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April 3, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
21:28
1029 Freedomain Radio: Hanging By A Thread...?

Flagpoles, Lifeboats and the Edge of Ethics - dealing with "emergencies," an article by Host of Freedomain Radio, the most popular philosophy podcast on the web - www.freedomainradio.com

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The End
The End it's Stefan Malony from Free Domain Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
This is a little article that I wrote called Hanging by a Thread.
Flagpoles, lifeboats, and the edge of ethics.
And this was in response to a listener I'm also a philosophy student, who persistently questioned me on an aspect of the book that I have written called Universally Preferable Behavior, a rational proof of secular ethics, available at freedomainradio.com.
If you buy it and you don't like it, I'll give you your money back.
I'll send it to you for free. You can pay me only if you like it.
Just get this book into your hands.
I don't think there's a more important thing for you to read.
As a human being, but that's, of course, if I thought there was a more important book to write, I would have written that one.
So, I hope that you will get a hold of a copy.
I think it's a completely life-changing book.
And I think the most essential thing that rational secularists can do is to address the problem of ethics.
Without that, we will always have governments and we will always have religion.
So, we will always have violence and superstition until we can come up with a rational, secular, scientific proof of ethics.
So, get that book.
Whatever it takes for me to get it into your hands, just let me know, and I will get it to you.
It's available as an audiobook as well.
So, this philosophy student kept questioning me on this aspect of ethical theory involving disaster scenarios, lifeboat scenarios, and a particular one about a man and a flagpole.
So, this is hanging by a thread, flagpoles, lifeboats, and the edge of ethics.
It seems to be a near universal compulsion for those interested in ethics to attempt to find situations where ethical rules contradict themselves, thereby introducing an element of irrationality or subjectivity to ethics.
Lifeboat scenarios, cannibalism is wrong, but what if you're starving?
Desperation scenarios, all starving men will steal, so how can stealing always be wrong?
And so on. All seem to be endlessly obsessed over.
One central problem, I believe, is that philosophers, like most thinkers in the humanities, suffer from both physics envy and Newton paranoia.
Physics envy is a desire to gain the kind of universal absolutism that remains possible for those dealing with non-conscious matter and energy, or mathematics for that matter.
Newton paranoia is the fear that a seemingly comprehensive and accurate theory will turn out to be incorrect in extreme situations, just as Newton's theories in situations of extreme gravity at extreme speed.
It is interesting to note that biologists do not seem to suffer from either of these pathologies.
In dealing with the effects of DNA replication and mutation, they face a large number of grey areas, as well as continued skepticism from Christian superstition, and a few significant challenges in the differentiation of species.
Plus, the discipline was also invented centuries before the discovery of DNA, yet somehow managed to soldier on.
The fear that extreme situations will break a theory, combined with the desire for absolute certainty, has stalled the development of ethics since before the days of Socrates.
In the absence of rigorous philosophical proofs, ethics has remained embedded in the rather soupy morass of culture and religion, much as physics did before Bacon.
However, to me, there is something enormously unpleasant and, frankly, irresponsible In endlessly hacking away at all of the lifeboat scenarios and trying to find the final and irrevocable answers to the various catastrophes and extreme situations that can be imagined in this or any other world.
Philosophers, particularly moral philosophers, are the ethical physicians of mankind.
Currently, ethics remains such a subjective and murky swamp that it can be reasonably said that the world is suffering from a plague of bad ethics.
It is certain that the ethical propositions accepted by most thinkers, the validity of voluntary contracts, the non-aggression principle, property rights, would solve or prevent almost all the institutional evils that the world currently suffers from.
However, ethicists, particularly the academics, worry themselves half to death and bore us almost entirely into the grave, fretting about whether a man hanging from a flagpole can kick in a window to save his life.
To me, this is like possessing the cure for cancer.
but refusing to release it, because if someone takes it and is simultaneously struck by lightning, falls into a sinkhole and sneezes, there may be an adverse reaction.
I believe that this scholastic retreat to inconsequentiality occurs, because it is far easier to endlessly debate ethical impossibilities than to actually live your ethics because it is far easier to endlessly debate ethical impossibilities than to actually *sad*
If, academic or not, you believe in the moral validity of the non-aggression principle, then clearly to really live that value requires you, at least,
to no longer associate with people who advocate aggression in the form of domestic violence, child abuse, or institutional violence such as war, taxation, and just imprisonment.
Certainly, most people do not see the violence inherent in the existence of a government.
But it does not take more than a few minutes to understand this basic fact once It is pointed out.
If however, after weeks or months of pointing out the violence of the state, those around you continue to support it, then ethics means absolutely nothing at all if you continue to associate with them.
Of course this is all emotionally very unpleasant, but unpleasant or not, it does remain a simple fact that if you claim that something is evil, the initiation of force, then you must by definition also accept that those who advocate evil are corrupt at best and complicit at worst.
For an ethicist to continue to associate with people he defines as corrupt or evil is a complete contradiction of any reasonable moral standards.
As foolish and ultimately contemptible as, say, a district attorney who rails against prostitution and then turns out to be a customer.
That having been said, I will do my best to eliminate at least one of the challenges posed by those who wish to find the limits of property rights.
I have worked, as I said, for the past few years, or decades, on developing a rational proof for secular ethics, which I talk about in my book, Universally Preferable Behavior.
In it, I discuss the oft-cited example of the man on the flagpole.
In this scenario, I am hanging by my fingernails from a flagpole outside the window of someone's apartment.
My choices are to either A kick in the window and clamber to safety, or B plummet to my death.
Now, I will take it as a total given that just about everyone on the planet would choose option A rather than falling to his death.
In this situation, clearly we have an abrogation of property rights, breaking someone's window and entering his apartment, which is considered the most sensible right, proper and rational thing to do.
Ah, but if voluntarily initiating the destruction of someone else's property can be the right and sensible thing to do, how can we claim that property rights are absolute?
There are countless variations on this basic argument, such as stealing a loaf of bread when you're starving and so on.
Everybody would do it, but it's considered wrong.
To answer this opposition, we need to understand the nature of property rights just a little more comprehensively.
If we start from the position that there are no unchosen positive obligations, We can easily understand that the exercise of property rights is voluntary.
If my car is stolen, I am not morally obligated to assert my property rights and report the theft to the proper authorities or go hunting for my car myself.
I can quite easily shrug, blame the will of the gods, and go buy a bicycle.
Similarly, we can easily imagine a scenario wherein I would be very happy to have my car stolen.
Perhaps it requires expensive repairs, and I would rather get the insurance money.
Perhaps I was involved in a hit-and-run accident.
I'm happy to get rid of the evidence.
In these cases, if a thief were to ask my permission before stealing my car, I would tell him, yes, please go ahead and take it.
Thus, his removal of my car could scarcely be called theft at all, but rather would be a kind of free removal, such as when someone takes a television set that I've left by the side of the road.
Now, it is very likely that most people will be very upset if their car is stolen, and will attempt to pursue justice and recover their property and so on.
A tiny minority of people will actually be relieved to have their car, quote, stolen, in which case the permission to take the car is in a very real sense granted after the theft rather than before.
Of course, this permission does not have to be implicit, but rather can be entirely explicit.
Imagine that I buy a lottery ticket for $5 and find out that it wins nothing.
Is it reasonable for me to then present this lottery ticket to you, saying that I bought it on your behalf, and that you now owe me five dollars?
Very few of us would feel flattered and gratified by this unsolicited, quote, generosity.
Since I did not ask you to buy a lottery ticket for me, I will not accept an obligation to pay you for it after the fact.
Ah, but on the other hand, if I buy a lottery ticket and then find out that it wins a million dollars, what would you do if I present this lottery ticket to you, saying, hey, I bought this on your behalf, and you now owe me five dollars?
Clearly, you would jump at the chance to pay me five dollars in order to receive a million-dollar prize, thus happily accepting an obligation after the fact.
One final example.
If you come up on the street and stab me in the neck, that would be an example of a violent assault.
On the other hand, if I am choking to death in a restaurant and you are a surgeon who performs an emergency tracheotomy on me, you are also stabbing me in the neck without my permission, but I would doubtless thank you profusely afterwards for saving my life.
The difference is that I would give you Permission to stab me in the neck if I could.
But you cannot secure my permission under the circumstances, so you make a perfectly reasonable guess about my preferences, which is that I would rather be stabbed in the neck than choked to death.
In the same way, if I cannot or do not get your permission to buy a winning lottery ticket beforehand, I can reasonably assume that you will be happy with me buying a ticket on your behalf after the fact.
In fact, I can be completely certain that if I came back to you without the lottery ticket and said, I held a winning lottery ticket in my hand, but I threw it out because I did not have your permission to buy it ahead of time, you would surely be enraged, or at least upset with me.
Thus, one-sided contracts can be created without permission, and they are perfectly valid if the permission can be achieved voluntarily after the fact.
In this way, we can re-examine the flagpole scenario under quite a different light.
If I come home to find a policeman in my apartment, And they introduced me, a policeman in my apartment, they introduced me to a man who had kicked in my window in order to save himself from falling to death.
I would be thrilled and fascinated and entirely pleased that he had found a way to prevent his own demise.
I'm quite sure that the man would be more than willing to compensate me for my broken window, but even if he didn't, if he were homeless, say, or totally broke, I would still be pleased to have played even a tiny role in saving his life.
A broken window can be considered a small price to pay for a story that will thrill people for the rest of my days and the satisfaction that comes from helping to save a life.
If, on the other hand, I come home at the end of the day to find a policeman out front of my apartment building and discover that a man had fallen to his death, crying out that he did not want to break my window in order to save himself, I'd be absolutely appalled.
Why on earth would he not want to break my window and prefer instead to plummet to his death, I would ask?
In fact, I would surmise, no doubt correctly, that his obsession with preserving the integrity of my window was in fact a mere cover for a deeper and darker death wish.
In this case, we can see that the man who kicks in my window Would be doing so with a reasonable expectation that I would prefer him to do so rather than plummet to his death.
Just as a surgeon who cuts into my throat when I'm choking reasonably assumes that I would prefer him to do so rather than allow me to die.
If permission cannot be reasonably gained about the use of property ahead of time, then it can always be sought after the fact.
If I grab a lifesaver from your boat and throw it to a drowning man, it scarcely seems reasonable for me to imagine that you would prefer that I let the man drown rather than, quote, steal your property.
Look, we perpetually take this approach in the realm of gift-giving, insofar as we transfer property with the goal of enhancing happiness without gaining the prior approval of the recipient.
If I buy you a cat for Christmas, you may be very pleased, or you may be allergic to cats.
If you're pleased and accepted the present, you now own the cat.
If you sneeze and reject the present, then I cannot force the cat upon you.
In other words, I cannot compel you to accept a property transfer after the fact.
Although, of course, if I'm trying to please you, I should reasonably guess which gift will give you the greatest pleasure.
Thus we can see that kicking in a man's window to save your life is not a violation of his property rights at all, but rather a use of his property based on a reasonable assumption of how he would want his property to be used if permission could be sought ahead of time or in the moment.
If I guess wrong, Then I'm liable for the consequences.
If I steal your car, it's not a reasonable defense to say, yeah, it wasn't theft because I thought you wanted me to take your car, yeah.
If I buy a cat that you turn out to be allergic to, then the ownership of the cat reverts to me.
In the same way, if you would have preferred that I fall to my death rather than kick in your window, then of course I am liable for the property damage that I have incurred.
My guess as to how you would want your property to be used has turned out to be false, just as if I had taken your car thinking that you wanted me to, when it turns out that you considered my action to be rank theft.
Naturally, for any of this to occur, a man must be hanging from a flagpole, have no other option than kicking in a window, and the man whose window is kicked in must have preferred that the hanging man plummet to his death, and the man who has saved his life by kicking in a window must refuse to pay any and all restitution for the window he has broken.
Such a circumstance will never arise in this or any other universe.
The endless pursuit of these topics tells us much more about the limitations of ethicists than it does about the limitations of ethics.
Just as a note, after I published this article on my blog, freedomain.blogspot.com, somebody wrote the following comment.
Okay, what if there's a priceless Ming vase behind the window, and the man hanging from the flagpole knows about the vase, having visited the apartment before, and is not in good terms with the apartment owner?
That is, it's no longer, quote, a small price to pay, and the owner is ambivalent as to whether the other person continues to live.
Ha! To which we can only add, oh yeah?
And what if twelve orphans are hiding in the Ming vase?
Huh? Huh? Just as a final note, On Truth, the Tyranny of Illusion, available on my website for free.
Remember to come by, pick it up, also universally preferable behavior.
Print book, PDF, audiobook, get it.
It is absolutely no risk to you, and I promise you it will be one of the most important books you will ever read in your life.
Thank you so much for watching, as always.
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