Aug. 23, 2012 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
17:56
2202 Anarchast Episode 31 with Stefan Molyneux
In Episode 31 Jeff talks to Stefan Molyneux while enjoying the sun at PorcFest 2012. They dive into a discussion on many topics of philosophy but start out with Stefan's own rational theory of ethics called Universally Preferable Behavior (UPB). They then discuss mainstream philosophy and how the Platonist theory of forms has been the driving force for tyranny throughout the ages. Jeff asks 'if you were young would you go to a university today to learn philosophy', hear Stefan's response above.
Hey everybody, welcome to another edition of Anarchast.
I have another returning guest and I'm starting to feel like, you may feel like there's only 20 anarchists on earth because now we've started to actually evolve guests but that's not the case at all.
We're actually at Porkfest and I'm actually seeing a lot of people who we've interviewed in the past but over the internet so it's way better in person so we can see each other and then be here at Porkfest which is really cool and Stefan Molyneux, thanks for being with us again.
My pleasure, good to see you again.
How many pork fests have you been at?
This is my third.
Every time I've come with my family and my daughter loves it here.
My wife, now that it's not raining, the last two pork fests have been kind of like a car wash in the woods.
Really, really wet, rainy, muggy, and this means like 8 million bucks.
You go on a slow mosquito diet over the weekend, you come out 4 pounds lighter mostly because your precious fluids have been stolen by those little bastards.
But this, I mean, what an amazing day.
It's absolutely beautiful.
So, yeah, she's having a great time.
Good.
Yeah, well, some people think the government controls the weather, so maybe they're doing that on purpose, but now they're trying to fry us.
It's a little extra hot.
They haven't washed us out, now they're going to just irradiate us.
So, yeah, I wanted to talk to you about a few things.
One thing that's...
I'm still definitely in the learning stage of philosophy.
I'm an anarchist because it sounds good, and I love everything I hear.
And it gets chicks.
Yeah, not two.
I got all the girls.
But the philosophy side is still something I've definitely got a long way to go to learning.
And one of the things that you talk about a lot is UPB. And for a long time, I didn't even know what that was.
Even if you Google it, it wasn't really obvious.
So I'd like, if you could, to explain a little bit about UPB because some people might not know much about that.
Sure.
Okay.
So the great challenge is...
With ethics is a big problem because the only people who are usually interested in ethics are people who are kind of good to begin with.
You know, like serial murderers, politicians, they're not particularly interested in the discipline of ethics.
And so ethics has been a problem that it's a diet book for thin people.
Because you can't find a way to reach people who want to do great evil or who are creating propaganda that facilitates great evil.
You can't find a way to oppose them because those people don't really care about it.
And the people who want to go do great evil, they just want to go stampeding and so on to go and do it.
So, because we need people to be good for society to function, And people don't know what goodness is philosophically.
They can't find a way to convince other people unless they're already good, in which case, who cares?
And so because of that, people have turned to two things.
They've turned to gods and they've turned to governments to force people to be good.
And there's a carrot, right?
The carrot is you get to be free in the government world or you go to jail.
That's the stick.
Whereas in religion, you get to go to heaven or you have to go to hell.
And it's in the absence of a rational argument, you will always find that threats escalate Because you want people to do something, but you can't convince them rationally, so you end up just getting angry and threatening them with something, whether it's jail or hell.
And so, I've really spent a lot of time focused on how can we create a system of ethics that is irrefutable, that works from first principles, that doesn't appeal to self-interest, because if you appeal to self-interest, that doesn't work.
You know, like Ayn Rand's formulation, which basically said, that which is good for man is the moral, but there's no collective called man.
You know, that political power is working great for Barack Obama.
You know, because he wants it, he pursues it, he wants it again, he's addicted to it.
So, that which is good for him is the state that we have.
You know, for some guy who's in jail for marijuana possession, it's not so good.
But how do you determine between the two?
And Aristotle's pursuit of the excellence and stuff is like, yeah, excellence, you can have excellence in evil.
And evil people really like to be good at being evil.
So, I really wanted to try and take a different approach.
I've worked out a system that has been out for about five or six years now.
A lot of people have taken some good swings at it.
It's stayed up, so it's tentatively working.
It's always subject to revision.
Basically, the idea is that we differentiate ethics From aesthetics.
Aesthetics are, you like that shirt, for some reason that can't be comprehended.
You like that shirt, I like this shirt.
This is not a moral.
Your choice of shirts, what kind of ice cream you like, where you want to live, it's not a moral choice.
That's an aesthetic choice.
Because it's not universal.
Not everyone has to wear that shirt.
Not everyone has to live in Acapulco.
And so it's not a universal.
But in science, we know the difference between a universal and a local, right?
This rock falls is not a scientific theory.
You know, all objects accelerate to each other based upon calculations of mass and gravity.
9.8 meters per second per second falling towards the earth.
That is a scientific theory.
That's universal.
Everything does that.
All things do that.
So I differentiate between ethics and aesthetics by ethics is universally.
Preferable behavior.
Everyone has to, you know, for the theory to work, for it to be virtuous, for it to be virtue at all, it has to be universal.
The reason that it's universal is if it's not virtue, it has to be just some local preference.
And so there's four, I think, amazing moral rules that this system validates.
The first is don't steal, the second is don't kill, the third is don't rape, and the fourth is don't He said don't kill is the first one.
And Aristotle said a long time ago, he said, if you come up with a system of ethics that can be used to prove that rape is good, I kind of don't care what, you know, you've made a mistake somewhere, like it doesn't matter what logic you've used, there's something wrong with that.
And so very briefly, the theory of UPB, it works for sort of two guys in a row.
Bob and Doug in a row.
And if you say, stealing is universally preferable behavior.
Stealing is the good.
Stealing is what everyone should be doing.
It actually cannot be achieved.
It is a logical contradiction to try and achieve that with two guys in a row.
Because let's say, I want to steal your glasses.
And stealing is the good.
Then you should want me to steal your glasses because stealing is the good for everyone.
But if you want me to steal your glasses, I'm not stealing them.
Because stealing has to be something against your will.
In other words, it has to be something that I want to do, take your glasses, but something that you do not want me to do.
And so if you say stealing is the good, stealing is virtuous, stealing is universally preferable behavior, it can't work logically.
And we don't have to run through the books free on my website at freedomainradio.com, but I run through a bunch of these different scenarios, and I'm actually going to do a presentation with Doug Casey next month in Vancouver where I'm going to use audience participation to make these points, get people up, get them to act out various ethical scenarios.
The rape one might be sort of interesting.
Anyway, so the idea is that...
When you make ethics truly universal, then it actually validates all the common sense ethical instincts that we have around stealing, theft, rape, assault and murder.
Stealing with theft being kind of redundant.
So that's really what I've been working on.
It validates the anarchist position.
Because it's universal, you don't get a second layer of humanity.
You know, we're always trying to divide society into this layer cake.
You know, there's the citizens who aren't allowed to steal, and then there's the government, which must steal in order to maintain order in society.
And they say, well, it's a social contract.
You and I can't unilaterally impose contracts on the unborn against their will and then rob them for the rest of their life, but the government can because they have a different moral set of rules.
And so ethics, to universalize it, means not just horizontally among the citizenry, but vertically among the power structure, which destroys the legitimacy of the state, and reveals taxation as theft, and reveals war as murder, and so on.
And so that's a project that I've been working on for quite some time, and I defended pretty regularly, I debated pretty regularly, and if we can get a system of ethics that doesn't rely on guards and governments, I think we're a huge step closer to bringing people into a voluntary instrument.
Yeah, it's very interesting.
The more I look into philosophy, the more I really kind of like it.
Good!
That's the point.
It's very interesting.
I mean, a lot of philosophy, I would say, is not particularly good, but that's true of economics, that's true of just about any other field that you care to name.
But good philosophy, I think, is something that's really powerful and useful.
Yeah, I've been learning about that a little bit.
I was talking to someone and they were saying, you know, because I've learned this so much about other things, about economics, that most of the stuff they teach in university is kind of just wrong or just not good.
And dangerous.
Yeah, and dangerous, yeah.
There's another one that I can't think of at the moment, but many of the things they teach them in school is not right.
And I heard this about philosophy as well.
They start with, I guess it's Plato, which I think is a big troublemaker.
Oh, huge.
Yeah, I mean, Plato had this massive...
It's called the problem of universal, so the problem of concepts in philosophy, which is, how on earth do we look at that thing over there, which the camera can't see, and say, that's a house?
I mean, it's just, you know, it's light waves, it's atoms.
How do we know that that's a house?
And how do we know that that thing next to it is a broken-down old house?
Still a house, it's a different size, different shape, the roof is bent, nobody lives there, but we still know that that's kind of like a house, or at least a building.
How do we know those are old trees?
We've never seen them before we came to New Hampshire.
I mean, how do we know?
And the philosophers have gone crazy trying to figure this stuff out.
And Plato had this idea.
He said, okay, okay, it's better if you smoke something first, I've heard.
His idea was sort of like, okay, man.
Before we were born, we were floating in a world of perfect forms, and we saw the perfect tree, and we saw the perfect house, and the perfect blade of grass, and the perfect shirt.
And now that we're born, when we look at a tree, we get this memory of this perfect tree we saw before we were born.
I know it's insane.
It's completely insane.
But this was his solution to the problem of universals.
And they actually teach that in school?
Well, not only did they teach it, it has a massive, massive effect.
On human society.
On how we organize society.
Because they're all totalitarians.
All these guys like Plato and Kant and Hegel.
All these people who believe in this higher realm of truth.
This is where they put crap like the social contract.
The will of the people.
The moral justification for the ruler.
The divine right of kings.
Whatever nonsense they want to put.
They can find some higher realm to put it in.
And you've just got to obey that higher realm.
Now you can't ever experience it directly.
So you've got to go to some guy to say, Hey, what's in the higher realm?
It's like me saying, Jeff, you've got to obey me.
But don't think of it as me.
I'm just talking for this big, giant, invisible friend I've got, who's always right.
Whether he's called God, or the will of the people, or the majority, or whatever it is you want to say, the representative of the social contract, the divine right of kings, there's this invisible friend.
Trust me, he's always right, he only speaks through me.
But you're obeying him, not me.
So, Plato had this huge effect.
Now, Aristotle said this is all, you know, dope smoking, crack fiend nonsense, right?
He basically said, look, we see things, we see what they're used for, and we slowly derive concepts from the stuff that we see every day.
And, you know, you're around kids, you know, you see them doing this all the time.
My daughter was like, is that a chair?
Yeah, is that a chair?
Is that a chair?
No, that's an ottoman.
What's the difference?
See, you want four legs, three legs?
And, you know, one's flat, you sit on it, it's soft, it's got no back.
Well, there's a chair with no back.
Yeah, that's called a stool.
And you go through this whole process of refining these concepts.
You can see them developing.
I mean, she was no perfect chair before she was born that she's now referencing.
It's just something you slowly build over time.
And the reason that that's important is because if concepts...
Sorry, it's mildly technical.
If concepts are imperfectly derived from instances, in other words, if we get the concept of a chair from looking at a whole bunch of chairs, if we come up with something about a chair that is not representative of chairs, we're wrong.
So, you and I have will.
The people have no will.
Because will is a characteristic of the individual.
It's like saying, let's give the majority a haircut without touching any individual hair on anyone's head.
It would make no sense.
And so, if what we have in our head comes out of things that we see, and if there's a contradiction between our concepts and the things, our concepts have to change, because they're supposed to describe the things we see.
Then we can't ascribe collective characteristics to anything.
To any group of things, to any individual.
Like, a whole bunch of badgers are mammals.
But there's no little mammal bone in there.
There's no mammal hair that they have.
There's no mammal nipple hanging.
It's just a concept that we...
And if you throw an amphibian in there, it's no longer a group of mammals.
It's a group of mammals and a frog.
Right?
It's really important that if all of our concepts just come out of things in the world, then we can't push it the other way.
We can't back that train up and say, well, I'm now going to ascribe a characteristic to a group of things that's not there, like the will of the people, like the majority, like the state.
It's just a bunch of guys with guns.
And we can try and back that train up and say, well, no, they're called the state and they have different characteristics than just being people.
But if we take the Aristotelian view, which is also the objectivist view, That stuff in her head has got to accurately describe things in the world.
And if it doesn't, we're wrong.
We don't get to back that train up and describe different things to things in the world.
New characteristics, you know, the state can steal and it's good.
I mean, this is all nonsense.
But this war between Plato and Aristotle is very, very fundamental.
And Aristotle is used for the free market.
He is used for individualism.
Plato is used for tyranny.
And that's what Plato wanted, was a society of tyrants, where you lie to people.
He called it the noble lie.
You lie to everyone.
And to make them good, because they can't see this higher realm.
They don't get it, man, so we just go to order them around.
So this higher realm is always associated with tyranny, and this getting your concepts out of stuff is always associated with liberty.
Sorry, that's a long-ass explanation, but I hope that makes some sense.
Did Plato come up with democracy, too, or was that some other dickhead?
No, Plato was not a good fan of democracy.
Well, okay, but to understand it from Plato's point of view, he loved Socrates, and Socrates was put to death by a democracy.
They voted to kill him.
So, no, he was not a big fan.
In fact, Plato tried to get involved in politics.
In Syracuse, he really tried to get involved in politics because he wanted to fix the system from inside.
He was almost killed.
He was sold off into slavery.
He had to escape.
I mean, he had not a good brush with politics.
So, he was not a big fan of...
You got a breath up right now.
Oh, sorry.
He's gone.
Yeah, he was not a big fan of democracy or the will of the people, so he felt that you need enlightened philosopher kings who understood this higher realm, this perfect realm, and they would tell everyone what to do, and they'd have to lie to them, because these poor saps, they can't get to the higher realm, and they don't know what you're talking about, so you've got to give them a noble lie, and then they'll just do what you say, and if they don't agree, you've just got to sit in jail, take them out of society, because they corrupt it.
So, I think it was out of a desperation to be as charitable as possible, and to read the mind of someone 2,500 years dead, who knows, right?
He really didn't like democracy.
He saw what it did.
And of course, they ended up trying to do the same thing to Plato.
They ended up trying to do the same thing to Aristotle, kill him as well.
And he had to escape and say, I am not going to let Athens sin against philosophy twice.
And so they did not have a great deal of luck with the political system of the day, which is true for philosophers throughout history who actively espouse individualism and critical thinking.
Interesting.
I never knew any of this.
That's great stuff.
The history of philosophy is gripping stuff.
This informs the mental map of how everyone looks at the world.
But we don't know about it because studying the history of philosophy is studying a whole series of rational oppositions to the oligarchies that rule us and they don't really want to teach that stuff too well.
I had Bob Murphy on yesterday, and I asked him a question which I thought was interesting.
What would you say to a young person who might want to go to, say, Harvard and take economics?
Would you say, go do it?
And I'll ask you the same question.
To a younger person, should they go to university and learn philosophy, or should they just watch Free Domain Radio YouTube videos all day?
Well, I think I would suggest that they go to learn logic, because logic is philosophy.
To learn the history of philosophy is interesting, but I don't think you need to be in a classroom to do that.
I think that, you know, it's that line from Good Will Hunting, you know, you just spent $150,000 in an education you could have got for a library card and three bucks in late fees from the New York Public Library.
I think philosophy is in conversation.
I think you can read about it, you can talk about it.
But the whole point of philosophy is it's a spinning wheel that's got to hit the road.
Philosophy is very abstract and you get all these crazy scenarios like Bob's wife is dying of some disease and it's $10,000 for the pill and the pharmacist, well, he doesn't have the money, can he go and steal?
Things that people don't really face in your life.
Philosophy, I think, is really around You know, seek the truth, learn the truth, and then you got to speak the truth, and you got to take the consequences.
That to me, you don't study medicine except to cure people, to do something in the world.
And so I think you study philosophy, but the great danger is you end up just studying philosophy, not stimulating virtue and challenging irrationality and unjust authority in the real world.
So the danger, of course, with going to Harvard is you end up in a huge amount of debt, With not a lot of job prospects, certainly in philosophy, and so your great temptation is then, oh well, I've got to become a professor of philosophy.
And to me, that is staying out of the social discourse and just teaching other people who might want to get a degree in philosophy to become professors in philosophy.
It's a rotating ivory tower.
I think, and the way that I've approached it is, you know, from the greatest mentor of philosophy in the world, Socrates, you go into the marketplace, you talk to anyone who will listen about virtue, reason, and ethics, and integrity, And you hope they will buy you lunch.
That's why I do a donation-based model because you can't do a whole lot better than he did.
I think your fans will get mad at me if I get Stefan Molyneux sunburnt and you can't do any videos for a week.
You've got to recolor things so I don't look like a giant tomato with sunglasses on.
Thanks so much.
Just let everyone know in case they don't know about your website or anything else.
It's freedomainradio.com or you can go to youtube.com.
Forward slash Free Domain Radio.
Check it all out.
All the books are free.
I hope that people will faceplant into the buffet of philosophy and eat deep.
