?
Well, of course, you start to get a whole load of nonsense about all of this stuff, like the question of, did Adam have a belly button, how many angels can dance on the head of a pin, and all this kind of stuff.
There's, well, there's a lot of nonsense at it.
As you start seeing when you have to multiply all the exceptions and create all these additional layers in this theory of the elements from the Greeks and the continuing circles within circles of the Ptolemaic astronomy system, you just know that there's a faulty premise somewhere in the middle, somewhere deep down, right?
E equals mc squared cleaned up a lot of this stuff as well.
And so I think that...
It's reasonable to say that, at the moment, we don't really have much of a clue about ethics, and that ethics are the most important thing.
As I've argued many times before, ethics are the prime movers of human motivation.
Yes, it's true that human beings are motivated by material things, as the economists say, but they are motivated by morals more than...
I mean, after the sort of... Base requirements are met.
They're motivated much more by morals than they are by materials.
And you can see this because of the number of people who can be trained to go to war without even a draft.
So, people are motivated more by morals than they are by material things.
And so, the science of ethics or the approach to ethics is something that's very, very important at the moment.
Now, if we understand that we don't have...
Any real valid theory of ethics floating around at the moment, other than, I would humbly sort of say, the one that we've been talking about here, but if we kind of get that we don't have a theory of ethics any more than the Greeks had a consistent theory of physics, we just have some stuff that explains a few things and feels true, but is totally inconsistent and there's so many exceptions and so many complications and so on, then I think it's reasonable to ask, well, What needs to be done for a theory of ethics to be valid?
What needs to be achieved?
Well, we don't have to reinvent the wheel here.
We can look at our good friends, the material and biological scientists, and say, well, how do they do it?
I mean, science and capitalism are two of the greatest things that human beings have ever invented.
That's pretty good.
And logic, of course.
Numero uno. All hail Aristotle.
So we don't have to reinvent the wheel.
We can say, well, how does a scientific theory work?
Well, the first thing that a scientific theory has to achieve is internal consistency.
In the same way that...
and that the premises have to be correct, and so on.
So if somebody hands you a mathematical proof that's 100 pages long, and you notice at the front that one of their central premises is 2 plus 2 is 5, You're not going to read much past that, right?
You're going to say, sorry, but you missed something here at the beginning, so I'm not really going to go that much further here because you have missed one of the real basics, so you fix that and come back, right?
So, internal consistency.
A physicist says a rock falls up and a rock falls down.
Well, which is it, right?
A rock falls simultaneously up and down is not a physical theory that can be taken with any real seriousness.
And don't email me stuff about this other time with stuff in and out and back and from with simultaneous movement across vast galaxies.
I'm just talking about Iraq here.
So, we have a requirement for internal consistency.
Now, as we talked about yesterday, universally preferred behavior exists without a shadow of a doubt and cannot be argued against without invoking it, so it's just a fact.
And universally preferred behavior exists in the realm of ethics, of course, right?
Because if you have an ethical theory that is internally consistent to begin with, I'm not saying that that necessarily means that it's true, but internal consistency is sort of a requirement, because matter is consistent, as we've talked about in the introduction of philosophy series.
So internal consistency would be the first and central key to a moral theory, right?
Which is why the golden rule fails miserably, as we've talked about.
And there's a couple of other things that I would sort of suggest would be a good touchpoint for a good moral theory.
If your moral theory fails the coma test, right?
In other words, is it so long, such as mine, that it puts people into a coma?
No, wait, that's not it. It's, you know, a guy in a coma can't really be considered to be evil.
A guy asleep can't be considered to be evil.
So... If you have a moral theory that requires proactive and positive action, then you've got a problem with your moral theory, right?
Now, also, your moral theory has to be independent of space and independent of time, right?
So it can't say that, you know, the Christian moral theory is something to do that if you're born before Christ, you get to only go to limbo because you didn't meet Christ, you can't be saved, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
Well... Well, there you already have, I mean, one of about a bazillion significant problems, in fact, a criteria that is strong enough to say that, well, the moment that Christ died on the cross, everybody's moral nature changed.
Well, you know, if you don't just naturally gravitate towards this nonsensical idea of a soul, then you're going to have some problems with that, right?
So, it doesn't make any sense.
It's like saying that gravity reversed itself In 0 AD, or 30 AD, I guess, 33, you would have a tough time making that case, if you had no evidence.
I don't know what the hell's going on with the Big Bang these days, but you're not going to have much luck with that.
So it's got to be independent of time, independent of place.
If you are, say, a radical subjectivist and you say that, or I guess a democratic subjectivist or a collectivist subjectivist, you would say something like, well, whatever the majority wants is what morality is.
So if they want to stone women to death, and they just happen to outnumber women, or they have more power in Syria, then they get to stone people to death, and it's perfectly moral.
Whereas if in North America we're not so much with the stoning, that's also perfectly moral, then you have a moral theory that is nothing more than a description of what is.
Whatever it is, is my theory.
That doesn't even reach to the level of this element theory of the ancient Greeks.
You're basically just describing things and calling it a theory.
Look, the sun's rising. That's my theory.
Look, the moon is out in daytime.
That's my theory. Right?
That's not a theory, right? It's not abstract.
It's not universal. It's not reversible.
It's not predictable. It's not reproducible.
It doesn't have a falsified criteria.
If you just describe stuff, there's no falsified criteria, right?
The sun is rising. That is my theory.
Well, how would it be falsified?
Well, if the sun didn't rise, that would be my theory.
So, that doesn't work.
Just merely describing things doesn't work at all when it comes to explicating a moral theory.
So we aim for internal consistency and I don't think that that's too high a bar to ask for when it comes to dealing with something like ethics.
You can't say that there's no such thing as ethics because that's applying universally preferred behavior and consequently doesn't work at all.
And so you can withdraw from the conversation or you can admit that there is such a thing as ethics and start to work on creating at least an internally consistent set of ethics.
Now, I would say that there is a certain, not a final, but a certain kind of taste test that I think is important in ethical theory.
And this I'd take directly from Aristotle.
If you come up with an ethical theory that says, you know, murder and pedophilia are the highest moral objectives, It may be worth just going back to the drawing board and saying, huh, well, isn't that interesting?
Because that just doesn't seem right.
And again, that's not a final criteria, and I know I said that feeling is not the nth degree, but with some of the basics, right?
If you come up with something that says patriotism is at best amoral and usually trending towards immoral, that may be upsetting, but there's been plenty of criticisms of patriotism, the last refuge of a scoundrel, Throughout history, so, it may be something that's okay, but I don't think there's a lot of people who say that rape is a great thing.
And even those, I guess, the man-boy-love association, whatever, who say pedophilia is a great thing, redefine it as love.
Again, it's not a fun, it's just a taste test, right?
It's just a kind of feel, right?
So, if we sort of accept this basic fact, that Internal consistency, logical, uniformity, reversibility, universality, all these kinds of things, which, you know, I don't think it's too much to ask for a theory to be able to provide those things.
If we say that that's a reasonable approach to take, Then the first thing that we do when somebody proposes a moral theory is we say, okay, well, is it internally consistent?
If you say that murder is wrong, does it matter if you put on a uniform or do you have magical coat of a thousand colors, capacities, or powers for certain kinds of uniforms that if you put on a costume, then you suddenly have your entire moral nature reversed and can now kill and be rewarded with ticker tape parades and free medical care and pensions and, you know, parades and all this kind of stuff.
Then, except if it's Halloween, in which case it doesn't count, and except if some guy doesn't say it's okay, in which case it doesn't count.
See, already you've just got a mess on your hands, right?
So if you say murder is wrong, the initiation of force, not in self-defense, then that's great.
That's more of a description. You sort of have to say why murder is wrong, but at the very minimum, it has to be logical and consistent.
Now, if it ends up condemning The military as an evil institution, well, that's, you know, that's too bad, in a sense, right?
That's just like saying, well, Einstein should not have offended Newton with new theories, right?
I mean, that's, you know, people's feelings don't really count that much when it comes to science, right?
I mean, otherwise, we'd still be back in the Dark Ages, or even further back.
I mean, every priest was offended by the advent of science.
Almost every priest, so...
People's feelings don't really matter.
People get all upset. But when people get upset, a lot of times, without good reason, I mean, I know I get upset, but if people get upset without good reason, and maybe that's been me at times too, but then usually it's because there's a bunch of nonsense that they believe that they've acted on, and morals, of course, is explosive this way.
If people have acted badly, then they're going to be against consistent theories of morals.
They're always going to want to give themselves an ouch.
They're always going to want to give themselves an escape clause or an escape hatch.
They just don't want these iron laws.
The same way that priests always want an escape hatch for God, right?
At some other dimension. God can scurry away to some other dimension and retain his possible existence.
Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. In the same way that statists and even libertarians or minarchists want to keep the government, right?
They don't want these iron laws to close down, but they clang over the face of the government.
So they want to, oh, we need governments for national defense.
Maybe everything else, but national defense, yeah, it doesn't matter, right?
People just, they really hate fear and loathe just plain rules.
It's like people, it's like getting mad at gravity or aging, it's just bizarre.
But anyway, so I think internal consistency is something that needs to be striven for.
And last but not least, I would also say that once you've achieved internal consistency, and that's the first thing that you want to do, if you're going to start dealing with ethical theories, independence of time and space.
And so on. And wherever you have alterations in your moral rules that they're based on some sort of physical thing, right?
So a horse goes to a zebra when it gets striped.
There's some physical measurable thing.
And you may say that a person's moral responsibility declines as their intelligence declines to the point where if they're seriously retarded, they don't have the same moral responsibilities as others.
But there's a physical thing. There's a testable objective, physical thing.
You're just making up rules, like putting on a uniform or something like that.
And I think I would say that once you have an internally consistent theory, then you're a long way.
A long way along, right?
It doesn't mean that you've got the whole answer, but at least there's some consistency.
But then you need to sort of start chewing through the evidence, right?
You need to start chewing through the evidence.
A theory...
That does not refer to evidence at all.
It's just a pretty much scholastic theory.
It's like defining the laws of Gondor from Lord of the Rings or something.
I mean, there may be internal consistency, but it has no particular relation to reality.
So you do have to kind of plug your theories into reality and run them through the old testometer.
And the old testometer...
It's something like, does your theory predict why and give the reasons for the failure of communism and fascism and so on?
Does it explain why power tends to corrupt?
Does it explain a war?
Does it explain all of these kinds of things?
Or at least give reasonable facsimiles of an explanation, or at least that the evidence is not running completely contrary, right?
So if you come up with a perfectly consistent moral theory that says that capitalism, you know, let's say you're a Marxist, and A completely consistent moral theory says that capitalism should self-destruct Not through statism and mercantilism, but just through its own very nature, and that the workers should become poorer, and so on.
And then the complete opposite occurs, then obviously your theory is wrong, right?
You've not taken into account some particularly key aspect of reality, right?
So you want to sort of run some of historical realities through, right?
Why is it that...
Religious extremism tends to grow.
Why is it that science is effective and prayer is not?
Why is it that governments tend to increase in power until they self-destruct, taking large sections of the economy with them?
All of these things should be explainable according to your moral theory.
I think that it's also bonus points if your moral theory can also explain why People hate moral theories so much.
Why they always want to give themselves just a little bit of amoral wiggle room, right?
Maybe the prostitute that I'm going to is just getting her girl guide badge and sexual slavery.
Maybe there's just some exception, right?
If you can explain that away, you know, bonus points as well.
If you can explain certain aspects or habits of power, Such as why propaganda is so essential to people in power and why they always start by grabbing hold of the kiddies and filling their brains with junk.
And if there's some explanation around psychology and biology as well, I think so much the better.
But I think that this is not a high bar to ask for.
It's asked for scientists all the time.
It's asked in business all the time.
Six Sigma is the scientific method applied to the business world.
It's asked in...
Mathematics, it's asked in a wide variety of fields.
It's asked in a wide variety of fields.
Moral philosophy is the only It's a major area where somehow people feel that they're just above this kind of stuff, and where they just eject opinions without learning, without the requirement for consistency, and where there's an enormous amount of confusion and bafflement, right? And of course, where there's confusion and bafflement in the realm of ethics, power wins, right?
So, it's very important.
To fight your way through to this.
And the fact that people keep throwing in half-baked and undigested opinions to this, and I've done it in the past too, so, you know, no big ivory tower here, but when people keep throwing random opinions and ethics is about who likes chocolate cake and all of this kind of crap, it's just making it worse.
People are just kind of making it worse.
So I would say that, you know, if you're interested in moral theories, The first thing you need to do is clean up your own history.
Look at your own history and try and figure out where...
Because everyone's sensitive in the realm of ethics.
We're all very sensitive because nobody likes to look in the mirror and say, Hey, I have a capacity to be a really bad guy.
Or, I have been a really bad guy.
I mean, that's very hard, right?
That's a hard thing to do. So, you've got to make sure that you're not, you know, throwing moral terms around when you're actually just defending your own past actions or corruptions or whatever.
We've all had them. I mean, we're all human.
And... So, there's a certain amount of emotional clean-up that you need to do in a way that you don't need to do if you go into math or physics or even business to some degree.
But there's a certain kind of emotional clean-up that you kind of need to deal with.
I would say that's important.
That was helpful for me.
In fact, I would say it was essential for me.
Learn to have peace with your history, peace with your errors, peace with your corruptions, peace with the bad things that you've done and make restitution where you can.
And then you can approach the problem of ethics knowing that you're not just making up a bunch of nonsense to...
Defend your own history, right?
So that's sort of important.
There's an emotional aspect to moralizing that I think is often overlooked, I guess you could say, and I think that's a real shame.
So there's that aspect. Now, you know, maybe you don't need to do any of this, and maybe you're perfectly fine in this area.
That's great. But then, if you're going to start to deal with the question of ethics, You have to get over the idea that there's something subjective about it.
I mean, you just have to, and I've gone through this argument about 20 times a year for 200 years, it feels like.
2000! I've gone through this argument so many times with people that now I'm just going to have to refer them to the syllogisms in Proving Libertarian Morality, which I think is a fairly good go at solving just these kinds of issues, but If you're going to jump in and say, first of all, people feel like, emotionally, people feel like as soon as somebody comes down with absolute morality, that that person is now a bully.
And that's just because that's been their experience.
And ethics has been used as a tool for bullying people who you have power over and getting them to enslave themselves and whip themselves.
And we're all, I think, perfectly aware of these kinds of dangers.
Nothing particularly shocking about any of this.
But morality as a tool for subjugating others is a very well-known phenomenon.
And so when I come up and say, sort of, well, morality is not subjective, morality is absolute, morality is universal, people feel like there's a, I don't know, like I'm lying them back in a coffin and pouring concrete over them and waiting for it to set.
You know, they're getting trapped, and so on.
But of course, it's enormously liberating to have clarity about ethics.
It's enormously liberating to have clarity around ethics, because your emotions will lead you astray.
Because we're all taught a bunch of nonsense.
Your emotions will lead you astray.
It's like being raised in a cult, a religious cult, and then thinking that it's going to be easy for you to have objective ideas about God and religion and cults.
Well, that's not going to be the case.
I would say that that aspect of things, there's liberation in knowledge, there's liberation in facts, there's liberation in consistent theories, as we all know from looking at the world of science.
So, that's an important thing to understand.
There's not bullying and absolutism.
There is, if it's absolutism, like...
You obey my will, of course that's bullying, right?
And that's ridiculous. And that's also completely contrary to the argument for morality.
Any consistent theory of ethics would not be, obey some guy.
Any more than any scientific theory is, I'm right because I'm right.
That sort of nonsense tautology we will reserve for priests and the fading classes of status, hopefully.
But obedience to reality is liberty.
I mean, that's really the fundamental of what it is that I've been talking about for the last year.
Obedience to reality is liberty.
Because fighting reality is to be enslaved in illusion.
And illusion is defending a unity of thought, imagination, and oppression.
Whereas surrendering to reality gives you a universe to play with.
And have fun with. And to explore and enjoy.
And to understand and to reason about.
So... Just because I talk about absolute universal morality, I don't think should be reasonably construed as an idea that I'm somehow involved in or wanting to enslave people or tell them what to do and this and that.
Tell them what not to do. I'll certainly tell them what is not universally preferred behavior or what universally preferred behavior would oppose or condemn.
You know, that's like, are you enslaved if you're diabetic and a dietician says, don't eat sugar?
Are you enslaved if you're diabetic and a doctor says, inject yourself with insulin?
Well, I don't think so. I think that you're quite enslaved if you don't and you start going blind and losing your limbs and die.
That would seem to me a slightly negative course.
Are you enslaved if you go and get a filling from your dentist?
Well... I guess you could say in some bizarre way that you are, but it would seem that the consequences of failing to do that would be far worse.
So, certainly the idea of absolute morality is not to enslave people, but rather to set them free.
So that there's some certainty about how it is that you're going to live your life.
Not some. Some pretty significant certainty about how it is that you're going to live your life.
So, I hope that that helps, as far as that goes, and I hope that it helps sort of understand where it is that I'm coming from.
I'm absolutely baffled as to why, I mean, other than thinking that there's a lot of corrupt people out there who want to defend their historical actions at the expense of any kind of objective truth.
But, in general, I'm really quite baffled at the degree of hostility that people have towards the idea of absolute and universal morality.
Maybe people prefer just this sort of whim-based existence where they do whatever they want and call it ethics or say that there's no such thing as ethics and that it is universally preferred, that people not believe in universally preferred behavior and all that kind of nonsense.
So I hope that this has been helpful.
I certainly appreciate your time and attention and energy in listening to these conversations.
I hope that they're fun for you.
They're certainly great for me. And I will talk to you soon.
▲
Export Selection