June 14, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
11:14
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| Now, I would submit, with regards to this question of objectivism and other philosophies, and instinctual knowledge or innate knowledge of ethics, I would submit that actually Ayn Rand knew a lot about this, | |
| because in her fiction, She does portray her heroes as people who are just born that way. | |
| And, I mean, the two that spring to mind, I mean, you could say Kira in We the Living, but the two that really spring to mind are Howard Rock in The Fountainhead and John Galt in Atlas Shrugged. | |
| These are not People, these are not, I guess, women. | |
| Forget Kira. I mean, this is an interesting thing in the Rand novels that in the first book, reason loses. | |
| Second book, it's a draw. | |
| And in the third book, it wins. | |
| I thought it was a good transition. | |
| I don't know if it was planned or not. But... | |
| But these transitional characters are the two poles, right? | |
| So you have these characters who are, you know, kind of innately evil and never change, and then you have these characters who are innately virtuous and never change, and then you have these characters who represent the transition characters, and this is standard stuff in any kind of art, right? | |
| You need the evil, you need the good, and you need the transition. | |
| And, again, because Ayn Rand, though a great writer and a great philosopher, was not much of a psychologist, she didn't seem to be overly troubled by this sort of fundamental question, which is, if you look at someone like James Taggart, who sees, I guess, Francisco's beautiful, lean Spanish form and hates it, right? | |
| Because he himself is lumpy and tubby or whatever, right? | |
| Well, Why? | |
| Why does Dagny look at Francesco and, you know, fall in love with his beauty and James Taggart become resentful towards that? | |
| And I don't have a big, strong answer. | |
| Certainly, the fact that there's a worship of the physical beauty in Atlas Shrugged and in The Fountainhead, and kind of like an odd... | |
| An odd approach, right? | |
| Philosophers do find it... | |
| Artists prefer the shorthand of physical beauty to the challenge of creating moral people, right? | |
| So, in Ayn Rand's world, I guess, well, one woman says that Howard Rourke is not handsome, but they have these sort of lean and, you know, attractive forms of copper hair and, you know, there's all that kind of stuff. | |
| And that's a shorthand, right? | |
| For, you know, Dagny has to be beautiful and Dominique has to be beautiful and It's kind of odd, in a way, for a philosopher to focus so much on physical beauty as a reflection of spirituality. | |
| Lillian Reardon is attractive, but there's something kind of corrupt about her, like there's something that floats around her. | |
| But the people who are born evil are just born evil, the Floyd Pharisees and so on, and the people who are born good are just born good. | |
| And that allows Ayn Rand to sidestep the problem of transition. | |
| Now, in my own small way, in my fiction, and in particular in, well, in Revolutions to some degree, but for sure in The God of Atheists, I have really tried to work with The problem of these transitional characters. | |
| They just don't have just evil guys. | |
| They don't have just good guys. | |
| But the struggle with the transition is a challenge. | |
| It's one of the biggest challenges, right? | |
| And philosophers, I think, if they want to really help change the world, should be very sensitive towards that transition from corruption, which a true philosopher will view as a kind of avoidance. | |
| Again, I use the word true philosopher here advisedly. | |
| This is my perspective, right? | |
| But... If we have innate knowledge, then corruption is the avoidance of that innate knowledge. | |
| If we have innate knowledge of the basics of good and evil, don't tell the truth, don't steal, don't kill. | |
| If we have an innate knowledge of that kind of stuff, then the philosopher's work is to some degree more psychological than syllogistical. | |
| Because if you have to prove ethics to someone, as I said before, if we have no innate knowledge of ethics, if you have to prove ethics to people, Then they're not responsible for that lack of knowledge, right? | |
| Any more than anybody's responsible for not knowing Euclidean geometry. | |
| So, if the work of philosophy is to prove philosophical principles to people, then a philosopher can stick with the idea that there's no innate concepts, we have no knowledge of good and evil, until a philosopher proves it. | |
| This good and evil. | |
| And then good and evil is magically created, like the Garden of Eden, right? | |
| But then, of course, there's a problem, which is that there's no evil until you define evil. | |
| So how does evil come into existence? | |
| Well, of course, the innate knowledge aspect deals with that problem. | |
| But the challenge with that, because of course when I decided to devote my life to philosophy, which is to say when philosophy sat on my face and said, say, uncle, do this or you'll never sleep again, then I sort of really wanted to make sure that I was not going to be repeating the mistakes of the past, right? That was my major, major, major goal. | |
| So, you know, there's already been a Socrates, there's already been an Ayn Rand, There's already been an Aristotle, there's already been a Kant, there's already been a Hegel, there's already been a Schopenhauer, there's already been a Nietzsche, all these people, right? | |
| And they've already done what they've done, and they've lost, right? | |
| In a very fundamental way. | |
| Philosophy, as I've said before, is pretty much a grim history of getting its ass kicked by nationalism, militarism, cultural values, so to speak, and so on, religion. | |
| And so I want to do it again, right? | |
| I don't want to do that stuff again, because that would be sort of pointless and narcissistic. | |
| And if we are wholly and hugely and slavishly responsible for the truth, not so that we create it, but responsible to the truth, then it should not be about us and our egos, but about the truth, regardless of what it costs us personally. | |
| So, for myself, once I understood, as far as I do, the reality that there is innate knowledge of basic ethics, but there is a specialization in the field of ethics that has great value, then once you accept that people already understand ethics, at least in this middle realm, then the question becomes, why aren't they ethical? | |
| I mean, you're not going to go up to anyone who says murder is good. | |
| Maybe some baiting kind of nihilist. | |
| But nobody seriously lives their life that way and espouses that as a personal value or as a universal value. | |
| So this is the problem with... | |
| With philosophy, right? We innately understand ethics at least to... | |
| And what I mean by this is to the degree that we could spend the rest of our life focusing on getting people to live those kinds of ethics and still not be done, right? | |
| That's why I get kind of pissed off at the lifeboat scenarios, hanging off a flagpole and stuff like that, because it's like... | |
| If all that UPB has proven that rape, theft, murder and assault are immoral, universally, we could just take any one of those and spend the rest of our lives trying to get people to understand that in a universal sense, you know, because that renders the government immoral and the army evil and so on, right? And police immoral, at least once those ideas are further out there. | |
| You could spend the rest of your life working on that and still not to be done. | |
| Right. I mean, if there are more sick people in the world than you could ever treat with the methods at your disposal, why would you sit there doing research on the most obscure diseases possible? | |
| You already have your work cut out for you. | |
| That's sort of been the frustration that I have with ethicists who just sit there and paralyze themselves and others with really obscure and technical and who gives a rat's ass, never going to happen kinds of ethical problems. | |
| Right. We already have our work cut out for us in terms of the ethical challenges that we can both identify and heal in the time that we already have in this world. | |
| We're never going to run out of ethical illusions even if we just look at the basic four that UPB validates and works with. | |
| So that's sort of what bothers me about people's response to UPB. It's a damn good proof about why these things are immoral. | |
| And so go out there and work with that proof and get people to understand that A state is evil and a military is evil and so on. | |
| Isn't that enough work for one lifetime? | |
| Can we not say that that's enough, that we don't have to go and all these life posts? | |
| It's just a way of avoiding having to actually confront people about the moral realities of the world that we live in, right? | |
| It's to just go back into yet another academic, weird kind of answer, right? | |
| Or non-answer, or actually avoidance of answering or acting on that. | |
| Let me modify that clause one more time, shall I? So, once you understand that the job of the philosopher is not to reason people into virtue, but to get them to accept the virtue that they already know innately, then the job of the philosopher becomes more psychological than syllogistical, which is, of course, why on this show we talk so much about psychology. | |
| Because if people understand that theft and murder and rape and all these things are salty, That they're already wrong. | |
| If everybody gets that already, then why is it so widely praised in abstract cultural terms, right? | |
| Through the state, through the military, and so on. | |
| And that's why, you know, we try and figure out not how to prove these things to people, but why the things that they already believe are applied so inconsistently. | |
| And again, that leads us back to psychological challenges and all this, that, and the other. | |
| And that is really why the focus is so much on psychology. | |
| And I would say that It is a lack of the union of these two disciplines that has hampered the acceptance of philosophical principles throughout history and across the world, because I think that religious people, priests, are far better psychologists than philosophers are, | |
| and that's why they kick our asses, and statists and the government are far better Psychologists than philosophers are, and until we understand that our job is simply to help people live with the values they already hold, and that means uncovering the psychological blocks to doing that, | |
| then we're just going to forever be right and ignored, and that, of course, I've had more than enough of in viewing throughout history and, of course, within my own life and the culture I live in, so that's why I take the approach that I take, and hopefully that makes some sense as to why we love the Rand, but we have to build on What she did and try and extend it to achieving real effect in the real world. | |
| Thank you so much for listening. Hey, look at that. |
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