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Dec. 18, 2006 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
20:06
562 Universally Preferable Behavior for Children
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Good evening, brothers and sisters.
I hope that you are doing well.
It's Steph. I am heading home after a nice lengthy day, dropping a colleague off at her hotel, and I thought I had an excellent suggestion from an excellent listener, and the suggestion was, can I explain the universally preferable behavior In a way that a five-year-old could understand.
And I think that that's a very valid question.
Because it is a really slippery concept.
Again, not slippery because it's illogical as a whole, I hope.
But it's slippery primarily because we are just used to so much bigotry and nonsense around the idea of ethics.
So I'm going to give it a shot.
And you can let me know if it makes sense.
I won't imitate a five-year-old because I think I do that fairly regularly in my podcasts.
So let's see if this makes any sense.
Now... The reversibility and universality of the argument for morality can, I think, be reasonably expressed and explored using the following concepts.
A five-year-old comes up to you.
Let's say you have a five-year-old son and a five-year-old daughter.
Your five-year-old son They're twins?
Yeah, let's just say that. And your five-year-old son comes up to you and says, he's eyeing a big birthday cake or a big cake, and he says, I want a piece of cake.
And maybe there's something that, if it's cut evenly, will get two reasonable-sized slices for your kids, right?
Now, as anyone who's ever spent any time around kids knows that, especially when you have siblings, the measurements have to be, like, on the atomic waste scale is how you have to measure things when you're involved with children because, I mean, and it's perfectly healthy and natural that they would be concerned about getting less than their fair share.
Of whatever it is that's going around.
And of course, it's not a very good thing for a younger sibling in particular to not be concerned with portion size because otherwise they get the short end of the stick and don't get to last.
That would have been weeded out, I think, fairly rapidly in the old evolutionary matrix.
So, one of the things that you can say to your son is, so you want a piece of cake?
And your son will say, yes, and I want to cut it.
Yes, and I want to cut it.
And you can say, well, sure.
Now, of course, he's going to, your son's eyes light up in sugar-induced coma greed, and he's going to say, great, I want to cut it.
Give me the knife. And he's going to cut this massive honking slice of cake for himself, and naturally, he is going to leave a mere tiny sliver for his soon-to-be wailing sister.
So, that obviously is not a particularly good way to teach the argument for morality, to give your son the knife and say, sure, cut yourself off a piece, and then your daughter is crying, and so on.
So, one of the ways that I would say to my son is, I would say, would you like to cut a piece?
Right? And his eyes, of course, are going to lie, yeah, absolutely, I'll cut the piece.
Yeah, daddy, get me done. And then I'd say, okay, here's the knife.
You can cut the piece. Now, you can cut the piece, but your sister then gets to choose which piece she wants.
So you can cut whatever size and portion and slice that you want, but your sister gets to choose the first piece.
This is one way that you can teach the argument for morality or universally preferable behavior.
It's, of course, another way to teach empathy, or a way to teach empathy that I think is very helpful.
I'm not saying that anyone who's listening to this can't figure this out.
Of course, you can, and much more complicated stuff, too.
But this, of course, is the processing that occurs within your son's mind.
He's like, oh...
So I get to cut the piece, but she gets to choose it.
So I want to get the most cake possible, and my sister also wants to get the most cake possible.
So if I cut a three quarters one quarter, she's absolutely going to choose the three quarters and leave me with just the quarter.
So, of course, now your son is going to be completely obsessed with being completely and totally fair, in a sense, right?
So your son is going to be really focused on cutting this thing with, again, the atomic weigh scale and mad precision right down the middle.
So that when your daughter chooses the slice, there's almost no possibility that she is going to get even one or two atoms or maybe even an electron more than he is.
And this is a way to teach something called the argument for morality or universally preferred behavior.
Which is to say, you want the greatest possible piece of cake and your sister wants the greatest possible piece of cake.
Then, of course, what you do is you teach them something about the government, where after he cuts the cake very carefully, you eat both slices.
But that's something which, you know, he may need to be a little bit older to appreciate the subtle political satire of that, so you might want to try that when he's five.
So, that's sort of one approach that you can take, right?
Now, another approach that you can take is just simply asking the why.
See, parents who don't understand the universally preferred behavior or the argument for morality are always stuck on the receiving end of the why questions with children.
You know, well, you have to have a curfew.
Why? Well, you have to go to bed later than your sister or earlier than your sister who's older.
Why? This kind of stuff, right?
Well, I think that it's very important when you have kids to spend this time, and I know it's a bit annoying up front, but it's worth spending the time To get them to understand how decisions are made, how moral decisions are made, rather than just do it because I told you to, or do it because that's how the mood strikes me today, or don't do it because I'm feeling irritable and want to deny you pleasure, all these kinds of things.
But the kids can actually learn this kind of moral stuff pretty early on.
So, if your kid comes up to you after Halloween, and he just had a sugar-splosion the day before, and couldn't sleep, and was cranky, and then whatever, got up early, and it was just a mess, right?
And then he wants to come and eat more candy, and he says, I want more of my candy.
Maybe he's so young that you're sort of holding on to it so he doesn't eat it all at once and get himself really sick.
And then the question is, why do you want more candy?
Well, I want more candy because it tastes good, right?
Okay, so you want more candy because it tastes good, so you want to feel good, right?
And the kid says, well, yeah, of course.
And then you as the parent can say, well, so you like feeling good and the candy will make you feel good, right?
And not having the candy will make you feel bad, right?
And the kid will say, yeah, okay, got it.
Can I have some candy now, please?
And then you can, as the parent, reply and say, okay, here's the problem.
When you do something that makes you feel good, I end up feeling bad.
Right? So, you have, you know, seven fistfuls of candy and then you're racing around like a mad dervish and then you pass out during dinner and then you wake up with a headache and you're cranky and you're upset and then you go and throw up and maybe you make it to the bathroom and maybe you don't and then you sleep really badly and wake me up.
So, we have a challenge, right?
We have an exciting challenge to work out.
You want lots of candy because it makes you feel good, and you don't mind so much that you're going to feel bad later, right?
Because you're a kid and you're not supposed to worry about that kind of stuff, and clearly you don't.
But I also want to feel good.
So, if you get all the candy that you want, you will feel good.
If I... Give you all the candy that you want.
I will end up feeling bad because I will be upset that you're ill and I won't get any sleep and so on, right?
So I totally get that you want the candy and I totally understand that candy tastes good and you want as much of it as you can stomach and more and to heck with the consequences.
Makes total sense to me. Right?
But exactly the same as you want the candy is, I don't want you to have all the candy.
Like, you want all the candy, and I totally understand that because it makes you feel good.
If you don't get it, you'll feel bad.
Exactly the same, in exactly the same way, I don't want you to have all the candy because I'm going to feel bad if you have all the candy.
This is just universally preferred behavior.
And again, this is more on the aesthetic side.
It's nothing really to do with ethics.
It's not evil to eat lots of candy or anything.
But this is sort of how you teach empathy.
It's the people who don't really get empathy or who don't feel empathy for other human beings in any sort of substantial way.
They're the people who have the greatest trouble with the argument for morality.
Of course, one of the greatest problems is that they're the kind of people who need it the most, but that's never a new problem when it comes to ethics, right?
The fact that the people who need ethical theories the most rage against ethical theories the most.
That is absolutely and inevitably a problem of Of ethics that the universally preferred behavior isn't going to solve, except that it's going to come down, or at least I hope that people who talk about it will come down like a ton of bricks on people who attack it, attack universally preferred behavior, because they're the people who need it the most.
And if you take away the excuse and maybe end up banning them, then you're going to end up at least standing firm for that, which is true, and will have taken away a significant excuse from people, however much they may rage against it, and so on.
And of course, if you have a moral theory that is never going to achieve any good, if it doesn't anger bad people, then you know you're not on the right track, right?
There's two ways that you know you're doing something right, right?
Well, three ways. Four.
Four. One, logic two, empiricism three, virtuous people like it.
And four, non-virtuous people dislike it quite intensely.
And it is always the case, pretty much, that the non-good people will...
Hate a valid moral theory a lot more than the good moral people will love it.
And that's just something you have to recognize if you're going to be an ethicist in the world, that you will get much more condemnation from bad people than you will praise from good people.
It took me a little while to get used to it, but I still think I'm getting the hang of it now.
And it's worth knowing as you go out into this world and you get the reactions of people that you're going to get when you talk about this kind of stuff.
So, universally preferred behavior is something that is around reciprocity and universality, right?
So, one of the things that I hated when I was a kid was that my brother got more allowance and got to stay up later.
He was two and a half years earlier.
Now, of course, in my family, there's so much chaos that I remember one night going to bed, and my brother was supposed to come to bed five minutes later than I was, and as a highly mature woman, Six or seven-year-old, I would actually count to 300, which I knew was five minutes.
And then if he wasn't in bed, I'd give him a little room and then I would complain.
And I remember one night, I went to bed and counted and then fell asleep and woke up and counted again.
And literally an hour or two had gone by.
And I finally came out and my mother and my brother were making cookies together.
And it was just like, oh, the betrayal.
Oh, there was much woe.
In the apartment that night.
Sorry, the flat for those who are in England.
But this really is to help children who have these kinds of problems with justice or problems with fairness.
You know, five minutes is not really a big thing to ask.
Of course, it didn't mean anything, right?
Because it was just whatever people felt like in my family.
But if you have a younger sibling and an older sibling...
The problem is, of course, the younger sibling is operating in simultaneous time, but not simultaneous age.
So, given that the younger sibling doesn't know fundamentally or has not experienced what it's like to be two years older than he himself is, right?
I mean, my brother was born two and a half years before I was, or a little bit under.
And so, I was born and my brother was there, but he doesn't get any points for me, sort of when I'm a kid, being born earlier, because it's not something that I experience.
I wasn't around, right?
It's like asking people to, you know, describe the French Revolution.
Like, I wasn't there. So, I mean, visually, you know, describe it firsthand.
So, you know, my brother didn't get any points for that, of course, right?
I mean, why would he? But...
So I was experiencing simultaneous time, but not simultaneous age, right?
So that's sort of one of the problems that occurs between siblings.
Well, why should I have to go to bed sooner?
We're both in the same time frame.
I didn't put it that way when I was a kid.
But in my gut, that's kind of how it felt, right?
So you can sit down with the kid, right?
I would sit down with myself and my brother or whatever, maybe just with myself and say, okay, so if we say that you and your brother should go to sleep at the same time every night...
Go to bed at the same time every night.
Then what you're saying is you're six and he's eight.
So when he's eight, he has to go to bed at 7.30 or 8 o'clock or whatever it was.
Say 8 o'clock. So when he's eight...
He will have to go to bed at 8 o'clock.
That's what you're saying. You both go to bed at 8 o'clock, right?
It's like, yes, that's right.
That's fair. Fine. Okay.
Now, he's currently going to bed at 8.15 because he's two years older.
But the rule that you're setting up...
It's not my brother goes to bed at the same time that I do.
Right? Because what you're saying is that somebody who's 8 should go to bed at 8 o'clock and not 8.15.
Because you're going to bed at 8 o'clock and you're 6.
So what this means is that you...
In two years, we'll be going to bed at the same time.
Because when you're 8 o'clock, obviously, if you're making a rule called, when you're 8, you go to bed at 8 p.m., then that rule has to apply to you too, right?
Because otherwise, you're just making something up.
It's not fair, right?
It's got to be universal. Which means that if you say that, then you will also be going to bed at 8 when you're 8, right?
As opposed to 8.30 or 8.15 or whatever.
So there's going to be a certain amount of kicking back and forth, and the kid is either going to agree with it or the kid's going to say, no, he just should go to bed when I go to bed because I say so.
And then you're going to say, okay, so the rule is that you...
So, the abstraction of that rule, or the rule behind that sort of rule, is that brothers can order brothers to go to bed whenever they see fit.
Right? So, you, as a brother, can order your older brother to go to bed whenever you see fit.
You can order him to go to bed at 4pm if you want to play with his toys all night.
Yeah! Right! Yeah!
Okay. So, if brothers can order brothers to go to bed whenever they want, then your brother can also order you to go to bed whenever you want.
You make the rule, the other person gets to choose as well.
You cut the cake, your sister gets to choose.
If you make a rule called any brother can tell any other brother when to go to bed, then your brother also gets that rule.
Then you bring the other brother in and say, what time do you want your younger brother to go to bed?
He'd be like, oh man, he's such a past four o'clock.
Okay, so now you have to go to bed at 4 o'clock, and when do you want him to go to bed?
2 o'clock! 2 o'clock, because I'm going to bed at 4, and I want two hours to play with his toys or whatever, right?
Okay, and then you go back to the older brother, right?
Okay, so now he wants you to go to bed at 2 o'clock, when do you want him to go to bed?
Noon! Or whatever, right? You can see, you just keep walking, and this conversation, you have to be patient when you're a parent, right?
But this conversation will never end, right?
And so you say, okay, so now we don't have a rule that works, right?
Because it's not universal. It's not applicable to everyone.
And we also have a rule that doesn't work if you say that when you're 8 you have to go to bed at 8pm and not 8.15 because you don't want to go to bed at 8pm when you're 8.
You want to go to bed at 8.30, right?
So there's another rule that doesn't work.
So in these kinds of ways, you simply abstract the principle from whatever the kid is saying and get them to understand that it's got to apply to everyone.
You just make up rules for yourself, right?
Right? If your older brother is a...
If you've got an eldest son who's a bit of a bully and he grabs toys, you say, okay, well, so you're saying the bigger person grabs the toys, right?
Right? So then you just grab the...
I'm not saying... I don't know how you'd equate this or do it in a way that would make sense, but it's like, okay, so then I can take the toys from you.
You don't actually have to do it, but you just have to say that that's the rule that you're actually talking about here, right?
That if the bigger person takes the toys, then I can take the toys from you, right?
Right? And then you just take the toys from him, right?
Just, you know, take the toys and say, I wanted to play with them and I'm bigger than you, and your rule was that the bigger person takes the toys, so now then he's going to get upset.
It's like, okay, so the rule is not that the bigger person takes the toys.
What is the rule then, right? All of these things, I mean, kids are incredibly good at figuring this kind of stuff out and working with this kind of stuff.
So, in ways in which you can provide examples to children, and hopefully this sort of clarifies the way that I sort of talk about and think about these kinds of things, and I hope that it makes sense.
Last thing I'll say is that you people with your Christmas shopping are not donating, and it's been four or five days since my last donation, which I think has been one of the longest stretches ever.
I know that it's Christmas, and I know that you want to spend money on other things, but I would really appreciate a couple of shackles thrown my way in the Christmas spirit.
I'd like to think that I'm not the price of a Wii, but maybe the price of a CD. Thank you so much for listening.
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