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Jan. 28, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
25:02
624 Nutrition and Morality (Originally recorded Fri 26 Jan 2007, 5pm)
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Time Text
Hello? Hello?
Hi, it's Steph. Hope you're doing well.
It's 1652, Friday.
Out before five. How lovely.
And podcasting on my way to pick up the gorgeous wife with whom I had a most civilized and enjoyable lunch today.
And then we...
to the gym. And to the sweating.
And kudos to her for picking up so well on the skiing.
We went twice this week, and it was good fun.
So we now no longer bemoan as much the snow.
If you don't have a winter sport, snow, she just sucketh most deeply.
But when you sort of say, okay, well, my drive sucks a little, but at least I've got snow for skiing, that takes a little bit of the sting out of the winter.
As they say in the Gaelic persuasion.
So, I had an excellent post, an excellent question today.
Today, it's all a blur.
I am so zen. I am in a moment-by-moment of now.
But I wanted to talk about a response to an excellent question that was put forward by a long-time poster-slash-listener-slash-participant in the Sunday, 4 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time Skype shows.
Please join us if you get this by Sunday.
That would be nice. And he had a question around universally preferable behavior.
And his question was this.
And an excellent question.
Universally preferable behavior, UPB, this is the definition of morality, at podcast 622, I think that we might be able to eschew the definition again, because if you're randomly skipping around, why a mouthful of acronyms is, I'm afraid, your punishment.
But it sure beats a fish's image.
So... The question is this.
Ooh, look at that. I'm two minutes into the podcast.
I'm already starting the topic. It just feels wrong.
Wait, let me talk about something that happened when I was six.
No, wait. Seven? Seven?
No, I was six. Hang on a sec.
No, no. Actually, it starts as a joke and ends up as another podcast.
But he questioned the universally preferable behavior paradigm so that he's had questions coming to him, which make perfect sense to me, wherein people say, well, nutrition is universally, eating well is universally preferable behavior.
Eating well is universally preferable behavior.
Going to the gym, taking care of yourself, not gaining weight, whatever it is, right?
Safe sex is universally preferable behavior.
And since morality, absolute and universal morality, is about universally preferable behavior, Then should we not have a government to enforce these things?
Good nutrition, since it's universally preferable.
And it all makes perfect sense.
If you just miss one of the words.
One of the words.
The issue that this sort of formulation runs into...
is the difference between actions and best practices.
Well, that clears it up, doesn't it?
Okay, let me try it again.
Universally preferable is nice, but there is a reason that I've tacked on the word behavior, and behavior is really very core to this whole concept of universal morality.
It's really about behavior.
Now... Universal morality does not prescribe or say that something like stealing is wrong, in my opinion.
It's the actions that really count.
So it's the actions which are prescribed.
If you go up to somebody and you sort of stick your finger out and you say...
Not too close.
You're like 20 feet from them. You just put your fingers in a little gun.
You know, your thumb up and two fingers out in the classic childhood manner, childhood boy manner.
And you say...
Give me your wallet or I'll shoot.
Somebody's going to think that...
I mean, they'll be a little alarmed at hearing you, but when they see you don't actually have a gun, they'll just think you're kind of joking or crazy.
They'll feel alarmed, but they're not going to feel the same way that they would if you actually had a gun and were pointing it at them.
Then they would give you their wallet and this and that and the other.
So when you are clearly...
In a situation where you can't do violence to someone, but you threaten or you ask them to give you a wallet in an angry tone or whatever, that's not really the same as actually having the gun available.
So if I call you up, let's just say you live in, I don't know, Australia!
G'day! Oh, it's fabulous.
We're actually top in the...
No, 21 listed...
Number 21 in the list of Australian podcasts.
And, man, you slap-happy bunch of ex-convicts.
I love you. Mwah! Slap a shrimp on a bar before me.
And... Oh, I'm so sorry.
Could you come up with a more cliched Australian phrase?
I don't think so. So...
Oh, God! Oh, God!
The thread let me run back in my brain.
So if you live in Australia and I call you up and I say, oh, gentlemen down under where we're Beard of Flo and Mench Under, if you don't give me your wallet, I'm going to slap you.
And you say, hey, where are you calling me from?
And I say, well, I'm calling you from Canada.
And you say, well, I think I'll take my chances.
I really do. As far as that slap from Canada goes, I think I'll be okay.
So, really, when you're talking about what is prescribed by an irrational system of morality, it's not a process, it's not a sequence, it's not a whole bunch of things.
It really is just kind of a specific action.
Pointing a gun at someone is kind of like wrong.
Now, I could accidentally drop a gun and as it turns in mid-air, it's going to point at you and so and so and so.
Like, I understand there's some intention involved, but a whole bunch of things have to kind of come together in a moment for something to be wrong.
And ethics always comes down to that particular moment.
So, if I am...
Got the gun pointed at you, and I threaten to shoot, and I got my finger on the trigger, and so on, and I say, give me your wallet.
Well, that is a series of actions.
It's very, very specific actions that occur in a moment that is where the ethical problem arises or occurs.
It's pretty specific.
It's not a process.
It's not a whole sequence of things.
So that behavior aspect of things is very, very important.
Like if I say to you, oh man, I'm so sorry.
I was going to hold you up.
And take your wallet. But unfortunately, I left my gun in my car and I parked my car about 10 blocks away.
So listen, you stay here.
I'm going to run back to my car and grab my gun.
And then I'll meet you back here.
God, it's going to take me like 20 minutes because it's pretty busy on the sidewalk at the moment.
I think there's a sidewalk sale in Chinatown where apparently they don't have fridges.
They just keep everything on the sidewalk.
So, you hang tight here for 20 minutes, maybe 25 minutes.
I'll be right back with the gun.
Well, there, you have the intent, the desire, and so on, but you don't actually have the gun.
So, there's a bunch of things that have to come together and point the gun with intent to get something achieved right then and there to transfer property or whatever.
So, there is, of course, intent that is involved, like...
If a blind man mistakes your house for his house, thinks he's forgotten his keys and breaks in, we don't generally say that he should be prosecuted to the full extent of the law and probably just has to replace your window or something like that.
You probably do have the right to shoot him because you don't know that it's a blind man who's mistaken your house for his and so on.
But morality and the bans that universally preferable behavior sanction is pretty specific stuff.
It's pretty specific actions.
Like rape, it's a pretty specific action.
And murder and theft is all pretty specific actions.
Even things like fraud, where you're lying to someone in particular in the moment in order to achieve material gain, whether that would be banned in a free market society, I don't know.
Who cares, right? Right now.
But the issue is that it's very, very specific sort of actions that are objective.
Rape is not a subjective phenomenon.
I mean, except for... Mary, I guess, from the Bible.
But other than Mary and some of Zeus' victims, ooh, and a few of Vishnu's victims, and a couple of young lads, Aphrodite, Heterion.
But for the most part, rape is taking out the supernatural being element of justice.
Rape is a pretty specific and objective thing.
An objective thing. There's no such thing as a good rape.
And, of course, there is the question of finding out after the fact, but that's the question of proof.
That's not the question of whether rape is good or evil.
That's simply the question of who's telling the truth.
Was it a regret-based date rape, quote, date rape that occurred after the woman realized she didn't want to have sex with the guy who felt bad about it?
Was there a drunkenness?
There's all these complications, but they're really to determine whether rape occurred, not whether rape is good or bad.
So, universally preferable behavior, any proposition that's put forward, as we know from things like the coma test, wherein you can't, say, put forward a positive obligation to someone, such as you must help the poor, you must serve your country, or you're evil because then somebody in a coma or somebody who's just plain asleep is not capable of doing the good thing and therefore must be evil, right? So, if you say that the positive proposition...
Is to help the poor, then somebody in a coma cannot help the poor.
They're doing the opposite of the positive moral commandment, and therefore they must be evil.
Doing the opposite has got to be evil, right?
If I say rape is evil...
Sorry, if I say that...
If I say that rape is evil, then not raping is at least better.
It's good. It's good relative to raping.
And if I say that not raping is good, then raping is evil.
There is not a whole lot of stuff that doesn't swing both ways, so to speak.
There is, of course, stuff that's neutral in the middle.
There's a difference between refraining from evil and pursuing a positive good.
And that's sort of what we're talking about here.
But universally preferable behavior doesn't have a lot to do with positive goods.
Because universally preferable behavior...
It has to be common to all people at all places and all times.
And positive prescriptions, which are more around aesthetics, or as we've called them before, sort of the nice-to-haves.
You should treat people well.
You should return phone calls when you say you're going to.
You should be on time, and so on.
But if I were to say, podcasting is a positive moral good, and anybody who doesn't podcast is evil, then I would be setting myself up with entirely too much competition, which would probably outstrip me, and that much we don't really want.
So it's true that there are positive virtues that you should pursue, but those aren't universally preferable behaviors.
It's never a good idea to rape someone, but there are certainly situations wherein you could lie and be late and have perfectly good reasons for doing so and perfectly good excuses that would make sense to any sort of sane human being.
Like if you're late somewhere and it's because you got shot, then it would not be particularly sensible to go to the dinner despite being shot.
It would make sense to go to the hospital and get yourself looked at.
And, of course, the old moral conundrum where someone comes in and says, where's your wife?
I want to kill her. And you know where she is, but you say, I don't know, because we're all this kind of stuff, right?
So, as far as positive moral obligations like be noble, be virtuous, be brave, tell the truth, and so on, be honest, those are great, those are nice to have, but they're not an absolute requirement as far as universally preferable behavior goes because they start to impinge on or get mixed up in people's personal skills and attributes and so on.
Mathematicians do an enormous amount of good in the world, but heaven forbid that being good at mathematics should be a positive moral obligation because then I would definitely be in at least the ninth, if not the tenth layer of Hades with regards to moral perfection.
So that really is not a very positive thing to be able to do from universally preferable behavior standpoint to come up with positives.
You should do X. Nice to have for sure, and I'd certainly prefer people who tell the truth and are on time, but they're not universal and they're not absolute.
Because they don't pass the coma test, right?
As we talked about before.
So, there's very sort of specific actions combined with intentions, and of course you can't read intentions, you can only read actions, or you can't sort of psychically bond yourself with the mugger and figure out what he's trying to do.
But you can certainly determine or gauge people's intentions by their actions.
So, if I'm in some foreign country, or foreign planet, who knows, where a handshake is considered the ultimate act of aggression, I walk up to some guy, and smiling is considered the last insult before you kill someone, and I walk up to someone because of my own cultural upbringing with a big grin and shake their hands,
and then they give me their wallet and back away slowly because they think I'm about to kill them, and I hand their wallet back to them, Then clearly my intention, though it's been interpreted in one way, my intention is not the other.
If I then laugh maniacally, grab the wallet and run away, then it's all the more likely that I actually did in fact intend to frighten this person and steal his wallet.
So when we talk about something like nutrition, there's a couple of things.
Nutrition is useful to talk about, just as the scientific method is useful to talk about.
Because people say, well, morality doesn't exist.
It's like, well, neither does nutrition, but that doesn't mean nutrition is subjective as a discipline.
Neither does the scientific method, but the scientific method doesn't exist, but it's still incredibly valuable as a methodology for learning about reality.
So nutrition is useful to talk about, but then people who have a fear and a hostility of universally preferable behavior...
Which is entirely psychological in nature.
This is such a simple concept.
I'm not saying it was simple to come up with.
It certainly wasn't. But it's really basically just such a simple concept.
It's how everyone lives all the time.
The only reason that people would have any great deal of hostility towards it is that they're embedded or enmeshed in some kind of corrupt situation and would rather argue about alternate dimensions than go and deal with the people in their life who are immoral or immoral or corrupt or whatever.
But if somebody says, well, okay, so it's interesting, you bring up nutrition, but don't you notice that nutrition could be defined as universally preferable behavior in that people should prefer to eat well?
Well, that doesn't cut it, right?
That doesn't really cut it.
Nice-to-haves, shoulds are a whole lot different from positive moral obligations because they have to be...
It's possible and available to everyone at all places at all times.
So if you say good nutrition is a moral absolute, that everyone should universally prefer to eat well, Or universally eat well.
Because it's not each individual that prefers.
You have to run around convincing everyone that they shouldn't rape.
That's not universally preferable behavior.
That's any theory which prescribes as moral behavior or condemns as immoral behavior for everyone at all places at all times.
So the question is not, is nutrition universally preferable behavior and therefore nutrition is exactly the same as ethics and the whole thing falls to the ground?
The question is really, is it evil if through will or circumstances you cannot eat well?
Are you evil if you do not eat well?
So let's just say a piece of meat, a piece of greens, a piece of carbs.
That's eating well for whatever reason.
I'm certainly no nutritionist.
And, unfortunately then, you come across some killing fields concentration camp where you get a couple of fish heads and a small box of rice every day, which is not enough for the intense physical labor that you are going through or being forced to do.
Some sort of Ivan Denisovich situation where you get just wretched food and you have an enormous amount of caloric requirements because of the cold and the labor.
Well, are these people evil?
Universally preferable behavior, if it were to eat well, then if you do not have access to food, if you are in a lifeboat, or you are lost in the jungle or the desert, or for whatever reason, then you are acting against universally preferable behavior because you're not eating well.
And this is not exactly directly analogous to the question of, well, if someone with a gun forces you to kill, you're not more responsible for that either.
When you are asleep, you are not eating well.
When you have a bite of cake, you might be eating well or you might not be eating well.
If you eat a lot of carbs, you might be eating well or you might not be eating well.
The diet for a wrestler is very different from the diet for the average office worker in terms of optimal calories and carbs and fats and proteins and so on, sugars.
So carbs are fantastic if you're doing a lot of physical labor.
Then you need them, right? Must have carbs.
Pregnant women have different dietary requirements than old men.
People who have stomach cancer have very specific dietary requirements.
People who have Crohn's disease, people who have irritable bowel syndrome, and there's about a bajillion other things, diabetes and so on, all of which are going to very much change What your nutritional ideal is going to be.
Your nutritional ideal also can never be predicted or never be put into place.
So, what is the ideal diet for, like, in a moment by moment, meal by meal, number of grains of rice by number of grains of rice, meal for a diabetic?
Nobody knows. It's personal.
It changes day by day. You just have general guidelines.
Try to avoid the entire cake.
You know, that kind of stuff.
If you're trying to lose weight, that's different than if you're trying to gain weight.
Anyway, you get the general idea.
Mixed in with all of this are two other factors that I think are quite important, and I'll start with the least important one.
The first is that food is pleasurable.
Pleasure, obviously, if it's not at the expense of somebody else, is good.
Pleasure is good.
Pleasure is positive.
And so it certainly is true that if you go through a really heavily restricted, or it seems to be true, I don't know if it is true or not, if you go through a heavily restricted calorie intake, like 1,200 calories a day, there's indications that that can make you live longer.
Maybe it doesn't, maybe it just seems longer because you're hungry all the time, I don't know, but...
That's a possibility. Now, is that ideal nutrition?
To live on 1200 calories a day or 1000 calories a day?
And thus be able to live eight years longer or ten years longer?
Is that ideal? Or would people rather eat and enjoy eating and die younger?
Who can tell? Who can tell?
There is no ideal diet that is suitable for all people at all times.
So it can't be universally preferable behavior.
No nutrition can be universally preferable behavior.
Now, that's a fairly important thing to understand.
You can say to everyone, don't rape, don't kill.
That's universally preferable.
That's objective. That's common to all people, all places, all times.
What's right to eat?
Good heavens, who knows?
I mean, other than some general principles, and of course, you are then required to learn from other people.
What if you just don't have any access to nutritional information?
Maybe you have access to food, but you don't have any access to nutritional information.
You're on some, I don't know, some commune in Africa where you've got a variety of foods, but you just don't have any access to nutritional information.
Well, does that mean that you're evil?
Well, I don't know. I would guess not.
Universally preferable behavior can't be so dependent on other things.
It can't be so dependent upon knowledge, on the availability of food, on nutritional understanding, on a deep analysis of your own physiology and appropriateness and so on, right?
So that, to me, can't really stand as universally preferable behavior.
It's nice to have, for sure.
I think people should eat well and so on, but...
The pleasures of overeating are clearly, if you look at the sort of midway shots on television around news time, the pleasures of overeating are pretty significant for a lot of people.
So it's kind of hard to say they're all evil for eating badly.
Now, it certainly would be evil to force feed somebody food because the last thing I'll sort of mention in this area is the principle of self-ownership, of course, is pretty important here as well.
There's a difference between mutilating another human being and mutilating yourself, right?
I mean, if you're into self-mutilation, then that's dysfunctional, but not evil, because you are exercising ownership over your own, I would say, inappropriate ownership over your own property, right?
So if you crash your car, that's not particularly a problem for you legally.
If you crash a leased car, then you have some exciting challenges to deal with from a legal standpoint, because it's not your property.
So if you abuse your own property, it's your property.
Do what you want with it, right? So if you overeat and so on, that's your own issue.
That's your own property. If you force-feed somebody else to the point where they get fat and sick or whatever, then that's a violation of self-ownership on the other person's part and so on.
So I think it's an excellent question.
I wanted to sort of point out a couple of things that were different about the question of nutrition versus universally preferable behavior.
But the moment that you fragment into knowledge requirements and a process rather than, I mean, to eat well is to monitor, like to eat really well, you go and get your blood test every week and figure out what your glucose levels are and insulin levels and so on, whether you're sick or not, right?
You can always go and do this.
And then have highly customized meals prepared for your own particular body type and so on.
All of which, of course, is very expensive.
Those who have the most money can afford to eat the best from that standpoint.
So, I mean, junk food is cheap.
Good food is expensive.
So then you have a cost element as well involved in that it takes a certain amount of money, choice, options, and knowledge to be able to eat well.
And it also requires accurate science, right?
Like, I sort of gave up on this stuff when eggs and bacon turned out to be good.
I just sort of gave up because I just figured I'm just going to eat what I like and not listen to anyone because, I mean, they just don't really know what they're talking about and new fads come along all the time and so on.
So nutrition is a useful metaphor for helping people to understand universally preferable behavior, but it's far too subjective, and it's far too continuous a process.
It doesn't pass the coma test, and it doesn't violate self-ownership for you to overeat.
So from that standpoint, I think other than it being a useful metaphor...
I don't think it's fantastically applicable to, or even remotely applicable, to the whole question of universally preferable behavior, because it can't be consistent, universal, and available to all people at all times in the way that don't rape is.
So thank you so much for listening. Nice, short, tasty podcast.
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