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Nov. 9, 2009 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
22:16
1506 A Brief History of Ethics

An overview of the four major approaches to ethical reasoning, from Aristotle to Rand - and why they doth sucketh...

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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Wallenew from Free Domain Radio.
This is a brief, very brief, history of ethics, and I hope it sets the stage for why I worked so hard on my own theory of ethics, universally preferable behavior, which is an audiobook or PDF you can get for free at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
So, very briefly, and I understand I'm going to be casting the net fairly wide here, but I think in a very useful way.
There's a huge problem with ethics as a discipline.
It's sort of like if you had the most amazing diet in the world, but you were only ever allowed to sell the book to slim people, that would be kind of frustrating, right?
Not much point having a diet book if only thin people are allowed to buy it because they kind of don't need it so much, right?
If it's around weight loss.
Clearly, if you have a diet book around weight loss, you want to target the people who are overweight, so that they can use it to regain some degree of better weight.
But this really is the history of ethics, and it drives ethicists completely bad throughout history.
And it basically runs something like this.
We want people to be good.
Ethicists want people to be good in the same way that nutritionists want people to eat well.
But the problem is that the only people who are really interested in theories of ethics and willing to sort of read up on them and implement them and experiment with them in their own lives, the only people who are really interested The people who tend to be interested in ethics tend to be pretty good people already,
which is why ethics throughout history has tended to be a diet book aimed only at the thin.
Only people who are pretty decent people interested in right and wrong, good and bad, study ethics to begin with, but those really aren't the people that you have to worry about from an ethical standpoint.
It's like you have a cure which you can only apply to healthy people.
Well, they don't need the cure.
The dangerous people in the world are the evil people, the people who will use or encourage the initiation of force against individuals to solve problems.
Those are the people. That we really have to worry about.
Not the academics studying ethics, in my opinion, or maybe the academics we have to worry about a bit, but the average person who's interested in ethics.
We don't really have to worry about them so much.
It is, you know, the sophists, the manipulators, the politicos, the military men and women, the people who will use violence to solve problems.
They tend not to be very interested in a devoted study of ethics or philosophy, and thus you really are always preaching to the choir as an ethicist.
Until universally preferable behavior, I would argue.
And so I do get a fair number of emails asking me, like, what's different about my approach to ethics?
An excellent question.
Well, I would sort of argue, or I will argue right now, right now, right here, right now, that there have been four basic approaches to ethics throughout history.
And they are the argument from authority, the argument from pragmatism, The argument from happiness, and the argument from a kind of subjective universality, which is where Kant's categorical imperative fits.
So we'll run through these in a mad wind sprint and see if we can find something useful out of the idea.
The argument from authority is really where ethics starts, and it is a vile parasitical way of keeping the middle and lower classes down below the kings and the priests who ruled us from the beginning.
The argument from authority is, be good or you'll be killed.
Be good or you'll go to hell.
Be good or you'll be damned.
Be good or I'll punch you.
Be good or whatever.
Obey me. And that's called obedience.
And that's called virtue. And that's called good.
So basically, it's brute force, either physically, in terms of punishment, or psychologically, in terms of instilling in helpless, independent children fears of, again, a like River Styx afterlife of misery.
If they disobey their secular masters.
That's the argument from authority, and although that's where ethics started, it runs all the way through to the present day.
Now the second, so there's religion and statism and patriotism and all of these things, and some parental authority sadly, comes from the argument or relies on the argument from authority.
And I'll go through the various degrees to which These ethical arguments doth sucketh in a little bit.
The argument from pragmatism is sort of related to the argument from happiness.
And this is objectivism and other kinds.
Aristotelianism was a little bit more on the argument for happiness, but the argument from pragmatism is When we don't use violence to solve our problems, then society as a whole is better, right?
So the Randian argument is man's life is the highest standard of value.
That which serves and enhances man's life is the good because it helps man to survive and flourish.
Reason and nonviolence and peace and trade and negotiation and all of that all fall into the category of Of that which serves man's life, and therefore they are good, and that which harms man's life is the evil, and so, you know, violence and falsehoods and so on, predations and all that are bad, because they do not further man's life.
They do not enhance man's life. So it's a pretty pragmatic argument.
You know, if you want to serve man's life in the abstract, then don't initiate force and so on.
Like if you want to go north, go that way.
But what if you don't want to go north?
Well, anyway, we'll get into that.
The argument from happiness is really the Aristotelian approach, and it goes all the way through.
In some ways, it's Rawls' theory of social justice, but it is the argument which says that happiness is the greatest good in life, because it is the one thing that we pursue for its own sake, right?
We don't say, I want to be happy in order to X, Y, and Z, to get a girl, to get rich, to whatever, right?
No. Rather, I want to do all of these things with the goal of achieving happiness.
Everything else that we do, we do in order to achieve something.
That something, which is the end to which most of, if not all of our actions tend towards, is happiness.
Like, when you're happy, you don't say, now that I'm happy, I can fix my roof.
Your happiness is an end in itself.
And so, Aristotle would say that a life of courage, of observing the Aristotelian mean, of virtue and honesty and honor and integrity, he uses a lot of adjectives, not so much around specific actions, but a life of honor, a life of excellence, a life in the pursuit of knowledge and virtue, is that which makes us the most happy, and therefore, that's what we should do.
I think it's not a very good argument, and I'll sort of tell you why.
Not that I want to go up against Aristotle.
His bust is rather hard.
The argument from subjective universality really came around the Enlightenment and the post-Enlightenment.
And Kant's big contribution is what's called the categorical imperative, which can be roughly described as you should act as if your action...
It creates a universal rule that everyone should act like you.
So you should act with the thought that my action will immediately create a universal rule which everyone will follow, right?
So if I go and steal something, then stealing is now what everyone should do.
And then you think, well, could that possibly work?
And you say, well, no.
It can't work if everyone's stealing because, well, for a variety of reasons, we all understand.
I think that there's significant problems with the Kantian argument as well.
Otherwise, I'd be a Kantian.
So the argument from authority is really the argument from mysticism and collectivism, right?
So it goes, you know, Plato...
Through the Neoplatonics, through St.
Augustine, through the Gnostics and so on.
And so really, wherever you have collectivism and mysticism and statism, you have the argument from authority in many ways, right?
It's not just a good idea. It's the law.
Why do we pay our taxes?
Well, because we'll be thrown in jail if we don't.
That's the argument from authority.
The argument from pragmatism came a little bit later, although I have sort of mentioned that there are some earlier precedents for it.
The argument from pragmatism came a little bit later.
So if you look at someone like Hobbes, Hobbes says, well, in the absence of a state, We live, you know, nature is red in tooth and claw that we just go around clubbing each other and killing and raping and stealing.
And so we need a state to defend ourselves against the predations.
And this is very common in the modern world, right?
If you've ever argued for a free society, what do people say?
They say, well, if we lift the lid...
If we lift the lid of the cauldron off human desires by getting rid of the state, we will get this eruption of vile, slathering, blood-dripping, foam, wolverine fangs on the fists and so on, that we will live in a state of vampiric war of all against all, right? I mean, that's also a Freudian metaphor, like the seething id and the fragile ego and the clamped-down superego, which is the state, the citizen, and the base desires of the criminal classes.
So the argument from pragmatism runs, well, you know, in order to secure these liberties, a government is instituted among men, right, to protect ourselves.
From the evil beasts that surround us and are only restrained by the thin blue line of the cops and the courts and the police and the prisons and so on, in order to save ourselves from these slathering beasts of the underworld, what we have to do, see, is have a government that's going to keep these people in their place and protect us and blah blah blah.
It's the argument from pragmatism.
That's why we have a government, that's why we obey laws, because goodness is protection of property and life and we need the state to achieve that.
The argument from happiness Well, I mean, that's the whole Aristotelian thing.
There is a kind of argument from hedonism.
There's a very 60s kind of thing, a Ginsbergian kind of thing.
The argument from subjective universality is around.
It's not quite as strong as it used to be.
And let me tell you why I think these arguments are problematic.
And then I'll tell you why I think universally preferable behavior solves this problem.
And also solves the problem of selling diet books to thin people, which I mentioned earlier.
Well, the argument from authority is not an argument at all.
It's just a threat, right?
Human beings are so constituted.
We are pattern-making machines at all times, right?
And 99.99% of the time that you hear an argument for ethics, what you are hearing is an ex post facto rationalization for a monstrous crime, right?
So the state is a monstrously criminal organization.
The state is instituted, and then later, in order to justify that, people come up with, oh, you know, the social contract, and if you don't like it, you can leave, and you can vote, and you can get involved.
But these things come after the imposition of the state.
They're not reasons for the institutions of the state, because if they were, you and I would be given a social contract, they would be competing social contracts, which is, you know, the idea of a stateless society, a DRO society.
We would actually be consulted.
We would have a chance to participate or not to alter, you know, in the way that we can choose which restaurant we want to eat at or who we want to marry.
So, ethics is not first, and then we build the society based on the ethics.
So people always claim that. Well, you should obey the government because of the social contract.
It's like, well, which came first?
If the government came first, then there's no such thing as a social contract, and it's just made up after the fact to justify the predations of the manipulative and violent upon the peace-loving or fearful.
So the argument from authority is not an argument at all.
The argument from pragmatism Welcome to my show!
They will all strangle their husbands in their sleep and eat their children.
You could just make that up.
If we do this, then apocalypse will result.
I mean, that's just a pathetic argument.
And it's really embarrassing that it has survived so long.
I guess it shows how susceptible to irrational fears we are.
It's a shame, but it's not really a very good argument.
And the problem with the argument from pragmatism These all, with the exception of Rand's arguments, they all exist or were invented or created or written down prior to the theory of evolution, prior to the Dominion Revolution, which helped us to understand, and also prior to the understanding of genes and DNA replicants and so on.
And so, the problem is, collectivism and its relationship to ethical theories is a lot easier to understand, erroneously, to understand badly, if you don't think of individuals, right?
So, the argument from pragmatism says, well, in order for me to protect myself from bad people out there, I'm going to give this power to the other guy, right?
But of course, for the other guy, his argument from pragmatism, which is completely different from mine, is to say, I'm going to promote the idea that you need to be afraid of everyone around you, that everyone around you is a seething beast about to strike, and therefore you're going to give me power to rule over you and protect you from enemies that I have invented.
So his argument from pragmatism It's going to be completely different from your argument from pragmatism.
And this is the problem with the Randian argument as well.
She says, that which serves man's life is the good.
Rationality, peace, voluntarism, the free market are the good, and therefore they should be pursued.
But there is no such thing as man's life.
As an abstract, there is no such thing as man's life.
There are only individual men and women who act in the world.
So, you know, look at, to pick any example, Bill Clinton, right?
So look at Bill Clinton. I mean, he got, was obviously happy to be president because he ran for reelection and I'm sure he would have continued.
He stayed in politics, just went over to North Korea to get these women.
So, he obviously loves the world of politics.
He loves giving his silver-tongued speeches.
He loves dripping that dewy-eyed baba magic all over everyone.
And he gets to use his interns as personal geishers.
I mean, he gets to do horrible things with cigars.
Not that there's ever a non-horrible thing to do with a cigar, including smoking.
But... He loves that stuff.
So for him, the argument from pragmatism is, I love the status system.
I do love it, right? Because it gives him what he wants, money and his fortune.
He's made a fortune from being president.
He gets like $150,000 for speaking engagement now and money and power.
They made like, what, $12 million last year, the pair of them.
So they're wealthy, they have power, they have prestige, they get to travel all over the place, they get to do exciting things, they get free everything, you know, he signs autographs.
He loves that life, right?
Because if he didn't, he would have quit on the second day and said, this is not for me, I'm sane, right?
So the argument from pragmatism and happiness, which Rand and Aristotle are big on, and others, of course, I'm really just picking a few of the greats, Well, it works at a very subjective level.
Because, I mean, just think of a sadist, right?
A sadist is happy when he's causing pain to other people.
So he wants a society where you can cause pain to other people, right?
His desires are the opposite of his victims' ideas, right?
And the problem with the argument from pragmatism slash happiness is you then have to go to Bill Clinton and you have to say, Bill...
I know you seem happy, but you're not really.
You're not really happy.
You're not happy. You only think that you're happy.
You're just not really happy at all.
And therefore, you should change and be happy and be peaceful and get out of government and blah, blah, blah.
But he's going to look at you and say, but I am happy, right?
I really enjoy this life.
Where do you go from there? I mean, there's no way to go from there.
So, this is why these theories have not been effective, because you have to try and convince people who are acting in a way that you consider immoral, that they're not really happy, or it's not really practical.
Well, it's pretty frickin' practical for George Bush or for Barack Obama or for Clinton or Reagan or Carter or Nixon or Ford or any of these.
It's pretty practical for them.
They make a fortune. They have money and power beyond their wildest dreams.
They get to run into other countries.
They have militaries that they're beck and call.
Obviously, they like it.
They worked very hard to achieve That level of political power, they hung onto it like grim death and only left it when beaten out by the vestigial power of the Constitution with term limits.
So how are you going to stop these guys and say, no, no, no, no, no.
You only think that you're happy, but you're not really happy.
They'll be like, I really am happy, so screw you, philosopher.
Your argument from pragmatism, well, this system works beautifully for me.
Your argument from happiness, I'm really happy pursuing and achieving and taking power because power is a kind of drug to people that gives you endorphins.
You know, when you have power over someone, a lot of people get a real kick out of it.
It's a little kinky, but it's really quite real.
So that doesn't work, right?
And so the argument from subjective universality, the golden mean or the categorical imperative, That's not a very good argument either.
It seems like a good argument, but it's not really a very good argument because let's say that we go back to our, you know, to pick on Bill Clinton for no particular reason.
Let's go back to Bill Clinton. So he says, well, I want power and I want to have control over other people's lives.
And I'm really glib.
I'm a good public speaker.
I'm passionate. I'm tall.
I'm good-looking. I've got a weird squirrel tail of a hairdo that people seem to like.
Oh, it's just envy, don't you know?
And so I want a system.
So if I have a system wherein, if I can create a rule called the most glib and, you know, the people with, you know, good educations, people with the Rhodes Scholarships, who are tall, who are handsome, who can crank out a great speech, who are charismatic, those people should run society.
He's totally happy to make that a universal rule.
Because it serves him, right?
Like, the biggest guy, the biggest kid in the schoolyard is going to say, I think that physical strength should be how lunch money is distributed.
Because he's biggest, right?
And so he's going to be perfectly happy saying, yes, I'm happy to steal from the kids because I'm biggest.
Nobody's going to steal from me.
I'm bigger. I'm nasty.
I'm violent. I'm sadistic.
I'm cruel. And so those are the things which should...
Command the distribution of lunch money in the playground.
So he's perfectly happy to say that, right?
To make that a universal rule because it benefits him.
Now, UPB, universally preferable behavior, my approach to ethics, solves all of these problems in a way that I consider both magnificent and crystallinely beautiful.
It is my fortress of solitude that I'm trying to bring to you to the world.
So I hope you will give the book a shot.
There's also a bunch of videos here.
I'll link one of them below.
That talk about universally preferable behavior.
But the argument from authority sucketh.
The argument from pragmatism and happiness, they will buy you dinner, they will even give you flowers, but still they sucketh and not in a way that you like.
Argument from subjective universality has never worked, or rather has worked in a very terrible way, right?
So, you know, Hitler says, I believe that the angriest non-German should get to rule Germany, and I'm happy to make that a universal rule because it will benefit him.
So, universally preferable behavior doesn't fall into any of these categories.
And, of course, I'm madly addicted to the scientific method, which is not to say that I'm an expert in science.
But, I mean, the scientific method specifically rejects the argument from authority.
Nobody ever says that a scientific theory is true because it would be really useful.
Or nobody ever says a scientific theory will be true because it will make people happy.
And there's no such thing as subjective universality in the scientific method.
Like the loudest guy in the room doesn't get to say whoever shouts his theory the loudest is the one whose theory is correct and everyone goes okay let's give that a go So, you know, I'm a real slave to the Baconian scientific method and the Aristotelian.
He's often dismissed for not being interested in empirical testing.
It's really not the case at all.
But UPB, you know, crashes with extreme vehemence all of these false approaches to morality.
And so I hope that you will take the book for a spin.
And I'm happy to hear your criticisms and comments.
And I'm trying to keep these relatively short.
Thank you so much for watching and listening.
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