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June 20, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
26:42
2165 The Ethics of Idiocy

Have you ever had someone pose these kinds of ethical questions to you? A man's wife is dying, and the druggist will not sell him the medicine that will save her, is he allowed to steal it? A trolley is thundering down the tracks, do you throw a switch and have it kill fewer people. Well-stocked answering them.

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Hello, everybody.
It is Stefan Molyneux from Freedom in Radio.
So, here are some typical, candy-ass, ridiculous philosophical questions that are bandied about, oh, so regularly.
And I'm actually not even going to say my answers.
The answers to these questions.
Number one.
Poor Bob.
His wife is sick.
And she needs a drug to save her.
And that drug costs $10,000.
Bob, he does not have the money.
And the pharmacist who has the drug will not sell it to him for less than $10,000.
Is Bob justified in going and taking the drug, stealing the drug?
Well, of course not.
I mean, of course not.
And then people say, ah, so somebody should die in order to respect Your property rights.
Well, but the reality is that Bob's wife is not dying because of the pharmacist.
Bob's wife is dying because she's ill.
And it's impossible and ridiculous to take these kinds of cases in isolation.
So, for instance...
If Bob is part of a social group of any kind, then Bob is going to go to his friends, his family, his church, his Legion Hall, his you name it, right?
Photography club and say, my wife is really sick.
I need to borrow some money and I will pay you back.
And they will all chip in and they probably won't even ask for the money back.
Right?
If Bob has a hundred friends, then, you know, they each chip in a hundred bucks, and he's fine.
And that's one possibility.
Charity.
And if he doesn't have any friends, he can go to a charity.
The United Way, the Salvation Army.
He can go to any number of charities and say, this is the situation.
I don't have any money.
If you don't have the charity to give me, I will work for you for free for a certain period of time to pay off the money.
So he can get the money that way.
What about going to a bank and saying, look, if my wife takes this pill, she's going to get better, and then with the additional income of her working, we will be able to pay you back.
Well, so be it.
He gets the money from the bank.
Ah, maybe the bank doesn't want to lend him the money.
Well, why is the bank not going to lend him the money?
Because...
He's got no credit.
Why has he got no credit?
Well, he's old enough to be married, right?
So we assume he's in his 20s probably, and his wife is sick.
Has he never had a job before?
Does he not have a job now?
If he's young, he's got parents, and his parents will help him out.
If he's older, then he should have worked a little bit here and there, or at least paid off some debts, borrowed and paid off some money.
Here's another perfectly legal way for Bob to get to $10,000.
He can apply for a bunch of credit cards with, you know, five credit cards with a $2,000 spending limit.
He racks them up.
And then he pays back the credit cards.
Or if he can't, he can declare his bankruptcy.
And lo and behold, his wife is fine.
He can auction off a portion of his wife's future earnings after she's cured, right?
So let's say she makes $20,000 a year, takes $10,000 at six months of her wages, so he offers someone a full year of her wages, $20,000 in return for $10,000 now, signs a contract, bang, he's got the money.
Here's another way that he can get the money.
He can say to the pharmacist, are you kidding me?
Are you kidding me?
You were going to let my wife die rather than strike some kind of deal which will get you paid back later for the sake of a life-saving medicine now?
Fine.
You, sir, are a total prick.
You are a total prick.
And I'm going to start to mount an education campaign that says this is what you're doing.
My wife is dying.
I've offered you every conceivable way to work for you for free, to sell off a portion of my wife's earnings, to pay in installment plans, to get charity, and you will not sell me the medicine if I don't have the money up front right now.
In other words, your inaction is going to trigger My wife's death.
I'm going to put this on the web.
I'm going to complain to your governing body.
I'm going to talk to the newspapers.
Do you think the newspapers would be interested in some selfish store owner who's going to trigger the death of a woman?
Yeah.
Oh yeah.
How much bad publicity is this going to generate for you?
I would also, if this didn't work, I would contact the agency that made the drug, the company that made the drug.
And I would say, look, you want this drug to help people.
We want to be helped.
I'm willing to do whatever it takes to pay you back over time or whatever.
But if you're not willing to give me the drug to save my wife, I am going to put this on the web.
I'm going to contact the local media.
I am going to try and rouse public sentiment against you.
And how much bad publicity is this going to generate when I hand out pictures to the media of my wife's shrunken-faced...
Gauze-wrapped, dying face to the media.
How much bad publicity is this going to generate for you?
And it's all true.
No slander in it.
It's all true.
Do you think that they're going to find a way to get the medicine to you for some possible remuneration down the road?
Of course they are.
Of course they are.
They're not idiots.
And this is just off the top of my head.
These are probably a dozen ways that this person can get the money.
But...
If you don't have any credit and you don't have any health insurance and so on, then you've kind of been irresponsible.
And it's a tough world in the real world.
In other words, your irresponsibility is the root cause of your problem.
So let's say that you have a really terrible credit rating and every time you borrow money from someone, you never pay it back.
Well, then people are going to be much less likely to borrow you.
Maybe you've been a complete prick to everyone in your social environment.
You've driven away your parents by being a total jerk.
Okay, maybe your parents are a little more reciprocal.
They were probably jerks first.
But let's say you've driven everyone out of your life by being selfish, by not listening to advice, by yelling at your friends, bullying them, pushing them, attempting to pick up their girlfriends, taking long, slow, languid dumps on their Chippendale furniture.
Like Freddie Mercury's cat.
This, you've driven everyone away because you've been a total jerk.
Well, in the real world, you know, in a free society, actions have consequences.
You may be able to appeal to the kindness of strangers like Balanche Dubois, but the kindness of friends has been kind of tapped out.
Maybe friends have helped you and helped you and helped you, and you've never lifted a finger to help them back.
You've bled your social account dry.
Well, that's kind of your fault then that no one wants to help you.
It's kind of your fault that nobody wants to lend you money.
Because property is personhood.
Property is the body.
And if you're not comfortable with violations of the body, you shouldn't be comfortable with violations of property because they're really one and the same thing.
So, the real question is this.
Not a guy's wife is dying, blah, blah, blah.
The real question is this.
A man takes up smoking.
Everyone tells him not to take up smoking.
He gets a long lecture from people who are smoking saying, listen, you don't want to drop five grand on a crippling habit that's going to socially ostracize you, make everything smell, make you cough and kill you.
So don't do it.
But he doesn't listen to them.
He goes and does it.
His doctor says, listen, you've got to not smoke.
It's really, really bad for you.
And he keeps smoking.
People offer to his insurance company office to pay him for a smoking cessation program and he doesn't do it.
He just keeps smoking and keeps smoking.
And then he gets lung cancer.
Is he allowed to hold down the pharmacist and remove a lung?
He gets lung cancer in one lung.
Is he allowed to hold down the pharmacist and remove the pharmacist's lung with a spoon to replace his diseased lung?
I mean, hospital, who cares, right?
Is he allowed to forcibly remove the pharmacist's healthy lung, the pharmacist who quit smoking, or who didn't smoke, who never smoked?
Is he allowed to do that?
If you don't think he is, then obviously you don't think the guy should steal.
Here's another example.
If I eat and eat and eat and don't deal with whatever emotional issues are driving me to eat and eat and eat, I don't go to therapy, I avoid dieting, I avoid everyone who's telling me to lose weight, I don't listen to my doctor, I don't do this, I don't do that, I don't do the other, and then I get diabetes.
Am I allowed to siphon off somebody else's insulin?
Is it pancreas?
I think pancreas.
Who knows, right?
Am I allowed to siphon off somebody else's insulin to replace my own every day?
To hold them down, stick a needle in their arms, siphon off their insulin.
I know it doesn't work that way.
Just go with me in the metaphor.
Am I allowed to siphon off their insulin to replace mine, which through my own choices I have destroyed?
Well, if you're not comfortable with that, I go to a firework store and I buy a big box of fireworks.
And everyone says, read the instructions.
And for heaven's sakes, don't light them indoors and don't light all of them in the box at the same time and don't hold them while you're lighting them.
And I read the instructions.
I'm intelligent.
I'm capable.
But I decide, wouldn't it be fun if I held the fireworks and lit them?
And I blow off both of my thumbs.
Am I then allowed to tackle some passerby and cut off his thumb and ask the hospital to attach it to my hand?
Of course not.
Of course not.
People somehow think that property is entirely separate from the body.
But it's not.
If I enslave you for a month, I haven't taken any of your physical property.
I haven't taken any of your physical parts.
I haven't taken your thumb or your lung or your insulin.
I've simply taken your time.
But time is an aspect of morality.
Time is an aspect of ownership of property.
I mean, rental versus ownership is differentiated through time.
Ownership, there's no end.
End to the ownership in rental, there is.
Renting a car is different from buying a car because of the element of time.
Time is essential to ownership.
A rapist only owns or possesses or utilizes his victim for a short time.
Yet it is not any of the less crime for that.
And so, if you go and steal $10,000 worth of someone's stuff, you have just involuntarily enslaved them for the amount of time it took for them to produce that $10,000 worth of value.
You go and steal the pharmacist's $10,000 pill, then he's got to go and make $10,000.
That may take him a month or two, so you've just enslaved him for a month or two.
As surely as if you locked him in a basement.
Just because the government does it doesn't mean we should.
Now, a desperate man goes and steals.
He's made all the bad mistakes.
He's got no friends.
No charity will help him.
He's got no credit.
No credit cards will even give him freebies.
He can't beg, borrow, or any kind of make promises or anything like that.
This is a ridiculous situation.
Of course someone's going to help him.
Of course someone's going to help him.
So he goes and steals.
Okay, so he goes and steals.
And then he takes the punishment.
Okay, it's still morally wrong, so he's going to do it.
He's going to do it.
If the pharmacist press charges, then he has to go, and his wife's alive because she took the pill, and he goes to jail for a month.
Fine.
That's his choice.
Everyone can make these choices.
It's still morally wrong.
He still has to make restitution.
And I'm sure the pharmacist would rather have double the price of the pill back.
Right, so either the pharmacist is going to offer this up front, or he's going to take it in legal restitution in a free society.
Someone's going to offer him double the value.
He's going to have to pay him back double the value of the pill or whatever was stolen or whatever the punishment is going to be.
So, you know, he either agrees to it up front or he goes through the extra hassle of having to press charges in a free society afterwards.
He either agrees to give the pill in return for money later on or it's going to be extracted through some sort of punitive measure.
So that's the answer.
Life is a continuum.
You know, it's not philosophizing in midstream.
It's like Noam Chomsky's thing.
Well, the guy's got three kids and, you know, he doesn't have the money to feed...
Well, stop having the kids.
It's a choice to have kids.
Parenting is the...
You don't have a choice over who your parents were, but you do have a choice over becoming a parent, right?
Anyway, so that's...
That's number one.
That's number one.
It's nonsense, it's ridiculous, and it's a...
It's a setup.
It's a setup.
We can't take the healthy lungs from healthy people to subsidize the disease lifestyle of diseased people.
You can ask someone for a lung.
You can hope that someone comes up who's a dead donor body, but you cannot go and take someone's lung because you smoked.
You cannot go and hack off someone's thumb because you lost both of yours because you were an idiot.
Because I believe in the little bugaboo called choice.
I believe that choice is limited in significant areas based upon childhood trauma, but I believe that that choice is only limited fundamentally in the modern society.
That choice is only fundamentally limited because of our ignorance and avoidance of the effects of childhood trauma, not because of the childhood trauma itself.
So, for instance, if you have...
If you have a tendency towards heart disease in your family, but you don't know that, then you're just going to live a normal life and die at 40.
But if you know that you have a tendency towards heart disease in your family, then you can take all the necessary steps that you need to avoid becoming a victim of it.
If you don't know the effects of your family history, then the choices that you make are going to be considerably worse.
And this is why I've focused on, you know, publicizing the Bomb and the Brain stuff and publicizing all the shows I've done recently, because I want people to know the effects of childhood abuse upon their adulthood, because their choice does diminish.
In the absence of the knowledge of the effects of childhood abuse, choice diminishes significantly.
But I do believe also...
That since, I mean, the basics of psychology have been around, and you could argue since Shakespeare's time, but the basics of psychology have been around certainly for 120, 130, 140 years.
And in particular over the last 40 years, since the self-help revolution and the self-knowledge revolution of the 1970s, nobody can claim to know that, or nobody can claim ignorance of the fact that your childhood has an effect on your choices as an adult.
I mean, that's like a smoker saying, I had no idea it was bad for me.
Now.
Oh yeah, 1920 maybe, but now?
No, it's ridiculous.
Now, of course, there are the long-term domino effects of allowing people or morally justifying the stealing of...
Medicine, right?
If you morally justify the stealing of medicine, all you're guaranteeing is that more medicine will be stolen, which means less medicine will be developed, which means there will be fewer pharmacies, which means eventually, if that trend continues, there will be no medicine.
Obviously, right?
It's real good for the guy whose wife's dying, but it's real bad for the guy whose wife's dying a couple of years down the road.
Because he's got nothing even to steal, beg, buy, or borrow.
So that's the pharmacist nonsense.
Let's look at another one.
There is a trolley.
Ah, the trolley of philosophical doom, death, and destruction.
There is a trolley that is coming down the tracks.
And there is a switch.
And you can pull the switch.
You're on a bridge.
You can see this coming down.
And on one side is...
Five people, and on another side is one guy, and they're all tied to the tracks.
Let's see how ridiculous this stuff is.
They're all tied to the tracks, and you're up there, and you can throw the switch.
Which switch do you throw?
Which way do you send it?
Do you send it to kill the two guys tied to the tracks, or do you send it to kill the five guys tied to the tracks?
The old guys or the young guys?
The fat guys or the thin guys?
The pregnant women or the women with children.
I mean, what a load of nonsense.
sense.
Thank you.
I mean, let's at least try and cure diseases that have the capacity to exist.
You tell me anyone in history who's actually been faced with this choice.
Who's actually been faced with this choice and doesn't just react in some instinctive manner.
Who on earth has stood on a bridge and seen a bunch of guys tied on a train track and a trolley coming down and knows which way the switch is going to go and blah, blah, blah, blah, blah.
I mean, the trolleys have built-in brakes.
They...
You don't get...
I've lived for 45 of God's green years, and I have never seen anyone tied to a train track.
Outside of Sting slash...
Oh, what's her name?
Grace something or other.
The supermodel with the angular cheekbones.
I've never seen anyone tied to tracks.
Demolition Man, that's the name of the song.
I've never seen anyone tied to any train tracks.
And so, this is never going to happen.
You know, maybe once in the entire history of the universe is somebody going to be faced with this choice.
It's like training for a sport that doesn't exist.
It's like going to school for eight years to treat imaginary illnesses that can't possibly exist.
I mean, that's insane.
It's mental.
I mean, in general, you know, people will work to minimize the damage that is occurring.
So generally, I think people will try and steer the train onto the track with the fewer people to get squished.
Yeah, okay, fine.
Or maybe the older people can get squished, they've had more of a life, the younger, pregnant, who knows, right?
But generally, people will work to maximize.
But what nonsense.
I mean, nobody's ever going to face that situation.
It's a no-win situation.
It's really designed to just paralyze you.
Well, it provokes debate.
But so what?
It provokes debate about something that's never going to happen, doesn't exist.
These lifeboat scenarios are just ridiculous.
It's ridiculous.
You don't start off people's discussion about medicine by talking about imaginary illnesses that are going to cause the death of the patient, no matter what.
There's an imaginary illness called Lipsa-Rapsa-Dopsa-Dopsa-Dong that's going to kill your patient.
What do you do?
I don't know.
I mean, give me something real.
Give me an appendectomy.
You know, give me something that's actually going to happen.
It's ridiculous.
It's not thought-provoking.
It's brain-paralyzing.
So, here's another example, or a counter-example.
Taxation is force.
Discuss.
Discuss.
Well, there's something that's actually happening.
And there's something where there are real moral judgments.
Talking about the consequence of taxation, is it good or bad?
Taxation is force.
Discuss.
And once people understand that taxation is force, what is your relationship to people on the receiving end of tax money?
What is your relationship to the people who are enforcing this violence?
What is the morality of theft?
Those, to me, would be actually intelligent discussions and useful discussions to have.
There's another one.
I saw some tool on the Colbert Report.
I think it was some Harvard douche who was talking about you're in a lifeboat and you eat the sick person if you're out of food.
I mean, who cares?
It's never going to happen.
And, of course, if you're in a situation where there's no productive choice...
Then you're not in a situation where morality applies, where freedom applies.
You know, if you're a hired killer, go out and shoot some guy, that's immoral, because you don't have to do that.
If somebody's got a gun in your head and says, shoot this guy or shoot this guy, and you shoot one of them, it's not a moral situation.
Morality requires choice.
Morality is...
I mean, you don't see a lot of nutritionists visiting prison inmates because the prison inmates eat whatever slop is put in front of them.
They don't have a choice about their food.
That's why a nutritionist who's going to go to a prison is ridiculous because they don't have any choice about what they eat.
I mean, if you suggested that to a nutritionist, go to the prison and try and convince the prisoners to eat better meals, they'd say, look, they can't choose their meals.
Are you crazy?
What?
Nutritional advice is meaningless when you don't have a choice about what you eat.
Moral advice is meaningless when you don't have a choice about your actions, when you're not in a situation of 360-degree choice.
It's like two guys jump out of a plane, and then one of the guys is a philosopher, and he turns to the other guy and says,"'Which way do you want to go?' Well, I'm heading down because that's where the...
I don't have a choice about where I'm going to go.
I'm heading down because that's what gravity's going to do and splat.
So these, I don't know, this is emergency situations.
Who cares?
Doesn't matter.
It's ridiculous and it's a prison visit for a nutritionist.
Or it's like trying to give career advice to Ivan Denisovich, right?
Solzhenitsyn wrote this book, One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich, about the life of a man who is in one of Stalin's work gangs, where he's forced to wake up, he's forced to go and build houses in the middle of nowhere, and he has no choice about any part of his day.
It's like going to him and saying, what would you like to do with your day tomorrow?
What would make you happiest tomorrow?
Well, all the choices that would make him happiest don't exist.
Not be here.
Go to Acapulco.
Have a youthful Britney Spears.
Gyrate on my happy Joe Johnson.
I mean, it would be ridiculous.
I mean, you understand, this would be the actions of a crazy...
Applying to Joseph Stalin and saying, I want to give career guidance to the prisoners of your worker gulags.
I mean, good heavens.
That would be considered insane.
Yet somehow in the realm of philosophy, philosophizing in situations of far greater extremity, emergency and far less choice...
It's somehow considered to be thought-provoking and stimulating, and it incites discussion.
I mean, the only discussion it should incite is, you know, bullshit, professor.
Come on, bullshit, professor.
You want to talk ethics, Mr.
Prof?
Let's talk ethics, Mr.
Harvard douche on a stick.
Let's talk ethics.
Let's talk about where your salary comes from.
Because your salary largely comes from the state cartel-protected and subsidized employment that you have.
Your money comes disproportionately from the poor through force.
What are the ethics of that, Mr.
Professor?
Because that's something you and I can do something about.
You, in particular, can do something about it.
Why can't you have that discussion?
Meh.
F. Let's get back to whether we eat the sick boy in the lifeboat.
I want to talk about the ethics I can actually do something about that permeate our entire society.
Selling off the labor of the unborn through national debts.
What's the ethic of that?
No, no, no, no, no!
Let's talk about trolleys and people tied to train tracks, right?
You get it?
All it's designed to do is to get you to think that philosophy and morality has nothing to do with anything.
It's all bullshit, half-stoned, late-night dorm room rap sessions that lead nowhere and can conclude nothing.
Is spanking the initiation of force?
Why do we bar hitting among adults but permit and praise it from children for children?
Well, there's something you can do something about.
There's something you can make a choice about.
There's a principle that can be applied.
Can we talk about it?
Nope!
Nope, nope, nope.
And this is what is called philosophers.
Career counselors for prisoners and nutritionists for jail cell inmates.
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