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May 12, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:03:23
1064 Ethics and Science - The Conference

UPB, science, ethics and the challenges of rationality.

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Okay, so Alan, you had some questions regarding UPB, is that right?
I do.
All right.
So let me regather my thoughts here.
Okay.
So my first question actually is what the relationship between UPB and property rights is.
Well, the relation between UPB and property rights is that UPB is not a moral theory.
That is the first thing to understand and a lot of people get confused about that which I'm sure is somewhat my fault and somewhat the complexity and challenge of the idea.
UPB is to moral theories as the scientific method is to a scientific theory.
It is a way of validating The truth or falsehood, or the validity or invalidity, the rationality or irrationality, the consistency or inconsistency of a proposition, the scientific method can be thought of as sitting underneath UPB. It is a subset of UPB. That's my mad intellectual vanity that I've created a bigger structure than the scientific method.
And of course it's not particularly original, although the application of it to the question of ethics I think is.
But UPB is simply a way of validating the truth value of propositions, and it requires that they be internally consistent first and foremost in terms of logic, and secondly that they conform to the physical evidence of the world, which is why it is a superset of the scientific method.
And of course philosophy is bigger than the scientific method because the scientific method deals with obviously science and philosophy deals with lots of other things like moral propositions.
A moral proposition is a challenging thing to analyze of course because it does not exist in reality.
Truth does not exist in reality.
Morality does not exist in reality and so on.
So it is a challenging proposition or set of propositions to review.
So after that sort of very brief introduction The question of UPB and property rights is really twofold.
So when somebody proposes property rights are valid, then that falls into...
Because they're claiming an objective truth.
If I say, I dreamt about an elephant last night, I am not claiming an objective, empirical, universal truth, and therefore that is not subject to...
If I say I like ice cream, that is true or false and there's some evidence for it or against it, but I'm not claiming a universal truth.
Ice cream is made with milk is a universal truth and that is subject to UPB and science and so on.
So if I put a proposition forward which says I own my body or I control my body, So, if I own my body, then clearly I am the one.
Who is operating my vocal cords and producing the sound, operating my vocal cords, my jaw, my tongue, and so on, to produce the sound, and we hope, at least, operating my brain to produce the thought, which results in the sound, which results in the idea being transmitted across the space between brains and so on through the vibrations in the air.
Now, if I say, I do not own my body, I've put forward a formative contradiction, logically, because I am using my body to say that I cannot use my body.
I am manipulating my vocal cords, my jaw, and my tongue to say that I cannot manipulate my vocal cords, my jaw, and my tongue, and that is like shouting in the...
Sorry? I just need to think about that one for a second.
Okay, I'll keep going and then you can come back if it makes sense or not.
So, to reject the concept of self-ownership, you can do it, of course, but the moment that you tell somebody that self-ownership is invalid, you are using self-ownership to communicate to the invalidity of self-ownership, which is like yelling in someone's ear that sound does not exist.
It is a fundamental contradiction.
It's not quite like that.
I'm sorry? You could conceive of a proposition that you don't own your body, but then you're saying that something must.
Something has to own your body.
If I believe that I do not own my body, and there are certainly people who are in mental asylums who believe that they do not own their body, I'm sure to some degree or another.
But the moment that I formulate and propose an argument which says, like you can run around thinking, I don't control my body, it's controlled by Dick Cheney on the mirror station using Atari 2600 joysticks, you can believe all of that, of course, but the moment that you formulate and communicate the idea, you are exercising self-ownership.
Probably. Okay, well, I'm perfectly happy to hear how that's not the case.
Well, I don't actually happen to disagree.
I can just conceive of a situation where it might not be the case.
I'm certainly happy to hear of that situation, too.
See, because I'm not entirely sure what we mean by, you know, self.
Well, which part of you is talking to me?
Well, I don't know. It's not your spleen.
It's not your spleen.
It's not your foot. It's not your ear.
It's not even your tongue. It has to do with your mind to some degree, right?
But it could... Well, hold on.
We know this logically because if we remove your little toe, you can still talk to me.
If we remove your tongue, you can sign language at me.
Even if the only thing that's left is your eyes moving, you can still use that to communicate things.
That's just an Aristotelian process of elimination.
But objectively, you can conclude that my body is conversing with you.
Sure, absolutely, because there's no Vulcan mind meld, so yes, it is your mind that is using your body to communicate with me.
My mind could be split.
I don't know why this would be, but just conceivably, I could implant a mind in my mind that can see everything that's going on, but can't actually control any of it.
You could implant a mind in your mind.
What does that mean? Basically, okay, so I build a computer and I give it a mind.
So it's conscious and it can think.
And then I jack it into my brain so it can see and experience everything that I can experience, but it can't actually control any of these processes.
And, I mean, I'm sure that would be the case, in which case you would be responsible for putting the brain, the computer, in your mind.
But, I mean, that wouldn't invalidate self-ownership.
It just would be that the computer chip in your brain could not use your vocal cords and your tongue, but you could, and that's who I'd be talking to.
Now, if nobody could use your vocal cords and your tongue, then we would simply, if no part of your brain could communicate with me, Then I would never know what the contents of your mind are.
You would be as invisible and irrelevant to the world as a dead person, right?
Yeah. Okay, so...
I mean, it would be exactly the same as if you locked yourself in a little cage with food and water in the middle of a mountain or the core of the center of the earth or you went to go and live on the dark side of the moon and never communicated to anyone in any shape whatsoever.
Nobody knew that you were alive and nobody was able to communicate with you in any way.
It would be an irrelevant situation, right?
Because you would never contribute to the world of thought or converse with any other human being.
So the moment that you communicate with somebody, though...
You are exercising self-ownership and therefore cannot deny the validity of self-ownership and that's the sort of logical consistency of the proposition.
The second is that of course medically and biologically we know that the conscious mind or the mind itself is connected to the brain stem which is required for the neurological control over the throat and the jaw and the tongue to produce sounds and so on and that My brain is not connected to your spinal cord and your brain is not connected to my spinal cord,
so here we have a self-consistent theory regarding self-ownership and also which conforms to the medical evidence of the singularity of control over the spinal cord and the nerve endings.
Okay, so we could actually reverse this and say the thing which owns me is myself.
Whatever it is, it doesn't matter what it is, but if it owns me, it's me.
Well, see, the thing is, this is in terms of what is conceivably verifiable.
The only part of you that I can verify is the part that can communicate to me.
Quite. So if you say, I had a dream about an elephant last night, I can't verify that, of course.
I can verify that you've said it, but I can't verify whether you dreamt, right?
So the only part of you that is verifiable, that emerges into social reality, is the part of you that communicates, and it can be non-verbal communication, it can be, you can moonwalk, you can raise an eyebrow, you know, the Colbert fashion, it doesn't have to be, but some form of impression on the senses.
What if there were two of me and one of me could talk and had this chip so I could see everything that was going on, but another me controlled my arms and legs and everything?
I'm sorry, I'm trying to figure out what that would mean in reality.
There's two of you like a clown?
As in, I have some form of multiple personality disorder, and there's one me, and both of us can see what's going on, and there's one me that can talk to you and tell you about the elephant dreams, but if I try and walk over to talk to you, it doesn't work because the other part of me is in control of my legs, and it might decide to go and chase after a woman or something, I don't know.
Okay, first of all, I mean, that doesn't happen medically, but let's say that it does.
I know, but... Let's say that it does.
Well, the only part of you that I would be able to converse with about property rights would be the part of you that could formulate sentences and communicate them in the real world, right?
Right, but I wouldn't own any of my property unless I got it.
You would have to own the part of you that communicated language.
Otherwise, I would have no idea that you would say anything, right?
A guy in a wheelchair, in a sense, does not have ownership of his legs because he can't control them, but he has ownership of his voice.
Yeah, but I can't...
My body could conceivably have two people in it and two bank accounts, essentially.
Sorry, I'm not following that part.
Two people in your body? What does that mean?
Yeah, well, okay, first of all, I want to let you know why I'm asking these questions, because I understand they seem very weird.
This is actually how I understand things, is almost entirely through a logical perspective and what all the consequences would be in various strange hypothetical situations, and I generalize from those consequences to a principle.
Okay, so there's two people in my body.
There's two selves.
Let's just make this simple, okay?
Everything above my neck is controlled, or everything above my shoulders, I mean, is controlled by oneself.
So I've got, you know, eyes and mouth, but everything that would normally do work, like typing things into a computer or walking around or lifting things, all that is controlled by something else.
Well, but that doesn't happen in reality.
I know, but I want to know what the consequences of that would be.
No, no, no, no. I mean, that's like saying, well, what if a rock fell up and down at the same time?
Well, we're trying to describe reality.
Well, no, but I... Actually, the question of what would happen if a rock fell up and down at the same time is very instructive to me, because...
Well, okay, that one isn't, but...
Because I just try and imagine it, and it doesn't work.
Actually, no, it does work. Because then...
Because then...
This is physics.
You probably don't care, so I'm going to be very quick about it.
Then it would mean that things could be described by non-function mathematics, because it's got two...
Two solutions to a single equation instead of only one at a single point in time.
Well, but it would require a different kind of reality where opposite events could occur simultaneously, and so it basically looks like trying to invent the biology of hobbits.
I mean, it doesn't mean anything, right?
It's not part of reality.
You see, that's why it's so instructive to me, because it doesn't mean that, actually.
It just means that, okay, I actually thought of this.
Do you know what the equation of a circle is like?
Pi r squared? I mean, okay, the other equation, x squared plus y squared equals r squared.
Vaguely. I mean, I'm going back a ways, but yeah, somewhat.
But basically, all you need to know is it's x squared plus y squared equals r squared, and that gives you an image of a circle on the origin of radius r.
Now, if we tried to make...
In physics, all things are described with reference to an independent variable called time, and they have only one location at any moment in time.
But if equations like x squared plus y squared, well it would be x squared plus t squared equals r squared, were allowed, they would sometimes be at two places at once.
Like a rock flying through the air would literally bifurcate And go round in a circle and then come back and join itself again and keep going.
I don't know where it's going. And the consequences of that would be like you'd need a new conservation of energy.
It would violate the law of locality.
You could get intergalactic communication down really easily because It has to stay in the circle, so you jiggle one rock, and the other one, no matter how far away it is, has to stay in the circle, so it jiggles two.
Which would violate the fact that physics has to be the same everywhere, and it gets to be a mess, but it does tell me that, ah, so we need this independent variable.
Right. Now, can you tell me what the equation would be for a square circle?
No, I can't do that. That's just a flat contradiction.
Right, and so is the idea or the psychology of one part of your brain working your vocal cords and another part of your brain completely disconnected in terms of the self working your arms and legs.
That's a square circle. I mean, it's something that does not occur in reality.
Well, okay, so I don't understand that.
I mean, I don't mean to pull any kind of authority, but my wife is a psychologist, and so I studied psychology as well.
There is no such phenomenon as one part of your brain working your vocal cords and another completely independent, yet simultaneous, yet unknown to the first, second self working the rest of your body.
It just doesn't happen. Well, so what I'm trying to do is get you to explain it to me because I don't get it.
Okay, okay, so the square circle to me, that actually can't happen.
It's logically inconsistent.
It can't even possibly happen.
Well, sorry, and how is that different from a rock falling up and down at the same time?
Um... Because that can't happen either.
Because I can give you the mathematics describing a rock falling up and down at the same time.
It's just inconsistent with the rest of physics, but it's not self-inconsistent.
Oh, you mean like if a rock hived into two things and went up and down simultaneously?
Yeah. Yeah.
But wouldn't that be like that?
Okay, yeah. So, I mean, if you split a rock in two, for sure, but the same rock moving up and down at the same time is impossible because it would mean that the altitude was a number going up and down at the same time, which is impossible, right?
It's impossible, but it's not self-inconsistent.
Like I said, I actually came up with an equation to do that the other day.
As I say, it's not self-inconsistent.
It's inconsistent with the rest of physics, sure, but...
So you can have a number go up and down at the same time.
Yes. Well, okay, not a number.
Well... I mean, altitude, right?
If a rock was going... If a rock is going up, the altitude increases.
If a rock is going down, the altitude decreases.
So what you're saying is it's possible to have a number go increase and decrease at the same time.
Well, not a number. It has to actually bifurcate into two numbers as well.
Oh, sure. I mean, if you split it into two, but that's not what this is.
This is a single rock going up and down at the same time.
Yeah, like... Well, okay.
Um... So, I mean, we can understand that that's not possible, right?
You cannot have an equation that increases and decreases simultaneously.
No, no, the equation for the circle does exactly that.
No, but I'm talking about an altitude going, like, the altitude of a rock cannot go up and down at the same time.
So, we say the equation for the altitude for the rock is x squared plus y squared, well, x squared plus t squared to make one of them time equal r squared.
And we have a perfectly good equation that has two solutions at any particular moment in time.
Right, but if we're measuring a single rock going up, and we're saying we have an altimeter, we attach a little altimeter to the rock, right?
If the rock is going up, the altimeter increases, but the altimeter cannot both increase and decrease at the same time, right?
Yeah, well, that's what I said.
It's inconsistent with the rest of physics, like altimeters, definitely inconsistent with altimeters, but it's not self-inconsistent the way a square circle is.
Okay, well, I don't feel that we're making any particular progress on this, so let's go back to the vocal cord.
Let's accept that your vocal cord is what...
Let's accept this thing which is impossible, which is fine, which is that you have two personalities.
One is working the vocal cord and the second is working the body.
Yeah, my question is then, so would the things that my arms did be owned by that second consciousness?
I don't know, because would I ever have access to the second consciousness?
So for instance, does the second consciousness get control of the vocal cords?
It knows sign language, and so do you.
Okay, it knows sign language, and so do I. Now, do these brains operate simultaneously?
In other words, could this human being say that self-ownership was valid, while at the same time the second personality could sign that self-ownership was invalid?
Yeah. I think I've worked it out now because the second person signing that self-ownership with invalid is doing so with ownership of the arms.
Yeah, so it's still a self-contradiction.
You could make this like one person telling another person to strangle a guy.
That's the equivalent between the brain and the body in this case.
Awesome. Okay. Now I understand what's going on now.
Excellent. And we were talking about UPB. Yes.
So basically, the idea of self-ownership is something that is the root, of course, of property rights.
And so self-ownership is axiomatic because you can't reject self-ownership without accepting self-ownership.
Quite.
So, I mean, that's how UPB begins the approach of validating theories of property rights.
Right.
I don't mean to interject, but there is a case of Siamese twins with connected brains.
For sure, absolutely.
There's no question of that.
And that would be a complex situation because you would have an interweaving of the spine relative to the mind, right?
Yeah, I saw a program on that, and I saw literally two brains kind of controlling one body, but they had separate control over the body, like the right side, the left side.
I don't know, however that intertwined in their nervous system to the brains, but they were functional.
I mean, they kind of just did stuff together.
Right, and for sure there would be times where it could be conceivable that that would be problematic, but that doesn't have any particular significance to UPB. See, UPB is not physics, at least in the realm of ethics.
Ethics is not physics. There are times when the property of something can be disputed.
There are times when you're in some situation where a conceivable reversal of property rights could be imagined or a conceivable reversal of ethics could be imagined and so on.
So, for instance, you know, we don't like the use of violence, but in self-defense it's valid.
But what about when you think it's self-defense, but it's not, and it turns out, and this and that, and do you have...
Like, there's things which are gray areas within ethics, for sure, but that's not a particular problem with regards to UPB, because UPB, in the realm of ethics, is describing biological entities, not physics.
Right, so biology requires general principles that are adhered to, but of course there are things like mutations and so on.
In biology there's deformities, so a horse is defined as having one head.
Every now and then a horse will be born with two heads, but that does not mean that the science of biology has become completely subjective and irrelevant, if that makes sense.
Yeah, it does. I have not read UPB yet, but I will order it today.
On your site, but I do have a friend that's reading it, and I've told him I started listening to Stefan Molyneux, and he's like, oh yeah, I'm reading his book.
And then, from what I understand, it's a universally preferred behavior.
Is that correct? Universally preferable, not preferred.
Okay, preferable behavior.
And that's something like, you prefer not to be murdered, You prefer not to be stolen from?
No. Does it work like that? No, it doesn't because some people do prefer to be murdered and some people do prefer to be stolen from.
So that's why it's not universally preferred.
It's not a description of that which everybody prefers.
Okay, well, I'll just hold my questions until I read it, so I'm done with that.
No, and I appreciate it.
It's an important distinction, and I just, perhaps due to the limitations of my brain, I could not figure out a better way of putting it, but that does come up.
I don't describe what everyone prefers because, clearly, if you look across the world, lots of different cultures and even individuals within those cultures We prefer many different things, and so Catholics say no to birth control, and hippies more so, right?
So it's not what people do prefer.
The question is, is there a way of validating what should be universally preferred?
Right. Well, I mean, the situation he described to me was kind of like one of them lifeboat situations.
You know, where he said, for example, you have a baker baking bread, and you have a starving man that steals a loaf of bread because he's starving.
Is it morally permissible for him to steal the bread?
Well, UPB doesn't answer that question.
What UPB does say, though, is that whatever answer is given to that question, it must be logically consistent, and it must be universally applicable.
Okay. Now, there's examples of these kinds of lifeboat scenarios in the book and on my blog, and there are ways to work them out.
But people always want to, and I'm not saying you, but people in general always want to jump to, what are the answers to, a guy steals a candy bar, are you allowed to shoot him if you're the store owner?
Everybody, you know, the guy's hanging off a flagpole, and can he kick the window in to get into somebody's apartment rather than fall to his death, and the starving guy, and so on.
I do want to get to those kinds of extreme situations, but going to those extreme situations without a rational framework in place is like going to quantum mechanics without a theory of physics or science.
It just ends up being – you're kind of making stuff up as you go along and stuff that feels right and doesn't feel right and it seems like an impenetrable conundrum.
But the reality is that if you have a framework like UBB in place you can actually work to answer these questions in a way that is logically consistent and conforms to the evidence.
And when I say conforms to the evidence what I mean by that is It is generally a good idea, I would say.
And this is old Aristotle to the rescue, right?
But Aristotle said, look, if you come up with a theory of ethics, that's all well and good.
But if somebody can use your theory of ethics to prove or to quote prove that rape is the highest moral good and, you know, I don't know, stabbing kittens for fun is the highest moral ideal, then it doesn't really matter what you say.
Something's wrong with your moral theory because we just kind of know that these things are wrong.
And in the same way, if you come up with a moral theory that says that communism – sorry, let me just finish my thought.
If you come up with a moral ideal that says that communism or the collection of property rights to a small and coercive minority, if your theory says that communism should be the highest moral ideal versus, say, the free market or something, and then we look at history and we see, well, the free market or something, and then we look at history and we see, well, communism killed hundreds of millions of
Then you also have a problem with your moral theory because you're saying it's the highest – communism turns out to be the highest moral ideal and maybe you say that murder is wrong.
but then you have a contradiction.
Because if communism is the highest moral ideal, but it gets a huge number of people murdered, Right, so that's kind of like intuitive ethics?
Well, there is intuitive, but it's also sort of practical, right?
I mean, the reality is you're never going to convince people that rape is a moral good.
You just, I mean, there's some practicality involved in this, and it just can't be right.
I mean, we just kind of get that it can't be right to go out and rape someone.
And so... It's just, to me, that's one of these things.
And UPB deals with the question of rape very effectively, and it deals with the question of theft.
Sorry, UPB validates moral propositions such as rape is wrong, theft is wrong, murder is wrong, and so on.
It affirms property rights and so on.
So UPB does a really good job of validating these theories.
Okay, I totally agree.
Like I said, I'm going to order the book, and then I'm going to pose my questions after I read the book.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
I think that you'll enjoy it. And of course, I don't know if you knew, but the price has just been dropped by about 35%.
So you can order two if you like.
One for marking up and one for lending out.
That's the idea. Well, maybe I will.
I think I have a friend I'm trying to convince into the realm of anarchy, anarcho-capitalism.
He's actually one of them anarcho-socialists.
I'm trying to... I'm trying to get him to see the light.
Certainly, UPB will help with that, but you also may want to give him a more gentle introduction, which is, I think, going to be closer to where he's coming from.
You want to give people bridges across the chasm, so to speak.
One big catapult, Evel Knievel style, might be a bit alarming for people.
There's a new book out which has an introductory video called Everyday Anarchy.
And that might be of interest to you.
It's free as well, right? The audiobook is free, the PDF is free, and the print book is out in a couple of days, and it's under $10.
But you might want to send him to the video, which has a link to the free audiobook, and that, I think, will be probably a better introduction, because at least he'll see that we agree on a whole bunch of points to begin with.
Yeah, can you go ahead and...
I'm sure I can find it on the site, but can you go ahead and post that link up there?
I won't do it right now because I'm recording the video, but I will do it after the call.
Okay. Thanks.
Oh, my pleasure. Right then.
So we were talking about property.
Yes. So I actually had to work all that out on my own, so I guess I'm glad that you confirmed it for me.
Now I'm wondering if you know the rest of the stuff that I worked out.
If I know the rest of the stuff that you worked out?
Yeah. Like...
Since you own your body, axiomatically, you own everything that you make because if you didn't expect that you would own it, you wouldn't make it in the first place.
No, I would say that's an argument from effect.
What I would say is that if we own our body, then we are responsible for the effects of our body, right?
So if I strangle a guy, I am responsible for strangling because I own my body, I own my hands.
Morality is basically around I own the effects of my actions and property rights are a result of that.
Right. Well, okay.
But I don't want to talk too much.
Okay. I do want to ask this, I guess, while I'm here.
Do you have a definition of ethics on hand?
Like what you personally consider the ethics?
It's a theory of universally preferable behavior.
That which human beings ought to prefer in universal terms.
Okay, so there's...
So even though UPB isn't technically moral, I believe is how you put it?
UPB is not a theory of ethics.
It is a way of validating logical propositions.
Okay. But there is only one set of things that it actually validates.
Well, UPB is mathematics as well, right?
A mathematical theory does have to be internally consistent, right?
Right, yes. You can't base a mathematical theory on 2 plus 2 is 4 and 5 at the same time, right?
I mean, you can, but it's just not going to be true, right?
So, okay, so ethics is just...
Okay, what I want to ask then is, is ethics everything that UPP validates or anything that UPP validates?
I would say that it's neither.
I would say that UPB is a way of validating the truth statement of propositions, and that includes ethics and science and math and geography and biology and all that kind of stuff.
Okay, so ethics is one of the things that UPB validates.
Sure, it is any proposition that contains an objective truth statement.
Wait, I don't quite get that.
Well, any proposition that I claim possesses an objective truth statement, Because what I'm claiming to describe is reality, right?
Because whenever we use the term objective, we're describing sensual external reality.
Now, sensual external reality is both logically consistent and internally consistent and so on.
And therefore, when I'm claiming to make a truth statement, I'm describing objective reality.
And since objective reality is logical and consistent, any truth statement that I claim to make with regards to objective reality must itself be logical and consistent.
Yeah. Unfortunately, I still don't understand.
I'm still trying to, like...
Like, what I want to know is UPB has to do with things that aren't ethics.
But you, like...
Well, okay, let me give you an example.
If I go to a scientific conference, it is considered preferable that I provide reason and evidence for my theories, right?
And it is considered universally preferable.
It's not like it's preferable in India, but they hate it in America, right?
It's not like ice cream where...
Yeah, it's not subjective.
It's not a local preference.
It's not a custom. It's not a mode of dress.
It's considered universally preferable to provide reason and evidence for your scientific theories.
If I go to a scientific conference and start talking about how I think that the world is both a round and banana-shaped and made of fire and ice and water at the same time and goes forward and backward in time...
No, it would not. People would find it a ridiculous waste of their time, right?
Yeah. Well, no, I mean, like, fire and ice and all of it.
It's very colorful. It is.
Oh, yeah, they may be entertained, and they may say, well, there's a guy with an arts degree, but they would not consider it any worthy contribution to science in general.
And so... So it's universally preferable that if I'm describing reality, that I use the principles that reality represents, which is logic and evidence, right?
Okay. So that's an ethical statement, and it is validated by UPV. I'm sorry, no, that's not an ethical statement, because if I don't use the scientific method, I'm not being...
I'm sorry. Right? I meant the statement, like, you should use logic and evidence at conferences is an ethical statement.
Well, no, because if I went up and didn't use logic and evidence at a scientific conference, I would not get thrown in jail, right?
Well, that doesn't mean it's not ethical, it just means it's not legally actionable.
Well, no, but would you consider somebody who, let's say some scientist went mad and started gambling about something, we would not consider him to be evil, right?
Yeah, sorry. That was a brain fart on my part.
No, no, but you're right. Of course we shouldn't determine what is moral by what lands you in jail, because this conversation might land us in jail at some point.
So, no, I agree with you.
I just sort of wanted to point out that we would not consider that to be an evil action.
That doesn't mean that it's not, and UPB handles that very well, I think, because there's two categories of preferable behavior.
There is aesthetically preferable and universally preferable.
And aesthetically preferable behavior is something like being on time, not swearing at people, being polite, you know, things like that, right?
That's aesthetically preferable but can't be enforced through coercion.
But then there's universally preferable, which is something which is enforced upon someone or coerced upon someone where self-defense is valid and so on.
So we may say that going to a scientific conference, it is aesthetically preferable, if you have the choice, I mean if you haven't just been struck mad, to use reason and evidence in the basis of your argument so as not to waste people's time and money who've flown maybe a long way to come to the conference and so on.
But we would not consider that you can't shoot someone who's not using reason and evidence at a scientific conference, right?
Right. Okay, so I'm still a bit confused about how we get from UPB to actual ethics, because it seems to deal with a lot of things that aren't ethics.
And I know you have a system of ethics yourself, and I want to know how you got to UPB to your ethics.
Well, sure. Well, let's say that, as we talked about earlier, if I say self-ownership is invalid, then I violated UPB, right?
Right. So, self-ownership must be valid, which is the basis of ethics, right?
Yes. I mean, if I don't own my actions, then I can never...
I mean, there's no such...
Oh, yeah. Okay. Right? Yeah, I... And, for instance, if I put forward something which says theft or the forcible transfer of property against someone's will, if I say that is the highest moral ideal...
contradiction logically because theft is the highest moral ideal and I use this example in the book of two guys in a room who have I don't know a piece of wood and if I say theft is the highest moral ideal then it is impossible for them both to be moral at the same time right yeah because guy A is stealing from guy B and therefore he's good but guy B has to let himself get stolen from in which case it's not theft but he can't be moral at
And basically the highest moral ideal is for them both to be pulling simultaneously on a piece of wood while neither of them are moral until they snatch it away from the other which makes the other person instantly immoral.
So that idea that theft is the highest moral good is simply a complete self-contradiction impossible to practice in reality and therefore cannot be valid.
Yes. Okay, so do we have to take our UPB stick and then start running around to propositions and just test them all until we find the ones that work?
Yeah, it's actually more of a nuclear device, I found.
It's a very powerful stick.
It is, of course.
And of course, I would say that it is something that when we bring this to the humanities, we bring the golden age of mankind to bear upon the world.
That, of course, is my belief in the same way that science brought the golden age of reason to that side of things, at least until the government started building nuclear bombs and particle accelerators to go nowhere.
But, yeah, no, absolutely.
To me, this is the statement that I would bring forward, and I bring it forward all the time to people.
And it is a very effective and powerful way to put limits, boundaries, and objective processes on what is generally considered to be a very subjective realm, which is...
Because we have so many emotions around it.
We don't have particularly strong emotions about whether the world is round or flat, but we do have very strong emotions about...
About rape and murder and theft and other kinds of violations of persons and property and child abuse.
We have very strong feelings about that and I think the feelings should be respected but they also should be placed through the rigor of a logical and empirical analysis.
To me, the genius of UPB is it explains why people have such strong emotions.
Right. It explains why we dislike rape so much, not only because of the pain and the unpleasantness and the monstrous evil of it, but because any theory which says it's good is wildly and immediately logically inconsistent, as is theft and murder and so on.
So I think it's a real breakthrough in terms of explaining not just the logical consistency of certain theories or lack thereof, but why it is that we have these implicit beliefs to begin with.
Okay, cool. So I just want to ask this again to make sure I've heard you correctly.
So we take UPB, and then we go out and we find axioms, well, not axioms, statements to use it on.
And until, I don't know, until we found them all?
Or... Well, I mean, look, we will spend the rest of our lives dealing with just a few.
God exists, the government is required and necessary.
I mean, you could just spend the rest of your life on one of those and still only chip away at the foundation.
So it's not like we're going to run out of things to apply UPB to.
A soldier is moral, he is a hero.
All of these are completely non-UPB-compliant statements.
Okay, I get it. And that's what bothers me, and I don't mean in terms of you, but that's what bothers me in general with these lifeboat scenarios.
I mean, there is a catastrophe of ethical irrationalities in the world, governments, Islam, Christianity, the institutionalized rape of state prisons, war, deficits, all kinds of harassment of citizens, control of the money supply, all of these horrendous violations of morally consistent statements are going on in the world.
And people just kind of want to bypass all of that, right?
And it's like, well, I'm not going to deal with the emergency that's in front of me.
What I'm going to do is make up a situation where conceivably there may be some limitation on these ideals.
And to me, that's always struck me as, and again, I don't mean with you because I understand sort of how you approach these problems, but it's kind of annoying because to me it's like this.
It's like you're a doctor who's trained to deal with a plague and you're up to your waist in bodies and people are dying of the plague and you've just got to inject them with something to make them better.
And doctors are standing around debating, well, you know, what happens if someone has an aneurysm and a heart attack and spontaneously combusts and is struck by lightning at the same time?
What should we do when they're coming up with all these details and bodies are piling up around them?
And I think that we have more than enough application for UPB in our lifetimes around real and present dangers and evils that we don't necessarily need to spring directly to sort of worry and fuss over the lifeboat scenarios, if that makes sense.
To wonder which point we should put on the syringe when we inject them.
Well, to debate internally, right?
And what if human beings had a reptile hide?
How thick would the point of the needle need to be?
And let's diagram it and figure it all out.
And it's like, you know, every day that we spend debating about ethics, another 10,000 people meet their deaths at the hands of states, right?
So... To me, there's just a kind of urgency to this stuff.
And UPP definitely works very easily in terms of governments and religions.
And it seems to me that we have more than enough work cut out for us with where the world is right now.
Indeed. Though I have a quick question that's mostly unrelated.
See, my immediate reaction to all these people die, it's like, well, yeah, but they're dead.
They don't care anymore.
It's much worse for the people who are still alive.
Well, sure, but if we spend a day arguing about lifeboat theories rather than propagating the basic facts that states and religions are corrupt and evil, which UPB fully supports, and you can make that argument with anybody in a few minutes...
Then that's just another 10,000.
And again, it's not like those deaths are morally...
We're not morally responsible for those deaths because we're not out there killing people.
But at some point, a doctor has to step up and perform his craft, right?
Right. Oh, by the way, I did want to thank you for your time.
I do appreciate that.
No, it was enjoyable. I mean, you obviously have a very decisive, slippery, and tricky approach to things, and I certainly don't have any problem with that.
I'm glad that we were able to come to some resolution and didn't get lost in the swamp of my semi-knowledge of physics, so I'm certainly glad that you took the time to bring these issues up, and I hope that you will read the book and go out and proselytize among the heathens, so to speak. I actually meant to say that at the beginning.
I still have more questions. Which is another reason why I thank you for your time.
Do you have enough answers to go and start talking about ethics with other people?
Well, I do, but I... Good!
So what you're saying is I know how to heal the plague that's in front of me.
There may be some other more obscure illness that I don't know how to heal yet.
I say let's deal with the plague in front of us and then we can start researching the more obscure illnesses when this plague is dealt with.
Okay. UPB made me think of a system of ethics that springs directly from property rights.
I wanted to see what you think about it. Sure.
Okay. So we were talking about something before that I meant to argue with you about.
Okay, okay. The thing about...
You only make something like...
Let's say a house for the sake of argument.
You make a house because you expect to live in it.
And if you didn't expect to live in it, you wouldn't make it in the house.
And you said, that's an argument from effect.
Sure. Except, I don't think it is.
Okay. I don't know if it is or not, really.
But I want to add this point.
It's... It's part of the necessary conclusions of property rights which are axiomatic because if someone tries to steal the house that I made, they affirm property rights once again by stealing the house.
They expect to keep it while simultaneously denying my property rights.
Right. So, it seems to me that it...
I don't know if it's...
I don't see how...
I think I understand the question.
So, you're saying that if we deny property rights, there's no such thing as property because nobody will build or make anything, right?
Yes. If we deny property rights, we actually destroy property.
Well, sure. But remember that human beings act on an individual basis.
So, let's just take for the example...
Bill Clinton, right?
So, because Bill Clinton was involved in a system where property rights were repeatedly and egregiously violated in the form of taxation and the monopoly over the currency, Bill Clinton has ended up as a multi-multi-millionaire, right?
Indeed. So, if we should have ethical systems that result in an increase in property for an individual, then the state has worked beautifully for him, yes.
So if we're going to go from an argument from effect, Bill Clinton is going to argue for the state, and you're going to argue against the state, right?
Because he's going to say, you're going to say, well, my accumulation of property is diminished when there's a state, but he's going to say, well, mine is vastly increased, so you're going to end up with no way to resolve that, right?
But he's... But he's being logically inconsistent, though, because...
Well, no, but your argument was not around the logical inconsistency, but the effect on property and creation and transfer thereof, right?
I agree with you that he's being logically inconsistent, but that's why I rejected the idea that property rights should be respected, because otherwise people won't make or build things.
That's definitely why I wanted to talk about this, because I'm trying to get to...
I'm trying to simply state the case that it's logically inconsistent to steal, basically.
Sorry, it's not logically inconsistent to steal.
Any theory that says that stealing is moral is logically inconsistent.
A person's actions have no logical consistency, right?
I mean, but a person's theories do.
Like, for instance, it is not logically inconsistent to do a tarot card reading.
It's perfectly self-contained and so on.
It is logically inconsistent to say that a tarot card reading has anything to do with truth.
Okay, so I guess that might be part of my theory then, is that I'm not sure how to say this.
You can extrapolate someone's values from their actions.
Well, maybe, maybe not, but I don't think that's particularly necessary.
I think that we simply have to keep re-examining the theories.
It is my personal belief, and I think that there's good evidence for it, that ethics is one of the central core drivers for human beings, and it's the thing which motivates us just about the most.
And so if we get the right ethical theories in place, the world will be a paradise, not a perfect paradise.
People will still steal, they'll still be raped, and people will still get cancers and puppies will die.
But it will be an almost infinite improvement over what we have now.
So a thief will look at a piece of property that he can steal and he will say, well, it's good for me to steal it.
It results in an accumulation of my property.
And of course, I am such a small factor in the overall productivity of the economy that I am not going to prevent anybody from...
I'm not going to prevent society as a whole from gaining or having the desire to make property.
So if I steal one car from each city once every six months, there's no way that the car industry is going to shut down.
So he's going to say that it is hugely beneficial to me while creating almost no dent in the productivity of society as a whole.
Therefore, it results in an accumulation or an increase in my property and therefore it's a practical or rational thing to do.
And we can't argue with him at that level.
Of course it is perfectly rational to say that if I steal a car, I end up plus one car.
I mean, of course, and somebody else ends up minus one car.
But what we can do is we can say theories which say that stealing is right are incorrect and immoral.
That's not going to eliminate the car thief, but what it will do is eliminate the state and the church, which is of course what – those are the things that cause us to lose property.
I've never had a car stolen, but I get the equivalent of a car stolen from me in terms of capital every time I pay taxes every single year, right?
So I'm trying to focus on that which is causing the most, quote, disease rather than the random unpredictable elements that are going to be a tiny minority in a free society.
And indeed, even if you did get your car stolen in a free society, you'd probably be able to get it back.
Oh, sure. The DROs would be all over it.
It would be a voice-activated car so nobody could use it.
If it weren't me, then tons of ways that you could deal with that.
So the danger is not the individual thief who wants to steal your car.
The danger is the ethical theories that support the systems of institutionalized predation and violence like the state.
Okay. The thing is though, if it is in fact true that we can somehow extrapolate someone's values from their actions, then I think I can expand UPB, I think.
Well, I mean, I'm all keen to have UPB expanded.
I mean, you know, go for it.
But again, I have a sense, and I'm going to go out on a limb here and just talk frankly about psychology.
I have a sense that you like to think about things rather than try and talk about them with people.
I have a sense that you like diagramming rather than going out and proselytizing.
And what I'm saying is that UPB is a strong enough step forward.
That we can go out and actually change people's minds about core moral issues even if we just take something like the state which would be a huge boon to get rid of for humanity as a whole.
I think that it's sort of the situation where once you accept that slavery is immoral Then you kind of got to go out and talk to people about the immorality of slavery.
And I think what you want to do is come home and say, well, what if hobbits owned elves?
Would that still be immoral? Or what if I could make slavery immoral for, you know, little green men on Mars as well?
And what I'm saying is go out and talk to people about the immorality of slavery because you obviously have a huge degree of intelligence, analytical ability, and communication skills.
So I'm going to invite you for your own happiness, not for any kind of responsibility to an abstract good, but because when you go out and you make the case to people and you light up their minds about truth and virtue in a way that they can actually use in their own life, that's an incredible high.
I'm offering you the heroin of...
of moral proselytizing, and I would suggest that expanding UPB will not make the world freer, but getting people to understand how UPB invalidates governments will.
Right.
So, well, I totally have to agree with you that I prefer to sit around and think, not so much about the elves, though.
Well, you know, as a metaphor, Urakai, the fighting Urakai.
Well, the thing is, like, what I'm trying to get at here is that...
Well, okay, put it this way.
It seems that UPB has to deal with self-defense differently.
Is that true? Slightly differently?
Well, I don't want to go into the whole argument for self-defense because that takes up a good chunk of the book, but no, UPB perfectly validates self-defense.
Well, I can validate self-defense in two lines if you can extrapolate someone's values from their actions.
Sure. But still, you have to run those values through UPB, right?
Well, yeah. I mean, it's a cooperative venture there.
Yeah, and to me, the primary danger is not people's actions, but people's theories, right?
Because that is what supports, that is what makes invisible the greatest evils.
Like it's true that if you clean up the water supply to get rid of cholera, that people may use cholera to kill each other once in a blue moon.
But the important thing is not to worry about the actions of people putting cholera into each other's drinks because they have a bad marriage, but rather to look at the water supply that is rendering the transmission and infection of cholera invisible to everyone and work on the source from that standpoint.
Wait, hold on a sec.
False moral theories make evil invisible and actually make people worship evil as a good, right?
So the government is an evil institution of monopolistic coercion.
But yet, because of false moral theories, people praise it as a good, right?
And you can't get people to correct what they think of as a good, right?
So focusing on individual actions is like...
If people don't know that it's a contamination of the water supply that is spreading cholera...
Then they won't go to the source, and they'll just end up treating the symptoms all the time.
Alright, well, let dude interrupt first.
Well, I will. I was, I'm sorry, I was just saying, isn't that what propaganda is all about?
Is making moral justification for doing something that's, well, evil?
Yeah, there was a guy who posted on the board recently who was in the army who was talking about a course he took called Killology, which was overcoming every human being's natural revulsion against murder.
And that took a lot of work to get people to accept and to practice rank murder and then to cry with tears of gratitude when they have a medal pinned on their chest for genocidal slaughter.
And you're right, it takes a lot of work.
Human beings are born, UPB, it takes a lot of work to put them into propaganda robots, right?
Yep. You guys can go ahead and continue.
I just wanted to say that.
That's propaganda. Because you say, well, we're making the world safe for democracy.
Well, that's a moral justification.
You know, we're making the world safe from terror.
That's a moral justification.
Because they're always looking for a moral...
What would you call it?
Yeah, a moral justification for doing...
Something evil, and I think that's what you're talking about, is the theory that's saying this is morally permissible to do, and then people go ahead and do it.
Well, not morally permissible, morally noble.
Yeah. Like, not just a neutral, but an act of good, right?
Soldiers are heroes. Yeah.
What are troops, right? Nobody has bumper stickers which say, support the mafia's hitmen, right?
Right. It's like required of you, actually.
Yeah, and we know, of course, that when we bring UPB to questions of the state and of religion, particularly the infliction of religion upon children, which is a form of child abuse, people get extraordinarily volatile right away.
And that's because, of course, you're encroaching upon the core corruption that has been inflicted on them, and which now they are probably inflicting on others, their children, and so on, which is that we have been taught to worship evil as the good, which makes us slaves of the devilish.
Yeah, and I think it's just part of our humanity to know, even somewhere deep inside of ourselves, that that's wrong.
Because when I used to be a Christian, there was a guy that came back from Iraq, and he openly admitted to the pastor and everybody that he killed civilians.
And the pastor said, well, you will be forgiven, and kind of encouraged him to, you know, what you're doing is right.
Don't worry about it.
It's kind of like an automatic forgiveness.
The very fact that it bothered him...
I think that's just, I don't know what it is, maybe part of this humanity talking?
Well, yeah, propaganda cannot reshape the human soul.
And you could have propaganda which says that chocolate is great for you and vegetables are terrible for you.
And you could then eat chocolate and you could reject vegetables and you could believe that with all your might.
But you're still going to get sick and anemic and bone brittle, right?
Like your body knows differently and it's the same thing.
Our conscience is irrevocable.
Our conscience is irrevocable.
We can believe that evil is the good, and we can do evil and call ourselves as the good and go to parades and ticker tape and listen to music and hail to the chief and get medals and this and that, but when you look at the prevalence of self-hatred, suicide, mental illness, brutalized relationships from the people who come back from war, the conscience is irrevocable.
The conscience will get you no matter what you tell yourself.
Right, and just like he said, and I used to be in the Navy myself, and there is an indoctrination program in there to make you think what you're doing is right, but you can tell he was looking for forgiveness, or he was looking for, I guess, yeah, you would call it forgiveness for what he did.
No matter how much they told him it was right, you were in the right to do that, he just somehow knew it was wrong.
Yeah, human beings run on UPB, right?
The way that the world runs on physics.
Human beings run on UPB because we're constantly interacting with objective, empirical, and rational reality.
So you can't will a stone into an elephant, and you can't say that a stone should be both a stone and an elephant at the same time.
We all recognize that in terms of reality.
We all know. That if you put a stone in a tuxedo, it doesn't turn into Fred Astaire.
And yet we believe at some surface level that if you put a costume on a man, murder becomes the greatest good.
But deep down we know that it's all nonsense and we deal with the hellish repercussions of that after the fact when it's too late.
Right. I think that's very important to just kind of bring to the realization of the world that I mean, and it's in us already.
You know, it's in us already.
It's just kind of clouded by fog.
You know, this kind of dual morality taught by religions and government and stuff like that.
It's all clouded in fog.
And we'll never run out of, you're right, we'll never run out of people to enrage and offend with the truth in our lifetime, so I just think that we've had enough theorizing and now it's time to go out and start making a real difference, which is challenging and scary because the whiteboard is so tempting, right?
But it is so essential to go out into the world and to start spreading the truth once you have it, right?
There's no point, like Darwin sat on the theory of evolution for like 15 years or something like that, and it didn't do anybody any good in particular until he went out, or at least he had a Right, right. Yeah, I certainly try to do that.
I've been kind of excluded from certain family members and stuff like that because I stood on, I guess you'd call it, principles that they disagreed with.
I made new friends, too.
I think I've gotten to some people and people have gotten to me.
It's an exchange, but it's a better exchange, I think.
And it's funny because we so much admire in the abstract the man who stand and fall on the blood of their beliefs, right?
We so much admire, at least Christians do, so much admire somebody like this mythology of Christ who refused to recant and was nailed to the cross for his sins.
And we even admire people like Socrates who died rather than betray what he considered to be his ideals.
In the abstract, we completely love these guys for the heroism and nobility of their courage and integrity.
But sweet mother of all that is unholy, whenever human beings meet a person like that in real life, suddenly they become the Romans, not the guy on the cross.
Suddenly, they become the prosecutors of Socrates rather than the sympathizers of Socrates.
In the abstract, everybody sides with Socrates.
When they meet a Socrates in the flesh, everybody grabs a rock and takes aim.
Right. I guess when they conceptualize a hero, it would be like Socrates, but when it's in real life, they're gonna, I guess, nail him to the cross.
It's a pretty aggressive thing, which of course Ayn Rand talked about in her novels quite a bit, but that's just a reality that we have to deal with.
You know, first they ignore you, then they fight you, then they hate you, then you win.
I mean, that's just the natural stage of the evolution of human thought.
And it is, of course, the greater the battle, the more honor.
The bigger the enemies, the more glory.
And so I love the fact that it's so hard myself.
Because if it wasn't also, it would make no sense why it hadn't happened already.
Well, I'm going to stop here just because I'm going to end up with a one video image per second on YouTube if I keep going.
But is it okay with you guys if I release this to a wider audience?
I think that we had some excellent, excellent questions here.
Yes. Okay, great.
I still have more questions, though.
Sorry? I still have more questions, though.
I'm sure that you do, but I tell you, why don't you go and proselytize for a bit and then come back with questions that other people have as well.
That would be helpful, I'm sure, too.
So thank you, everybody, so much.
I really do appreciate it.
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