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Oct. 19, 2007 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:53
886 Universally Preferable Behavior: A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics

An introduction to my new book!

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you are doing well. I just have one thing to say before we start, which is...
I have done it!
My brothers and sisters, I have finished the book.
The book. Universally Preferable Behavior.
A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
It is a magnificent work, if I do say so myself.
We have nice tables.
There's a full index.
We have a nice table of contents so that you can find what it is that you're looking for.
It's nicely laid out, and it is available now from freedomainradio.com.
Just go to the homepage. There's a nice big graphic wherein you can pick up the book, and I strongly urge you to get this book for a couple of bucks for Wouldn't it be fantastic to know that we can be both moral and rational, and that we can have morality without gods or governments?
It is the holy grail of philosophy, and it's been sought since the time of Socrates.
I believe I have done it, but it's important, of course, for you to review that.
And I promise you one thing, either I have done it, in which case this is, I guess, quite revolutionary and something you'll definitely want to be a part of, or I have failed, in which case, I promise you this, I have failed not, I haven't sort of leaned up against the wall, I have basically taken a Scud missile and ridden it at about Mach 1200 into the wall.
So it's going to be entertaining and edifying if I failed, Which I don't think that I have.
So, I'm going to do whatever it takes to get this book into your hands.
It's cheap. It's $21 for the softcover from Lulu.
You can get it, again, through freedomainradio.com.
It's $14, I think, or $15 for the PDF, $16 for the MP3 audiobook.
And if you don't like it, like if you order it and you don't like it, I will absolutely give you your money back.
If you don't think it's a very good piece of work, that it's revolutionary, I will absolutely give you your money back.
And if you...
If you feel that you've wasted your time, I will absolutely personally apologize to you.
And if you can't afford it for whatever reason or don't have access to a credit card, you can mail me a check, just send me an email, I'll send you my address.
Failing all of that, I will just send you a free copy and you can pay me whenever you like.
Whatever it takes to get this book into your hands, this is the new world.
I believe this is the world that we have been waiting for to arrive so that we can get past all of this subjectivist muck about morality and define it as a rational and objective science.
So, without further ado, I've got to read you the first couple of pages.
This was a draft copy which I edited like mad, and I will read you the first couple of pages, and hopefully this will snare you in.
Universally preferable behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics.
Forward. In many fairy tales, there lives a terrible beast of stupendous power, dragon or basilisk, which tyrannizes the surrounding lands.
The local villagers tremble before this monster.
They sacrifice their animals, pay money and blood in the hopes of appeasing its murderous impulses.
Most people cower under the shadow of this beast, calling their fear prudence.
But a few... Drunk perhaps on courage or foolhardiness, decide to fight.
Year after year, decade after decade, wave after wave of hopeful champions try to match their strength, virtue and cunning against this terrible tyrant.
Try and fail.
The beast is always immortal, so the villagers cannot hope for time to rid them of their despot.
The Beast is never rational and has no desire to trade, and so no negotiations are possible.
The desperate villagers' only hope is for a man to appear who can defeat the Beast.
Inevitably, a man steps forward who strikes everyone as utterly incongruous.
He's a stable boy or a shoemaker's son, a baker's apprentice, or sometimes just a vagabond.
This book is the story of my personal assault on just such a beast.
The beast is the belief that it is impossible to define an objective, rational, secular, and scientific ethical system.
This beast is the illusion that morality must forever be lost in the irrational swamps of gods and governments, enforced for merely pragmatic reasons, but forever lacking logical justification and clear definition.
This beast is the fantasy that virtue, our greatest joy, our deepest happiness, must be cast aside by secular grown-ups.
And left in the dust to be poured at, paraded, and exploited by politicians and priests and parents.
This beast is the superstition that without the tirades of parents, the bullying of gods, or the guns of governments, we cannot be both rational and good.
This beast has brought down many great heroes from Socrates to Plato to Augustine to Hume to Kant to Rand.
The cost of mankind has been enormous.
Since we have remained unable to define a rational system of universal morality, we have been forced to inflict religious horror stories on our children, or give guns, prisons, and armies to a small monopoly of soulless controllers who call themselves the state.
Since what we call ethics remains subjective and merely cultural, We inevitably end up relying on bullying, fear, and violence to enforce social rules.
Since ethics lack the rational basis of the scientific method, morality remains mired in a tribal war of bloody mythologies, each gang fighting tooth and nail for control over people's allegiance to virtue.
We cannot live without morality.
But we cannot define morality objectively.
Thus we remained eternally condemned to empty lives of pompous hypocrisy, cynical dominance, or pious slavery.
Intellectually, there are no higher stakes in the world.
Our failure to define objective and rational moral rules has cost hundreds of millions of human lives in the wars of religions and states.
In many ways, the stakes are getting even higher.
The increased information flow of the Internet has raised the suspicions of a new generation that what is called virtue is nothing more Or less than the self-serving fairy tales of their hypocritical elders.
The pious lies told by those in authority and the complicity of those who worship them are clearer now than ever before.
Truth has been exposed as manipulation, virtue as control, loyalty as slavery.
And what is called morality has been revealed as a ridiculous puppet show designed to trick weak and fearful people into enslaving themselves.
This realization has given birth to a new generation of nihilists, just as it did in 19th century Germany.
These extreme relativists reserve their most vitriolic attacks for anyone who claims any form of certainty.
This postmodern generation has outgrown the cultural bigotries of their collective histories, but now view all truth as mere prejudicial assertion.
Like wide-eyed children who have been scarred into cynical wisdom, they view all communication as advertising, all claims as propaganda, and all moral exhortations as hypocritical thievery.
Since we have no agreement on a cohesive, objective, and rational framework for evaluating moral propositions, morality remains mired in mysticism and its inevitable corollary of violence.
Just as, prior to the Enlightenment, religious sects warred endlessly for control over the blades of the aristocracy, so now to complete competing moral mythologies war for control over the state and all its machinery of coercion.
Thus morality remains relative to modern science, just as medieval, quote, astronomy did to modern astronomy, a realm of imaginary mythology enforced through storytelling, threats, compulsion, and exploitation, which actively bars any real progress towards the truth.
This beast of relativistic ethics looms above us, It enslaves the young in state schools and Sunday pews.
It ensnares the poor in the soft gulags of welfare.
It enslaves even the unborn in the bottomless well of national debts.
As I wrote in my previous book, On Truth, The Tyranny of Illusion, The most fundamental lie at the center of unproven ethical theories is that such theories are always presented to children as objective and incontrovertible facts, when in truth they are mere cultural bigotries.
The reason that scientists do not need a government or a Vatican is that scientists have an objective methodology for resolving disputes with scientific method.
The reason that language does not need a central authority to guide its evolution is that it relies on the, quote, free market of accumulated individual preferences for style and utility.
The reason that modern morality, and morality throughout history, has always had to rely first on the bullying of children and then on the threatening of adults is that it is a manipulative lie masquerading as a virtuous truth.
The truth is that we need morality.
The lie is that gods or governments can rationally define or justly enforce it.
My goal in this book is to define a methodology for validating moral theories that is objective, consistent, clear, Rational.
Empirical. And true.
I'm fully aware that at the moment you will very likely be feeling a rising wave of skepticism.
I fully understand that the odds that some guy out here on the internet, the homeworld of crazies, has somehow solved the philosophical problem of the ages are not particularly high.
In fact, they would be so close to zero as to be virtually indistinguishable from it.
Still, Not quite zero.
Ground rules. Extraordinary claims require extraordinary proof.
In taking on this mammoth task, particularly in such a short book, I have set myself some basic ground rules, which are worth going over here.
Most of these will be discussed in more detail throughout the course of this book.
1. I fully accept the Humean distinction between is and ought.
Valid moral rules cannot be directly derived from the existence of anything in reality.
The fact that human beings in general prefer to live and must successfully interact with reality in order to do so cannot be the basis for any valid theory of ethics.
Some people clearly do not prefer to live and steadfastly reject reality, so this definition of ethics remains subjective and conditional.
2. Ethics cannot objectively be defined as, quote, that which is good for man's survival.
Certain individuals can survive very well by preying on others, so this definition of ethics does not overcome the problem of subjectivism.
In biological terms, this would be analogous to describing evolutionary tendencies as, quote, that which is good for life's survival.
This would make no sense.
Human society is an ecosystem of competing interests, just as the rainforest is, and what is, quote, good for one man so often comes at the expense of another.
3. I do not believe in any higher realm of ideal forms.
Morality cannot be conceived of as existing in any other universe, either material or immaterial.
If morality exists in some other realm, it cannot then be subjected to a rigorous rational or empirical analysis.
And, as Plato himself noted in The Republic, society would thus require an elite cadre of philosopher kings to communicate, or more accurately, enforce, the incomprehensible edicts of this other realm upon everyone else.
This also does not solve the problem of subjectivism, since that which is inaccessible to reason and evidence is by definition subjective.
4.
I do not believe that morality can be defined or determined with reference to arguments from effect, or the predicted consequences of ethical propositions.
Utilitarianism, or the greatest good for the greatest number, does not solve the problem of subjectivism, since the odds of any central planner knowing what is objectively good for everyone else are about the same as any central economic planner knowing how to efficiently allocate resources in the absence of price,
effectively zero. Also that which is considered the greatest good for the greatest number changes according to culture, knowledge, time, and circumstances, which also fails to overcome the problem of subjectivism.
We do not judge the value of scientific experiments according to some platonic higher realm or some utilitarian optimization.
They are judged in accordance with the scientific method.
I will take the same approach in this book.
I also refuse to define ethics as a positive law doctrine.
Although it is generally accepted that legal systems are founded upon systems of ethics, no one could argue that every law within every legal system is a perfect reflection of an ideal morality.
Laws cannot directly mirror any objective theory of ethics since laws are in a continual state of flux, constantly being overturned, abandoned, and invented.
And legal systems the world over are often in direct opposition to one another, even at the theoretical level.
Sharia law is often directly opposed to Anglo-Saxon common law, and the modern democratic mob rule process often seems more akin to a mafia shootout than a sober implementation of ethical ideals.
Six. I am fully open to the proposition that there is no such thing as ethics at all, and that all systems of, quote, morality are mere instruments of control, as Nietzsche argued so insistently.
In this book, I start from the assumption that there is no such thing as ethics and build a framework from there.
Seven. I do have great respect for the ethical instincts of mankind.
The near-universal social prohibitions on murder, rape, assault, and theft are facts that any rational ethicist discards at his peril.
Aristotle argued that any ethical theory that can be used to prove that rape is moral must have something wrong with it, to say the least.
Thus, after I have developed a framework for validating ethical theories, I run these generally accepted moral premises through that framework to see whether or not they hold true.
I respect your intelligence enough to refrain from defining words like reality, reason, integrity, and so on.
We have enough work to do without having to reinvent the wheel.
Finally, I believe that any theory, especially one as fundamental as a theory of ethics, does little good if it merely confirms what everybody already knows instinctively.
I have not spent years of my life working on a theory of ethics in order to run around proving that, ooh, murder is wrong.
In my view, the best theories are those which verify the truths that we all intuitively understand and then use those principles to reveal new truths that may be completely counterintuitive.
Having spent the last few years of my life preparing, training, and then combating this beast, I hope I have acquitted myself with some measure of honor.
I believe that I have emerged victorious, though not entirely unscathed, and I look forward to seeing who shares this view.
Of course, if I have failed, I have at least failed spectacularly, which itself can be both edifying and entertaining.
I studied the history of philosophy in graduate school and hold a master's degree, but I do not have a PhD in philosophy.
I am far from a publicly recognized intellectual.
While I may not be the most unlikely champion, I am also far from the most likely.
Whether I have succeeded or not is not up to you.
And it is not up to me.
If the reasoning holds, the greatest beast is down.
So I hope that you will come by freedomainradio.com.
Pick up a copy of this book.
Read through it. It shouldn't take you more than a day or two.
And help me fill in the cracks if there are any.
Help me correct it if there's anything wrong, which I'm sure there is.
But I think this is a great leap forward in the realm of thought.
I think it would be great for you to be in there at the beginning.
I promise the book will increase in value over time.
Whatever it is that I have to do to get this book into your hands, you just email me and you let me know what the conditions are, and I will get you a copy.
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