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June 14, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
52:17
1086 Objectivism and UPB Part 1

Do we have innate knowledge about right and wrong? Two approaches...

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Good afternoon, everybody. Hope you're doing well.
That's Steph. It's Saturday, the 14th of June, 2008, and it's time for one of the patented FDR shower casts, which is not quite as alarming as it sounds, though it could be considered somewhat alarming,
which is... We fired the maids, and, you know, it's all part of our devotion to philosophy and The desire to keep my wife from actually strangling people who don't cling to her satisfaction, which certainly is a motivation for me.
And so I'm doing some chores, and I wanted to get caught up on a bunch of stuff that has been kicking around.
The first thing, of course, and I don't know if you'll ever hear this, David, but a fine objectivist gentleman sent me a very long and wonderful email.
Criticizing my perception or stance on certain aspects of objectivist ethics, which I promptly fed to the outlook monster, which ate and destroyed it.
So I do apologize for that.
I did spend some time trying to find it, but what Microsoft doth taketh away, very few men can find.
So I'll have to sort of reconstruct it within my mind, of course, naturally, to my own advantage, but it's the thought that counts.
So, this question, a criticism that I've put forward about objectivism, objectivist ethics, basically runs a little bit like this, which is saying, the man have no innate knowledge of good and evil,
of right and wrong. And then, what happens is, Later on, this is from Galt's speech, but later on then Ayn Rand says, but if you're immoral, you'll be miserable.
And this is something I've always had trouble with, and it is a pretty fundamental problem in ethics as far as I'm concerned, which sort of runs like this.
If human beings have no innate knowledge of good and evil, if they have no innate philosophical knowledge, then...
They're not evil until they are instructed upon in philosophy, right?
You can't call them evil.
If human beings have no innate knowledge of right and wrong, then you can't call them evil until they have been exposed to this knowledge.
And, of course, have accepted it.
And Lord knows, theories of ethics are controversial, to say the least, right?
Some of the toughest work I've had to do in the realm of philosophy, intellectually and emotionally, of course, is like, okay, well, working in the sort of universally preferable behavior, the approach that I take to ethics.
So, this is, I mean, the central problem, of course, that ethicists face is good people are already ethical and bad people don't care about ethics.
So, it's sort of a useless discipline, if that makes sense.
So, it's like I can only sell my diet to thin people.
Well, those aren't the people who need to diet, right?
So if you can only sell your diet book to thin people, what's the point of what you're doing, right?
If you can only sell your book on nutrition to people who already practice good nutrition, then there's a certain amount of WTF that goes on in the realm of being an ethicist.
So, if human beings have no innate knowledge of good and evil, then clearly the value of a philosopher goes up to some degree, but I also would argue that the value of a philosopher then goes down to an enormous degree as well, for the following reason.
If I am an evil guy and a philosopher cannot logically call me evil until I learn all the complex depths and twists and turns and so on of philosophy, Then, naturally, what I'm going to do is I'm going to avoid such knowledge like the very plague.
And then the philosopher logically cannot call me evil because I lack an innate knowledge of good and evil.
And so I cannot be called evil because we cannot call ignorant stupidity, right?
I mean, I'm not sure what we can call stupidity, but for sure we can't call ignorant stupidity any more than we can call a toddler short.
We can, I guess, or call all toddlers short.
And it's true they are short relative to adults, but so what, right?
I mean, that's just the nature of the beast, so to speak.
So if we have no innate knowledge of right and wrong, Then we cannot be held accountable because we have no innate knowledge and we have not been taught the knowledge.
And, you know, I've used this metaphor before and I apologize for using it again, but metaphors are tough to come up with.
But we don't call a doctor in the Middle Ages bad for failing to prescribe that which had not been invented, penicillin or something like that.
Now a doctor is bad, right?
But who doesn't do that?
But we just, we don't.
And we don't call medieval...
Physicists, stupid or retarded or irresponsible or ignorant, if they don't talk about the theory of relativity, quantum mechanics or the massive statist boondoggle known as string theory, because they simply have no knowledge.
If you don't have the knowledge, you're not responsible for the deficiency.
I'm not dumb because I don't speak Mandarin.
I may be dumb for other reasons, but not that one.
I just don't have the knowledge. So this is, of course, a foundational problem, in my opinion.
I think UPB solves this quite nicely, and we'll get to that in a little bit.
Because UPB, not only does it solve this, but it can walk on water, turn water into wine, and I believe come back from the dead.
We'll find out in a day or two when we open the closet.
So Rand has this problem.
Human beings have no innate knowledge of philosophy.
Therefore, human beings cannot be evil.
They couldn't have been evil prior to Randian philosophy.
Randian philosophy was considered moral philosophy, in particular, revolutionary.
So there's no evil occurred.
She invents evil when she invents the philosophy, because human beings have no innate knowledge and so on.
And that's fine. You can certainly take that as a logical approach, but it doesn't work very well.
And of course, What we're basically saying is ignorance of the law is every excuse, right?
Because human beings have no innate knowledge of good and evil.
Ayn Rand invented a proof or an approach to ethics in her philosophy.
And this is not just true of Ayn Rand, but of anybody.
And therefore, if she invented it, people who did not know it beforehand cannot have been morally responsible for what they did.
And So, of course, if you're a bad guy, and let's say that this new airtight proof for ethics is floating around, then, of course, the first thing that you want to do is to make sure that you learn nothing about philosophy.
I mean, if ignorance of the law is every excuse, like if you can just go anytime you're accused of any crime, you can just go up and say, I didn't know it was illegal.
And you can do this repetitively.
Then, of course, the first thing you want to do, if that is a valid defense, is to completely and utterly avoid learning anything about the law.
Right? So, you do solve certain problems when you say human beings have no innate knowledge of good and evil in philosophy and moral philosophy.
But, I mean, not only do I think it empirically incorrect...
But also, I think it creates the problem that good people, you know, are already good and will read up in moral philosophy, but bad people, because they're not responsible for that which they do not know, will simply avoid learning about philosophy.
And so again, philosophy is, again, you're only selling diet books to thin people, right?
So that problem then still remains.
Now, as to the question of whether or not human beings are born with innate knowledge of good and evil, well, interestingly enough, of course, Ayn Rand says that they're not, but in a truly wild bit of logic, let's say, she also says that she herself was born with this knowledge.
So, for instance, and this is more autobiography than argument, but it definitely ties into the argument, in my opinion.
So Ayn Rand says that we have no innate knowledge of good and evil, but, she says, I have held the same beliefs and had the same fundamental approach to truth since I was about seven years old.
And it takes...
A fairly stupendous amount of vanity to not notice this contradiction, right?
And Lord, I mean, don't get me wrong, Ayn Rand, stone genius.
We love the Rand, but she knew a little something about vanity, let's say.
And, you know, perhaps rightly so.
I mean, who knows, right? But she was, I mean, she was an incredibly gifted woman on so many levels, right?
But she knew a little something about vanity, and of course she obviously liked this idea that she had been a stone virtuous capitalist philosopher since she was about seven in Soviet Russia, right?
But of course she faces the logical problem of explaining just how she was an empirical capitalist philosopher at the age of seven in Russia, in Soviet Russia of all places, because Clearly, she had not been exposed to a lot of Milton Friedman in Soviet Russia.
So that, of course, is quite a considerable challenge.
And this, of course, is why I'm glad I never met her.
I mean, I love the Rand, but she would not have been a big fan of mine for very long, because this is just a kind of basic contradiction.
How did she become a capitalist philosopher with no exposure to capitalist thinking at the age of seven if she did not possess innate ideas?
And how did all of her other friends and family not become capitalist philosophers, right?
So in...
What was it?
Judgment Day or something? The Nathaniel Brandon book?
Somewhere I read about that Ayn Rand's sister had come to visit her fairly late in life, I guess.
And what happened was she sort of recognized that she, Ayn Rand, and her sister had almost nothing in common.
And this is something that, if I remember rightly, she says, you know, well, we've never had anything in common.
Well, if you have two children raised in the same culture, in the same household, and one of them becomes, you know, a world notorious, if not world famous, rationalist philosopher, and the other one Well, not so much.
And that this split occurred, or was evident to Ayn Rand when she was very young, like seven years old, then how is this difference explained?
I mean, we certainly understand that people have inborn...
Personality traits and that science may not have been available to Ayn Rand.
I don't know when it came out, but it's pretty clear from brain scans and so on that given the same stimuli, different people's brains react differently.
And I'm not saying this is necessarily moral.
But it certainly is the case.
I mean, I remember when my nieces were babies and vacuuming around them, you know, one of them would look at the vacuum cleaner and scream in terror.
And of course, then I would stop doing what I was doing.
But the other one would just giggle and laugh and found it quite delightful that there was this big roaring beast coming up at her.
It's neither good or bad. Certainly, we recognize that there are innate personality characteristics, intelligence, creativity, extrovert versus introvert, language versus analytical versus mathematical skills, and so on.
We recognize all of that.
And yet, the objectivists fall short of saying that we have innate knowledge.
This David Fellow wrote to me and said, but the fact that a man is unhappy when he is not moral, or if he is not moral, does not mean that he automatically knows what it is to be moral.
And an analogy that I would paste over that to make that a little more clear, hopefully, is that the fact that you get, that you've become poorly, the fact that your health takes a hit when you eat badly does not necessarily mean that you know how to eat well.
Right, so the fact that, I mean, this would be what happened to Christina several years ago, before we met, but in what she calls the pre-maintenance years, I don't know what that means, but she got sick when she ate cheese and couldn't figure out why.
Gassy and, you know, crampy and unpleasant all around.
So her body was basically saying, I don't like something, right?
But she didn't know what it was. And then after a while, of course, she went for a test for lactose intolerance.
And as it turned out, she was lactose intolerant.
So the fact that she was not well when eating lactose in no way indicated to her what she should or should not be eating, right?
I mean, she could have gone through a process of trial and error and so on.
But she ended up having the test, and then she figured out what the problem was.
She was told what the problem was and adjusted her diet accordingly.
So, in that way, this objectivist, and I think it's not just him, they say, well, this is how we resolve this seeming paradox.
It's not really a paradox. So, the fact that I end up being unhappy if I act in a non-ethical manner does not mean...
That I know how to act in an ethical manner.
It just means that I'm not happy if I don't.
And it's a fine argument.
I don't think it's valid, but it certainly is a fine argument.
And so my response to that...
Sorry, and the example that he gave, and I apologize if I'm paraphrasing it inaccurately in any way...
But, the example that he gave was, he says, you're building a bridge, and you're building, I don't know, a suspension bridge out of balsa wood, or something like that.
And then, when you try to drive a truck over it, don't you know, the suspension bridge doth fall down, right?
And he said, the fact that you have built a bridge that doesn't work, that doesn't hold up what it's supposed to hold up, and that you recognize that, doesn't give you the ability to know what to build the bridge with.
It doesn't give you automatic knowledge of the tensile properties of Steel or iron or, I don't know, concrete or whatever it is that you would build the bridge out of in the future.
And that, of course, is true.
I mean, the fact that a bridge falls down doesn't tell you how to build a bridge exactly that doesn't fall down.
So, my response to that, or my response to these arguments as a whole, is...
Long-winded to the point of being interminable, but, and repetitive, but you know that already, so I don't have to repeat that, I think.
Oh, look at that, I'm repeating about repeating.
So, my response to that would be to say, look, it certainly is true that building a bridge out of balsa wood will have the bridge fall down, doesn't tell you the tensile properties of steel, but that's not actually how it works psychologically in the real world,
right? Since we're using building a bridge as a metaphor for living virtuously, honorably, or whatever, versus living dishonorably, then what happens is people don't set out being corrupt in their life and sail along merrily, think that they're doing fine, and then one day their life completely collapses.
That's just not how it works psychologically.
What does happen when people are living dishonestly or dishonorably is that they get progressively uneasy over time.
They can't sleep, they feel anxious, they get stressed out, they run for reinforcement in the social metaphysics kind of way that Rand talks about.
They run for reinforcement to others, right?
So, I mean, George Bush, say, certainly a man who would be considered not to be living his life with an excess of honor, let's say, George Bush isn't just going to want to wake up one day and pull a James Taggart kind of psychological seppuku and throw himself off a bridge.
But people who do live dishonorably...
Do face a fair amount of anxiety, which, of course, they counteract by surrounding themselves with people who reinforce their false beliefs, right?
I mean, certainly Rand, again, would not be a complete stranger to this.
So that is interesting to me, because if you're building, well, if you're planning, and people also face this in the planning stages as well, If you are planning and building a bridge and you say, I want to make it out of balsa wood, you will actually feel, I mean in the metaphor here, you will actually feel anxiety during the planning process.
You will feel something, something is wrong.
You will get anxiety.
You will have dreams. Like something will occur for you that says, huh, And of course we know this, also because there is such a thing as philosophy, which arises out of an unease with existing, quote, answers, false answers, answers of religion and culture and so on.
So, it's not the case, the bridge falls down, but you feel uneasy throughout the whole construction of the Balsa Wood Bridge.
You feel, oh, there's something wrong.
I mean, that's why I went to therapy.
I felt there was something wrong.
I didn't know what. I felt there was something wrong.
The reports that I've heard from people who are therapists is, you know, people come in because they feel anxious or unhappy and they And they don't know why.
And sometimes it can take a long time to figure out why.
You know, what's going on, why they're unhappy, and so on.
So what that means is that there's some...
And this, of course, is the unconscious, right?
Which is not... Ayn Rand doesn't have any characters who dream, right?
But the unconscious has some sort of processing about integrity that occurs innately, right?
Instinctually. So we then have to accept that there must be some innate knowledge of the fact that balsa wood is a bad substance to build a bridge out of because people feel uneasy about it before It falls down.
They don't have to wait for the evidence, for the direct empirical evidence to come in, i.e.
the bridge falls down.
They don't have to wait for that before they feel uneasy.
So in the same way, If Christina, when she had lactose intolerance, if she felt uneasy every time she thought of eating something that contained lactose, then we would say that some part of her knew what was going on, knew the association, and so on. So, it can't be that human beings don't, even by this guy's own argument, right?
It simply can't be.
That human beings have no innate knowledge of right and wrong because they feel uneasy before the empirical evidence of disaster in their life, ethical or moral disaster, before that evidence appears, they feel uneasy, which means it's non-empirical.
If you feel uneasy just building the Balsa Wood Bridge before it even falls down, then it simply is the case that you have some innate knowledge Or physics, some innate knowledge of the fact that balsa doesn't work.
Now, that doesn't give you all the precise knowledge that you need to build a bridge that'll last for X number of years and, you know, be just strong enough to build, to hold whatever it is you want it to hold, but not so strong that you waste materials and, you know, all that kind of stuff.
So it doesn't give you all of that precise knowledge, but it certainly does.
It certainly does give you knowledge that things are going awry before there is tangible evidence that they're going awry, which, of course, indicates what I would consider the happiest possibility for philosophers, which is that people have an innate knowledge of right and wrong, but that getting it precise and getting it certain and getting it correct The Aristotelian mean or my sort of UPB thing.
That's tough, right? So we know what we shouldn't eat to gain weight, but that doesn't mean that we know what an optimum diet is, right?
So that's good, because if people didn't think that eating had anything to do with gaining weight, then they'd never go to nutritionists in the first place.
So that wouldn't help nutrition very much, right?
If they thought it was, I don't know, where the birds were flying currently that made them gain weight, they would never think to put it together with their diet.
But everybody understands, innately or instinctively, that their diet has at least something to do with their weight.
And therefore, they will go to a nutritionist who can help them fine-tune things to get things down the right way.
So, in conclusion, to this part, we do have innate knowledge.
That's just empirically verifiable, and even by the metaphor that this fellow puts forward, we do have innate knowledge of ethics.
But we don't always know, in fact, often we don't know, how to implement it, how to implement ethics in ways that work in the long run.
Where we give people enough forgiveness that we don't unjustly charge them or require them to have a knowledge that they don't possess.
But at the same time, we don't give them so much latitude that we can never apply any moral judgment that we say, well...
Being good is hard and being good is complicated, but it's not so hard and complicated that nobody can ever be responsible who avoids the knowledge of philosophy.
So anyway, all of this kind of stuff I think is important.
So I do stand by this sort of original approach that it is the case that we do possess innate knowledge.
Ayn Rand quoted herself as an example of that, and it does solve the problem, which ethicists have and have always had, that we have innate knowledge, but it doesn't grant us perfect knowledge.
It does raise the value of philosophy and give philosophers something to do, which of course I'm quite happy with, because me like ye the thinking, and so I think it provides that balance.
So, the next thing I'd like to talk about in this regard, How does the UPB theory explain this issue of innate knowledge?
And we'll dip a little bit into developmental psychology here, which I think is important.
And I don't think Ayn Rand could have spent a lot of time around children, because she was an excellent empiricist in so many ways.
But that sure helps.
To have spent a lot of time around children, is very helpful in figuring out this issue of innate knowledge, right?
Now, certainly, children, babies, infants, are born with innate knowledge, right?
If you put a breast-shaped thing near the face of any baby, and almost every man under 100, then the baby will actually turn his head and open his mouth and begin suckling, right?
Which, of course, is exactly what we would expect.
So, innate knowledge is all over the place.
In the animal kingdom, birds migration, the bees dance to show people how to.
It's not taught through language, but is innately knowledgeable, so to speak.
I mean, whether you want to call that knowledge, I don't know.
It doesn't really matter, but it certainly is being born with a kind of information.
The intellectual development of a child follows very specific patterns and is not something that It's taught from outside.
I mean, children raised by wolves figure out object constancy, right?
I mean, they just do. It's just something that human beings and, in fact, all animals have to figure out object constancy.
I mean, there's no point hiding nuts for the winter if you're a squirrel if you forget that they exist come the coldest snows of winter, right?
Innate knowledge occurs. There's a window of language acquisition that is developmental within the brain.
And if I remember right, it's something like two to four or two to three years old, where a child can be learning dozens of words a day, even just picking them up, even if they're not trained, absorbing them, sponging them up.
And in this period, Either the child is exposed to a human language and gains all of the extraordinary linguistic abilities that we all have, or, again, this is sort of the wolf-child thing, children who are raised without human contact due to some horrible accident or malevolence.
Later on, they simply do not develop language to the same degree.
There's a sort of plastic language acquisition Components to human brain development and you either get it or you don't.
It's not like they never learned language, but they just never learn it very well if they're not exposed to a language during that time period.
So this innate capacity for language is very specific to particular developmental stages.
And this is true for a lot of different things.
We don't have to go into a lot of detail, but when it comes to something like The development of the mind, there is a lot of innate stuff that is cooking around that is scientifically and empirically well documented and well validated.
So, human beings certainly do possess So how do we go from human beings possess object constancy and human beings innately possess some knowledge or ability to process reality and to interoperate with reality?
Children will learn how to throw a ball relatively easily.
The amount of calculation and challenge that is involved in that.
Dogs don't know math, so to speak, but they can catch a frisbee, which follows a mathematical pattern of flight and fall.
By the way, My Life as a Dog?
Good movie. So how do we translate that kind of knowledge to UPB? Well, UPB, as you hopefully know, is an umbrella theory.
So UPB is a way of describing the acquisition The understanding and the dissemination of valid knowledge.
And of course, when knowledge is considered, at least in my approach, when knowledge is considered valid, what that means is that knowledge accurately describes empirical reality.
So empirical reality, sensual external reality, is logical and consistent and predictable and Stable and, you know, the Aristotelian laws of logic are derived from the behavior of matter and A is A and all that kind of stuff.
So, thoughts which we claim are true in an objective and valid sense are true because they accurately describe external tangible material reality.
That's what true means.
Accurate description of reality, objective reality.
Now, if we accept that human beings have an innate capacity to learn and analyze and understand sensual or objective reality and not in the sort of dog-like manner But rather in the conceptual way.
A long time ago, I think it's a very good idea that I had around that concepts are fundamentally descriptions of atoms or atomic behavior.
Because matter has consistent but different properties, we can have concepts.
A tree is composed of largely the same atoms, or you could say cells, I guess, but largely the same atoms, which all have similar properties.
Well, they have the same properties between trees and so on.
The tree may be composed of different configurations of them.
Carbon has a carbon atom, which is all over living things, has consistent properties, and therefore we can have concepts.
Concepts are really descriptions of atoms.
So if we sort of understand and accept that human beings have an innate capacity to conceptualize or to derive rational rules for the behavior of reality,
matter and energy, excuse me, or the effects thereof, well then If ethics is related to that pursuit, then just as human beings have an innate capacity and ability to work with concepts, then if ethics are...
Excuse me, just a little water.
Do not panic. I am not showering.
I am merely cleaning the shower.
So, sorry. Let us refocus.
Let us return. If human beings have the automatic ability to conceptualize reality, which we do, and if ethics is related to that ability,
then we have an innate knowledge or capacity to process ethics, just in the same way that we have the ability To categorize something like a chair, a table, a ball and so on because of its rationally consistent properties and behavior.
Now we need concepts because animals don't have ethics, right?
Like lions totally bud in line like all the time.
It's just a pet peeve of mine and you just you can't reason with them.
So In this way, a human being can categorize a table or a ball or a chair or whatever, right?
A boy band. Can categorize these things, but doesn't necessarily have to be a physicist to do so.
The physicist takes the concepts to a logically consistent and highly abstract level.
A dog can catch a ball.
A human being can categorize a ball as a ball and give it certain characteristics round and so on.
But a physicist can describe the atomic structure of the ball and the mathematical arc of the flight and so on, right?
So it's just different levels, right?
And that would be, right?
Animal, no ethics. Human being, instinctual ethics.
Ethicist, you know, a finely hewed, detailed look at the question of ethics and what they are and what they mean and How to determine valid ethical approaches or rules from invalid ethical approaches and rules and so on, right?
And to take another way of looking at it, an animal will eat what it can catch and what it likes.
A human being can categorize, any human being can categorize the concept of, you know, bread and carbs and sugars and fruits and vegetables and so on, but it takes A nutritionist to go to the finest level of detail and abstraction with regards to food.
Yeah, the average human being may not get the carbs versus non-carbs, but of course a scientist or a nutritionist can.
So UPB, I think, answers this question as to how human beings Can have an innate knowledge of ethics, but not a perfect knowledge of ethics, of course, whether, but, you know, a highly conceptualized, abstracted, specialized knowledge of ethics.
Because human beings can automatically conceptualize reality.
It's just part of our innate ability as a human being.
And if ethics falls into this category, and universally preferable behavior is the description of the requirement for ethics, Which is that, you know, they're universal, they're rational, they're so on.
And since we already have this ability with regards to reality as a whole, and it is unique to our species that we know of, then since ethics fall into the same category as all other conceptual abstractions that human beings work with in reality, then this would explain why we have an innate knowledge of ethics, but we still need philosophers.
I think that's pretty cool, myself.
So, in the same way, a human being can categorize a ball innately as a concept, as a something, you know.
They don't look at the salt shaker and say, pass me that ball, unless they're auditioning for an Oliver Sacks book.
But, they do not automatically have knowledge of things like atoms and strong and weak forces and all the stuff that goes on down deep in the bowels of physics.
So that explains how human beings can so obviously work within reality, but that we still need scientists and physicists for a lot of the things that are not obvious, they're still true, or counterintuitive, they're still true.
So what does this all mean in practice?
How does this translate?
To the tangible here and now.
Well, I think that what this approach helps to do is it helps us to solve the problem of both moral responsibility and the requirement for abstract ethical systems.
So I'll give you an example.
If My gorgeous and talented wife tells me to go to the store.
Well, asks me, but let's not kid ourselves.
If she tells me to go to the store and pick up some bananas, and I go to the store and come back with a video game, because we might as well work with real-world examples, And she says, well, I asked you to go and get bananas, right?
And I say, when holding up a copy of Unreal Tournament 3, I thought this was a banana.
I can't imagine that she would take me seriously.
She might be tempted to, because the alternative might be too much to bear.
But she would not take me seriously, and she would probably laugh in kind of a despairing way, as she is wont to do.
So... I would not be able to get away, because, I mean, even if I was not, and then if she said, well, this is a video game, not a banana, a bunch of bananas, then if I said, well, look, I'm not a biologist.
I am not a horticulturalist.
Would she accept that?
As a valid answer. Honey, would you accept that as a valid answer?
She says yes, and that's why I married her.
No, she says no.
I would not accept that as a valid answer.
Now, it certainly is true that I am not a horticulturalist, neither am I a biologist, but she would accept that such specialized knowledge was not required in order to differentiate a bunch of bananas from a video game.
If I don't know the Latin name for bananas, it doesn't mean that I can't pick up a bunch of bananas, because I've tried that one too.
I thought a bunch of bananas was Unreal Tournamentus III, but no luck.
So in this way...
But of course, if she asked a...
A monkey to go and pick up a bunch of bananas from the store, the monkey would just stare at her balefully and mildly resentfully and with a great deal of apparent confusion, which is also a strategy that I have tried on more than one occasion, which also doesn't work.
So she just accepts that innately, just as a, let's hope, reasonably intelligent human being, She just accepts that when she says, can you pick up a bunch of bananas, that she doesn't need to show me a photograph and train me and so on because she dealt through that in the early part of her marriage.
Okay, enough marriage jokes. Actually, not quite.
Maybe a few more. And she knows that I possess this basic ability in a way that animals don't.
Simply because I am a human being who is not two, right?
Physically. So she's going to rely on that level of knowledge that I just possess.
Now, she may innately possess, I don't know.
But certainly prior to language, people ate bananas, right?
Prior to language, but after we became brighter than chimpanzees, people pointed to, climbed and ate bananas and had them as a sort of psychological or conceptual category.
So, in this way, she's dealing with this middle layer of knowledge, right?
Above an animal but below an abstract expert, right?
The level of categorizing a banana as a banana, which is something like a conceptual category, which is something that animals can't do, but below the level of needing to know You know, the Latin name, the exact, you know, protein and cellular makeup of bananas and, you know, exactly what fruits they are related to.
Like, I don't need to know whether tomato is a fruit or a vegetable in order to go and pick up a tomato, right?
So, she's relying on this middle layer or level of knowledge.
It's above an animal, but it's below a conceptual expert.
And in the same way, When we talk about ethics, virtue, right and wrong, what we do is we are, you know, to those who are not experts, we are immediately saying that we are relying implicitly upon this middle layer of knowledge.
Above an animal, below an expert.
So, we may not know All of the ethical arguments for and against abortion.
Some complex ethical issue.
We may not be able to solve all of those masturbatory lifeboat scenarios that ethicists love to dream up to get grants and waste time.
We may not be able to answer all of that kind of really tough conceptual problem.
We may not even In fact, we probably can't, I would say.
We don't know why murder is wrong.
At least, I would say, until UPB, but that could just be my vanity, but let's just say that's sort of my theory, my approach.
So, we don't even know why it's wrong, but that's okay.
I don't know why a banana is a banana.
I don't know its history. I don't know its correct biological definition.
But I still know what it is, right?
So in the same way, like I don't know the equation for ball, but I can still categorize things as round, right?
And so I may not, in fact probably don't if I'm the average person, I can tell you why murder is wrong, logically, empirically, but I can certainly tell you that there's something wrong with it,
right? If I get gangrene, I may not know the theory of disease and infection and the Latin name of the hideous bug that is turning my leg green, but I still know there's something wrong with my leg,
right? And UPB, as a theory or an approach to ethics, as a framework for ethics, solves this problem nicely.
Because it says, look, ethics are exactly the same as any other conceptual derivation which human beings have an innate capacity for.
And that doesn't mean that every human being is going to answer ethical questions the same way and know all the details about what is the best or optimal copyright system to work with or any of the really thorny things that go on in the realm of ethics.
Because, of course, if there was such unanimity, we would not need experts to begin with.
We know that empirically.
People have lots of different conceptions of right and wrong.
So, an ethicist who's UPB compliant, who takes the UPB approach, can very easily say to somebody, Murder is wrong, and you're responsible for killing someone, and the guy's going to say, well, I didn't know murder was wrong, right?
And the Randian will say, okay, no problem.
Logically, the Randian would have to say, okay, no problem, but listen, seriously, here's a copy of Atlas Shrugged.
Read it and go forward and sin no more.
But the UPB ethicist says, yeah, of course you know that murder is wrong.
He says, well, I can't prove that murder is wrong.
But that's akin to me saying, I don't know the Latin name for banana, so I can't recognize a banana.
I don't know the technical definition of why a banana is a fruit and not a vegetable.
Therefore, I can't distinguish a banana from a tomato.
And in this way, the basics of ethics The basics of ethics because they are derived from exactly the same mechanism that gives human beings their staggering conceptual ability and unique conceptual ability in every other sphere of thought and interaction with reality.
Because ethics follow that same pattern, then a knowledge of ethics is as basic and central to humanity and instinctual and built-in A knowledge of ethics is as built in as a knowledge of any other concept, right? A child knows the concept of candy and what is candy and what is not.
If you've ever tried to tell them that an artichoke is a Babe Ruth bar, you will know that that does not work so well.
And since the basics of ethics You know, the rape, the kill, assault, steal, and so on.
Since the basics of ethics are so instinctually understood by all human beings, and that aspect of things is innate, Then an ethicist and a society's ignorance of the law is no excuse, right? You don't have to be told that murder is wrong because you understand it instinctually, which of course, you know, we call as exhibit A, the fact that there is no ethical system in the world where murder is considered good.
I mean, if murder is desired, it's always reframed to self-defense in the Nazi paradigm, right?
They're going to get us, so we'll get them first kind of thing.
So, I think this helps find the middle ground between human beings have no innate knowledge of ethics, which is clearly false and would result in an impossibility of ethics ever being developed and promulgated because, as I said, the evil people would simply avoid learning about ethics and therefore would evade or escape moral responsibility for their crimes.
But on the other hand, we certainly can't say that human beings Have a consistent, objective, and even similar view of ethics across different cultures, except that the basics are generally considered to be accepted.
Rape and theft and murder are universally prescribed in almost all ethical systems that I know of.
And again, that doesn't mean that Muslim women don't get raped or Eskimos don't steal from each other, but there certainly is this basic understanding that if questioned, they will say that it is wrong, and that is, of course, in the same way that I, you know, if questioned, is there a difference conceptually between a banana and a tomato, I will answer in the affirmative.
Though, don't pester me about the UT thing, because I can definitely swing both ways on that one.
So, that's...
The UPB approach, and I think it creates a very positive environment for the development of ethics, and it allows us to hold those who act against ethical norms responsible for their actions, while still creating value for philosophers, which is something that I'm quite keen on.
About for obvious reasons.
So I hope that this is helpful.
And again, if you're an objectivist or somebody else who finds questions or problems with this theory, I would be more than happy to hear from you.
And perhaps we can have a nice, tidy, live debate.
Again, Oovoo.com is a great place to pick up the video player for that.
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