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June 22, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:41
1685 Virtue, Ethics, UPB and APA

Thoughts on the Differences between Virtue, Ethics, Morality and the Unconscious...

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Hi everybody, hope you're doing well.
It's Steph. This is a talk on virtue.
Somebody posted on the board what are Steph's thoughts on virtue or something of the like, and so I thought I would share them.
So to me, ethics is the theory and virtue is the practice, right?
Ethics is the blueprint and virtue is the bridge.
Theory and practice. And as I've talked about in the UPB book, ethics is divided into APA, or aesthetically preferable actions, and UPB, universally preferable behavior.
I guess it could be aesthetically preferable behavior, too.
Most... I mean, the challenge of virtue...
Why is it so hard? Well, the challenge of virtue is that...
You know, 99.999% of the time, we are going to encounter situations that are not UPB but APA. So, the virtues that we practice in our daily life that are tough, you know, things like courage and integrity and so on, honesty and those sorts of virtues, those are very tough because those are gray area slash conditional virtues.
Oh, I know, I don't like the gray areas, but they're important in this area.
So, the straight, bald initiation of force is anti-UPB. Rape, theft, all anti-UPB. And yet, I must say that I don't actually face a lot of temptation to go out raping, pillaging, and killing people.
So, I don't really need a whole lot of virtue, or I guess, to not do that.
I don't really want to do those things at all.
In fact, I would find them enormously repellent to even contemplate doing.
And so, I don't really need a whole lot of ethical theory.
To deal with that, at a personal level.
I mean, of course, at a social level, UPB blows up governments and things like that, but at a personal level, this is not where my ethical challenges are.
So, if society as a whole could adopt UPB, then lickety-splickety, yummity-yummity, we are doing very well.
But that's not really where individuals need to focus their attention, at least in the present, I would suggest.
I don't think there are a lot of hitmen listening to this podcast.
So, what we need to do is to focus on the tougher virtues, which is the APA virtues.
The APA virtues, aesthetically preferable actions, are things like honesty, and they're not absolute, because UPB trumps APA every time, right?
So, if someone says, where's your sister, I want to strangle her, then, you know, honesty doesn't trump UPB. APA doesn't trump UPB. The hierarchy is UPB, APA, and neutral, morally neutral things.
And so if somebody says, well, where's your sister?
I want to strangle her. Then you don't say, well, she's right under the stairs, right?
It's the Jewish ghetto thing.
You don't say, you don't speak honestly, you don't have honesty as a higher virtue than human life, right?
Than a violation of UPB that would result in somebody's death.
And so, since UPB trumps APA, honesty bows to UPB, right?
So, if somebody says, I want to go strangle your sister, you say, I don't know where she is, or I don't have a sister, or whatever, right?
And, of course, those aren't things that we run into a heck of a lot either, but there are more tricky kinds of situations which we can run into more often.
So, for instance, a challenge that people continually write to me about is intervening in public and social situations of child abuse.
Well, these are very, very challenging to figure out.
I mean, obviously, you don't want to intervene in a situation of child abuse in such a way or with such a person.
That this person is going to then beat their child senseless later because they were humiliated by your interference.
And this may have nothing to do with how you do it.
They may just do it, right? So since I think standing up for your values and intervening to help children is a value, it's an APA, why then I would say That it doesn't trump acting in such a way that gets a child beaten up any more than you use.
Like integrity with your values around protecting children should not result in children being harmed.
That would be to have APA trump UPB, which doesn't work.
It doesn't work at all. So, when you're in that kind of situation, right, so you see a child who's being aggressed against or abused or yelled at or whatever, right?
Well, you have a tough challenge.
UPB cannot tell you what the result of your intervention will be.
APA will tell you that it's a good thing to do if it's not going to result in additional beatings for the child.
Then it's a good thing to do, but UPB can't tell you and APA can't tell you what is going to happen if you intervene.
Now, this is where self-knowledge comes in.
The vast majority of ethical decisions that we need to make are in the gray areas, things like honesty and integrity and courage and so on, nobility and heroism, all those kinds of things.
Those are the tough choices that we actually have to make in life.
And the reason that they're tough is that how honest are you?
You know, I'm not perfectly honest.
If a cop pulls me over for speeding, I mean, it's happened once in my life, I think, If a cop pulls me over for speeding, I'm not going to say, I don't recognize legitimacy of your moral authority because you're wearing a blue costume.
I'm just not going to do it. When I'm crossing the border, I'm not going to get into arguments with border guards about the legitimacy of demarcations of tax forms.
I'm just not going to do it. Honesty, courage, and integrity?
Well, no. Right? So, these are the complicated decisions that we have to make as far as virtue goes.
People who are against the war can choose not to pay taxes if they're in America or England or other countries involved in the war.
They can choose not to pay taxes, and they will risk jail.
Now, we can admire the integrity of someone who doesn't pay their taxes, but Canada is involved to a very small degree, I suppose, in the war in Afghanistan, and I pay my taxes.
These are not easy decisions.
I'm not initiating a force I am aggressed against.
If a guy steals my gun and goes and kills someone, it's not me who is liable, but the guy is liable for two crimes, theft and murder.
So the fact that my money is stolen and used to aggress against innocent people in Afghanistan is not on me.
That having been said, if you're into the argument from a fact, then maybe you'd be more into some sort of tax resistance or tax avoidance.
I don't recommend it. It's certainly not my course of action, which doesn't mean that it's right or wrong.
It's just my course of action is to look at the greater good of what I can do philosophically, i.e.
not in jail. So, these are tough issues.
These are tough questions. How long do you stay in a relationship that has a history of abuse, trying to fix it up, trying to make it better, trying to repair it, trying to put it on a different footing before you say enough is enough?
Well, I personally don't think that anyone can tell you the answer to that.
There is no objective and rational UPP answer as to how long you should try to improve a relationship before giving up on it.
This is a personal Issue, as I've always said, right?
If you have a relationship in your life with a history of abuse, my recommendation has always been, you know, get the professional help, talk, talk, talk, talk, talk, be vulnerable, open, open until you just can't stand it anymore, and then remind yourself that adult relations are voluntary.
Well, that is, there's no way, do it four times and then stop.
Do it 10 times, do it 20 times, don't do it at all, do it once and then stop, right?
There's no one who can tell you the answer to that.
Now, the one thing that we do know about the human mind, very clearly, is that the unconscious can process thousands of times more information in the same time slice as the conscious mind can.
Conscious mind can do a dozen or two.
Unconscious mind can do staggering, staggering amounts of information.
So this is why, to me, an ethical life requires very strong degrees of self-knowledge.
An ethical life requires very strong degrees of self-knowledge and a very good relationship with your unconscious.
Because to navigate the complexities of ambivalent personal moral choices without being drawn into the mere argument from effect, which is just a kind of religion, you can use that to manipulate anything that you want.
In order to be a truly moral person, you need to have access to the unconscious because the unconscious can process such a vast amount of information so instantaneously.
So, if you see some guy beating up his girlfriend, his body language, I guess the number and color of his tattoos, his haircut, his clothing, whether his jaw is clenched or not, you can't reason that out.
From a conscious standpoint, but your unconscious will give you, I think, a very good portrait of the human being, of who he is deep down.
And that will give you a strong sense of whether it's good or worthwhile to engage, right?
So when I have engaged, it has been when I'm nervous about the interaction, but I'm not frightened for the children.
I'm just sort of frightened for the interaction, so then I'll engage.
But at any time where I see this occurring, where I'm genuinely frightened for the children, I don't.
I accept that my intervention, at least according to the best knowledge that I have, which is the unconscious processing of what is occurring, there's no better or greater or deeper knowledge that you'll ever be capable of achieving than a full-on unconscious sunbeam of light going into a particular situation.
If you're thinking and experiencing with your whole brain and your whole senses, you're unconscious, you're conscious, The mycosystem, all the way from the amygdala to the neofrontal cortex, you're never going to have better information in a faster timeframe than your full-on experience of a situation.
So I accept that given that my judgment or my experience or my intuition says that intervening is going to be very bad for the child, I don't do it, right?
But I need to have knowledge and trust within myself and a comfort level with instantaneous self-knowledge, with instincts, with ambivalence, with all of that complicated stuff that goes on.
I need to have that in order to actually make a decision with the best available information for the best interests of the child in that situation or someone who's being beaten up.
The reality is, ethics is only going to spread, philosophy is only going to spread in the world according to the degree of ethical courage, of virtue in action that we can sustain as individuals, perhaps even as a community.
Now, I don't really believe that people are going to be incredibly admiring of us, or of you and I, if what we haven't done is killed, raped, and stolen, defrauded people.
People don't say, what a moral hero.
He has refused from, he's refrained somehow from strangling homeless guys under the bridge.
Yay. What a poster boy for ethics.
No. The way that ethics is going to spread is through admiration.
And argument, of course, right?
But with argument, it's necessary but not sufficient to spread virtue.
So, the way that virtue is spread, the way that ethical ideas and virtuous behavior is spread is through admiration.
Now, in order to act in a way that other people are going to admire, you need to have full access to the unconscious.
Because if you try to think through, from a conscious standpoint, if you try to think through every possible situation of aesthetically preferable actions, you will fail, and I will fail, and everyone will fail at all times.
I'll sort of give you an example. If you've ever seen great acting, of course you have, right?
So when you see great acting, what is it that you're seeing?
Well, you're seeing a highly integrated portrayal of a personality.
And I'll give you one example from a pretty cheesy show, but which can be quite entertaining.
But at the end, I think, of the second season of Castle, the woman whose name I can't remember...
He wants to express her love to Castle and he shows up with his ex-wife.
And a look crosses across her face of pride and humiliation and uncertainty and yet certainty.
This is a really great flicker.
I must have watched it like ten times.
It was really impressive.
A great little snippet of acting.
So much was communicated in literally a half a second about what was going on in this woman's heart and soul.
I mean, there's lots of other examples of great acting.
But that's one that sort of just popped into my mind because I watched it the other day.
Or, I mean, the classic, of course, it's the on the waterfront speech, I could have been a contender, where he pushes away the gun in a loving way, with disappointment in his brother's behavior, Marlon Brando's character.
Terry, I think his name is. Now, the reason that great actors get paid so much is because it's a damn near impossible feat.
And it's not something that you can do by merely thinking it through, right?
So you can't say, well, I want the character to express this emotion and that emotion and some other emotion.
And so what I'm going to do is I'm going to raise this eyebrow and purse my lips and do this, that, and the other.
Trust me, as a guy who spent two years in theater school and acted for quite a while, it's much, much tougher than that.
So, to be a great actor is to allow your unconscious to take over.
I mean, you do a lot of preparation, of course, and there's a real craft to acting, but the magic source, the art, is in allowing the unconscious.
There's no way you can consciously turn yourself into a good actor.
It's a matter of instinct and talent and preparation and just letting it fly, so to speak.
And the same thing is true in terms of ethics.
The great challenge of excellence is reproducibility.
Any blindfolded idiot can walk onto a golf course, swing n number of times, and eventually score a hole in one.
Or when I took Isabella to a golf store the other day, I was looking for something for Christina.
Not golf-related.
Doesn't really matter. And they had a little putting green where you could try out the putters.
And so what I did was I had Isabella with me and I showed her how to putt and so on, right?
And I sank three or four putts in a row from pretty fair long distance.
And I'm no golfer, trust me.
And that was not something that I could probably do again very easily.
I couldn't reproduce it. Isabella even sank a putt, but that does not turn her into a golfer.
So, excellence is not in the moment, right?
Excellence is in the reproducibility of things.
And I think we have to assume that the unconscious is not inventing things in the moment, right?
So, if you have good instincts and you've trusted your instincts and you've followed through on your instincts as best you can to find out whether they were good or bad, at some point, you know, skill is all about the automation of instincts.
Talent, ability is maybe having the potentiality for that, but everybody has to work hard who's going to be good at something.
I just read Malcolm Gladwell's book about that.
And the reproducibility of virtuous behavior is having the right theory, of course, right?
I mean, if you just give a ball and a racket to some guy who doesn't know how to play tennis, he will, out of one out of every hundred or thousand serves, will go in beautifully.
But if you teach him the theory of, you know, curl your racket over top of the serve and so on and follow through and all that.
I played a lot of tennis. Then you will get him to be able to reproduce those great serves in a much more consistent way.
Well, in a consistent way at all.
So you do need the theory, and then you need the practice.
And then when you're actually in the situation of playing a game, you need to trust the instincts and think strategically and all those kinds of good things.
Well, exactly the same thing is true.
In terms of ethics, you can do the right thing accidentally in some ways if you don't know the theory.
You can do the right thing. Or you can most often do the wrong thing even if you have the right impression or the right goal, the right intention.
Social programs were designed to help the poor and they've ended harming the poor and the harm to the poor is only going to get worse as governments begin to run out of money, of course, and they're dependent and have made their life decisions based on the existence of a system which simply cannot continue.
So from that standpoint, the challenge of philosophy is to have the theory down, which of course is what UPB and APA, like the UPB framework is all about, have the theory down, and then recognize that the majority of the ethical decisions that you need to make in your life are going to be positive.
In other words, you're going to need to do something rather than refrain.
UPB is all about not doing stuff, not killing, not raping.
But ethics, the only ethics which we really admire Is the ethics that are positive, where somebody is acting in a positive manner, right?
UPP is simply reactive and negative.
But it's because there's no unchosen positive obligation.
But when you do choose a positive obligation, like virtue, right?
Not just do no evil, but be virtuous.
When you choose a positive obligation, well, then you need some serious skill.
Some serious skill. And through that, you need practice.
You need all of the complexity...
All of the amazing parallel processing power of the unconscious to unravel these highly complex situations which contain far more information, far more useful information than the conscious mind could ever process in a year.
You can get that in the unconscious literally in a second or two seconds, which will allow you to make those kinds of decisions that will be startling to people, which will also People will admire that.
And we are in such a state within the world, philosophy is in such a decrepit and decayed and rotting state in the world, that we are going to have to spread it through admiration.
We simply can't spread it through argument because, as Bomb and the Brain Part 4 shows, people are astonishingly not susceptible to argument.
All we seek is ex post facto confirmation bias and the invention of agreement with prior traumatic Opinions or prejudices, really.
Or traumatized prejudices.
So we are going to have to spread philosophy through admiration, through the admiration of people and the envy to some degree.
Admiration and envy, right? So envy for happiness, admiration for the positive APA virtues of courage and honesty and so on.
I mean, that's always been my approach.
I'm not saying I've achieved it consistently, of course, right?
But that's certainly been my approach.
I mean, I want you to be proud of what I'm doing, not in substitution for being proud of yourself.
I want you to be more proud of yourself, but I want you to admire what I'm doing and be proud of what I'm doing as a way of spreading philosophy, not because I want you to have any admiration or pride for me as an individual, but in terms of what I'm doing, what we're all doing, really, to help the world.
And so, since philosophy can only be spread through admiration and, to some degree, envy of happiness, like, I mean, to take an example, right?
This is an obvious example. I'll just touch on it briefly.
Why do people diet? Is it because they want to have heart health and so on?
Well, they may say that, but basically what happens is they see a picture of themselves in a bathing suit.
They say, oh my God, what the hell has happened to me?
And they see one too many Calvin Klein underwear ads, and they're like, okay, that's it.
I'm going to die. So they envy the people who are more slender or who are ripped, have six-packs, and they admire that courage.
Oh, sorry. They admire the strength of will or the resolution to achieve that.
So, it's out of admiration and envy that people die, which is why it doesn't work.
Now, philosophy is a little different, I think, in terms of what you can achieve, but it is going to come through admiration and envy, and that means living a virtuous life, and that means having deep self-knowledge and self-acceptance so that you can navigate the incredibly tricky, to the conscious mind, but very Easy to navigate to the unconscious mind all of the complexities of positive moral actions of APAs that do elicit admiration and envy in a way that simply not killing and stealing and so on doesn't.
I hope that helps explain some of my thoughts On the challenges and possibilities of Virtue and the relationship between APA and UPB. And as always, I thank you for your excellent questions,
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