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March 21, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:25:04
1018 The Ethics Debate
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Okay. Can you hear me clearly?
I sure can. Can you hear me all right?
Yes. Great.
Well, thanks for taking the time.
You had some questions or comments or issues or criticisms, all of which is great, of this UPB thing, and you were talking about some other approach to ethics that, of course, is always of interest to me, so I was wondering if you could tell me just a little bit more about that.
Sure, I guess I can give a summary of my position.
It's very similar, although not identical.
Are you still there?
Yeah, you just faded out.
Ah, that's weird. You still hear me, though.
Yeah, I can adjust the volume here, but go on, I can normalize it later.
Still getting used to this. Anyway, my position is similar, though not identical, to Ayn Rand's.
I would describe myself as a rational ego...
I believe that essentially the purpose of ethics is to provide a series of abstract principles that allow you to pursue your own self-interest, essentially a long and happy life.
A great term for this would be something like eudaimonia.
And I believe that the purpose of your actions should be to pursue eudaimonia, to pursue a long and happy life.
And that's the primary consideration that should be taken into account, at least in the long term, when making decisions.
Right. That's pretty much a brief summary.
I mean, obviously the details of it would go into more depth.
Alright, and so a long and happy life is the goal or the ideal?
Is that right? Correct.
Okay, and what are the principles that would support the achievement of the long and happy life?
Well, you could probably write a book on that, but as a brief, I would say principles such as integrity, honesty, good old-fashioned hard work, non-aggression, Things along those lines.
Basically the things that allow a human life to flourish, which would be liberty, consistency with reality, the application of reason.
I mean, you can make a list a mile long of various principles.
Right. Now, I understand the Randian and the Aristotelian sources of this, which, of course, I'm not saying that it's not yours, but I guess one of the challenges that I've always had trying to understand or explain that is that some people seem to take great pleasure in pursuing the achievement of power, and, of course, particularly political power, over other human beings.
And also, of course, there are people who are sadists, Who feel happier by pursuing cruelty or control or abuse of other human beings, if that makes sense.
I understand where you're coming from.
The main problem with that argument, as far as an attack on rational egoism, is that the examples you've given, sadists, people that want direct control of the state, I believe they make up a minority of humankind.
I think the majority of human beings are victims of the state rather than those that actually live off of it.
And I believe that, you know, if people were more rational, if they, you know, took a more direct libertarian approach to society, something I know that, of course, you advocate, That these exceptions, like sadists and things like that, would not be much of an issue.
As far as whether the sadist's action is moral or immoral, because it brings him happiness, I guess my primary consideration isn't so much what brings him happiness as it is what brings me happiness.
And being attacked by a sadist is definitely something I'm not interested in, so I'm going to take actions to prevent it.
Well, sure, but I mean, a masochist could, and again, this is all devil's advocate stuff.
I'm not saying this is the majority of human beings, necessarily, but a masochist could take great pleasure out of being controlled by a sadist.
I mean, this is not a wildly uncommon phenomenon.
And so, sorry, I'll just go these one step at a time, and so perhaps you'd like to give me your thoughts on that?
On the fact that a masochist might actually enjoy being Oh, does.
Does actually enjoy. And we can see this, for instance, psychologically speaking, the repetition compulsion for people is very high, right?
So for a lot of people, if they've been controlled or abused in their childhood, they have a very strong desire, seems like an almost overwhelming addiction at times, to continue this dysfunction into adulthood.
It is a relief of anxiety to put themselves in a familiar and controlled environment or situation.
I'm not saying this invalidates.
I just wanted to get your perspective on it.
Well, here's how I would look at it.
I mean, the first thing, of course, to look at is whether it is actually in their long-term interest or whether it's just sort of them fulfilling an immediate urge.
Like if you have a heroin addict, for example, I mean, few people would argue that the heroin addict is fulfilling his long-term self-interest, that he's flourishing, but yet he'll keep going after heroin until somebody intervenes to help him break free of his addiction.
That could probably be analogous to a lot of the masochistic relationships that people have where it's not necessarily healthy, but they keep doing it because they keep having an urge, maybe because of childhood abuse or things like that.
Really, to break someone free of that is a difficult task, but if you can explain to them how their actions do not actually serve their interests, and that if they were to behave differently, then they could break free of this and live a happier life, I think that would be a good start as far as fixing that particular problem.
Right, so happy is a, and again, this is, I'm not trying to, you know, define you into oblivion, but happy life, happiness is something that is not immediate, but more long-term, right?
Right, I guess I should start, I'm trying to get used to using the word eudaimonia, because it doesn't have the ambiguity that the word happiness has, because happiness can just refer to like pleasure or immediate joy, whereas eudaimonia has a more long-term context.
Yeah, it's more like spiritual well-being, if you don't mind the mystical side of the word, which, I mean, I'm not a fan of, but I mean, it's more like long-term well-being, right?
Satisfaction with your existence might be a good way to put it.
Right, okay. Now, tell me about the long part, because there are some people who take genuine pleasure and happiness out of life-threatening situations, you know, risk seekers and so on, and they would, if you took that away from them because they're high-stimulus individuals, they would find it to be quite a boring and under-stimulating kind of life.
It would be like you and I in an isolation chamber, I guess.
So they would pursue actively things which would put themselves at risk.
And I'm thinking about, you know, skydivers and stuntmen and mountain climbers and so on.
And they're definitely taking actions that would threaten the longevity of their life, but which produce genuine well-being and happiness for them.
Well, I mean, if it genuinely produces well-being and happiness for them and it doesn't come at the expense of me, I mean, I don't know if I have any reason to intervene.
Well, no, and I'm not saying intervene, but you said a long and happy life, right?
And I'm just saying that long may not be a consideration for some people, at least not a primary consideration for, you know, quite a few people.
What you're basically digging at here is is-ought, if I understand correctly, is-ought, the is-ought dichotomy, because you're saying that there's some people who don't accept that one ought to live a long life.
Well, no. I mean, it's just that for some people, the length of their life, if they only aim for the length, it would interfere with their happiness, right?
Oh, I see what you're saying.
I'm not trying to sneak something else in here.
I'm just working with your definitions.
You know, with all respect, I mean, I think you and I agree on a huge amount.
I just sort of wanted to make sure I understand what you're thinking about.
Oh, I understand. I mean, I guess it's a balance, right?
Because we all do things that no doubt contribute negatively to our health for immediate benefit.
I mean, like you might have a cheeseburger or a cigarette or a beer or, you know, any number of things.
Nobody lives a perfectly healthy life or else it would be extremely boring.
Well, and it's impossible, right?
I mean, you can have a bad dream which will raise your heart rate in a negative way, right?
So some things are just completely outside of your control anyway, right?
Right, so I guess there's a balance between the length of your life, you know, and how happy it is that you try to achieve, right?
Because you want to maximize both, and in an optimal situation, they would both be as high as possible, but we recognize that in reality, you know, sometimes you have to sacrifice one to gain the other, and thus we try to maintain a balance.
As far as, you know, say, someone who likes to skydive or bungee jump or any number of these things, Various extreme...
I'm sorry if you want to call them.
I think the main concern here is...
Oh.
I'm sorry, you're cutting out quite a bit here.
I can't hear you at all at the moment.
Here we had some technical issues and switched to the telephone.
Hello. Oh, hi.
How's it going? It's going pretty good.
Are you able to hear me clearly? I sure can.
That's probably going to be a little bit more stable than your internet, which was kind of getting exciting and choppy.
You have no idea.
Okay, so, sorry, we were just talking about this question of a long and happy life and the relationship that the good life has to that, and we were sort of recognizing the challenges and complexities of these two things,
that what will make some people happy would be a shorter life, or at least the risk of a shorter life, and also that happiness needs to be defined as something that is Long-term and benevolent well-being rather than short-term immediate gain.
Does that make sense? Yeah, and I was talking about the fact that we all every day make sacrifices of immediate well-being for the sake of a lengthier life and vice versa.
We'll sometimes do something that's unhealthy or Something that's not good for us because we enjoy it, knowing full well that overall it's going to have a detrimental effect to our health and maybe to our well-being later on.
I was going to say, I think there's a balance to be maintained.
You could see the people that do extreme sports, skydiving, things like that, as being on one side of the extreme spectrum, whereas the other side would be like People that are health nuts, that never eat anything that tastes good, that exercise an hour a day, who do any number of things that take away a great amount of pleasure that they might experience in their life for the sake of lengthening it.
So I think there's a balance that needs to be maintained.
Yeah, no, I think, and this is, of course, the Aristotelian mean, right, that an extremity of risk pursuit would be called foolhardiness, and an extremity of risk avoidance would be called neurotic, right?
I'm not as familiar with Aristotle as I wish I was, but that should be changing very shortly.
Well, he just sort of had this approach, he said, you know, like courage is the middle point.
Because if you're really too courageous, it's called foolhardiness, and you charge into the battle with a toothpick, right?
And so he would call an excess of courage to be foolhardiness, and a deficiency of courage to be called cowardice, and finding the balance and the mean...
It's somewhere in the middle, and it's, of course, sometimes could be a moving target depending on where you are in life as well.
Well, of course. I mean, you know, in a situation where, for example, your life is under immediate risk, like, for example, if someone has cancer, they might go and, you know, get radiation therapy or chemotherapy, even though those have obvious detrimental effects to their health, in the hopes that, you know, it's going to cause the cancer to go back and that they might actually be able to lead a more normal life.
But at the risk that it might actually kill them.
And a normal person who's not infected with any kind of a cancer or anything like that isn't going to do anything like that.
Yes, and I could also imagine a situation where a person finds that he has a terminal illness, he's got six months to live, where he's going to start going skydiving and spending all his money and do things that in the absence of that illness would seem to be completely irresponsible, but in the presence of that illness and the shortness of time that he has left would seem to be a completely, we wouldn't exactly say responsible, but perfectly comprehensible behavior.
Well, I mean, in that case, for example, The amount of longevity to his life that he's having to sacrifice has basically been eliminated.
In the normal situation, you look at a skydiver and you think, that guy's crazy.
He's only 24 and he's in perfect health.
There's no reason for him to risk the next 50, 60 years of his life for that.
But if you know he's going to die in the next two months and he knows there's nothing he can do about it, then suddenly the action doesn't appear to be as irrational as it would otherwise.
Right, right.
And this, while I perfectly agree with all the stuff that we're talking about, where I faced my challenge, and this could be my neurotic challenge, it could be a breakthrough challenge, I don't know, but, well, I think I do, but I'm saying I don't have proof.
Where I think my challenge was that to me that's more aesthetics.
You know, how long should you live?
How happy should you be? Where should you get your happiness?
The scale is going to change depending on the environment and the situation and the circumstances.
It just seemed to me, while I agree with that from an aspect of wisdom and an aspect of balance, I could not find a compelling enough set of absolutes in that to establish empirical and objective morality.
Well, here's What we're looking at, because when I was looking at your book, I re-read, I think I managed to get through the first half of it today, just to try to re-familiarize myself with it, because it had been a couple months.
That's what it's most like to hear.
I think I managed to get through...
No, I'm just kidding. I remain unconvinced, but we can discuss it.
Sure. What I see is, you defined ethics almost on social terms, like ethics Are only those behaviors that involve, basically, whether or not you're using violence on another person, or at least ethics apart from what you call aesthetics, which you define separately from ethics.
Whereas I don't think, for example, Aristotle would have considered those separate things at all.
I think he would have referred to all of them as ethics.
Yes, and by my definition, his ethics would be under the rubric of aesthetics.
I guess the way I see it is I see the aesthetic, or what you call aesthetics, such as flourishing a long and happy life, as the justification for the ethics.
The non-aggression principle arises out of a need to live in a society where violence is not a regular thing, so that you can pursue your flourishing and your happy life.
Well, and I agree with you, but unfortunately, there are a huge number of people who completely and totally believe that the pursuit of power gives them a flourishing and happy life.
And this is the same problem that was faced, of course, as far back as the pre-Socratics, right?
Which is that we say, look, you should be benevolent, you should be wise, you should be honest, you should be humble, you should be rational, you should be this.
And everyone's like, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's an election on.
And they don't listen.
And so one of the things that I was really concerned about in terms of spending my intellectual energy, it's just my opinion as far as this goes, was to say, look, I'm not going to make the case any better than Aristotle did.
I'm not going to write a better book than Atlas Shrugged.
I'm not going to make that kind of an impact.
And if the problem has not been solved for the past 2,500 years, Of the good life being something that is compelling enough for people to give up the pursuit of power, the pursuit of money, the pursuit of sex, the pursuit of material goods and so on.
Not that you would have to necessarily give up all of those things to live the good life, but the case that was made in ancient Athens and in ancient Rome by the Stoics, by all of the philosophers and even some of the Christian philosophers, It just doesn't take in the general population, right? I mean, the general population just stampedes after the...
I shouldn't say exactly just the benefit of the moment because people go to dentists and they diet and they do defer gratification and so on.
But the argument that you're making, which I hugely respect, I mean...
Doesn't translate to effectiveness in the general population.
And I wanted to see, that's sort of what the UPB book is about.
I wanted to see and say, ooh, okay, let's go totally nuts and let's imagine that I can try and find a way where we can come up with a set of ethics that requires no assumptions whatsoever, right?
Because somebody says, if we go up and say, well, if you follow these sets of rules, you will live a long and happy life.
But you've got these nihilists, these seekers after power and so on, either people who don't want a long and happy life, who are masochists or nihilists or sadists or whatever, or people who firmly and completely believe that a long and happy life involves something like political power or business success, whether it's in a free market or corrupt environment.
And philosophers have just been unable to make that case, if you understand what I mean, by taking the approach of You know, the sort of finger-wagging, almost like a mom approach.
Well, you know, this might hurt, but it'll be good for you kind of thing.
I see where you're coming from, and I think that the problem actually has its root in epistemology rather than ethics, and I'll explain why.
You're right that people have already presented the idea that, hey, if you're honest and, you know, hardworking, you don't commit acts of violence, etc., etc., that you'll live a long and happy life.
And you're right that people have...
By and large, well, to a degree, they've adopted it.
I mean, it's not like we're living in, you know, the Stone Age where everybody's, you know, killing stones and killing each other and all that.
I mean, there is some relative amount of peace, even if we have the state regularly committing acts of violence.
I mean, I still can walk down the street in relative safety and live a relatively good life in the way things are now, although I'd love to improve it.
But I think the problem, the root of the problem, I think lies in an anti-conceptual mentality.
Like if you take a look at, you know, you just start talking to people about this stuff.
You talk to them about, you know, virtue.
You talk to them about living a happy life, etc.
And their eyes will just glaze over because they're so focused on concretes that abstractions just don't even hit them at all.
And I think that one of the major contributions that Ayn Rand gave to philosophy...
was her epistemology and her basically explaining, hey, you know, abstractions aren't just these big things that don't apply to the real world.
They're derived from the real world.
They're something that directly reflect the real world and allow us to actually understand it in a much better way than if we tried to somehow comprehend the interactions of all the concretes themselves.
I think that if we can get the anti-conceptual mentality I don't know if I want to say hatred, but distaste for abstraction, that that is where progress will begin.
Well, you could be right, and I certainly do appreciate the Rand's arguments in this area, but it would seem to me that I just, off the top of my head, I would say that human beings are completely the opposite of concrete, not to take too opposing a view.
But when you look at something like religion or patriotism or even elections or even people's adherence to a sports team, which is a completely abstract entity, you know, a made-up group because you live near them, you're supposed to support them.
But even if we just focus on something like religion or people's support for political parties, that is intensely abstract.
In fact, I would say that one of the major problems with that is that it is entirely abstract and unrooted in material reality.
But I'm not sure that I follow exactly how we can look at most people as anti-abstract and concrete when anti-empirical and highly metaphysically weird and abstract things like countries and religions and so on seem to hold people almost entirely in their sway.
Well, it's not that they're...
I don't know if anti-abstract is the right word because you can't actually be...
Anti-abstract, because humans operate at that level.
It's impossible to not operate at the conceptual level without essentially, unless you're talking about, you know, one of those various, some homeless people and things like that that don't really even think.
I mean, it would be very difficult to not have abstraction.
I guess what I'm trying to get at is Let's take religion as an example, and you're right.
You've got God, and you've got this whole thing that's very abstract.
It's not like you can point at some object and say, that's God.
It's believing in something very, very abstract.
But if you look at the motives, what are the reasons that people actually believe in God?
Is it that they actually buy into this abstraction, that they really, truly believe it?
Or how many of them are just doing it because that's what everyone else is doing and it's the path of least resistance?
I mean, I suspect that a lot of it is the latter, but a lot of it is, I mean, some people are really motivated by this devotion, and I would say that maybe they need to have their noggins checked, but they are sort of motivated by this metaphysical bliss, and they genuinely seem to, at least, I don't know, you know, you can't read people's hearts, but there do seem to be a lot of people who are either invested in, or believe in, or at least are motivated to conform with these abstractions, right?
And of course, even if we say, well, people are only religious because they want to follow the path of least resistance, they're still going for another kind of abstraction called approval, right?
Well, I guess you're right in the sense that they're going for an abstraction, and everything's an abstraction.
But abstractions are also in a hierarchy, so there's certain abstractions...
I'm sorry to interrupt you.
I just want to make sure I understand what you mean when you say that everything is an abstraction.
Well, not, okay, yeah, I guess we're talking philosophy, so it's important to be specific.
I don't mean primacy of consciousness or any of that.
I mean that all of our thoughts and the way we organize our knowledge is entirely abstraction.
Like, if, for example, I've got a DVD sitting on my desk Even though I'm looking at the DVD, when I think about it, I'm using an abstraction of that DVD. I'm not, you know, it's not like the entity has somehow entered my mind.
Like everything, every thought we have.
Yeah, we go from sense data to concepts.
The sense data is subjective.
Sorry, the information coming in from outside is objective.
The stimuli is objective, I guess.
And then we have our sense data, which is mostly subjective, and then our concepts, which are subjective but valid if they match the external stimuli.
Right. That's all I was saying when I was saying that everything is abstractions as far as our mind is concerned, not reality itself.
The DVD itself is not an abstraction.
Okay, so sorry to interrupt.
I just want to make sure that I'm piecing this together, if that's alright.
Because you said earlier, and I'm sure you've got a good way of explaining this, I just want to make sure that I understand.
You said that people are concrete, and I'm just trying to square that with everything's an abstraction.
And again, I'm not trying to trick you, I know that's a good answer, I'm just not sure I follow it.
Oh, that's what I was going to get to.
Sure. Abstractions form in a hierarchy, right?
So you have your very low-level abstractions, like, for example, sky.
You know, which, even though it's an abstraction, there's a very specific concrete that it's referring to.
You know, I look up and I see the sky, and that abstraction refers to that concrete.
But then you take something much higher on the hierarchy, like integrity.
And there's not, like, an object you can look at and say, that's integrity.
Integrity is... A result of several underlying layers of abstraction that ultimately go down to concrete, but build their way up.
And when I say that people are concrete bound, or tend to be, what I'm saying is they tend to focus on those lower level abstractions that can be easily and directly derived from empirical data, and they tend to shy away from those abstractions that are built up from those higher level abstractions that don't come to them as easily.
Okay, I think I understand.
So, when somebody looks at a tree and says, that's a tree, that is concept derived from sense evidence of tree, when somebody looks at somebody looking at a tree and says, that guy who says it's a tree is telling the truth, is comparing an abstraction called...
Integrity or honesty to an abstraction called a tree and a guy saying that's a tree and matching it.
So you get further removed from the sensual data, right?
But you still have to stay in line with the evidence that it starts with.
Right. Like a correctly formed abstraction, even the very high up ones like say integrity or something like that, still ultimately boil down to empirical data if they're formed correctly.
But They're not as easy to form because they have to be built up through layers, and it requires a lot more thought to grasp the concept of integrity than it does to grasp the concept of tree.
Yeah, and even more to actually put it into practice, as I said.
Okay, so if you feel that people are more concrete and that they just deal with sensual data more, I'm just trying to understand where something like patriotism and religion come into that, because those don't refer to anything that is tangible, right?
Well, no. I mean, like obviously I'm an atheist, there's no God, but people still believe in God for some reason, which actually occasionally that thought will hit me and blow my mind that most of the people around me actually believe that.
But they'll buy into these high-level abstractions, but like, for example, God isn't actually formed from, you know, concrete data.
It's not a valid abstraction.
God is actually an interesting abstraction, but it's an easy one to grasp because the entire point of the concept is that it's not graspable.
Like, you know, everything is defined like as omniscient and omnipotent, and in ways that you can't grasp it.
So it's just this sort of nebulous feeling thing that people believe in rather than in actual valid abstraction.
So it's not like integrity, for example, where you have to arrive at it through a long series of Conceptual chains that branch from empirical data, God is almost like one of those low-level abstractions, but placed in a high level, just completely disconnected from reality.
I'm sorry, and again, I'm just trying to understand the mental map here, but the low-level abstractions are definitely rooted in reality, right?
Well, they should be.
That's the important distinction here.
They should be. People form abstractions that aren't.
Right. So, again, I'm sorry, I'm just trying to understand.
So you say that people are concrete, and is the concrete that they are focused on things in reality that are not abstracted?
They either focus on things in reality, I mean, they're abstracted, but at a very low level.
I guess when I say concrete-bound, I mean, it might be more precise to say low-level abstraction-bound, or something like that.
And with a concept like God, for example, if you look at it, they think about it, and For example, what does your actual Christian think when he thinks God?
Because he can't wrap his head around, you know, he's everywhere and he does everything and all this stuff, because that's basically fantasy land right there.
What he thinks is, you know, I've got this perfect set of rules that I can just follow, that I don't have to know the detailed, abstract There are derivations from reality that lead to them.
All I have to know is that this book said to do these things, and I can do them.
So in effect, like for example, the ethics of Christianity are presented as low-level abstractions, basically like murder is wrong, why?
Because God said so.
Stealing is wrong, why?
Because God said so.
It's basically, instead of forming high-level ethical abstractions, they're just given these rules that are these low-level, not concrete, but close to concrete, I'm trying to think of a good way to explain this, because they're not actually based on concretes, but they're emulating low-level abstractions.
They're pretending like they're based on these immediate concretes, so that you don't actually have to grasp the underlying concepts that create them.
I think that your categorizations are interesting.
I'm not sure that I would put, say, the desire for a Maserati into the same category as a desire for religion or patriotism.
I think that you may be pushing a bit of a round peg into a square.
I think the distinctions are interesting, and I think that there's some really good stuff there, but I think that it doesn't fit, I think, to put religion into sort of base material greed like sex or material desires.
But that could just be my...
I mean, this is the first time I'm hearing it, so this is just my response.
I'm not saying that that's correct. Right.
Well, some of this is kind of new thoughts for me as well.
Sure, sure. But back to the original topic, basically what you were talking about is you were going to use universally preferable behavior basically is trying to tackle ethics from another direction Because, you know, people have already tried tackling ethics from the rational, egoistic type perspective of, you know, you should live a long and happy life, and these principles will help you get there, and it hasn't worked, so you're trying it from another angle.
Is that correct? Yeah, I would say not from another angle.
I would say in a way that works.
I mean, that's just my prejudice because I put so much work into the book, so take that for what it's worth.
I was going to say that rational egoism seems to work pretty well for me.
Well, sure, but it doesn't work in terms of convincing other people who aren't rational egoists.
That's the problem, right? And that's the challenge.
Well, I mean, I'm sure somebody's been convinced of it.
I mean, most people who are rational egoists, I don't know that they've always been that way.
No, of course. But I agree.
There are you and I who've been influenced by the writings of rational egoists, for sure.
But I would say that, you know, just take the ridiculously long view.
If you look at the sort of 2,500-year history of philosophy...
I would say that, particularly if you look at some of its arch nemesis, for instance, politics and religion, just to say, the statism or patriotism and religion have been open enemies to philosophy since pretty much philosophy began.
So if we look at 2.5 thousand years of combat between philosophy and religion and philosophy and patriotism or statism, To name just a few of the enemies that philosophy has targeted, philosophy has just had its ass kicked, repeatedly and consistently.
Philosophy remains this, you know, bespectacled, you know, like pencil-necked, pencil-armed guy getting his lunch money taken every day by the thugs of religion and the state.
So... What I'm sort of saying is that if we don't have something that does not require any agreement beforehand, right?
So you say, well, if you want a long and happy life, then you should do X, Y, and Z, right?
Well, then I have to want a long and happy life, and I have to believe that you will say, against what everybody else says, that this is how to achieve it.
And what I was trying to do was to say, I don't want any system of ethics that requires anyone's prior agreement with anything.
And without violating the is-ought dichotomy, right?
Because I can't just make up preferences and say that they exist like a tree does.
So my goal was to say, look, we suck at winning the battles because religion and statism are in many ways exactly as strong and in some ways even stronger than they were at the dawn of philosophy.
After 2,500 years of getting our ass kicked all over the playground...
What I wanted to do was to try and create an approach to ethics that could steamroller over anyone, no matter what premises they accepted, right?
So if somebody comes up to you and says, I don't want a long and happy life, I want to go out in a blaze of glory, then you just got to shrug and say, okay, well, I don't think that's wise, right?
And they're just going to go for it. What I wanted to do was create something where I could just take people like that down, you know, in one way or another.
So that was sort of the general goal, if that makes sense.
Right. I guess my immediate question when it comes to that is, what is it about universally preferable behavior that you think will be more convincing to that type of individual than rational egoism or any of the other ethical theories that are available right now?
Well, as I sort of mention in the book, the primary thing that we have to worry about is not the individual who wants to do harm, but rather the intellectual who wants to propose moral theory.
So you can take, as I mentioned, you can take steps to protect yourself against the individual criminal, so you can put in alarm systems or learn to use a gun or whatever.
But, again, state violence or institutionalized violence, which we see in primarily two forms throughout history, in the state and in the church, or in religion, in these two aspects, we are entirely helpless to afford.
And those two aspects are not supported by direct force, but rather by ethical theories around allegiance to God, which always turns out to be allegiance to a priest, or allegiance to your country, which always turns out to be allegiance to some guy in office with, you know, So, for me, what we need to do is have a way of taking on ethical theories and not have it be, if you believe this, then this follows, right?
So, if you believe that the greatest good for the greatest majority is the goal, then you will go with the utilitarian principle.
If you believe that social justice is the goal, then you'll go Democrat.
If you believe that whatever, whatever, right?
And it's with the Rand thing.
If you believe that life is the highest standard of value, then all this follows.
So, it's like... If you sort of agree where I plant my flag, then this is where you'll be.
But what I wanted to say is, it doesn't matter where I plant my flag.
It all follows no matter what.
And if you oppose it, you are accepting certain principles that support it.
If you support it, that's fantastic.
But I was trying to create something that simply cannot be refuted, no matter what your approach.
Now, of course, somebody can come and shoot me, absolutely.
I mean, philosophy is not...
A force field, right? Somebody can come and shoot me.
It's not like I can whip out my UPB Jedi mind tricks when the tax collectors come to pick up their booty, but what can happen is that when I engage in debate with people about virtue and ethics, that I can extract agreement with them whether they like it or not.
Okay. Well, I do want to say As far as I can tell from when I read the book and everything, I don't know that you actually drew any concrete principles, concrete principles, it sounds like a contradiction based on previous, but you know what I mean, that I disagreed with.
I mean, of course I agree rape is wrong.
I agree with the non-aggression principle.
Let me give you an example of one area where when I read it, it hit me the wrong way.
And it's your example where you have, let's say, for some reason I don't think you provided a reason, but I'm going to provide one just to show how a rational person might have ended up in this situation.
Let's say a bunch of thugs attack you, steal all your stuff, and put you at the top of a flagpole.
So you're sitting there, you're at the top of a flagpole, and your example you use is that there's a house nearby, and if you can swing yourself and break through the window and break into the house, you'll live, whereas if you simply fall from the flagpole, there's a good chance you might die.
And in your argument, you stated that it would be immoral to swing from the flagpole into the house, but that you might just do it anyway out of, you know, fear for your life or desire to not die.
Whereas the way I would look at it is that the non-aggression principle is a contextual application of ethics to the fact that other human beings exist, and the context in which the non-aggression principle is applicable is It's normal, civilized society.
The reason for that is it is in the context of normal, civilized society where the non-aggression principle allows you to pursue your goals, your values, happiness, etc.
In the situation where you're on the flagpole, the non-aggression principle is not actually going to do you any good because, in this case, it's going to get you killed and then that kind of violates the whole primary purpose of You know, that you accepted it for to begin with.
So it would actually make more sense in that particular scenario and thus, in my view, be more ethical to go ahead and swing into the guy's window.
And of course, you'd want to try to, you know, restitute as soon as possible.
And chances are, you know, most rational people aren't going to get angry at somebody for breaking through their window and then paying for it if their life was at risk.
But to me, that seems like it would actually be the more ethical choice to actually save your own life rather than to go plop on the concrete below.
Well, I wouldn't necessarily say that that is a situation where ethics is invoked in the abstract.
So what I mean by that is that if I bust through somebody's window, do you believe that this...
to save my life, which everybody would do.
I'm not saying like I'd sit there and say, well, I don't want to aggress against anybody's property and therefore...
I'm going to die, fall and die.
I mean, I'm a realist in that sense.
Nobody's going to do that, and that's important to understand.
The question is, though, if I do bust through somebody's window, does that person have the right to demand restitution from me?
If they want to.
If he wants to. I would say they would.
Right, so that's all I'm saying.
If I destroy somebody's property...
Now, I don't think that there are too many people who would say probably think it was a thrilling...
I would pay somebody to dive through my window because I'd have a great story for the rest of my life, right?
So I would not myself pursue somebody who saved their life by diving through my window.
I'd be damn glad my window was there because it's good to walk through life knowing you've saved someone's life, right?
Or you've helped in that in whatever way.
So... When I say that it's wrong, what I mean is that the person whose property is damaged through no fault of his own and through an initiation of action on the part of another human being has the right to request, and legitimately so, to request restitution and have it paid.
That doesn't mean that I think that it's immoral in some abstract sense like God or Ayn Rand is watching and it's going to give you bad points.
It just means you're going to make the choice and you're going to obviously be so thankful for having your life saved that you're going to pay restitution and you probably pay the guy 10,000 bucks because you're alive and you're happy or whatever.
And everybody's happy, right?
If that makes sense.
Certainly it is an initiation of aggression against the person's property but all I mean by that is that the person has the right to restitution But, I mean, this would never particularly come into effect, I'm sure.
Well, I guess my concern there is that it seems kind of counterintuitive to regard that as wrong.
Like, I think, for example, if you just grabbed your average person and said, hey, if somebody slammed through your window because it was either that or they were going to die on the sidewalk, do you think that they did something wrong?
I think most people would say no, that they didn't do anything wrong.
And I think the reason for that is most people would recognize that the guy, you know, is rationally going to value his own life more than somebody else's window.
So I guess it seems like you're using an unusual definition of the word wrong in this context.
Because most people, when they say wrong, they mean you made the wrong or incorrect decision, whereas I think, as you pointed out, almost everyone would agree the correct decision in this case would be to go ahead and break through the window to save your life.
So if that's the correct decision, but wrong at the same time, that just kind of seems weird to me.
Well, I'm not sure what you mean by correct decision, to bust through somebody's window to save your life.
I mean, that's what people would do, for sure.
The same way that if I'm starving to death, I'm going to steal an apple rather than die, for sure.
Absolutely. But the person whose apple I've stolen does have the right to pursue me for restitution, right?
Right. Well, for an apple, but yeah, I mean, I get your point.
Right, so it can be entirely what you would do in an extremity, right?
But, I mean, nobody's going to say that jumping out of a tall building is the right decision.
But if you're, you know, in the Twin Trade Towers and you're going to burn to death, you're going to take your chances, right?
I mean, there are times when people will almost always do the, quote, wrong thing in particular circumstances.
And the wrongness in this is completely minor.
Because if you were to ask someone ahead of time, and let's say you phoned the guy, let's really go to town on this, right?
So let's say that it's my house and you're hanging outside on a flagpole.
Hi! And you phone me and you say, listen, I'm hanging on by my fingernails here.
Can I kick in your window so that I can save my life?
And I say, no, damn it, that's my stained glass window and you're not going to do it, right?
Then most people would think that I was a complete tool, right?
Oh, yeah. Right, right.
And then do it anyway. Yeah, and then the person would do it anyway, and that doesn't mean that I'd get to shoot you or anything, right?
But what it means is that it is wrong to bust up people's windows.
I mean, it's just wrong to do it, right?
That's a property rights thing which I go into in the book.
If you are in an extremity, then for sure you will give that a shot, right?
Right. But the wrongness is in the other person's viewpoint, right?
So if the other person has the right to press charges or to ask for restitution for you damaging his property, but nobody would do it, and so I don't see how that particular...
I mean, because it's a relationship, right?
Ethics is relational.
It's a relationship, right?
So I don't think we can legitimately say you can't Harm other people's property except in X, Y, or Z situation because then we're immediately back into subjective land, right?
Well, I mean, to a degree, there is some level of subjectivity to ethics.
And when I say that, I don't mean in the sense that, you know, whatever rules just you fancy are okay or anything like that.
But what I mean is the application of certain ethical principles can yield different results for different situations and for different people.
Sorry, sorry. The results, I have no interest in.
I mean, I have no...
I specifically sort of am against this argument from effect, if that makes any sense.
I guess my problem with the attack on the argument from effect is I see no other means of judging an action.
Well, but we don't judge an action.
We judge the justifications for the action.
The whole point of UPB is we don't sit there and say good, bad, good, bad.
What UPB basically says is all ethical theories, any theory which is proposed, which is supposed to describe or have some relationship to reality, must be universal and internally consistent.
So it has to be logical, it has to be empirical.
All that UPB says is that every single human theory, just as every single scientific theory, every theory that human beings propose must be logical and consistent.
And, you know, as a plus, explain the evidence that we have accumulated over the past couple of thousand years of civilization.
Right, so judging individuals is not what UPB is about.
UPB is, it's like saying the scientific method is judging how far or how fast a ball goes.
I mean, you can use the scientific method to do that, but the scientific method in its essence...
It's a way of validating theories, proposed theories about the behavior of matter.
Well, let me just propose a quick scenario, and maybe you can explain, because to me this scenario would seem to demonstrate that it's always about the consequences.
If I pull the trigger on a gun, whether that gun is pointed at a target, you know, at a firing range or at another person's head, is what's going to determine whether the action of pulling the trigger on the gun Is morally right or morally wrong?
So in this case, it would seem like the consequence of pulling the trigger on the gun is what determines whether pulling that trigger was right or wrong.
Well, but again, you're focusing on, which I understand, right?
But you're focusing on specific actions.
The UPB doesn't say, is pulling a trigger right or wrong?
That's like saying, does the science of medicine say whether injecting something is good or bad?
It depends what's being injected or whatever, right?
What UPB will say is, is it valid to use violence to achieve your goals or your ends?
Is the initiation of the use of force immoral or immoral, good or bad, consistent or inconsistent?
Or, another way of putting it is to say, Can a theory which proposes that the initiation of the use of force is universally preferable ever hold weight logically?
Can it ever be self-consistent?
And if it can't be, then it's an invalid theory.
So it's not, does this trigger get pulled or does that person get pushed off a bridge or anything like that?
It is for judging theories, not judging particular actions, if that makes sense.
Okay. I guess...
The main thing I have trouble with here is related back to the old is-ought dichotomy.
I still haven't quite understood or grasped why I or why anybody else would think that they ought to behave in accordance with universally preferable behavior.
Well, nobody has to, of course, right?
I mean, nobody has to use the scientific method.
If you want to act in a manner that is moral, then you have to act, your moral theories have to conform to universally preferable behavior.
That's all. You don't have to, right?
So, if you want to say something that is true about the nature of the world or the behavior of matter, then you have to use the scientific method.
I can, you know, put my underwear on my head, walk up and down the street and say, you know, quarks are made of cream cheese.
Right? And I certainly can be free to do that, to throw the scientific method out of the window completely.
It just means that as a result, anything that I'm saying about matter is completely wrong.
So people don't have to use UPB to validate their moral theories.
It just means that if they don't, their moral theories are just incorrect.
Okay. Well, see, the problem I have trouble grasping there is as a rational egoist myself, I... I've explained this earlier, the pursuit of a long and happy life, and we can get into the details of which is more important and all that, but the overall point is that that is the primary goal towards which my actions are headed.
So if the purpose of ethics, and maybe you can correct me and I'm wrong on what I'm assuming the purpose of ethics are, but if the purpose of ethics is to guide me towards making decisions and The decisions I want to make are the ones that lead me to a long and happy life.
And at some point I come across a decision that contradicts universally preferable behavior as you present it, but would be beneficial to a long and happy life.
Why should I act universally preferably?
And if I shouldn't, what practical use does universally preferable behavior have for me?
Well, I mean, that's a big question.
I guess my first response would be to say that you can make whatever decisions that you want.
I mean, you can make whatever decisions that you want, but unfortunately, the phrase a long and happy life does not conform to UPB because you can have a short and unhappy life and not violate any moral principles whatsoever, right?
Well, I guess in that case, if achieving a long and happy life or something along those lines is not The purpose of UBP, at least in my eyes, it becomes useless.
Like, what am I going to use it for?
Well, you're going to use it to validate moral theories that are proposed to you, right?
So if somebody says to you the government should provide health care, you can use UPB to destroy that argument.
Whether or not they agree with you about property rights, whether or not they agree with you about a long and happy life, no matter what they come up with, You can completely demolish that argument in about 10 minutes.
So that seems to me, since the goal of, for me, if we're philosophers, then we are doctors, right?
So the purpose of a doctor is not just to make himself feel better or to make just himself healthy.
If you learn philosophy, this is my opinion.
This is not a fact, right?
It's just my opinion. But if you learn philosophy, then you are a doctor.
And so you should work towards healing the sick, right?
So if you are a philosopher, then you are, I think, involved in the debate about ethics within society.
And once you become attuned to this, and I'm sure that you are, You see that everything is about ethics.
Everything is about ethics.
And if we have a methodology which allows us to, you know, take no prisoners, demolish finally what philosophy has set out to do thousands of years ago and completely failed, which is to demolish irrational and primarily the most important danger that we face is irrational and contradictory ethical theories.
Then that to me is fantastic.
It's like if you're a friend of Francis Bacon, and again, this is not to put myself in this category, but if you're a friend of Francis Bacon and you say, well, what good is the scientific method going to do for me?
Well, it's like, well, it lets you validate theories about matter.
I mean, no, it's not going to make, it's not going to build you a computer in the 15th century, but it is better to know the truth than to not know the truth.
Now, as far as a long and happy life goes, that to me is more around That, to me, is more using philosophy as a kind of nutrition, if this makes sense.
So, a long and happy life, self-fulfillment, self-knowledge, self-actualization, honesty, integrity, not using emotional or physical abuse or violence against other people.
Those things, to me, are great, obviously, because there's a lot about aesthetics that is important to a happy life.
It's not like, if I don't stab a guy, I'll be really happy.
So, there's a lot to do with happiness that has to do with Oh, surmounting the basic ethical norms, which I think I try to take a good swing at proving in the book.
But that having been said, I would say that the happiest life that you could have, my opinion, right?
This is my opinion, right? Because the happiness thing has a lot of subjectivity in it.
The happiest life that you could have Would be to take on and advance the cause of getting rid of these irrational and vicious and, frankly, genocidal ethical theories that are used to justify all sorts of atrocities, from the domestic ones of throwing, what, two million Americans in jail to the foreign policy ones of wars and so on.
I guess where I see a problem is that even if most people aren't rational egoists explicitly, the vast majority aren't.
Most people wouldn't even know what rational egoism means.
Right. But people still tend to pursue their interests.
And I'm sure you wouldn't disagree with that.
I mean, it's like one of the foundations of why the free market works.
So if somebody honestly believes that socialized medicine is going to provide them with better health care or that it would be in their interest, even if they're wrong, if that's what they believe, to me, if you come at them with, you know, Well, according to this ethical theory, according to abstract principle X, Y, and Z, that is not ethical or something like that, they're not going to care.
I think the only way that they're actually going to care is if you can convince them that socialized medicine is not in their best interest, that it's not going to provide them with better health care.
Or if it is going to provide them with better health care, it's going to be at expense of other things that are more valuable, such as liberty or things like that.
Now, someone is just Plain not going to listen or if they're just completely unconvinced and at the end they're just like, well, the way I see it, I don't care if it's stealing from other people or whatever.
I'm going to get my socialized healthcare and there's nothing you can do about it.
I don't think even UPB is going to do anything for that.
I don't see it as being something that's going to work for what your goal with it is.
And what is your experience of that?
Have you tried it? I tried using UPB to convince somebody that socialized medicine is wrong.
No, tried using UP because you have a theory which says that it's not going to work, right?
So I'm just curious what your experience has been of trying it.
I have not tried it, but if you would like, I'd be happy to.
Yeah, I mean, I've got tons of listener conversations and I've not had it fail once.
You've actually convinced every person you've spoken to with it?
I have not had...
Sorry, I have not convinced everyone, but I would say that's simply because they just don't want to hear or whatever.
I've not convinced everyone that UPB is the sole approach because people can always reject reason.
You can't convince people that science is the correct approach if they just want to cling to superstition.
However, in not one instance that I can recall, like I had a debate, I guess, a little while back with somebody who was a supporter of the Iraq War.
And within about, and I can send you the link, it was within less than 10 minutes I got them to agree that the Iraq war was immoral.
The reason is that people use ethical theories to justify these immoralities.
And without those ethical theories, the immorality simply will not stand.
Because economists have been trying to convince people, for instance, since Adam Smith, right, that free trade is in their best interest, and it doesn't work, and people just don't believe it.
So appealing to people's self-interest doesn't work.
I mean, that is an argument from a fact.
Well, you'll have less this, you'll have less that under socialized medicine, there'll be fewer doctors, and so on.
But that doesn't work, because, you know, Economy after economy after economy has slid into the morass of socialized medicine, even though economists have had ferociously great arguments for at least 100 years as to why it is so wrong.
So it doesn't work.
I mean, just empirically, that doesn't work.
I can tell you that UPB completely, at least for me, does work because nobody can do that which he defines as evil.
Nobody. It's like asking people to levitate.
It cannot happen as soon as...
And that's why people get so ferocious about definitions of morality.
But no, if somebody proposes that universal health care is a moral good and you can prove to them that it is not a moral good, They simply can't sustain the opinion.
They just can't. I mean, it's just the way human beings are built.
As you say, we are empirical and conceptually based people.
And as soon as you point out rank contradictions in people's theories...
Now, they may go tomorrow and ignore your argument completely and start trumpeting socialized medicine again.
And that's, of course, completely outside of your control.
But for sure, they will bow in the debate itself.
There's no question of that. Or they'll just leave the debate and, you know, yell at you or whatever.
But they simply can't win that debate.
Well, you'll notice in my review, I had referred to universally preferable behavior as a, and this is the terminology I used, a social ethical protractor.
And the reason I use that terminology is I do think it is an effective means of, if you want to take a given type of behavior, such as murder or rape or what have you, And you can plug it into universally preferable behavior, and I'll agree it'll demonstrate...
I'm so sorry to interrupt. I just want to clarify this point, because if this goes out as a podcast, you can't plug an act of murder into UPB, but you can plug theories which justify murder as morally good into UPB. Well, I mean, in the book, for example, you use murder as an example, and rape and theft.
No, sorry, I use theories justifying.
I say, can it be that murder is universally preferable behavior, right?
So can the act of murder be universalized as a theory which says that it is universally preferable behavior?
I'm sorry to be a total nitpicker, but that's like saying, can the scientific method validate a ball bouncing?
And of course it can't, right?
It can only validate theories that describe the ball bouncing.
Okay, fair enough.
But it is good for determining if the theory in question about murder or rape or what have you can be consistently applied, because you'll demonstrate, for example, if we have the theory that rape is good, Then, you know, people can't all rape each other at the same time and, you know, conversely, if someone tries to fight off being raped, You know, that's bad because if rape is good, they shouldn't be trying to stop it.
But if they don't fight it, then they're no longer being raped, so they're kind of stuck.
So then violence is both good and bad at the same time, and you have a ball going up and down according to the mathematical theory at the same time, which is impossible.
And the same thing, of course, works with socialized medicine, right?
Can people use violence or not?
If they can, then everyone gets to use violence and you can't have socialized medicine.
If they can't, then nobody gets to use violence and you can't have socialized medicine.
Sorry, could you just breathe a little further away?
You're just kind of breathing in my ear there.
Not that I don't like it. Oh, I'm sorry. Sorry, go on.
Anyway, so yeah, I mean, I agree it is good for that.
I mean, it is good for taking a certain theory, but it only seems to work with, and I guess this is why it's universally preferable behavior, it only seems to work with theories that involve interactions between people.
Like, I can't plug in, like, you know, if I've got the following options in front of me, what principles do I use to determine which one is going to better fulfill my life?
And let's just assume for the sake of argument I've got several options, none of which would violate UPB or the non-aggression principle or anything like that.
Where do I get the principles that allow me to make that decision if UPB doesn't answer that question for me?
Well, you can't use the scientific method to figure out if you should be a scientist, right?
Well, no, of course not.
And so you can't use UPB to figure out if you should be an ethicist or a brain surgeon or a garbageman, right?
Well, of course not. I'm sorry, I don't mean to diminish what you're saying.
I just, as far as I understand it, you're talking about The aesthetics of personal satisfaction and that sort of stuff, right?
UPB will maybe have a little bit to say on who you should marry, like it probably wouldn't be good to marry somebody completely irrational, but it certainly won't tell you whether you should buy blue or brown shoes, right?
But in terms of importance to me, here's an example I would use.
Let me give you two examples of decisions someone might make.
Like, for example, if somebody walks into a convenience store, they can choose to make the decision one way or the other whether to try to steal batteries from the store, you know, given the consequences of if I get caught, this happens, if I don't get caught, this happens, etc.
Take that same kind of dilemma and then take it to something that doesn't involve aggression, right?
Like, say, they're trying to decide whether they should become a nurse, Or whether they should become, you know, a full doctor or whether they should pursue another career entirely.
And I guess to me, UPB only addresses the former, even though the latter would be by far a more important and impactful decision on that person's life.
So, and once again, I'm going to give the same definition of ethics I gave earlier.
And if this is wrong, I think we may just be on a disagreement regarding definitions more than anything else.
But if ethics are there to provide me as principles to make decisions, and if there's a decision that's of great importance to my life that a certain ethical theory doesn't even address, that ethical theory seems like it's incomplete.
Okay. Well, first of all, the guy who is figuring out whether or not he's going to steal something is probably not going to reference UPB. And again, UPB is not around making specific decisions by individuals.
It's around validating ethical theories.
So, like, the scientific method won't tell you, should I go left or right at this traffic light?
Like, it will say that if you should go, like, if left is where you want to go, then you should go left if you want to get there, that kind of stuff, right?
So, I don't see that it would really help people make those decisions, but I would under...
I think, you know, with all due respect, I think that you might be...
In fact, I'm more than a little certain that you are underestimating the effects that negative ethical theories or irrational or inconsistent ethical theories have...
On people's lives.
And so, for instance, if we just look at something like the family, my parents are always right.
My parents love me even if they hit me.
My parents... Like, whatever, right? Like, the idea that family is the ultimate good, the idea that my country right or wrong, the idea that we should support the troops, the idea that I should pay my taxes because I want to be a responsible citizen, and this, that, and the other, right?
All of the... All of the ethical processing that goes on in everybody's life that has a huge impact on what it is that they do with their time.
Even if my parents are mean and nasty to me, I still have to go over there for Christmas and Thanksgiving and so on.
I have to expose my kids to them even if I think they're abusive.
Again, I'm taking an extreme case here, but an ethical theory called family has value no matter what, blood is thicker than water, all the sentimentality that goes around that, UPB blows that all out of the water because UPB does not recognize the distinction called A border or a bloodline or, you know, similar DNA or anything like that any more than the scientific method does.
So I think that if we understand that we can help people get rid of patriotism, get rid of God, get rid of allegiance to things that don't actually have virtue and value, I think that you're entirely underestimating, in my opinion, how much ethical theories feast and false and bad and manipulative and exploitive ethical theories feast on people's daily thoughts and decisions.
I don't know if I'd say that because, I mean, I attack ethics constantly as far as bad ethical theories and things like that, and I fully recognize that what someone thinks is right and wrong is going to determine and affect how they behave because people are only going to behave in the way that they think it's right.
But you said that you didn't see how this was going to be particularly important or effective for people's lives?
No, I said it was incomplete because there are certain decisions that it doesn't give an answer to.
Sure, but there are certain things that mathematics and science don't give answers to.
That doesn't mean that they're incomplete, right?
The fact that I can't use my car to drive across water doesn't mean that my car is broken, right?
It just means it's not designed to drive across water.
Well, I guess then, what would you call the science of just making decisions in general rather than decisions that impact other people or things like that?
Like, if you had to take a field and say, I'm going to determine a system That will help me make what is, in my eyes, the correct decision for each situation.
What would you call that science?
I wouldn't call it a science.
What would you call that philosophy or whatever you want to call that, that view, that set of principles, what would you label that?
Well, I think that it does fall under...
I mean, there's lots of ways in which UPB can provide guidance in this area, in the same way that science can provide guidance in areas as well.
For instance, if honesty is a virtue and a value, which I think in UPB we can say that it is, then of course honesty with yourself is important.
And of course honesty with yourself...
is a necessary, though not sufficient, prerequisite for honesty with other people, right?
So, if, for instance, you're trying to say, should I be a doctor or should I be an actor?
And you really want to be an actor, but your parents want you to be a doctor, then, of course, UPB will help you with that, right?
Because if you say, well, I should be a doctor because my parents want me to, then you have to explain why you have different moral rules for your parents, right?
Because you're pleasing your parents' wishes, but your parents aren't pleasing your wishes by encouraging you to be an actor.
So the sort of science of consistency is incredibly powerful to help you untangle the kind of influences.
So I talk to people and they say, well, I said the truth about something to my mom about something that happened in the past, and now she's really unhappy and everyone's coming down on me and blah, blah, blah.
And UPB is very powerful in that kind of situation.
And you say, well, so is the principle that your mother is working on that you should never cause pain to other people?
Well, she caused pain to you in the past and she's causing pain to you now, so clearly, as you've read on truth, so you know that that's the approach, right?
That there's inconsistency in these kinds of rules that are handed down.
In my opinion, if you pull away all of these negative and hypocritical and jaundiced and corrupt and sometimes well-meaning but just wrong influences, I think that our true self is revealed and we get to do that which makes us happier, but it's more around getting rid of negative influences.
You know, like if we take the poison out of our food, we become healthy, if that makes sense.
Well, right, but then once you start saying, you know, UPV can be used for this situation, UPV can be used for that situation, We've entered back into the whole is-ought thing, because if you're going to say, well, UPB is good because it can do this, I guess I can't see how it can be just valid in and of itself.
It doesn't seem to...
It requires consistency, and that's good, and it does cover some areas of decision-making, and I agree that it can be very useful to demonstrate how a certain ethical theory cannot be consistently applied.
But at the same time, if we're going to say that You know, anytime we try to address, you know, why should I do this?
Why shouldn't I do this? And we're just going to say, well, this is what it says.
You know, it's not going to tell you whether you should or shouldn't do it.
Isn't that the point of ethics is to tell you whether you should or shouldn't do something?
Oh, no, I don't...
I mean, I wouldn't say that.
I mean, because then we're just robots, right?
I mean, we look up, you know, what does ethics say I should do today, right?
Okay, I'm going to go do that.
That, to me, is not being free or spontaneous.
But I think, again...
Sorry, go ahead. I don't mean to, in a transcendental, sort of like, as an authoritarian sense of, you know, I'm going to look at ethics and it's just going to be written on, like, this big slab somewhere or something and just...
I'm talking about principles to guide your decisions because we can't just make decisions at random.
It's physically impossible pretty much.
Sorry to interrupt, but that's sort of what I'm saying.
If you genuinely want to be an actor and your parents are pressuring you to be a doctor, UPB completely unravels that situation for you.
Now, that doesn't tell you you should be a doctor or you should be an actor, but what it will say is that it is invalid for your parents to pressure you into becoming a doctor and call it a moral value.
Okay, I can agree with that.
And that takes a lot of the intensity and pressure off it, right?
Because people will say, well, you're a bad son because your mother's crying or whatever, right?
And UPB will say, no, no, no, that is not a valid rule, right?
And it just takes the pressure off these kinds of things.
And I believe in my sort of general thing, like if you don't push a sapling over, the tree grows tall kind of thing.
That if we can remove these parasitical false beliefs from the ethical beliefs, which are just everywhere in people's minds, if we can peel those away, pull them back, then what emerges, I think, is a very strong and healthy sense, which I think leads to, of course, the goal of long and happy life.
I mean, happiness is a goal, right, for philosophy in the way that health is a goal for medicine.
So I believe that if you start looking at this question of UPB, whenever anybody gives you some kind of ought or some kind of should or some kind of preferential state, bringing the UPB approach, I think, will blow a huge amount of cobwebs free.
At least that's sort of what's happened in my conversations with other people in the way that they've tried it.
And give it a shot. I mean, I'm not going to try and you certainly shouldn't, you know, believe me because I say anything, right?
But just when you have those situations, just start examining it from the UPB perspective and I think you'll find that it's very powerful.
Well, I'm not denying that it might be useful or that it might work, but let's take your example of the parents, right, where they're They're pressuring you to become something you don't want to be.
They're pressuring you to be a doctor, but you want to be an actor.
You use UPB to demonstrate your parents pressuring you to become a doctor is morally invalid.
Is that correct?
Okay. But the implied additional statement, or at least to me it seems implied, is, and that's why you shouldn't regard your parents' opinion in this matter.
Like, it seems like there's an implied ought there.
No, I mean, if you realize that your parents are hypocritically manipulating you for their own self-interest, let's say that that is what is occurring, then naturally people will disregard that.
I mean, for sure, right?
I mean, that's just inevitable.
We don't have to, you know, that's like, you know, if we say, well, in every second pill of Tylenol is a deadly poison, people will just stop eating Tylenol, right?
I mean, that's inevitable, right?
And that's why people fight this stuff so hard.
I don't mean you, right? But people in families fight this stuff so hard, right?
So as soon as you realize that your parents are giving you moral arguments because they are hoping to use the power of ethics in a false and manipulative way to get you to conform to their whims, then you will simply start disregarding their opinions automatically.
I mean, that's just the way the human mind works, right?
I guess what I'm looking at is more of, like, in reality, though, right?
Like, as in, you know...
Either in reality, and there's three possibilities here, I guess.
In reality, you should not consider your parents' pressures because they're trying to manipulate you, or you should try to consider your parents' pressures even though they're trying to manipulate you, or there is no should or shouldn't at all.
And which of these three do you think...
I know you're saying that you'll act automatically, but in terms of reality, is it that you should...
You shouldn't, or that it's just whatever.
There's no requirement.
No, there's no should. Like, for instance, for me, it's sort of analogous to this, if this makes sense.
If you say to me, Steph, by God, I really want to go north in this wood, right?
And you think you're going north, but you're actually going south, and I give you a compass, there's no should there, right?
You can continue to go south, right?
You just know that you're going south, and you don't want to go north, and that was just a lie, right?
Well, true. So, if I can give you a way to prove that your parents, in this made-up example, that your parents are manipulating and controlling you, yeah, you can continue to allow yourself to be manipulated and controlled, but you'll just know it for what it is, right?
But there's no should, right?
Because you can spend the rest of your life obeying your parents' whims, and you can get a Ouija board to consult them after they're dead if you want.
I mean, that's totally fine, right?
And you can go around stabbing and strangling people all that you want as well.
There's no bolt in the sky.
There's no physics that's going to stop you.
It's just that any ethical theory that you use to justify your actions will be false, right?
And if you say, well, I'm acting with integrity by obeying corrupt people, you'll just know that that is a false statement, right?
Right. So I guess what you're saying is that the majority, if not, well probably the majority, not everybody, there's always psychopaths and things like that, but the majority of the population wants to act good.
I know you've talked about this a lot, but you really respect mankind's desire to do what's right.
So what you're saying essentially is that by using UPB to demonstrate That their actions or the actions that they're supporting, or rather the theory behind the actions to be specific, the theory behind those actions is not moral or cannot be consistently applied.
And once they're unable to actually refute that, then because they now understand fundamentally that it's wrong to do whatever they're doing or the theory that's justifying whatever they're doing, that they'll automatically stop doing it or want to stop doing it.
They'll certainly want to stop doing it, for sure, yeah.
And again, that may not last, right?
Some guy may get a revelation about the fact that religion is nonsense, and he might be back at church in two weeks.
It doesn't matter, right? That's completely beyond your control.
As a doctor, all you can do is write prescriptions.
You can't run around forcing pills down everyone's throat, right?
Well, obviously, but I guess at this point, the only real concern I have left is that I don't know, it seems like if people couldn't be convinced that certain ethical theories were wrong because they were detrimental to their self-interest or to their life or to their happiness,
I don't know that if they'll be more convinced just with the argument that their actions, or rather the theory behind their actions, cannot be practiced consistently.
Because if someone has already decided that they're just going to act however they want to act, And that's that, then neither approach will work.
And if that's the reason why an ethical system hasn't gripped humanity to free us from things like the state, parental manipulation, and things like that, if the reason is because there are just too many people out there that just don't care, I don't know.
I mean, at this point, it almost seems like an obstacle that can't be surmounted if that's what the actual problem is.
Well, I'll just touch on this very briefly, but I think part of the reason, of course, is that it is beneficial for some people to have socialized health care.
I mean, if I've never bought any health insurance and I'm 50, right, and the socialized medicine gets put in place, it's going to be hugely beneficial for me, practically and immediately and economically and in just about every single way.
It is going to be beneficial for me, right?
So the problem with appealing to benefit, it is this subjective and it changes and so on.
Now, the guy born two generations from now who inherits this totally shitted up system, who is responsible, who gets all these debts and so on, yeah, he's totally screwed, right?
But the guy who gets the healthcare system, which was developed by the free market and then gets socialized, that guy, he's making out like a bandit for the first generation.
This is why state programs last so long.
The first generation makes out like bandits, right?
So the guy who's coming back from the Second World War who gets the GI Bill, he's getting a free education because the debt gets passed on through inflation and deficit spending to the next generation.
So You simply can't say to somebody who's 50 who's never had any health insurance, it's bad for you to get free health care.
He just won't believe you because it's not true.
It is good for him to get free health care.
It's not moral for the theory to justify the provision of these services at the point of a gun.
It's not moral or consistent or logical and you can only attack it there.
But you simply cannot attack people on the basis of immediate self-interest because they absolutely will benefit from statism and from religion in a lot of ways.
Well, that same person, do you think, like, if you've got the 50-year-old who has no insurance and socialized medicine is the hot issue, I mean, if he's, you know, because he stands to make out like a bandit, as you put it, do you think that he will simply decline or no longer act in a way to make out like a bandit if you present him with the UPB framework?
Well, I don't think that...
I mean, to me, that's not the focus, right?
I mean, the focus is you put the truth out as consistently as possible.
What people do with it is up to them.
He may do that. He may curse your name into the grave and go for, you know, socialized medicine no matter what, right?
But the fact is that you simply have to put the facts out.
Like, I mean, when Galileo figured out that the sun was the center of the solar system...
You didn't judge that theory by saying, well, does that mean that every pope and every cardinal is now going to believe that the sun is the center of the solar system?
That doesn't matter. It doesn't matter what people do with the truth.
The important thing is that we have a methodology for putting it out there and knowing that we're right and not requiring any acceptance of axioms but simply reasoning from the ground up so that people can't escape it.
What they do with that is completely up to them, and that's free choice, that's individuality.
I myself tend to focus not on the 50-year-old who will strongly benefit from socialized medicine because he's just going to make up whatever crap he wants to get his goodies.
I generally focus on the people who are young because they generally don't have quite as much invested in this kind of corruption.
Well, at the same time, I mean, couldn't you make the argument that if you're focusing on the people that are young that don't stand to benefit as much, You know, who might actually benefit more from having less, you know, taxes or things like that, in those cases, wouldn't appealing to their self-interest might actually work?
But it hasn't, right?
It hasn't worked for 2,500 years, and I'm not, I'm not, I'm not certainly, I'm nowhere near vain enough to think that I can improve on 2,500 years' worth of philosophy.
It's the same thing that I take with libertarianism, right?
So, I can't improve on 2500 years of incredibly brilliant people doing their thing, so I'm just going to assume that it can't be done, because 2500 years of brilliant people have not been able to achieve anywhere close to the goal that was desired.
In fact, in many ways, refer the back.
So, no, so I don't think that appealing to the self-interest of the young is going to matter, because their self-interest is also around getting jobs, getting careers in academia, conforming with their parents, going to church, so you're just one of another competing bunch of self-interests, and philosophy isn't going to pay them for, you know, years. And going through the individuation process that occurs with real philosophy, with true self-knowledge, It's a process that can last half a decade or more and is really grueling and unpleasant.
It's like saying to someone, well, would you like to sit in a dentist chair for the next two years?
It's like, thanks, but I think I'll be okay if I don't.
I just don't think that approach is going to work, but I can't prove that, of course.
It just historically hasn't for so long that I think there's good evidence for it.
Okay, so basically you're going to see, because I don't know if I've seen anything that indicates necessarily You say you have empirical data from your experiences with other people, and of course that's something I can research after we're done here.
But I personally, of course, haven't seen anything yet that seems to demonstrate that UPB is going to be more successful in this area than the previous ethical theories that have already failed.
Right. Remember, UPB is a framework for validating ethical theories.
So, for sure, absolutely, there is no guarantee that it's going to work, but it doesn't matter whether it works or not, because that's an argument from a fact.
What matters is that it's true.
Okay. Fair enough.
I mean, because either the truth is going to work or we have to lie, right?
I mean, this is my opinion, right?
I'm not saying that I've proven UPB to everyone's satisfaction.
Either the truth is going to work, if working is a criteria, or we're just going to have to start lying.
And if we start lying, then we're not philosophers anymore.
We're just sophists or priests or politicians or whatever, right?
I don't know that lying would actually work, though.
No, I'm sorry. I mean, even if we were looking at it like that.
So, I mean, even if you looked at it from a purely, you know, pragmatic standpoint, I mean, even then lying would probably be a bad choice.
Well, but lying works for a lot of people really well, right, in terms of gathering material power and prestige.
You know, it would be hard to convince Strom Thurmond that after he married his third Miss North Carolina and was in the Senate for 40 years, that he was not living a long and happy life.
It would just be hard to convince him of that.
You and I may disagree with him about his assessment, but lying works really, really well for a whole lot of people.
It's just happening to be lying.
That's all we have to keep saying. Okay.
Well, I'll tell you what, because it's been well over an hour at this point.
You have given me some good information.
I will definitely think about it further.
Give it a shot. Take it out for a spin, right?
This is the kind of car that you've got to drive to see how it handles, if that makes any sense.
Right. Sorry, go ahead.
I was going to say, I'll do some more thinking about it.
My main concern was just that, from my perspective, my goal of my actions, and Maybe, you know, this is the minority of people that have made this decision, but I already know, for me, I'm trying to go after, you know, eudaimonia, human flourishing.
And so for me, the ultimate justification that I use for any action I take, you know, is whether it will encourage that flourishing.
Like, to me, an argument that UPB will consistently, or at least most of the time, encourage human flourishing is far more convincing than simply the argument that You know, it's consistent.
Right. And UPB would say that what convinces you is not material, what is true is what is material.
And I'm sure you would agree with that as well, fundamentally, right?
Right. Well, of course. Truth means what refers to actually existing reality rather than something that doesn't exist or isn't actually existing.
Right, so let's do this.
I don't know if you recorded the video or not, but if you can just send me an email if you've got any links to what you've got, it'd be great.
To me, split screen would be better.
Who wants to look at me for an hour?
God, not even me. But I'll send this all to you once I've got it compiled.
If you can send me whatever you've got, that'd be great.
And I really do appreciate it.
I really had a great time with the conversation, and I really do appreciate you taking the time.
No problem. I enjoyed it as well.
All right, thanks, man. I'll talk to you soon.
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