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Sept. 3, 2008 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
59:54
1141 UPB - Stefan on the Michael Badnarik Show Part 2
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And my co-host this morning is Stephen Molyneux, who's written a book called Universally Preferable Behavior.
Stephen, we really didn't give you a chance to talk too much in that last segment.
Do you have any comments in response to Patrice?
Yeah, I mean, I thought that she had an obvious amount of enthusiasm for the topic, which nobody could falter for.
What I would say, though, is this.
The advent of reason, in my opinion, should not be opposed by religious people.
And I'm not saying that she's doing this, but this was the impression that I got, that to work on a rational theory of ethics is not the same as disproving the existence of God.
In the same way that a scientist who is working on the Big Bang Theory or quantum physics is not disproving the existence of God.
So I think that it's important for people who have faith in the existence of God To not sort of come out punching when a rational theory is proposed and say, well, that's bad.
I think that does not do credit to the belief and to the religion as a whole.
I think that people should welcome every expansion of reason and evidence in the world.
And if we want to have a show about the existence of God, I would be happy to talk about it.
But I think in this instance, I would certainly invite Christians to welcome the exercise of the God-given reason that we have.
Because I think that the expansion of rational evidentiary truth is not detrimental to their belief.
So basically when we were talking about the world is flat, originally people said God created the world as a flat object and then later Christopher Columbus noticed that when ships approached you could see the sails first.
And so then we humans went, oh my gosh, God didn't create the world flat, he created it round.
And so basically stating that the world is round and not flat is not a disapprove of a supreme being.
Yeah, what it does, of course, is it points out that certain sections of the Bible are limited by the knowledge of the time that it was written in.
And I don't think that there's any religious person who would dispute that, who's You know, walking the streets.
I mean, we fully understand that there are certain limitations that are in the Bible in its understanding of physics and biology that are specific to the time.
But I don't think that people base their entire belief on God, on whether the world is flat around.
I think that's sort of putting your eggs in one basket that is not very stable.
Right. So anyway, and again, when we're looking for this universal preferable behavior, it's not to exclude God, but to give people of religion a tool to talk to people who are atheists, to get them to behave in a manner that is beneficial for everybody.
I'm going to go now to Mike in Texas.
Good morning, Mike. How are you?
Hello, I'm enjoying the program.
Well, good. That was hopefully the intent.
Well, I've got to tell you, after that last round of calls, I just had to call in and just say I'm with a small, obscure group.
It's called...
Yeah, a small, obscure group.
It's called Christians for Jesus.
Okay, I don't understand the specificity of that.
I mean, I... It might limit an understanding that all Christians are for Jesus.
Is that not true? Well, I really have to question that in terms of action and dogma.
And Jesus himself said that there will be a great mass within the body who is deceased prior to the last remnant who really stays true to his way.
And I believe that that is the circumstance in which the young lady finds herself in who had just called during the last segment.
And I think if you really read the red words in the Bible and live by them and think by them, you will have a much different worldly and spiritual view than what is being termed as our Judeo-Christian Doctrine of today.
So I think that's just maybe a reasoned view or assertion there in this discussion.
Well, and again, all we're trying to do is come up with something that everyone can agree on.
If I see a man who is perpetrating a rape, I don't stop to ask him what his religion is.
I just stop him.
And again, we're not...
There are good people and bad people in every subset of humanity.
Good and bad white people, good and bad black people, good and bad Mexican people.
And what we're trying to do is to establish what is the common good.
What is it that we should all agree on?
And can we derive these conclusions logically and rationally?
Well, I would like to put forth the proposition that salvation, speaking as a Christian for Jesus, came to its fruition within the generation in which Jesus walked the earth.
Those were his words, and I believe that all this War and march toward an Armageddon in the future is being led by a false prophet and is not being led by God through Jesus Christ.
Hello? Hello?
Okay, don't go away, Mike.
I'm going to add Bert to the conversation.
Bert, welcome back. Okay.
Well, the author has a wonderful book, I'm sure.
I haven't had a chance to read it yet.
I enjoy reading all different things on ethics and morals.
I think it would be great. And I didn't want to delve too far into religion, because that's obviously not the focus of what he's intending to communicate.
But one of the things that he did bring across, this idea of killing and death, and you shouldn't kill, and the basis of that and how that works.
And so what I wanted to do to ask him was...
You mentioned your intention is to come up with a universal set of morals that everyone can agree on.
What I'm curious to know is what does the author propose is the mechanism That we come to agree on.
And the reason why I bring that question of the mechanism up is, in my observation, if you just take the, for instance, capital punishment from a state perspective, looking at capital punishment, there are rational people who come to that subject and disagree.
There are people on both sides of that issue that have reason and logic and understanding.
And they disagree about capital punishment.
So my question for the author is to ask him, what mechanism does he propose to work out these difficult problems?
That's a great question, Stephan.
Yeah, sorry, I think that's too difficult.
Can we go to the next caller? No, I'm kidding.
Those are excellent, excellent questions.
I just wanted to clarify something, at least from my perspective.
I'm not trying to come up with a system that everyone will agree on, because I think that would be an impossible task, because people will always have their own opinions.
For instance, the scientific method is pretty well understood by a lot of people, but there are lots of people who attempt to achieve knowledge.
By praying to their cats.
I don't know, right? There's lots of crazy ways that people try to get knowledge in the world, even though science is relatively well understood and respected, and has obviously a very good track record in certain fields.
So I don't think it's possible to create an ethical system that absolutely everyone is going to agree on.
What I do want to do, though, is to have a way of evaluating a moral proposition.
And what I mean by that is science is just a way of evaluating theories about the world.
And if I say the world is banana-shaped, well, science will have something to say about that.
And if I say capital punishment is moral, then I think it's important to have a rational framework for evaluating that.
Because what it generally comes down to is opinions, right?
So I think it's good, I think it's bad, and so on.
And not to pull religion back in, but there is that challenge within Christianity, which is, is it turn the other cheek, or is it an eye for an eye?
And depending on your particular personality, approach to things, you're going to come up with different solutions.
As to the question of capital punishment, I don't go into that specifically in the book, but I'll just touch on a way that I think we could approach it.
We can understand that to use violence in self-defense, if somebody is coming at you with a knife, you can shoot them, hopefully in the knee, but you can use violence to defend yourself.
That is a rational principle that can be validated according to reason and evidence.
However, I'm not sure that we can validly say a guy comes at you with a knife, stabs you, you don't die, and then six months later you can go and shoot him.
You know, the time frame between the aggression and the response has to be somewhat immediate in order for the justice to occur.
So I don't know that...
I don't want to get too far away from that because what you're saying is the key of the issue.
You've mentioned that it's a scientific approach, that you're trying to develop a scientific approach, and so obviously there needs to be some form of experimentation and evaluation.
There has to be a thesis.
You have to work through the scientific method.
Exactly what kind of experiment would you do to determine this kneecapping being okay only if it was immediately preceding some other violence?
What's your experiment there? Well, the first thing that I would do is look at capital punishment requires the existence of a coercive monopoly called the state.
So the first thing that I mean, as far as it's generally proposed.
So in science, you don't take anything for granted.
Everything is open to question.
So if somebody were to debate me on capital punishment, the first thing that I would ask is for them to justify the existence of this monopoly of violent people called the state.
If that could not be justly defended, which I don't think it can be, then we would begin to talk about other options or ways of dealing with violent crime and so on.
The experiments, of course, since the goal of any justice system should be to prevent rather than retaliate against violence, the experiment would be to see whether various approaches did, in fact, prevent rather than merely retaliate against violent crime.
That would be sort of the real-world experiment.
So this idea that a justice system must be to prevent instead of retaliate, what experiment...
Sorry, sorry, sorry to interrupt.
Sorry to interrupt. Sorry, I didn't say just.
What I said is that it should have the ideal.
Like medicine is better if it prevents you from getting sick than if it cures you.
But that doesn't mean that you don't need a cure.
It just means that it's better to prevent rather than to cure an ailment.
So the prevention of violent crime is certainly better than figuring out the retaliation.
So in the question of capital punishment, You would have to figure out which agency would be able to justly or morally provide such a possible service.
Once you had figured out the logic and the ethics of that, then you would begin to look at options about how violent crime could be retaliated against, even if it occurred.
And you would then have experiments, or not experiments, but you would then track the data to find out which was the most effective strategy in preventing crime rather than just retaliating against it.
And I know this is using a mechanism, but it looks like the gadfly.
It is. Because when you say something like, it is obviously better, or certainly it is better, What pops to my mind is I want to follow, if you're going to base this on religion and God, sure, show me a proof text.
If you're going to, as Mr.
Banerik put forward, you're going to do it based on what the majority of the people believe, let's have a survey.
If I'm going to do it based on what you believe, that certainly it's better for you never to get sick than to be cured of your illness, then we'll just base it on what you believe.
But if we're going to say that it's better to keep people from being sick than it is to cure them of their sickness, If we're going to follow a scientific method, you have to show that that's true.
You can't just make a statement that says it's true and say, well, everyone believes.
Well, everyone believes it's better to kneecap someone than to kill them, or everyone believes it's better to prevent crime than to punish it, or everyone believes that justice is less important than prevention.
We can't make those statements without having some basis in science if you're going to use that as your basis.
We're going to break for three minutes, and then we're going to come back with more Lighting the Fires of Liberty.
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And my co-host this morning is Stephan Molyneux, and we are searching for some universal truths, something that people of all religions can believe in.
I'm going now to Florida, and my friend Kay.
Good morning, Kay.
How are you this morning?
Hi, Michael.
I'm fine.
How are you this morning?
I'm delighted.
I'm very pleased that we have this intellectual discussion going on.
Thank you. Wow, just as you're talking, I have someone at my door.
Anyway, hi.
Do you think that there are universal truths that people of religion and atheists can agree on?
Well, here's what I wanted to say.
There were a few things.
Unfortunately, I have someone at my door, so I'm a little distracted.
You want to call back?
Anyway... Do you order enough pizza for everyone?
Let me call back because I have someone at my door.
I'm just going to call back. I'm sorry.
No problem. No problem.
It happens. There are things in our schedule.
Yeah. Go ahead and give us a call.
I will call back. We'll take your call a little bit later.
Okay. And we're going to go, if my computer will respond properly, I'm going to go to Mike in Texas and...
I'm not sure why it is taking so long.
Mike, are you on the air?
Yeah, we can hear you.
Okay. Well, I guess my question for Stephan is, if we're trying to bridge the various religions in the world with universal laws that allow us to live peaceably with each other as we walk the earth, would those might be Commandments 2 through 10?
Okay, I think that, obviously, thou shalt not steal, thou shalt not kill, some of those things are good, obviously, but the problem with that, in my opinion, is that in the scientific method, there's no such thing as commandment, right?
A commandment or a conclusion, which is a moral rule called thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, It can't be where you start from in science, right?
You can't start with something which says, my theory is true and I don't have to prove it.
And so the challenge that I've set, wisely or foolishly, successfully or unsuccessfully, is to say, what if I don't have commandments to work with?
What if I have to accept that lots of people believe lots of different things, that even people who believe That stealing is wrong support taxation or people who believe that murder is wrong support the initiation of force through the military.
If I have to deal with the world as it is without having access to divine commandments, how is it that I would try to prove an ethical system or create a system that could be validated through reason and evidence?
So I'm sure that a lot of what I come up with would also be valid within the Bible, but As a philosopher, I can't take the easy out of having commandments.
I have to try and reason from first principles, if that makes sense.
That doesn't invalidate the conclusions, but I can't start with those divine commandments, if that makes sense.
Well, let me just then respond by saying that if you do not include the first commandment, then these commandments aren't necessarily divine.
And in your premise...
I think you're looking for a scientific, as you call it, truism that is contradictory to human nature.
Human nature, I don't believe, I'll just pause it with you, is not a scientific theorem, so to speak.
And I think if you look at the 2-10, commandments 2-10, let's just say that they're not divine, that only the first commandment would be in that category, that we would have such a world,
and you talk about a government being rooted in evil, but there would have to be some rule, because of the fact that we are dealing with human nature, And if you have a government, so to speak,
that is really good for human nature, then hopefully people would not be fighting over resources or coveting resources and doling them out for their own gain and this kind of thing.
What do you think about those perspectives?
Well, you've said a lot, and I won't, I mean, we could have an hour on each of those points at least, so I'll just touch on one of them to give other listeners a chance to call in.
According to the theory that I propose, and I think that a lot of people who are against the initiation of force, most libertarians and so on, would agree with this, that it's impossible to have, logically it's impossible to have, a moral government because government by its very nature relies upon the initiation of the use of force through taxation, through a monopoly control, like a farmer with his livestock, through a monopoly control over citizens in a geographical area.
The statement, moral government, would sort of be oxymoronic.
Sorry, that's a volatile term to use on the radio.
It has nothing to do with you. That just means that it's a self-contradict free term.
It's like saying a moral murderer.
It just doesn't work logically.
Again, this is predicated on my theory, and you can have a look at the book.
It's free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free if you'd like.
Well, I guess I think your other quagmire on this is that human nature...
And scientific law are also contradictory.
What do you define as human nature?
Well, human nature is such that, you know, a survival instinct.
And the survival instinct is put up against conditions where you have to pray Not A-Y, but E-Y, on another living thing in order to survive.
And it doesn't seem to me that it's compatible with a scientific theory to try to come up with some kind of universal living.
Now, let me tell you, I was just watching public television the other day, and Stephan's question may be answered by our evil government, and that they are talking about chipping all of us And having all of our brains interconnected.
The Borg!
You will be assimilated.
Resistance is futile.
Resistance is not futile.
It's mandatory. Well, and MIT and the folks over in that particular university are leading this effort.
So there is a dark side to Stefan's quest to have universal peace and coexistence.
Let me just put a two-second response in.
I know we're coming down to the wire.
Human nature, empirically, is a very fluid thing, right?
So if you're born in Syria, you will very likely, 99%, you will grow up to be a Muslim, right?
And if you're born in England, then you will have other kinds of traits.
Human nature is to adapt to the prevailing social mores and ethical thinking within the society, which is why when you begin to change the way that people think about ethics, you actually begin to have a direct effect on human nature, and that is why These cultures tend to replicate around the world and you go to the base of the tree and you change the fruit.
Excellent, excellent conversation this morning.
I want to thank all my listeners for being so polite.
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It is a universally preferable behavior.
Some idea, some common good that we can all agree on.
And my co-host is Stephan Molyneux, who has written a book called Universally Preferable Behavior.
And we have people lined up.
I want to ask my callers to, when you call in, please give me a chance to put you back on the air.
Patrice has called back, and before I can get to her, she's dropped off the line again.
So be patient.
I mean, there's only so many people that I can have on at a given time.
Kay, you're back.
I am. I'm sorry about that.
Hi. Hi.
So, okay, I did have a few comments.
The first is that I really wanted to validate your guest for trying to marry up the sciences and the humanities.
I think it's a very, very big gap that we have that the sciences and our humanities are not married, and some attempts to do so have not resulted in a real great philosophy.
So I think it's a Herculean task that he's...
I'm trying to accomplish him here, and I really wanted to validate him for what he's doing.
And then I did have some comments.
Science, with all its methodologies and having to prove everything in the real universe that we have, sometimes forgets that there could be a master hand that is behind the very didactic universe that we live in and I think that that is probably one of the points that has separated sciences from the humanities and have gone in different directions and have given us a society that of which at this point in time unfortunately we're not all really proud of it because the humanities are We're lacking,
way behind our scientific procedures and methods.
Anyway, that's just my opinion and I wanted to call in mostly to validate your guest and his attempt and I don't think we're going to agree on this.
Man has been arguing about this for how many thousands of years now?
Well, I think that you're entirely right, and I just in general wanted to compliment the listeners on the perceptiveness and precision of their questions, particularly the Capital Punishment fellow who had excellent, excellent points.
So, I agree with you that the examination of value of that which makes life precious and beautiful For us, it's something that is explored in art and it is explored in religion and it is a beautiful aspect of life, that which we treasure, that which we consider noble and courageous and virtuous and lovable.
It's something that science cannot address.
I mean, certain aspects of psychology can measure it, but the question of value and beauty in life, I think, is where ethics has the most to offer.
And unfortunately, I think you're entirely right, our scientific and economic knowledge has far outstripped the development of philosophy in the realm of truth and beauty and virtue.
I agree with you. It is a completely insane task that I have set myself.
I am sure that I will fail a lot more than I will succeed, but I've always been of the belief that it's better to fail at a big task than succeed at a small one, if that makes sense.
Yeah. Well, I really like that.
And... I want to thank my listeners.
I have been telling people that my listening audience is above average intelligence.
They're incredibly polite.
And if there's any subset of the population that can and should address this problem, it is my audience.
So I want to compliment all of my callers so far.
We're going now to Janet in Texas.
Good morning, Janet. Good morning, Mike.
I just wanted to say that I heard your speaker earlier say that he had a problem with commandments.
But I want to pose this question, and that is, aren't you using science as the God here who wants to be in command of all people?
And aren't we just having a problem here with who's in command?
And personally, I'd rather it be God, and something that science can't touch, can't prove or disprove, And, you know, I just believe that we came to the Earth alone and we're going to go out alone.
And while we're here, we should take responsibility individually for what we think and believe instead of having a system for the world to live by some commander, human commander, which, you know, has always proven to be wrong.
Well, I think I agree with you a lot more than I disagree with you, which is great, and this is not uncommon when speaking with people who are religious.
For me, I completely agree with you that personal responsibility is essential.
I completely agree with you that human leadership is catastrophic if it is compulsive in all situations, under all circumstances, and the degree of catastrophe is unmatched.
You know, as I mentioned earlier, the statistics For state murders of citizens in the 20th century is over 250 million.
That doesn't even include wars.
That is just democide. So I think that the suspicion of human power, of political power, we share.
But what I would not say is that I don't just have a sort of problem with commandments, like I don't like the color of them or anything.
The reality is that when you're working from first principles as a philosopher, you simply can't assume the argument, right?
It's called begging the question. You can't say, well, if we assume that my argument is true, this follows.
You can't make that leap.
So the problem with...
It's like philosophy has a problem with commandments, not me.
I just sort of try and follow that.
And the last thing that I would say is that I do think that...
The goal of trying to live a better and more virtuous life is shared by religious people and is shared by non-religious people.
But if we can use science, not as a master, because science of course is simply a methodology.
Science is simply a way of trying to establish valid truths about the objective world that we live in.
I have to disagree with you on that.
I have to disagree with you that science is strictly just a methodology that wants to prove one thing or another.
I believe that science is a god to some people, and they want to use what they find, whether it's accurate or inaccurate, to rule over other people.
Well, I think that I'm sure that you're right, and I'm sure that some people view science as a god, and to that degree, I would say that they're not scientific.
Well, nevertheless, the people who are in control of science right now and the people who are arguing that we have to have laws and countries and religions that all agree based on some people getting together and using scientific knowledge, which is imperfect in itself, to become the leader and the commander of all peoples everywhere so that there's a common good, I believe that that is a complete falsehood and that it is impossible and that it's just another subset of people trying to be the commander.
You and I are brother and sister in that belief.
I think that we both share that belief.
I am very much opposed to coercive human institutions.
They are the root of just about all the evils in the world, so I think that you and I completely agree.
We may come from different roads, but the conclusion and the principle that we share I think is the same.
Janet, how can people be in control of science?
How can people be in control of science?
Yeah, I mean, the world is round.
Yeah, being in control of science myself, and, you know, I see a lot of the philosophers, so-called philosophers, they always go back to the world is round and the world is flat and blah-de-blah-de-blah.
But today is a different world, okay?
I don't believe that science And people studying science then and the shape of the world and all actually set out to prove or disprove God and take over the world and make everybody believe something and have a subset of rules that they have to follow and punishments and blah, blah, blah. That's just more of the same.
People were just mildly curious about how to make things better for people in the world and offer them something, not make them take it.
But I believe that eventually, because it was approved and disapproved by those in power, kings who believed that they were ordained by God to rule over everyone else, I believe that they wanted to own science, and now that's where we are today.
You can make numbers being a statistical person, having a statistics background, having a medical background, being in science myself.
You can make science say whatever you want it to say.
You can make experiments come out, yes and no.
I've seen it happen at Abbott Laboratories.
Different people run this, and they're equally qualified, mind you, equally qualified professionals that bring you the science of testing blood in machines.
I have seen them take some experiments, and one subset of scientists will make it say one thing, and the results for the same experiment will come out and say another thing, and everybody divides up and argues their points.
Well, I'm not sure that religion solves that problem of subjectivity.
Well, we're going to have to wait until we come back from this commercial.
This is our last commercial.
When we come back, we're going to go to Gary in Arizona.
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Welcome back. You are listening to Michael Badnark.
I am the stepfather of the Constitution.
Do not violate my Constitution or Bill of Rights.
It will make me very, very upset.
And you are here on We the People Radio Network.
We have... We're good to go.
Universally preferable behavior.
And we are debating the issue as to whether there are any universal truths.
I want to thank Janet for calling in.
I want to differentiate science from pseudoscience, however.
Just because somebody wears a white lab coat and carries a clipboard really doesn't make them a scientist.
And I agree that...
There's a lot of emotion now and subjectivity taking on in the guise of science.
Whenever I refer to the word science, I talk about true science where we're looking for the right answer and we don't have any emotional stake in the outcome.
I'm going now to Gary in Arizona.
Gary, thanks for being patient and waiting.
You've been online for a while.
Gary? Okay, then.
Can you hear me? Oh, yeah, Gary.
We're here. Okay.
I just had an observation about that commandment that says, Thou shalt not kill.
I think that's pretty universal around the world.
I think pretty much people know that.
But I wanted to say that, you know, all through the Bible, God kills.
But in the Ten Commandments it says, Thou shalt not kill.
And it's a seemingly contradiction to what actually takes place.
But if you dig a little bit deeper into the passage, that commandment that says, Thou shalt not kill, it doesn't say that.
It says, Thou shalt not murder.
And so murder would be the initiation of violence, and killing someone who crawls into your window at 2 o'clock in the morning would be self-defense.
Right. So if somebody comes at you to murder you, killing them is justified.
That's why God is justified all through the Bible in all the killing that he did.
What you won't find in the Bible is that God murdered.
God killed. Look, I mean, I don't want to get into a whole Bible thing here, but first of all, God doesn't get to claim self-defense because people can't kill God, right?
And secondly, I mean, if you just look at something like Sodom and Gomorrah, where a whole city is destroyed with women and children, obviously innocent children, or if you look at the flood story where only Noah and his family were saved, the rest of the world was drowned, That is not the same.
Obviously the children, the good people, and so on, were not killed justly by any reasonable moral standard.
I just wanted to make the point that the passage says, Thou shalt not murder.
It doesn't say, Thou shalt not kill.
Okay. That was my only comment.
All right. Well, thank you, Gary.
I appreciate that. We've only got a few minutes left.
I'm going to try to get everybody on the air.
Sandra from Texas.
Good morning, Sandra. How are you this morning?
I'm very good, thank you.
I just have one quick point that I wanted to bring up, and boy, you have a lot of things I could talk about this morning, but the Bible does, in fact, say that the earth was round.
It says it in Isaiah 40, 22, if anybody wants to look it up.
So maybe people believe the earth was flat, but not according to the Bible.
Okay. Okay.
Yeah. Just to be clear, I don't know that I ever said anything the Bible said.
It's just that people did believe at one time that the world was flat, and that is not true.
And what we're doing is we're trying to find things which are universally true, whether everybody believes them or not.
I don't think... I don't think everybody is ever going to agree.
There are too many people who can look at a photograph of the Earth from space and go, oh, you just photoshopped that.
You just made it look round.
It's really flat. So there are people who can very easily and sometimes do deny the facts, even when the facts are in front of them.
Rick from California, good morning.
Thanks for joining us this early in the morning.
Thank you. I just wanted to say that I really, really enjoy your show.
I always try to wake up early, but sometimes I can't make it.
I just wanted to say thank you for putting out this information once again.
I really do enjoy your show.
Well, thank you. I appreciate that.
I try to come up with topics that are going to be interesting.
I talked with one of my listeners yesterday who said that he was tuning in When we did the Myers-Briggs personality studies, his first reaction was, oh gosh, this is dull and boring.
I'm probably going to find something else to do with my two hours.
He admitted later that he got sucked in and listened to the whole thing.
He said that I could probably do a two-hour program on refrigeration.
And make it interesting.
I'm hoping that I don't have to push that hard.
But I do look for topics that, I mean, you know, not everybody's going to agree on that.
And I knew that before I invited Stephan.
And in fact, I invited Stephan because I knew that there was going to be energetic discussion on it.
I think that's one of the things that makes this program interesting.
And I'm not sucking up.
I really do believe that the people who listen to this program have above-average intelligence.
In over a year and a half on the radio, I think I had to cut four people off the air.
So everybody is very polite.
I mean, we don't always agree.
But we do agree to discuss the ideas and not poke fun of each other.
That is true. But once again, you're amazing.
Thank you. Well, thank you so much.
I appreciate the compliments.
I do my best and I accept all the blame and all the praise.
Whatever it takes.
Stephan, and you are to be commended.
Kay called from Florida to suggest that you have really bitten off a major effort.
People throughout history have avoided this question because it is so difficult to get our hands around.
But just because it's a difficult question doesn't mean that somebody shouldn't tackle it.
Yeah, it is the holy grail of philosophy to come up with a rational proof of secular ethics.
That's the subtitle of the book, UPB, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics.
I just wanted to, just before we go to the next caller, I just wanted to spend 10 seconds on a topic around science, which is that as people who are interested in the free market, we try to differentiate State capitalism, which is a form of fascism, which is, you know, the companies that hang around the government and get special privileges and so on, we try to differentiate that from genuine free market activity in the same way.
I think it's important to remember that a lot of scientific activity is state-funded and faces all the same corruptions and biases that would result from companies not being in the free market but rather hanging around the government.
So that's just, I think, an important distinction to make is to look at where the science is coming from.
and how the science may be corrupted, like some of this global warming nonsense, through billions of dollars in funding for following a particular path.
I frequently tell a joke, and I'll have to do it very briefly because we only have a few seconds left here.
A scientist is doing an experiment on frogs.
And he takes the frog and says, jump, frog, jump.
And it jumps 12 feet.
And then he cuts off a leg.
It jumps 9 feet.
Then 6 feet. And then, you know, 3 feet.
And he cuts off the last leg.
And the scientist goes, jump, frog, jump.
And it doesn't move.
And he goes, jump, frog, jump.
And it still doesn't move.
And then he writes on his clipboard, a frog with no legs is deaf.
And the conclusion, the moral of the story, it catches everybody by surprise, which is one of the elements of humor.
But the essence is that you can have all of the empirical data in front of you.
And still draw the wrong conclusion.
And I think you and I agree that when we talk about science, we're not talking about state-funded organizations that are out to prove a particular thing.
You don't start with the conclusion.
You know, you don't start with the data and then draw the curve.
And that's what you're trying to do philosophically.
It's not that you are opposed to the commandments.
You just don't want to start with the answer And then develop your proof.
You want to start from raw nothing, and you want to find the correct answer on your own.
Isn't that true? Yeah, I mean, very much so.
We want to start without knowing the conclusion.
Again, as I said at the beginning, I'm guided by that Aristotelian principle that you can't have a moral system that says murder is good and rape is great.
I mean, that obviously would be incorrect.
So I was sort of guided by that, but yes, I definitely wanted to try as much as possible To avoid relying on existing thought patterns on religion and so on.
And that's why, just to put the website out there, freedomainradio.com forward slash free, you can pick up the audio book.
You can pick up the PDF or order the print version.
Everything but the print version is free.
There's lots of podcasts on philosophy for those who are interested.
But those links are on my archive.
I want to thank Stephen Molyneux for being here.
And if you enjoyed this debate, if you'd like to continue it, send me an email to scholar at constitutionpreservation.org.
Scholar at constitutionpreservation.org if you would like to continue our search for the common good.
Thanks for listening, everybody.
Thanks for being so polite.
We'll be here again tomorrow at 7 a.m.
Join us, won't you?
Talk to you then.
Talk to you then.
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