All Episodes
Previous Next
Oct. 31, 2010 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:33:16
1776 Sunday Call In Show - Universally Preferable Behaviour (UPB) October 31 2010

Some excellent questions and clarifications about my theory of ethics, highly recommended.

| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Free Domain Radio.
This is the Sunday show on Aroo!
Happy Halloween to everybody.
I hope you're doing very well. I'm sure that the vast majority of my listeners are, at least in my mind's eye, dressed up as Vampyra, but a little bit more with the Bustier.
So, I hope that you're doing great.
Please sit comfortably, or at least as comfortably as you can, in your Halloween thong as we go through a few thoughts and ideas about Thank you.
And it is a way of proving ethics or establishing morality and ethics without gods, without governments.
And it's a challenging theory.
I will be the first to admit it.
And you bloody well would hope it would be a challenging theory because if solving the problem of ethics in the world was as simple as two and two make four, then we would all feel pretty darn stupid for not having figured it out before.
So you'd really hope that a secular theory of universal ethics would be really, really hard.
Now, it's hard in some ways because it's a challenging theory, but I would say that it's hard fundamentally because it's like trying to learn a language.
It's like trying to learn Mandarin while somebody is continually whispering We've been so indoctrinated to think that morality is enforced prejudice, whether it is enforced through the vengeance of God or the violence of the state and the punishment of the penal system.
We've really just grown accustomed to thinking that morality is just a geographically specific, well-armed culture.
And that is a real challenge for us in looking at morality from a scientific and rational and truly philosophical standpoint.
It's a massive challenge.
To stop all of that yammering that goes on in our ears.
I mean, just think of the way that morality is enforced in church and particularly in schools.
I mean, it's crazy ridiculous.
I mean, it's just stupid rules brutally enforced.
That's what's called morality. Morality.
And to look at it from a scientific philosophical standpoint is really, really, really hard.
Because of all of those, you're really swimming against the current of prior prejudices.
And so I sympathize with it.
It happens to me as well. I short circuit on the theory as well.
So I hope that people don't think that I'm sort of nimbly dancing across the UPB landscape without tripping at all.
So I hope that I won't trip too much.
So I've come up with a little UPB checklist.
And again, if you want more About the theory, hugely, hugely recommend.
I've got some videos on YouTube about them.
You can just search my channel for universally preferable behavior or UPB. I've got a free book at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
There are lots of podcasts.
You can do a search from the homepage of freedomainradio.com for a podcast on ethics and UPB. But start with the book, I would suggest.
So here's And I'll post this on the board as well after we have a chance to chat about it today to see if it needs any more refining.
But here's my little UPB checklist.
So people have said something like, well, since UPB, the first part is universal, universally, like something that has to be universal or is not a theory.
Just think of it in terms of science.
Science or mathematics has to describe something universal.
That is universal. It is not something that is specific.
2 plus 2 is 4 is universal.
It is not 2 plus 2 is 4 on Wednesdays, but it equals 5 on Thursdays and a unicorn on Fridays.
It is a universal theory.
E equals mc squared is not every alternate Tuesdays or when the moon is full.
It is a universal theory.
Objects accelerating towards Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second is not only over Argentina, but over Chile it's double that, and over Londonderry it's half that.
These theories have to be universal.
The same thing is true of ethics.
Now, when you're talking about something being universal, you can't Suddenly throw in accidental attributes that are unrelated to that universality and think that you've broken universality, which is a terrible way of saying something that we all know very obviously.
So if I were teaching you biology and I said, uh, all lizards are cold blooded, except for the blue ones, you'd say, well, wait a minute, that doesn't work logically.
If the blue ones are lizards and all lizards are cold blooded, then Blue lizards have to be cold-blooded, or if blue makes them warm-blooded, then they're no longer lizards, but I guess mammals or something else.
So blue, the color of the lizard, is not specific to whether it is warm-blooded or cold-blooded.
The only thing that's relevant to that is the temperature of its blood, of course, or at least its ability to regulate its own temperature in terms of its core temperature.
So you can't put in something that's inconsequential.
So people have said, well, you could universalize a moral rule called only eat fish on Fridays.
But that is not universal because there's nothing specific that makes Friday different from Thursday.
Right? So that's really, really important.
Whether it's Thursday or Friday makes no difference.
There's also nothing particular About eating fish as opposed to eating shellfish or a taco or a pita or anything like that.
So you have to make sure that when you're proposing a moral rule in an attempt to test or to break UPB, that it doesn't have an arbitrary and unimportant distinction.
So people have said, well, I could put forward a moral rule called you must pick your nose.
That could be universal, except it can't.
It can't be universal. Some people don't have hands.
Some people don't have noses. And so that can't really be universalized.
Is it very different to pick your nose as opposed to pick your ear?
No. I mean, you're still putting a digit into an orifice and we could go elsewhere with that, but we won't because for once we're going to try and stay classy without the capital K. So I think that's really, really important.
If you're going to propose a universal action, it really has to be universal.
You can't break it up with inconsequential details or characteristics like Blue is not a lizard because that doesn't work in biology.
It's like saying that 2 plus 2 is 4 unless the second 2 is red.
Well, the color of the numbers doesn't matter, right?
I mean, it's the universality of the principle that counts.
So make sure that you're not proposing specific, inconsequential, non-universal standards and then trying to run them through UPB. You have to go to the greatest level of abstraction.
So, the second thing to remember, the second UPB checklist after, is it truly universal, right?
So, is the action you're proposing or the theory that you're proposing truly universal?
The second thing you need to do is figure out whether it passes the coma test, right?
So, the coma test basically is that we, I think, all have got to accept that a guy in a coma can't be doing something evil.
A guy who's asleep can't be doing something immoral.
I mean, again, the argument for that is in the book.
I don't want to run through it here, but that's the sort of basic common sense standard that you need to look at.
And so if you say it's UPB to pick your nose, a guy in a coma can't pick his nose.
And so that is a problem, right?
So if you're saying that the positive action called picking your nose is virtuous, then the opposite action...
Cannot be virtuous. In fact, I would argue, and this is a point of some contention, which I might do a sort of article about, because I understand that people find this confusing.
If a positive action is moral, its opposite must be immoral.
It must be immoral. And this is one of the great challenges of UPB. So, you know, if going north is moral, then the opposite of going north is going south.
So the opposite action must be immoral.
Yeah, there's east and west and so on, but we're just talking about the opposite of a particular action must be moral.
So the argument would be that if respecting property rights is moral, and that is absolutely a theory that can be universalized, if respecting property rights is moral, then violating property rights must be immoral, because that's the opposite of respecting property rights.
If not stabbing a guy is moral, then stabbing a guy must be immoral, since that's the opposite.
If not raping somebody is a good thing to do, then raping somebody must be a bad thing to do.
So the opposite must be immoral.
So if you're proposing picking your nose is moral, then not picking your nose must be immoral.
And that doesn't pass the coma test, because a guy who's in a coma can't be immoral and is not picking his nose.
So it doesn't really work.
So we've got make sure it's truly universal and make sure that it passes the coma test and then have a look at two guys in a room.
Two guys in a room. And that's what you really need to focus on.
Two guys in a room. So to give you an example, so some people have said, well, let's say that eating ice cream is moral and not eating ice cream is immoral.
Well, it can be universalized.
I guess everybody can eat ice cream.
It doesn't pass the coma test, but let's just forget about that for the moment.
But we have to go back to the universality of it.
So why is eating ice cream the only thing that's moral, as opposed to eating a sundae, or eating yogurt, or yogurtini, or I don't know, whatever else they have.
I mean, so why would it be ice cream rather than something else?
Why would it be eating rather than something else?
Is it truly universal?
Of course, it's not really very universal.
If you break it apart and you actually inject the universality into the statement, what's really being said is preferences should be enforceable.
Preferences should be enforceable, right?
So I like ice cream, therefore everybody should like ice cream.
My preference is that everybody eat ice cream.
So what we're really talking about from a UPB standpoint is that personal preferences must be enforceable.
However, This doesn't pass the test of two guys in a room.
If my personal preferences are universally enforceable, we have to remember that the universal side of things is absolutely key to the theory.
Right? That's how we know it's different from personal preferences.
The universal aspect means that I can't just say it's my preferences.
I can't just say that it's my preferences that are enforceable.
I have to say everybody's preferences are enforceable.
So if I say, well, it's my universal preference, then everybody has to eat ice cream, then the other guy in the room can say, well, it's my universal preference that nobody eat ice cream.
And so we have two personal opinions, both attempting to be universally enforced, which simply can't work.
It cancels each other out.
It cancels each other out.
If I say it's universally preferable for everyone to eat ice cream, what I'm saying is that everybody's preferences are enforceable.
But if everybody's preferences are enforceable, then my preference that you eat ice cream can be logically completely countered by your preference that you not eat ice cream or nobody eat ice cream.
So it doesn't work.
It doesn't jive together logically that personal preferences can be enforced.
So this is another really, really important thing.
I do sort of break them into universally preferable behavior, which is morality, aesthetically preferable behavior, which are virtues.
Like courage, like honesty, like being on time, like standing up for what you believe in, like learning about truth and virtue, or helping somebody who's in need, or whatever, right?
These are aesthetically preferable.
They're virtues, but they're not universally preferable.
In other words, you can't enforce them.
That which is universally preferable, like The property rights like the sanctity of one's body against attack, these can be enforced, which is what self-defense is all about.
I think I go into this more in an article on my blog if you want to check it out at freedomainradio.com.
So I think it's really, really important to understand that you have to go universal, you have to pass the coma test, you have to, if you want it to work, you have to make sure that you deal with the two men in a room and can it actually be achieved.
The last thing that I would sort of mention is that universal behavior...
This is sort of a new standard I'm working on, so I hope it makes some sense.
But universal behavior can't be the same thing.
It can't be... It has to be like...
A jigsaw puzzle. It has to sort of fit together in a sense of opposites.
So to take an example, the initiation of force can't be universal because then everyone must initiate force all the time.
But if two guys in a room can't both initiate force at the same time and they can't both continue to initiate force at the same time because the initiation of force is the same action.
Two people in the room can't initiate the same action at the same time and maintain that initiation, right?
So a murderer can't be defended logically because Two guys can't murder each other at the same time because one of them then has to submit to being murdered rather than fight back against it.
But if he submits, then it's more like euthanasia and not murder.
In the same way that theft can't be rationally defended because theft is saying, I want to take possession.
In other words, affirm property rights.
I want to take possession of a piece of property by violating somebody else's property rights.
In other words, property rights are both affirmed on the part of the thief who's taking something and denied on the part of the victim that he's stealing from.
So that's really, really important.
They have to be, and I can't think of the right word, and I tried to talk about it with Christina this morning, I've tried and I can't think of the right word.
It's complementary, it's not quite the right word, but they have to kind of lock together.
So the initiation of force versus self-defense, those two lock together like pieces of a jigsaw puzzle.
It's like a key and a door, or, you know, we're not going to go there again because we're doing class without the capital K. But that is really, really important.
That the actions can't both be the same.
There has to be one action that is the initiation and the other side that is the response, and they can't both be the same thing.
You can't have two initiations of force.
Trying to think of two self-defenses.
So two guys in a room, how can they both act with self-defense?
Or how can they both enact the principle of self-defense at the same time?
They can't. And so I think that's really, really important that when you're talking about ethics, The universality means that it can't be the same action.
In terms of morality, in terms of aesthetically preferable behavior, it can be.
You can both be on time or whatever, right?
You can both be courageous.
It doesn't take away from the other.
But in real moral situations, there has to be the initiation and then the response.
They can't both be the same actions because the same actions can't both be initiated at the same time.
I'm sorry if that's a little confusing.
It's just a particularly additional standard that I wanted to sort of throw in there.
So I'll just sort of run through these again.
Sorry for the shortness of it.
I hope that they're useful. Is the theory being proposed?
Remember, UPB cannot deal with specific actions.
No generalized universal theory can ever deal with a particular specific.
It can validate the appropriateness of a particular specific, but you can't judge the morality of an action called stabbing someone.
You can't, because that is an individual action.
So, is someone being stabbed because they are attacking some guy and the defender is stabbing himself?
Well, that's not an immoral action because that's self-defense.
Is the guy being stabbed because a surgeon is cutting him open with a knife because he needs an appendectomy?
Is somebody opening someone's trachea because they're choking and they can't intubate?
Yes, I do watch my grades.
Or is somebody stabbing someone because they want to take his wallet?
So stabbing someone is not an action that can be evaluated by any theory of ethics because it is a specific thing.
It's like saying, what is my universal theory of gravity about this one rock?
Well, if it's only about this one rock, it is a mere observation in the moment.
It's mere empirical data. It's not a theory.
There's no scientific theory which says this rock falls down.
There are scientific theories which says here's how mass or energy interact in these predictable ways.
There's the inverse square law, but it doesn't apply to just one item, one thing.
It always has to be universal.
So don't get suckered into trying to morally evaluate particular instances.
You always have to morally evaluate theories.
Morality is a theory.
It is not a specific instance because specific instances can't be judged.
You can come up with examples, but then you have to extrapolate them into the theory.
So you have to present a theory for UPB to work.
Presenting specific instances doesn't work.
And it's not just a UPB thing.
That's a science thing. That's a mathematics thing.
It doesn't work.
So I think that's really, really important.
So only evaluate theories, not instances.
Make sure that you're talking about true and genuine universality.
All people, all times, all locations, all circumstances.
Make sure that you're passing the coma test.
Very, very, very important.
Make sure that you can put two guys in a room and have them rationally be able to act out a particular theory.
And make sure that it's not the same action that's being proposed.
Because fundamentally, morality is about inaction.
Fundamentally, morality is about inaction.
It's not about action.
So, morality is about not stabbing someone, not raping someone, not stealing from someone, not beating someone up.
It's about leaving people the hell alone to get on with their lives.
There are aesthetically preferable actions like keeping your word, like being on time, like behaving with honor and integrity and virtue.
But fundamentally, ethics is about not Using force of fraud to interfere with people to steal their property, to invade their body, and so on.
So positive actions are really tough.
You can't enforce self-defense for reasons that I've gone into in an article on my blog, in which I'll put in UPB 2, which will be coming out hopefully later this year.
So I hope that that helps.
Sorry for the long introduction. I hope that that helps.
In terms of clarifying what needs to go on in terms of UPB, I really do appreciate people's patience.
It is a tough, tough theory to get used to.
Once you get it, it's really easy to work with, but it's a hammer jammer of a thing to vault over.
So with that having been said, I'll turn off the camera now.
We'll go straight to questions.
I'll put a link to the full show below in case you want to do more Q&A about UPB. And thank you so much for your time and support, as always.
I have a question about what is considered aesthetically preferable?
Well, aesthetically preferable are things that can be universalized, but which can't be enforced.
So, for instance, you can say it's universally preferable that people should be on time.
What makes it universally preferable?
Well, sorry, the first thing is that it can be universalized, right?
So something can be universalized.
That's the important thing, right?
So if you're going to say that everybody should jump, well, that can't be universalized, right?
Because not everyone has legs.
Some people are in a coma or whatever.
But there are some actions which, you know, could theoretically be universalized.
But they can't be...
Right, so self-defense, and again I've gone into sort of an argument as to how this is the case.
Self-defense is something where if somebody imposes violence against you, you have the right For want of a better word, you have the right to respond to that, and so you can use violence to restore yourself to the state of not being aggressed against.
You know, some guy's running at you with a chainsaw, you can shoot him at the leg, and so on.
That can be universalized, and you're using force to respond to force, so it sort of does that jigsaw puzzle thing where one action can provoke another, but they're both not the same action.
But being on time is something that is really around honesty, right?
And honesty is something that can be universalized.
In other words, everyone can be honest.
Now, as to the question of whether or not people should be honest, the problem is, and actually this comes into something that I was going to drop in a little later, the problem with this comes into the self-detonating statements.
So UPP is also fundamental to self-detonating statements, and I've got some videos on YouTube about this.
And what I mean by that is that if somebody says to you, I'm going to meet you at 8 o'clock, and then they show up at 9 o'clock, then what's happening is that they're not being honest.
And the reason that that can't be universalized is that they're not late unless you believe that they're going to be there at 8 o'clock.
So if you say, look, this guy's always an hour late, so whenever he says 8 o'clock...
I know that he means nine o'clock.
So you both show up at nine o'clock.
In a sense, he's really not that late, if that makes any sense.
It's sort of like you're operating in two different time zones.
So he's not really late.
So in order for somebody to be late, you have to believe that they're going to be where they say they're going to be at that particular time.
And in a sense, for it to be late, it has to be something where they just I mean, we don't really assume that somebody's late if they got attacked by a cougar or something like that.
Then that's just an interference. And so this is the general problem with honesty and lying, is that the person who is dishonest is assuming that honesty has a value to somebody else and that somebody else is acting on the value of honesty, while he himself is not acting on the value of honesty.
So it's very similar to theft.
In that, theft is the affirmation and denial of property rights.
Lying is the affirmation of the value of honesty, while at the same time denying the value of honesty because you're creating an exception for yourself.
Now, the difference, though, is that it's around the avoidability.
So if somebody is continually dishonest with you but is not initiating force against you, then you are not having the dishonesty inflicted or enforced upon you.
You can avoid it at any given time, right?
So if I know someone in my life that just lies to me all the time, then I have a choice about whether that person continues to lie to me or not.
If some guy's running at me with a chainsaw, I don't have much of a choice about that situation.
I guess I can try and run away or whatever, right?
But that which requires me to voluntarily initiate contact and to accept this person in terms of taking their word at face value or whatever, it's eminently avoidable.
And the difference between the initiation of force and aesthetically preferable actions is the avoidability.
Can I avoid what is being put upon me?
If I have a friend who's continually an hour late, then I can stop seeing that friend.
I can mentally calculate he's always going to be an hour late.
I can do whatever. But the behavior is not being inflicted or enforced upon me.
And so it falls into the realm of preference rather than coercion.
Does that make any sense?
Yeah. Also, that made a lot of sense.
Thanks. I also had a question about things like watching porn or bumfights.
Can that be universalized into an aesthetically preferable behavior, or would that be immoral?
Or is that just a preference to not watch someone be exploited, even though you're not enacting violence on anyone?
Well, yeah, I think that...
Let's just sort of work through it, right?
Pornography is clearly a...
There's some grey area in it, right?
So I watched the first show of a Martin Scorsese production called Boardwalk Empire, which was on HBO. And I watched the first one.
And in it, there's a scene where some woman is...
I think the clip goes on for like 20 or 30 seconds, or in my case, two or three hours if you replay it often enough.
That's, you know, a highly sexualized scene in a movie.
You can, of course, think of many, many other films where there's quite a bit of, you know, naughty bits roaming around.
And so there is that aspect of it where there's, you know, explicit sexuality in movies.
And it can be a gray area.
There was a movie made by, I think, Penthouse about Caligula starring some truly stellar actors and some truly well-endowed actors.
It sort of intermingled between Pornography and a pretty good script, I think, by Gore Vidal, if I remember rightly.
So that's tough as well.
There's, of course, softcore pornography.
I sound like a real expert on these things, right?
But there is, I think, women-centered pornography, which is more sort of plot-driven and romantic, but which still has explicit sex in it.
And then there's the stuff that, you know, bad disco soundtrack, drugstore lighting, nothing but veins and spray popping everywhere.
That clearly is for no other reason than for masturbation purposes.
So I think there's the gray area that makes it very, very tough to universalize.
There is no initiation of force, assuming that there's no force in the, like it's not a snuff film or something, there is no initiation of force on the part of the pornographer, on the part of the person in the video.
On the part of the purchaser and so on.
So I would not say that pornography falls into the realm of morality.
I would say that if there is true violence in the movie, like if it is a snuff film, then I think an argument could be made that the person who purchases this and puts money into the hands of the people who have committed these crimes is an accomplice because without the money being handed over, the crime is Would not have occurred, right?
Nobody makes a snuff film if nobody's going to buy it.
So I think you could make that case.
It's a more complicated case to make, but I think it could be a pretty strong case.
But no, I don't think that those things are immoral.
I'm not sure the degree to which they fall under aesthetically preferable actions or whatever.
I mean, to me, it's a complicated question, right?
So victorious, I mean, sure, there are many...
Men out there spanking themselves silly relative to Victoria's Secret's catalogs.
Victoria's Secret's catalogs are not pornography and they're not even very secretive.
What's her secret? She's really slutty.
And in a good way. But it's tough to really say that that's, you know, wrong.
On the other hand, there's some pretty brutal and degrading pornography that I would think would need to be examined from a psychiatrist or really from a psychologist standpoint on an analyst's chair.
So no, I wouldn't put those under the category of morality, but I certainly would put them under the category of would require furthering self-knowledge on the part of the person who may be attracted to very exploitive stuff.
So exploitation isn't necessarily the act of violence?
Well, see, but that really depends on what you're going to call exploitation.
I mean... I think we would all understand that if you convince somebody of subnormal intelligence to work for 10 cents an hour, that's pretty exploitive.
And there is a certain amount, like for instance, so let's say that somebody has a really, some woman has a really low IQ and doesn't really understand what pornography is, but is still in there.
I would say that that's pretty exploitive and I would say that that's wrong.
That's wrong because, I mean, in the same way that Sex with children is wrong because they don't have the capacity to process the ramifications of the experience.
Sex has long-term consequences to self-esteem.
Sex has long-term consequences to one's capacity to have mature and respectful future relationships and so on.
And so, you know, children and people of a low IQ can't really process those consequences.
So I think that there's a certain kind where, yeah, there's no initiation of force, but there is exploitation that is wrong.
On the other hand, to somebody who's an adult of reasonable intelligence and so on, we still have to be responsible for our own Actions as adults, even if we've been through traumatic childhoods and histories.
So, again, I think there's a gray area there.
There's a case where it's clearly wrong, and there's a case where it's not wrong, and there's going to be some gray areas in between, but I think it could go that way for sure.
Well, I think that people that have experienced traumas in their past aren't as keen or don't understand what they're doing.
That they just fall into that type of behavior, and that could be what makes it exploitive.
Yeah, look, I mean, I remember reading many, many years ago, I can't even remember the name of the book, maybe somebody knows, Linda Lovelace was a, I think she's dead now, but she was a porn actress who was in a very famous movie called Deep Throat.
I think it came out in the 70s.
It was about a woman who had a clitoris in her throat and could only achieve orgasm through blowjobs, basically.
And I read her biography.
I've never seen Deep Throat, but I did read her biography.
And yeah, I mean, she had an absolutely wretched life.
Her start in porn was being screwed by dogs.
I mean, that is just a gross, repulsive, humiliating, disgusting, and degrading thing to go through, I mean, in my opinion.
And yeah, I think that's pretty rough stuff.
And so I think that that's not something that I think is very healthy to participate in.
And it comes, I mean, I don't remember much about her childhood, but it certainly comes from that sort of stuff.
That was really helpful.
I'm so glad. Thanks so much for your questions.
Very good. Alright, do we have any other questions?
UPB style questions.
Yeah, I think Lovelace was forced into pornography by her violent boyfriend and of course her violent boyfriend was She was in that relationship voluntarily, but the bomb and the brain stuff means that there's a certain amount of far less than voluntary behavior.
Free will is not something that is axiomatic to human nature.
I mean, free will is something that requires peaceful upbringings and a reasonable amount of intelligence.
I mean, it's not something that is just stamped like a soul on every single human being.
It's something that needs to be inculcated by good parenting and so on.
Hello. Hello.
Hey, I had a question about something that you mentioned, I think about six months ago on a call-in show about UPB. You mentioned, and this is a total risk of Do you remember that?
I do, and I've been sort of mulling that over, and I was sort of thinking about that this morning while I was making my notes.
I think I'm going to just have to leave those in APA. The reason being that I'm really trying to work with Occam's Razor, and this is why I sort of take down the seven categories to, I think, three categories, like neutral, APA, and UPB. I think that there's definitely a case to be made that moral courage is more important than being on time.
I think that's what you did with the kid who was being beaten up by his mom.
That, to me, is a hell of a lot more admirable and noble than being on time.
But I didn't want to create another category called positive virtues.
Non-enforceable, more important than being...
Because I think that just creates another...
Layer of grayness, because obviously they blend into each other, right?
So I think that just creates another category.
I still think I'm going to put the virtues like integrity and honesty and courage.
I'm going to put those in APA. And yeah, it's a scale.
Being on time is pretty low on that scale and moral courage in the face of helping someone up.
That is a different category, but I still think that they all stay within APA in that They can be universalized.
They are definitely preferable to the opposites because they don't require contradictions, right?
I mean, you know, the golden rule, right?
Do unto others as you would have them do unto you.
That's a sort of cheap and primitive way of looking at the question of universality, right?
So the reason that something like a guy who can swim who's watching a kid drowning, if he doesn't Go in to save that person.
And these are all, I mean, ridiculous examples, because it never happens.
Like, it never happens.
I mean, except with child abuse, of course, where it always damn well happens, with the exceptions of you and a couple other people, myself sometimes included, sort of stepping in.
But, I mean, people rush to help.
I mean, this is the basic fact of human nature.
The people rush to help.
To help others, right?
I mean, if I'm carrying Isabella and a big bag, I mean, everybody holds the door open for me.
They just do. People rush to help.
People, I mean, who wouldn't want the story of diving in to save a kid from drowning?
I mean, what a great thing to do.
What a satisfying thing to do.
What a positive thing to do.
And what a thing you can look back on with great pride at having done.
So people do rush to help.
But let's say that some guy, for whatever reason, we can't figure out We're good to go.
He would prefer somebody to come in and help him.
So it can't be enforced, but it definitely is universal in that if he were in the victim's situation, he would desperately want the intervention that he's refusing to provide the existing victim.
And that's why it can't be universalized, and that's why it's a problem.
But again, it sort of can't be enforced.
So I think I'm just going to leave those virtues in APA, if that makes sense.
Yeah, and that actually then leads to another question, which is, by what standard can we, within APA, by what standard can we put sort of courage and integrity and honesty on a more important end of that continuum than being on time, holding the door open for someone, things like that?
That's a very good question.
Because, I mean, part of me wants to say it's based on the consequences.
So if I don't intervene when a child is being abused, the consequences are far worse than if I'm ten minutes late meeting a friend for a movie.
But then, unfortunately, that goes into the argument from effect, which I will not do.
I will not go to the argument from effect.
That's why I said, like, what standard?
If we're going to sort of judge two actions that are both in APA, how would we judge which one is sort of more contingent upon your goodness in your soul than the other one?
Yeah, what percentage of APA? I think we can all recognize that intervening to To help a child who's being victimized is probably 95.
Maybe there's something higher. I don't know.
And being a few minutes late is like five, right, in terms of the percentage of APA-ness.
Right. But that's a very good question.
And so there's two things I can't argue for.
I can't argue for the empirical effects because that's an argument from effects.
Oh, or can I? Well, maybe I can.
Ooh, slither, slither, slither.
I also can't argue for the golden rule, right?
So I don't particularly feel egreged.
I don't particularly feel bad if someone's five minutes late.
But if somebody didn't dive in to save Isabella who was drowning, I would feel really bad, right?
Because then that's an argument from effect in terms of emotions.
But I think we can.
I think we can argue from effect.
Because if you look at criminality, clearly...
If I, I don't know, if I step on someone's foot maliciously, that's gonna hurt their toes a little, right?
If I drive over somebody's foot in my car, that's gonna crush their toes into a fine little porridge-y paste, right?
So, when we're in the category of aggression against the person, we do recognize scales based upon the objective effects of the injury, right?
Right, right. Does that make sense?
Right, yeah. Which is why sexual harassment is less bad than rape.
Right, right. So I think that we can look at the objective effects.
Once it's in the category, the scale is about the effect.
So once it's in the category of immoral, then we don't treat every immoral action as the same, right?
If I steal a candy bar from a store, that is not the same as burning it down, right?
I mean, in terms of the egregiousness of the action.
And that is based upon the effects.
So maybe what we can do is we can say that morality, the argument from morality is used to create the categories, but the argument from effect is used to create the gradations.
Within those categories.
Okay, I have another potentially annoying...
Wait, wait, wait. Oh, sorry.
Does that work? I mean, let's just assume that that works.
No, I think I'm satisfied with that.
But another kind of earwig question came up around sort of for honesty.
A what question? Like an earwig-y type question.
What the hell does that mean?
Does that mean something in another language just happens to sound like earwig in this language?
No, like earwig, like the word earwig.
I know what the word earwig is, but what is an earwig question?
Is that a question that, you know, hangs off an 18th century wig, crawls in your ear, and makes great sounds in your eardrum with its antennae?
I mean, I don't know what that means.
No, basically just another annoying question.
Oh, earwig is annoying.
Oh, okay, okay, because the word annoying is just annoying, so go ahead.
As opposed to earwake, which is completely clear.
And not at all annoying. No, no.
Another thing that came up when you were saying that was...
So, like, for honesty, for example, like, when you say we can look at the effects to figure out where to place that, which effects would we sort of look at?
Because with honesty, it can have kind of negative and positive effects.
With honesty, it can have negative and positive effects.
So, like, if you're honest... Go ahead.
Give me an example of honesty having a negative effect.
Well, I mean, it depends on sort of, I don't know, the perspective, I guess, of where you're looking like.
Obviously, we would look at the way that we approach it.
Honesty, it's great.
Like, it brings positivity and happiness.
No, no, no. But honesty is on a lower scale than UPB, right?
UPB trumps APA every single time, which is why when somebody comes in and says, you know, where's your girlfriend?
I want to strangle her.
You are not obligated to tell that person the truth because they're violating UPB and UPB trumps APA every single time.
Right. Which is why you don't get to stab a guy for being late.
Right. Okay. Gotcha.
No. So I think that the, what your answer to that question with the scale, uh, as far as consequences that I'm totally satisfied with that.
That's awesome. Well, no, but I like the honesty question, right?
Because honesty can create a very negative effect, but that negative effect is not contained within the honesty.
So, my doctor says to me, dude, you have colon cancer, right?
Well, he's being honest, and clearly that has a highly negative effect on me, right?
Because now I have to change my keyboard.
Just kidding. Oh, bad joke about colons.
Anyway, so that's an example of honesty having a negative effect.
But the negative is the colon cancer, not the honesty, if that makes any sense.
And you could also approach then that question in terms of if he withheld that information from you, that would have way worse effect.
Even more of a negative effect, right.
Right, exactly. There is also the honesty...
Which is uncomfortable. And, you know, I think everybody who's got kids is going to face that time where the kid loudly says, why is that woman so fat?
Right. Well, that's a fair question.
That is a fair question.
And it's funny, you know, because, I mean, I've sort of mulled over, and this is, I think it's vaguely on topic, I've sort of mulled over how I'm going to deal with this.
I don't think that I'm going to be able to say to Isabella that that's a rude thing to say.
Because it's a completely fair question.
The woman is fat, assuming that it's a fat woman or man or whatever, but the woman is fat, and it's a perfectly fair question to ask why that woman is so fat.
At some point, she's going to say, Daddy, why are you bald?
And I'll have to give her the honest scientific answer that I'm a solar-powered sex machine.
Okay, well, that. But no, if she's going to have the perfectly fair, or she might point at some other guy and say, why is he bald?
Perfectly fair question. I don't think a bald guy is going to be offended.
By a child asking, why is he bald?
It's a fair question. Of course, a fat woman is going to be offended and may be offended by a child asking, why are you fat or why is she so fat?
Why? Because that's more of a choice than bald, right?
Right. But so there's that kind of honesty as well.
But I would argue That the pain that that honesty causes is not the honesty itself, but rather the condition that it's describing, right?
So if a woman is upset because a child asks her why she's fat, it's not the honesty, the honest identification of the condition that is the problem.
The problem is that she's fat, right?
So it's not honesty that's causing the pain, it's what it's describing, much like the colon cancer example, though, of course, much less serious.
Right, and in a sense, it would also be the woman's own dishonesty with herself about her weight.
Because if the woman were completely clear that, yeah, I'm fat because I eat too much, and just kind of understood that, then a question from a kid, is it because she eats too much?
She'd be like, yeah, that's why, right?
Right. Or, you know, this mysterious glandular condition that people claim, or whatever, right?
But there's, you know, some...
It could be, you know, I was just in a coma for six months testing out UPB, and therefore I gained some weight, much like Atkins or whatever, right?
Right, right. Cool.
Well, those are all my questions.
Those are fantastic.
Great questions. And I really do appreciate the distinction, and I think it's good.
Yeah, I think I naturally, inevitably shy away from the argument from effect, you know, with great desperation.
Because I don't want to be Sim Harris, but also because it's so manipulatable.
But I think that it's fair to say that there is empirical evidence that puts different gradations upon moral or immoral categories around the effects.
So the effects can be graded, the actions can be graded in severity according to the effect.
That makes sense. Good earwiggy questions.
This means I'm going to have to get a mullet wig or something.
Just to make those clear.
All right, we have room for more with the questionis.
Yeah, sorry. Ethics and morality, I do use them interchangeably.
I don't have any particular distinction between the two.
At least, I mean, maybe there is, but I just use them synonymously.
It's partly to do with style.
Like, I just don't want to use the same word over and over again.
You could say morality is more the theory and ethics is more the behavior, like he behaved in an ethical manner, but it's not particular.
Does UPB assume or prove the NAP? UPB proves the NAP. I also wanted to remind people that self-detonating statements, I think, have a slightly higher weight in UPB than I may have formerly given them.
And there's ways that you can shorten conversations about UPB or about ethics to include the person's actions.
So, as I've talked about in the video series, which I hope to get back to at some point, about self-detonating statements, I did philosophy and I did property, I'd like to do determinism, but I'll have to wait till the winds of fate blow me that way, of course.
Oh, blow me that way, baby!
And so I would like to sort of point out that, I mean, you know, property is established through the simple act of making an argument, right?
That you're using self-ownership to produce an argument saying that you own the effects of your actions.
So property rights are established through self-ownership, through, I think, most efficiently established through the self-detonating statements, arguments.
And another way that you can approach this, of course, is that if somebody says that coercion is the way that we should make decisions in society according to the government, then what he's saying, because the government is just individuals, you have to universalize it, is that human beings should use force to achieve their ends.
But, of course, the reality is that if somebody is arguing that human beings should use force to achieve their ends, then he clearly does not believe his own argument, because he himself is using reason.
And evidence to achieve his ends rather than force.
So you can't argue that force should be used to achieve one's ends because the argument is not using force.
And I think this is pretty close to Hans Hoppe's argumentation ethics, although I'm certainly no expert on his approach, but I think that's fairly close, that he says you simply can't have a debate which validates the use of force because the validation of the use of force would be to not have a debate but rather just hold a gun to someone's head and demand that they believe you.
My question is with regards to UPB and a medical ethics scenario that was kind of brought up at some point with me.
So the scenario is you have a pregnant lady who has HIV and You want to give this lady some HIV medications to prevent her baby from getting HIV. However,
she has particular religious beliefs that are against using those medications.
And whether it is morally or ethically justified to I just wanted to kind of approach this question from a UPB standpoint.
Alright, so let me just make sure I understand this.
So the woman has HIV and there's medication which can prevent it from being passed along to her fetus, but she has religious objections to that.
Is that right? Yes, I think so.
Alright, so if you can mute, then I will attempt to answer that.
Well, the universality there means that...
I assume that this is a fetus that's coming to terms, so we're not going to dodge.
We'll just dodge for the moment the question of abortion, because I understand that what I'm saying has some ramifications there, but let's just sort of focus on this particular issue.
So, I think we all accept that a child that is going to come to term Has the same, quote, rights as an adult or as a child, right?
There's no magical difference.
We have five minutes before the woman gives birth and one second after the woman gives birth.
And we all understand that you can't strangle a baby that's been born.
And so, and now I think that there's a sort of fading back to, you know, I don't consider the RU486 or the morning after pill to be the same as strangling a newborn.
But we can sort of get into that another time.
But if we take the universality and we view the fetus that is going to come to term as a human being, then it really doesn't matter that the fetus is inside her.
In other words, if I as an adult inject child with HIV, then clearly I have assaulted that child in a truly egregious manner.
And if somebody were to use, like, so let's say I'm approaching, I'm some truly sinister nasty guy and I'm approaching some mom at the playground and I say, ah, I've got a needle full of HIV and I'm going to inject it into your child, then I don't think anybody would lose a lot of sleep if people just, you know, did whatever they did to, did whatever they could to prevent me from doing that.
You know, if that involved kicking the living shit out of me, then that's the way it would have to go.
And then I would then be charged with, you know, grievous attempted murder, attempted manslaughter, whatever you would call it.
So the fact that the fetus is inside the mother is not relevant because it has, if it's going to come to term, it has the same moral status as a child, right?
And if the mom, in some horrible barren Munchausen by proxy syndrome, An issue where the moms make the kids sick in that sort of sixth sense way to get attention or whatever.
If the mom injected her own child with HIV, then clearly she would be charged with assault causing grievous bodily harm or attempted manslaughter or whatever, and would then be on the hook financially for the rest of her life for paying for that child's medications and care and so on, and would be considered one of the most egregious forms of child abuse imaginable.
And so it doesn't matter whether it's her child or someone else's child.
It doesn't matter whether the child is inside her or outside her.
She does not have the right to voluntarily introduce a virulent illness into that child's body.
I don't give a flying fuck about her religious convictions.
I don't give a flying fuck about her licking buddy Jesus' armpit in religious ecstasy.
It doesn't matter to me at all.
The simple moral reality is that her beliefs, saying crazy or otherwise, don't matter at all.
In the same way that as somebody who's not psychotic, who just says, well, I strangled this guy because of my religious beliefs, we don't then get to say, well, that's fine then.
No problem. You know, go be free.
We say, look, your religious beliefs don't have anything to do with it, assuming you're not, like, insane.
You don't get to...
I mean, we don't say about the terrorists on 9-11, we don't say, well, you know, they had these religious beliefs, they believed that they were in the right, and therefore no crime has been commuted.
We all accept and understand that morality is greater than superstition.
I mean, even people who aren't philosophical accept that.
So her crazy-ass beliefs don't matter at all.
And the universality means that it doesn't matter if it's her child or someone else's child.
It doesn't matter if it's inside her body or outside her body.
This crazy bitch can't infect a child with HIV. Now, that's the morality of it.
I mean, she can.
I mean, obviously, she can do whatever she wants.
But in a sane society, there would be incredible consequences to all of that.
And so, yeah, that would be my particular approach.
Let me just talk about, somebody had a great question.
Let me just, it was Matt, a fantastic question.
So we were talking about aesthetically preferable actions and UPB, that UPB trumps APA. And he said, what if, but within UPB and APA, there are levels of effects, right?
So like slamming a door on somebody's finger is different from gutting them with a bread knife.
It's a different layer.
They're both the initiation of force, but, I mean, the scale of egregiousness is different.
So he said, what if an effect from something that's APA is worse than something that's UPB, i.e., watching a child drown versus stealing a candy bar?
So, yeah, of course, you steal a candy bar.
That's something that is a UPB violation.
And watching a child drown is not a UPB violation.
It's a huge APA violation, but it is not a UPB violation.
I think that's an interesting question.
Now, the way that I view it in terms of the effects of ethics is roughly along these lines.
UPB is enforced through violence.
APA is enforced through ostracism.
I want to run that around again, just to make sure people don't misunderstand, because those are some pretty inflammatory things to say, but I genuinely believe that.
So, UPB is enforced through violence.
So, if some guy's running at me with a chainsaw, I can shoot him, hopefully, in the leg.
If that's the only way that I can disable them, and if I can't get them away, UPB is enforced through violence.
APA is enforced through ostracism.
So, that having been said, I think that we can all understand that the proportionality of response is related to the egregiousness of the action.
So if you're a shopkeeper and some 20-year-old guy comes in and you see him stealing a candy bar, you are not reasonably justified in blowing him away.
Some shotgun, you know, just shred his chest, give him a great sucking chest wound like a black hole, and watch him dribble his life force into the drains.
That is not a...
So proportionality of response, I think, is very, very important.
So I would say that you don't have the right to hold a gun to someone's head and make him go and save a drowning kid.
I would say that if you did that, there'd be very few people who had a problem with it.
Let me just put it that way.
But again, we're talking about a situation that's never going to occur.
If somebody can swim and sees somebody drowning, he's going in the water.
I guarantee you that, you know, the number of people who wouldn't do that would be like one in a million, like truly sociopathic idiots.
But even sociopaths understand the power of social accusation and horror.
And so... The guy who's stealing a candy bar is going to have some response to him, and in a free society, there's no way that a DRO would support a shop owner blowing somebody away who stole a candy bar.
I mean, for two reasons.
One, it's a completely disproportionate response.
And two, there's no way to guarantee that the guy is stealing a candy bar.
There's no way to guarantee that the guy is actually stealing a candy bar.
You know, he may have left a dollar on the counter and the shopkeeper didn't see it.
I mean, there could be other ways in which it could be misinterpreted, right?
Because shop owners don't watch somebody the whole time that they come in or it's very unusual.
And if the shopkeeper is watching the guy the whole time, then the guy is not going to steal the candy bar.
As a former minor league shoplifter myself when I was in my early teens, I can tell you that if the shopkeeper is following you around watching your every move, you don't steal the candy bar.
And if you do, then you're crazy and you don't get punished as a criminal.
Somebody has a candy bar in their pocket.
The guy thinks a candy bar is missing.
He obviously didn't see the theft because that's not what shoplifters do.
So maybe the guy came in with the candy bar and he's blowing away a guy unreasonably.
So it's disproportionate and it's not gone through an objective process of evaluation.
So that is the kind of situation which is not usually dealt with through excessive force.
I mean, there'd be maybe a restraint and a restitution or something, but it would be pretty minor.
And would probably, I mean, if it was a kid, obviously it would be left up to the parents, and if it were an adult, then there would be sort of counseling that would then be deducted from the man's salary, and some money might go to the shopkeeper, but it would be a pretty minor thing to deal with.
But if you could imagine, if somebody actually stood there and watched a child drown, the amount of social ostracism that that man would be subjected to in the age of the internet would be I mean, just unbelievably staggeringly high.
Right? So some would post about this.
They'd get the guys. I mean, either nobody would know, in which case, who cares, right?
It's no longer a moral situation because it's, you know, it's an invisible situation for which ethics can't really apply.
It's like the physics of an imaginary universe.
If nobody ever knew, but if somebody did know, maybe find out who this guy was, maybe snap a picture of him, post it and say, this guy watched him drown and so on.
I mean, the guy would be thrown out of society.
Nobody would want to have anything to do with him.
Anymore. So the proportionality of society's response would be so high that it would be much more punishment than the person who stole the candy bar would ever experience, if that makes any sense.
Somebody, is there another way you could put forward the principle that two people can't initiate force against each other at the same time?
That's always bugged me. Well, let's use an example.
And I'm sorry to use an unpalatable example, but rape, as I've mentioned before, is the moral situation that is unambiguous.
Murder is tough because it could be self-defense.
It could be mistaken identity.
It could be lots of things, right? But rape is just complete.
And theft could be stealing something back.
It could be, you know, whatever, out of necessity because you're starving.
But rape is the one crime that is just unambiguously wrong at all times, right?
So let's imagine that there are two men in a room.
Let's make it a prison room for the sake of ambiance.
There are two men in the same room.
Is it possible for them to both rape each other at the same time?
In other words, if rape is a morally good thing to do, then they must both rape at the same time.
But the problem is that if it's moral to rape, then one person must be raping and the other person must be resisting that rape.
Because if it's not resisting, then it's not rape.
So in other words, it's really moral for the one guy to rape, but the other guy, in order to make that morality occur, must do the opposite of that which is moral and resist rape.
So rape is a positive moral good for the rapist.
But must be violently and strenuously opposed by the rape victim, by the rapee.
And so it can't be that that initiation of force called rape can be achieved by two men or two women in the same room.
So I think that's a really good way of looking at it.
Let's take another example since we seem to be going into various sexual dungeons in this show.
So, let's say that somebody really enjoys having, I don't know, being branded, you know, or something like that, and he's willing to submit to it, then it's not the initiation of force.
In fact, he may be paying to have some dominatrix in high heels and a bad German accent actually brand him in some hopefully unseen place.
So that's no problem.
But the act of initiating branding against someone, if that theory is morally good, it is morally good to brand, again, again, that wouldn't pass the test of universality.
It would be morally good to initiate the use of force.
Well, initiating the use of force is either consensual or it's not consensual.
If it's consensual, then no immorality is involved.
So clearly, if I'm lying on a—when I say clearly, I don't mean it's obvious.
I just sort of mean—this example should be clear.
I certainly don't mean to say that any of these ethical questions are obvious.
But clearly, if I'm dying of appendicitis and I beg someone to take out my appendix, hopefully they anesthetize me and I'm down, then the guy is—I'm not initiating force against the guy.
The guy is cutting me open to take out my appendix.
So there's no force involved there.
Because I want it, baby.
I want those hot wax drippings on my nipples.
And so there's no initiation of force, therefore there's no morality.
The initiation of force, in order for morality to be involved, must be non-consensual.
Must be non-consensual, right?
It's not rape if you're voluntarily role-playing.
I mean, it's kinky as all get-out, and you better have a safe word that's not a Welsh street name or an Aztec god, but it's not rape if it's role-playing.
It is rape if it's not consensual.
And so the initiation of force for it to be moral must be something desperately or even mildly unwanted by the other person.
And there you have the contradiction.
Right there you have the contradiction.
Because if the initiation of force is a value, then it must be a value to both people.
But if it's a value to both people, then it's consensual, and therefore it's no longer the initiation of force.
It's just kinky-ass role-playing.
It's S&M. It's not APA. We're really throwing around the bag full of acronyms.
It's not UPP. It's S&M. Now, if the initiation of force, which it has to be, if it's going to be the initiation of force, is resisted by the other person, then it is both a value and an anti-value.
It's a value for one person to initiate force.
In order for that to be achieved, the other person must strongly resist it.
So it's a plus value for one guy in the room and a complete minus value for the other guy in the room, and therefore it fails the test of consistency.
Does a woman have to resist for it to be rape?
What if the guy has a knife and she doesn't resist?
Well, she is resisting because he has a knife.
Right? I mean, the fact that he has a knife means that she doesn't want to do it.
Well, thank you. Again, this is difficult stuff.
I mean, I'm literally sweating right now.
And not just because I'm thinking about those S&M dungeons, because, you know, it's close to my initials.
But... It's hard stuff.
You know, this is hard stuff to figure out and to work on.
So I hugely appreciate the questions.
They are really, really great.
No, I turned off the video.
I can't stand and just stare at the camera for that long and think.
I think when I walk, I think when I pace.
But on the video, I did say the podcast will be below.
I was wondering if there was any initiation of force by watching someone drown because you're kind of initiating the continuing of the drowning.
No, no. Unfortunately, I realize the aesthetics of it are completely horrible, but we do have to be very clear about this, that in order for there to be an immoral action, there kind of has to be something that's different about you being there and not being there, right? So if a kid is drowning on some lonely stretch of beach where there's nobody around, then the kid drowns.
Tragic, horrible, but that's what happens.
If a man is standing on the beach and doesn't intervene, then he's not doing anything different than if he wasn't there.
Like nothing is changing by him being there or not being there, right?
The kid's going to drown whether he's there or not, if he's not going to do anything.
So his presence there doesn't change the outcome.
Now, the fact that it doesn't change the outcome is pretty reprehensible, but still, he's not initiating the use of force.
Whereas, you know, a guy comes up and stabs you in the alley, he kind of has to be there for you to get stabbed.
His presence is a material change in the outcome.
So, I think that's an important test to think of as well, I would say.
And look, I mean, again, I would say let's not get...
You know, massively overly fussed about the guy on the beach.
It's such a lifeboat scenario.
I mean, it's worthwhile to test the theory, don't get me wrong.
I think it's sort of important, but it's not essential.
It's just so rare.
Compared to war and taxation and the incarceration of millions of people around the world for nonviolent crimes, it's not a huge issue.
Again, it's worthwhile to test the theory, but there's a lot of stuff that we all agree on.
That I think is worth focusing on more.
All right, so let's get on with the issue of why would you study UPB? Why is it important?
Well, I think there's a couple of reasons.
Some, you know, pretty practical and some a little bit more esoteric.
The first is that I think without a firm...
I would say, actually, even unshakable foundation in ethics, you can't really do much in the realm of philosophy.
I mean, you just can't get much done in the realm of philosophy.
And the reason for that is that philosophy is about not having opinions, right?
If it's an opinion, it's not philosophy, and if it's philosophy, it shouldn't be opinion.
It's not like opinions are the same as superstition, but...
They're not wildly different in terms of not being universal and objective.
It's like religion. You know, if it's religion, it ain't science.
And if it's science, it ain't religion.
The two are completely opposed in methodology, content, form, and epistemology.
So I don't think that you can do much in the realm of philosophy unless you have UPB down.
Because otherwise, you're simply arguing...
Perspectives and opinions and cultures and nothing can be resolved.
I remember when I was 15 or so having a big ferocious argument with friends about the death penalty, but because we weren't working from first principles, it all just became opinion and argument from a fact and it became about which costs more and what sort of error is there and, you know, sort of vague ideas of punitive retribution and machismo and tough talking and just all this kind of stuff.
I just think that was a real problem.
And I tried to learn a lot from those early debates that if you're not going to start from first principles, you're just pushing opinions around.
And because you're pushing opinions around, you have little choice but to escalate in terms of emotional intensity, right?
Wherever there's not reason and evidence at the grounding of your beliefs, you end up having to yell louder or withdraw from the conversation, which is why political stuff is just so unbearable to watch.
Because it's all just opinions.
That's why religious stuff is so, you know, it has to get so hysterical.
The politics has to get so hysterical.
And religion, I mean, geez, don't mistake this for a moment.
Religion is completely fucking hysterical in its approach to the truth.
I mean, it's like, they're so uncertain and insecure that about what they believe that they have to invent massive punitive gods and heaven and hell and eternal watching and conscience and a soul and all that.
You see, understand this is all the superstructure that is erected to avoid the reality of a completely ridiculous set of assertions.
I mean, the Bible has to be so long, I say this as a guy who's put out a lot of podcasts, but The Bible has to be so long because it's fundamental nonsense.
And you have to start teaching children so early in religion because if you don't indoctrinate them, they'll never believe it, right?
So the preying on children, the ridiculous stakes that are raised, you know, of eternal punishment and reward and sin and the lakes of fire and dancing around with harps on clouds and all that, that stuff all has to be there because it's just not true.
I do often get complimented, which I guess is nice, for being relatively even-tempered.
And I think in many ways I am.
I definitely have my passions and I respect and try to get behind those.
But I can have pretty civil conversations with people I disagree with because I'm certain.
If you're not certain, if you're not working from first principles, things will just escalate.
Now the problem, if you don't work with first principles as well, you're simply going to get confused.
And when you get confused, then you're not doing...
The cause of philosophy any good.
Now, confusion, I sort of want to do a show on this, so I'll just touch on it briefly here.
Confusion is a good thing to have in many ways, because it means that you're pushing to new knowledge, right?
So if you're learning a language, there'll be times when you're confused about the right syntax or the right words, the right whatever, grammar.
And that's good, because it means you're not just repeating the same rote passages over and over again.
So confusion is not a bad thing.
But confusion without reference to first principles is just mental chaos, and I would say three doors down from mental illness, right?
So you have to have first principles that you go back to.
I get confused in talking about UPB. I think he did a pretty good job today, but there are times when it's harder to explain.
There are times, I remember an economics junkie called in a while back with his question about how self-defense fits into UPB. I gave him an okay answer, but it wasn't great.
I ended up having to sit down and work it through an essay.
So I think confusion is good, but you always have to have confusion going back to first principles.
So I think that you want to be certain about ethics.
That doesn't mean that you have to be able to fluidly answer every conceivable question of ethics, but, you know, I'll put the UPB checklist in a little essay.
It's worth just having printed out.
Maybe we'll do a card-sized one.
There's something to refer to.
To say, okay, well, wait a sec. This is tough.
So when you're learning a new language, there's nothing wrong with having a translating book handy.
I mean, that's how you know you're learning.
And UPB is a new language.
I speak it fairly fluently, though not perfectly by any means.
And other people are learning it.
And it's okay to have a reference.
It's good to have a reference. Don't pretend...
To just get it, right?
Because it's a tough theory.
It's a tough, tough theory, as it should be, as I mentioned at the beginning of the show.
So make some notes.
We'll put these UPB checklists.
Is it universal? Does it pass the coma test?
Two guys in a room. Are they opposite actions that are being proposed?
Have some simple answers.
Why are there no unchosen positive obligations?
and so on.
So have those chit class practice, recognize that you are speaking a new language into a world that is heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily, heavily invested in not learning this language.
Right?
I really want to emphasize this, which is why I repeated myself so often.
The world is massively invested in UPB being wrong.
Not just because, you know, people are just randomly petty or mean or vindictive or whatever, but because if UPB is right, if UPB is valid, if UPB works, then the world will be rewritten from the ground up.
Right? This isn't an upgrade.
This is a reformat, right?
And a different operating system.
This is A complete rewriting of the fundamentals of society.
Everything in society runs on ethics.
Everything in society runs on ethics.
And right now, ethics are superstitions.
Or bullshit pragmatism, which is just an ex post facto superstition.
Right now, society runs on superstition.
And the most powerful superstition is ethics.
If ethics become rational, if ethics become scientific, if ethics become empirical, society will be fundamentally rewritten in ways that we can barely conceive of at the moment.
So, I think that's really important.
An example of UPB was a video and podcast that I put out.
Actually, I haven't put out the podcast yet.
But your parents did the best they could, an examination of historical parenting, which is just UPB applied to the family, which is, of course, where things get most volatile, because that's a conversation people can actually have with people, which is what Untruth is all about as well.
It's my first book in 07, good heavens, I think it was.
And that's to say that if we have standards called You must be loved, you must be approved of, you must have, quote, passed the exam.
If you just say you did the best you could without any proof, then we should never have exams for children, and they should just pass everything and we assume that they're perfect.
And children should not have to do anything, but rather just say the words, I did the best I could, to gain full parental approval and love.
Right? Because that's just UPB. If you only have to say, I did the best I could, and there has to be no empirical proof for anything, then children should have those magic words as well.
In fact, they should have them even more so than adults do, because they're children, and therefore they should have far fewer moral standards and far lower moral standards than adults do.
So UPB is very, very powerful, but UPB fucks up your relationships, if they are...
Superstitious or subjective or exploitive or abusive.
I mean, UPB completely detonates the foundations of many relationships that we have.
I think it will detonate the bad ones and create a pathway to new and better ones, which is why people want to stay.
I mean, we also, look, I am, you are, we are also heavily invested in UPB not being true.
Hugely. I mean, probably I have a little less, but Look, if UPB is false, right, if UPB is false, if there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior, if it's all just about material acquisition, while pretending, do you not think I could be a great politician?
Do you not think I could become a great priest if there's no such thing as truth and universal standards?
Fuck, I'll ditch this shit and I'll go to a pulpit and I'll go run for office.
And you know I'd be hugely welcome in the religious community as an atheist turned Christian or Muslim or Zoroastrian.
I'd be hugely welcomed in the political arena as an ex-libertarian.
And my verbal skills and argumentation skills and debating skills are strong enough that I could just do some...
I could make a fortune.
Could make a fortune and amass great power.
But... You know, the only thing that restrains me from doing that is that there's rational and true ethics in my way.
So, we want UPB to be true, and we also want UPB to be disproven, because if UPB is disproven, then We don't have to have those conversations about virtue with people in our lives, about universality, about, hey, you're using this moral rule.
Did this apply to me equally, if not more so, as a child?
If not, why not? If UBB is false, we can go back to debating arguments from effect.
We can go back to looking up how the roads were built in the 18th century.
We can go back to looking up...
We can go join Sam Harris in his crusade to make the world better for certain people at the expense of others, which is exactly what the state...
It's all about. And religion, of course.
Some people go to heaven, everybody else goes to hell.
So, I think it's important to recognize that there's no philosophy without UBB. There's no philosophy without UBB, because then philosophy simply becomes opinion.
And there's no standing on the barricades for opinion.
There's no standing on the barricades for opinion.
There's no courage for opinion.
In fact, if it's opinion, being intransigent is being an asshole, right?
Like if I just say, well, Queen is the best band, okay, let's say something that's not UPB. Sting is the best singer ever, and I just stand intransigent on that, that's just being, you know, kind of close-minded, bigoted jerk.
If there's no truth, then certainty is error.
There is no philosophy.
If there is no truth, there is no love if there is no truth.
If UPB is false, the consequences are exactly the same as if determinism is true.
There are no values.
In a non-UPB universe, there are no values.
There is no truth. In a non-UPB universe, there is no philosophy.
In a deterministic universe, there are no values.
There is no truth. And there is no philosophy.
Because there are no preferred states if there's no UPB, and there are no preferred states if determinism is true.
So, if you want to have love, if you want to have integrity, if you want to have the self-esteem of courage and standing up for your beliefs, then you have to damn well figure out whether those beliefs are true or false, and there's no way to do that without UPB. So yeah, I think it's important to recognize that we need it.
I think it's important to recognize that it's true.
I think it's equally important to recognize that it's volatile and disruptive.
I'm not enjoying Boardwalk Empire.
I thought it was pretty cliched.
I watched a bit of the first episode, but I just couldn't get into it.
There were no likable characters, no particular message that I hadn't seen a million times before, so I didn't...
Didn't particularly get into it, I'm afraid.
But, you know, just my particular approach.
Is fraud force?
Well, yeah, for sure.
If it's not ahead of time.
I mean, if I send you $100 and you're supposed to ship me an iPod and you don't, then you've just stolen my $100.
As if you've just taken it from me.
It's more like pickpocket than it is, like stick them up.
But yeah, for sure, fraud is false.
Somebody said, when I took an ethics class, the professor had a hard time getting my fellow students to understand...
That just because something is against the law, it doesn't mean it's immoral.
People seem to have this little pre-programmed notion that laws set forth what is moral or immoral, that it's immoral to disobey government laws.
Well, of course, they do. I mean, that's what we're trained to do, right?
That's what we're trained to do.
This is positive versus natural law, right?
So positive law simply says that what's wrong is that which is disallowed.
This took a huge blow, of course, during the Second World War, when it was recognized that what the Nazis did was legal under the system of laws that they had created.
And people had a big problem with that.
And so that's a big problem for that, for sure.
You know, one of the nastiest unrecognized characters in all of cinema is Elliot Ness in The Untouchables.
Elliot Ness in The Untouchables is a complete fucking Nazi.
And I think if you ever watch that film, or if you ever watch it again, or if you see it for the first time, The last line in the film is such a damning indictment that nobody's ever commented or mentioned this, and maybe I'll do a movie review of it as a whole, but I don't think I could end watching it again.
But Elliot Ness is just completely stone evil in The Untouchables.
Because he goes around blowing the shit out of people, like killing and murdering left, right, and center.
Because he's a lawmaker and With prohibition.
In prohibition. And then at the end of the movie, does anybody know?
Remember what he says at the end of the movie?
A reporter says, hey, I hear prohibition's gonna end.
What are you gonna do if drinking becomes legal?
He says, well, guess I'll have a drink.
In other words, there's no ethics outside of what is legal and what is illegal.
If somebody says that it's illegal, I'll blow the living shit out of people, murder people, left, right, and center, like a truly deranged...
Hitman on steroids, cocaine, PCB, and religious psychoses.
But then if they make it illegal, I'll just go have a drink.
That's a weathervane of state power that is the root of this kind of evil.
This is, of course, the question.
You have friends who are cops to say, hey, is there any fucking law these people would pass that you wouldn't enforce?
If not, then you're just a hitman and you know it.
You're just an enforcer.
You're just the heavy.
You're just an Al Capone in a blue costume, right?
But this, I mean, this is utterly unremarked upon, right?
People don't even notice this.
We're so immersed in this law is virtue that when a guy says, oh, well, yeah, no, I'll shoot people left, right, and center because it's illegal.
But the moment they make it legal, I guess I'll just go have a drink.
There's nothing moral about it.
It's just What I'm told to do.
This guy's a hero, right? This is Kevin Costner plays him.
He's considered to be a stand-up guy, a hero, a good guy.
Because on the other hand, it's Robert De Niro braining people with baseball bats and stuff, right?
Not that that's giving away, because he does that in about 80% of his films, but I think that's just an important thing to recognize for sure.
For sure. Look, I mean, I've been meaning to do this 20th century thing, but I mean, it's taking a while to get the research together.
The death of the West, 20th century.
20th century, in a brief nutshell, is everybody became shit scared of absolutism in the 20th century.
Right? So relativism grew out of the Second World War.
Because the Nazis were really certain And the Allies, because of this traditional story of appeasement that's believed, the Allies were wavering and uncertain, and the Nazis were certain and resolute, and you see this all over the time, you know, that the bad guys are resolute and the good guys are wavering, and, like, the bad guys will put a bullet in you, but the good guys always hesitate, and so you get this huge amount of propaganda that certainty is evil.
This comes out of complete misunderstanding of the lessons of the 20th century.
It's not that certainty is evil.
It's that irrationality in action is immoral.
But for people to see the irrationality of the Nazis, they would have had to look into the irrationality of their own leaders.
To genuinely understand the evil of Nazism means to understand the evils of statism, which means to look into your own society.
But of course, the ruling class wants to beat off competitions.
Competitors, rather, they don't want to examine the roots of their own power.
So, this myth arose that what was wrong with the world was that people were certain.
And that's why you always hear certainty is always portrayed as extremism, as bigotry, as narrow-mindedness, as a lack of perspective, right?
I mean, this rally to restore sanity is going on this weekend.
It's just all about, you know, moderation.
Non-extremism.
See the other person's point of view.
Don't be certain of anything.
Because certainty is dangerous.
Because the Tea Party people, they're just damn certain, but they're crazy, angry, middle-aged white guys who feel threatened because of a multicultural society.
There's no argument. It's just any kind of certainty is considered immature and wrong and evil and dangerous.
Maybe not evil, but it leads that way.
But the problem is, of course, that society still needs to get shit done and the rulers still need to steal from you, right?
So they have to be pretty damn certain.
So, yeah, if you can get people to believe that the laws are morality, then you solve the problem of certainty, right, by just replacing it with authority, which is what always happens, right?
The opposite of UPB is totalitarianism because shit still needs to get done in society.
If we don't have reason and evidence, then all we have left is authority and violence.
It's one or the other. There is no middle road, except one leading one way or the other.
All right. Well, unless we have any other questions, my baby be up.
So I might...
And we went over last week, so maybe we can stop a little early this week if we don't have more questions.
There is going to be a video from Libertopia.
It's being worked on, but it will take a while.
That was a good speech.
That's a good, good, good speech.
Oh, a reminder, I guess I will be speaking at the Ontario Libertarian Party's annual gathering this Saturday, November the 6th at 10 a.m.
You can find the event on the Facebook.
My friend is asking, are you able to put the basic of what UPB is in one statement?
Well, sure. Well, sure.
Which statement do you want? Well...
Theories about human behavior must be universal.
Yeah, yeah, 1700 podcasts to do this.
Well, yeah, you know, I don't get donations for six words.
I haven't seen the Rally to Restore Insanity, I don't know.
I mean, I'm really losing steam on current events, so I think it's a little tough to, but I might have a look at it, or at least some of the highlights.
But I mean, I already know what it is, right?
I already know what it is.
It's that certainty is wrong.
And look, certainty in the political realm is wrong.
Of course it is. Because it means certain bullying.
It means certain violence. I'm certain that violence should be used to achieve my goals.
Yeah, that kind of certainty is wrong.
But you don't oppose it with moderation.
Well, some violence is valid to achieve some people's goals, yes.
But not too much violence and not everyone.
Less rape is not...
A moral standard.
Oh, I've done videos on voting.
I'm not going to reiterate those arguments here.
You're welcome to check them out on Utubby.
Oh, thank you very much.
I really do appreciate that.
Mr. K from Baltimore. Halloween.
Isabella has the cutest little bee costume and we're going to be rolling around with the other kids in the neighborhood and grabbing candy for Isabella.
I've done 134 true newses.
Well, all right.
Thank you everybody so much. I really do appreciate this very exciting challenge of UPB. It is a great, great theory to keep working on and to keep figuring out.
And I really do appreciate people's time to ask these questions.
And I would definitely recommend More questions, you know, send them to me by email.
I can do them in a UPB emails of the week.
I'm sorry, sorry, sorry that I haven't worked as much on UPB in terms of explicating it.
I keep dandling it in front of conference presenters saying this is what I'd like to talk about, but unfortunately they want other stuff and that's fine.
I am a market-driven guy still and you do have to play some clubs before you pay the stadiums, which is great and I hugely appreciate the people having me out to do my talks, but UPB is not a hot topic at the moment.
And so, I'm sorry that I haven't worked as much on UPB as I'd like to, but I will definitely have it on the list for the future.
And I hope to do a tour, a UPB tour, to people about UPB because I think it's very essential.
It is the most essential thing that is going on here, and I hope to further refine the theory, shore up its weak spots, find areas in which can be improved, which is definitely a communal process.
It's very hard to see the flaws in your own theory, but it's very easy to see the flaws in other people's theories, so that's where you can do some just great stuff with helping me to make it stronger.
I think by this time it's definitely become a communal effort, which means that you share the blame if it's disproven.
All right. Thank you, everybody, so much.
Thank you for your support.
Thank you for your encouragement.
Thank you for sending out the videos.
Thank you for your kind words.
Thank you for your donations. We are doing some magnificent stuff.
Next week, there's a time change.
Remember, it is a time change.
We will be doing it on Mars time.
Is that right? Mars time?
God of War. And...
Yeah, marzipan time, which means just wolf down the ugliest candy known to man.
I used to get that from my grandmother who was German.
Marzipan. It's hideous.
Satan's crappers. Anyway, so have yourselves a great week.
Don't forget the time change. I'll remember to post about it during the board and still got a couple of listener combos to shoot out this week.
And thank you again so much to the research team who's gathering together some great data for the FDR documentary.
And if you're interested, if you're interested, I'll just put this out at the end.
If you're interested, I have some vague rumblings of a possibility for a movie script.
And I have, I think, a really good idea, but it needs some fleshing out.
And if you're interested in that kind of creative stuff, I'd love to have a conference called with interested listeners where we just brainstorm about how this movie might shake out because I think that'd be a very interesting thing to get involved in.
So if you're interested, shoot me an email and we will set up a time to chat.
Have yourself an absolutely wonderful week.
We're doing some great, great fucking stuff here, people, and I really appreciate everyone's support.
Onward and upward, as they say.
▲
Export Selection