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June 2, 2014 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
49:45
2713 What The Hell Is Philosophy For?

Stefan Molyneux answers the question: What the Hell is Philosophy for?

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Hi everybody, Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Made Radio.
Hope you're doing very well.
So, I did this video yesterday.
Eight really tough to answer, philosophical questions answered.
And I made the case that it's really hard to know what something is.
Unless you know what it's for.
And when I was giving the talk, I felt the sandpaper-like Socratic demon resistance to dropping a truth bomb without adequate bunker shelters for the listeners.
So I've got to make that case more clearly.
I apologize for making it in passing.
It's a very important case.
Not to mention also making the case that the primary purpose of philosophy is the definition of promotion of moral excellence.
Well, that is a strong case to be made and I hope gives some sense or shape to what it is I've been doing, lo, these many years.
But I will make that case and hopefully it will stand tall.
So...
If you find two sticks in a field, two straight sticks in a field, you can say, well, these are two straight sticks.
But if you don't know that they're chopsticks, you won't know what they're for.
And those two sort of two little sticks could be used for just about anything.
But once you know what they're for, then you know what they are.
Could it really be said that you know what a heart is, what a human heart is, or an animal heart is, if you don't know what it's for?
Well, it's a moving thing inside the body.
But if you don't know it's to oxygenate blood and pump it around and so on, then you don't really know what the heart is if you don't know what it's for.
Now, this really occurs in the realm of biology, but philosophy...
It's a biological science or a biological discipline, and specifically it's a human discipline, because if it is related to morality, well then, it has to be A human discipline, because only human beings, to our knowledge thus far, are capable of abstract morality.
The comparison of proposed or current actions to an abstract ideal standard, that's really...
There's altruism in the animal kingdom and so on, and kindness and all that, but there's not abstract systems of ideal standards.
So...
Saying that you know what two sticks are is like going to a computer store and saying, I would like to buy some electronics.
It's just a very general category.
And the first thing that people would do is they'd say, well, what is it for?
What do you want to do with it?
Well, I want to listen to my cell phone hands-free.
Oh, you need a Bluetooth or something like that.
You have to know what it's for in order to know what it is.
Now, In the realm of geology, you don't wonder what the rocks are for because they haven't been created, they haven't evolved, they haven't adapted, they haven't developed a purpose, right?
They're just there to be mined and put on people's necks as jewelry.
Or millstones, I guess.
So, in the realm of geology, in the realm of physics, you don't really wonder what something is for.
For what purpose was the speed of light created to be 186,000 miles per second?
Well, there is no purpose.
It's just the way that it is.
Who developed gravity?
Who patented it?
And why did they do it?
Well, that would be a question if you were religious, I suppose.
But in the realm of physics, there is not...
A purpose argument.
What is the purpose of the infrared spectrum?
Well, it's to allow us to see things at night.
Well, no, of course, right?
It doesn't...
There's no purpose.
It just is what it is.
But in the realm of biology, the liver, the spleen, the lungs, they all have a purpose.
You know, to aid in the maintenance of life and all that.
And so it is legitimate within biology, within medicine, Within morality, within questions of free will and determinism and so on, to ask what is the purpose.
Maybe not the free will thing.
I'll come back to that.
But we can ask the purpose.
And in physics, you can understand something without having any answer or even having the question proposed, what is the purpose?
What is the purpose of photons?
What is their goal?
Why are there photons?
Why are they photons?
You don't need any of that stuff to understand physics.
In fact, the more you start asking what is the purpose of physical laws, the more you are a theologian and not a physicist, and the less you will actually understand about physics.
The great contribution of Darwin to human thought, the survival of the fittest by means of natural selection, it says, well, what is the purpose of biology?
Well, of course, the purpose of biology, the purpose of biological adaptation is to further the gaining of food and reproduction.
That's really the point of what the body or the organs or the cells are trying to do.
It has a purpose, to gain more food and to reproduce more effectively and to not be eaten, which I guess is part of a subset of the second category.
So, philosophy, to the degree that it says you should use a scientific method rather than reading tea leaves or counting pieces of belly lens in order to determine the truth about the natural universe, philosophy doesn't have a purpose.
It doesn't describe purpose.
Now, if you accept, as you should, the scientific method to examine the universe, you're saying that the purpose of human thought Is to achieve truth.
And the achievement of truth in the scientific realm requires a scientific method because consciousness is prone to error and you need all of these kinds of cool things like the scientific method in order to not be riddled with error.
We have confirmation bias, we make mistakes, we want grant money, and so on.
We suck up to politicians, we play politics, all the things that get in the way of our pursuit of truth.
So while there is no ought in the physical universe, there is no purpose in the physical universe.
The purpose in the scientific method is to, as much as possible, eliminate subjectivity, bias, error, and cheating from the pursuit of objective truths about the natural world.
So there's no purpose to reality, but there is purpose to the scientific method.
Now, the...
Purpose within physics is the pursuit of truth, regardless of value judgments.
But I guess, yeah, I mean, there would be a value judgment insofar as I know how many hairs there are on all of humanity's heads, and I have some digital clock that's constantly changing to update all of that.
And I guess you could say that's a truth, but kind of who cares, right?
I don't know.
Maybe there's some magic use for that.
I don't know what it might be.
But...
There is a value judgment in terms of who cares, but there is no value judgment in physics.
There's no preferred state in physics.
You simply examine what is.
I mean, if you are drawing a picture of some rocks, Then there's no real preferred state, right?
On the other hand, if you are landscaping your garden, then you're going to have preferred states for where the rocks are going to be.
A physicist could describe or an engineer could describe a car and simply say that that's what it is.
Now, whether the car is driving or a rusted jalopy up on four cinder blocks in some Arkansas front yard, well...
It doesn't matter.
It simply describes what is.
You, as the driver, probably prefer a car that works.
In medicine, there is, of course, preferred states, which is health.
And you go to the doctor because you have an illness.
You wish to be cured or you wish to maintain health or something like that, right?
So there's a preferred state in medicine called health.
There's no preferred state in physics other than potentially the relevance of what it is that you're studying.
So, in philosophy, which cannot be accurately termed the mere study of truth.
Now, there's a philosophy of science, there's a philosophy like why we use the scientific method, which, if you're not convinced by its amazing efficacy, say, over the last two, three hundred years, compared to the previous 100,000 years of human history, Then you can make a metaphysical and epistemological case for the value of the scientific method.
The study of reality is objective.
Human consciousness is prone to error.
The sense data needs to be verified by other sense data and other people.
And the aggregation of sense data in the validation of empirical theories is the closest we can get to objectivity.
It's the same thing in medicine, right?
X cures Y. It's a very tough case to make.
For reasons I'm sure we can all understand, it's a tough case.
People spontaneously get better.
Correlation does not equal causation and so on.
Which is why you need the double-blind experiment, reproduced many times, all that kind of stuff.
So, all that is really, really important to understand.
Is there a purpose to what it is that we're studying?
If not, then we should hopefully pursue it in terms of relevance.
So when it comes to the study of rocks and Earth's movement and so on, in general, geologists are employed in the pursuit of economically valuable minerals and commodities, gold and oil and diamonds and all that kind of stuff, right?
I guess you could have a geologist who just went around counting rocks and stuff, and he would achieve something factual, at least in the moment, but the purpose would be somewhat diminished, right?
But nobody would say that he was immoral.
Maybe kind of lunatic, kind of incompetent, but not immoral.
So, in the realm of philosophy...
There must be something to do with philosophy that is not to do with the other disciplines.
Otherwise, we just call it knowledge or thought or something like that.
So what is it that is unique to philosophy that is not contained in other disciplines?
Well, it is, I would argue, it is the realm of ethics, virtue, moral excellence.
I'm going to use these terms, of course, interchangeably so nobody can pin me down on anything.
But a surgeon can stitch up a murderer.
And nobody calls the surgeon immoral for saving the murderer's life because ethics is not the realm of medicine.
In fact, a doctor who withholds medicine From a man or a woman who he has moral objections to is subject to sanction, subject to negative judgments.
There are doctors in prisons who work to heal the worst specimens of humanity and so on and so on.
No value judgments in that.
What are the value judgments in physics?
Moral judgments in physics.
Well, I'm not saying that physicists have no moral judgments.
It's just that the degree to which they have moral judgments is the degree to which they're not actually doing physics.
Right?
So, when I was younger, a friend of mine's father received an offer to work on, I guess, what was called Star Wars at the time, which was the strategic defense initiative under Reagan designed to create a defense missile shield against incoming ICBMs or nuclear weapons.
And we had a righteous old moral discussion about the ethics of working on this.
But he never said, I wouldn't want to work on this because it's not physics or engineering.
He was actually an engineer.
But he said, I have moral problems with...
I have moral questions, I guess is a better way of putting it.
I have moral questions about what's occurring.
But he never said...
Like if somebody had said, I'd really like for you to work on...
St.
Augustine's theory of sin, he would have said, well, I'm an engineer, and that's not engineering.
But he didn't say, I'm an engineer, and Star Wars, or the Strategic Defense Initiative, is not engineering, right?
So he recognized that it was engineering, which is why he was asked to work on it, but he did not know whether he approved of it morally.
So those are the kinds of things that need to be understood with regards to philosophy.
today.
Philosophy is not the pursuit of truth, because physicists and engineers and so on are all in the pursuit of truth, as are doctors and...
Once in a while, lawyers, I suppose...
It's not about the pursuit of a higher value over a lower one because doctors are in pursuit of health versus sickness and so on.
So it must be something that is unique to the discipline of philosophy.
Now philosophy, I would argue, is the pursuit of an ought without an is.
So to see if I can help you It makes sense of that.
So, in medicine, they say, if you want to be healthy, then you should do X, Y, and Z. The nutritionist will say, if you want to lose weight or if you want to manage your diabetes, then you need to eat and drink X, Y, and Z and avoid A, B, and Z. But there's no moral compunction to this.
I mean, if somebody decides to gain weight Then we will say, oh, that may be inefficient, that may be expensive, that may be irresponsible, but it's not evil.
You know, throw someone in jail for gaining weight, right?
And if somebody decides to lose weight, we may say that's admirable, but we wouldn't say that's virtuous, right?
And so in philosophy, the great challenge has been to work on the ought without the is or the if, the ought without the if.
If you just feel like being moral, or if you want to be good, then you should do X, Y, and Z. Well, that's sort of pointless, because then it's basically diet books for thin people, right?
Here's how to be virtuous, if you already want to be virtuous.
But the great challenge of philosophy is that lots of people don't want to be virtuous, or only pretend to be virtuous, or create moral theories in order to prey upon Their fellow man, who is not even close to them psychologically, but exists in a sociopath-empath-predator-prey relationship.
It's sort of like saying to lions and gazelle, okay, if you don't want to eat gazelles, here's how not to eat gazelles.
Well, the gazelles don't want to eat gazelles, so you're not really changing their behavior much at all.
And the lions really do want to eat gazelles and can't really eat much else, and so they're just going to They're going to study gazelles not out of empathy, but out of being better able to eat them, right?
This is the relationship between sociopaths and empaths, right?
Those who have no conscience and those who are, well, let's just say often overburdened with a conscience to the point where they cannot see the sociopaths.
And in fact, are very often voting for and cheering for them.
in the hopes of being eaten last, I suppose.
So...
how do you promote moral theories among those who have no wish to be moral or who only pretend to be moral in order to exploit others well it's an interesting question and And I think my approach, which I hope is going to be a good philosophy approach to ethics, universally preferable behavior, or UPB, is a way of doing that.
So, you know, the physicist says, if you want to know something true about the natural world...
You need to use the scientific method.
If you're not using the scientific method and you're claiming to know something about the natural world, then you are wrong.
You are a liar.
You are false.
You are cheating.
A manipulator has a negative moral judgment.
If you say, I like ice cream, I guess that's the truth about the natural world and that your brain is a part of the natural world, but you don't claim to be using the scientific method to create that truth.
But if you say, there is a God and here is the rational and scientific proof for that and you're incorrect, then you are lying.
So science has its value judgments even without the if, right?
So, in philosophy, there's no, well, if you care about your fellow man, then you should do this, or if you want to be good, that can't work.
It doesn't have to be sort of pointless.
It's cancer treatments for everyone who doesn't have cancer.
And it's the same thing like in mathematics.
If you don't want to use mathematics and you want to use equations, then you're going to be wrong.
Even if you're accidentally right, you're still wrong.
So...
In philosophy, anybody who wishes to argue ethics, anybody who suggests any kind of preferred state that is binding upon the other person...
I like ice cream is not binding upon you.
You don't have to like ice cream or not like ice cream.
It's not binding.
Two and two is four is binding on you, in that if you say that it's wrong, then you're wrong.
Two and two make four.
So that is sort of a very important thing to understand, right?
So anytime anybody makes any kind of value judgment that is binding or imposable or obligatory for the other person to accept, then they're talking about universally peripheral behavior.
Anyone who accepts government accepts imposable and bindable moral propositions.
A citizen must pay his taxes.
It's not, I would like to, it would be great if, or I would really like, or I'll do a happy dance if, you must, or you go to jail.
That is a bindable...
Sorry, that is a binding, universal moral proposition, at least within the country.
Which is one of the reasons, you know, it's nonsense, right?
On this side of the line, you pay taxes to these people.
On that side of the line, you pay taxes to those people.
So it's not really universal, right?
I mean, it's not like you can...
Nobody says you can rape on this side of the line, you can't rape on that side of the line.
But the people who are allowed to impose force on others change depending on arbitrary lines on maps.
So anyone who accepts court systems and prisons accepts universally imposable and binding propositions.
Thou shalt not kill, thou shalt not steal, and so on.
Anyone who tells you that you're wrong.
Anyone who disagrees with you.
Anyone who says...
Your theory or proposition should be abandoned in favor of A, B, C or X, Y and Z. They are accepting UPB. They are accepting universal preferences that are binding upon others.
The moment someone says that you're wrong, they're saying, look, there's this universal objective state called truth.
Don't shoot the messenger.
I'm just telling you that you're wrong and you need to correct your information, your thoughts, your arguments, your processes in order to Be compatible with universal evidence, truth, reality, reason, whatever, right?
You know, if I say that Ottawa is south of New York, and someone says, no, that's incorrect, Ottawa is north of New York, then boom, UPB, right?
You should say true statements about objective reality.
Objective reality is that it's North of New York, I think you sort of get the idea.
Anybody who uses language is saying that words have objective meanings and can be communicated through the senses in coherently organized fashions.
So, I mean, you know, word salad aficionado is accepted, I suppose.
So, you have then an ought, and you don't have to worry about the if, if you want to do this and you ought to do that.
The moment somebody engages with you in a debate, they have accepted universally preferable behavior, and...
Anybody who never says anything, never debates with anyone, never corrects anyone...
Well, first of all, such a person doesn't exist.
I mean, I guess unless they're in a coma, they simply don't exist.
To judge and to correct is the universal itchy scratch of mankind's twitchy fingers.
So, we don't have to worry about that.
But even if you could theoretically create someone...
Who never corrects, who never says anything, never uses language.
Well, that person will never be part of the human debate anyway.
It's like saying, what are the property rights of somebody who lives so deep in the woods they never see another human being their entire life?
It really doesn't matter because nobody can violate their property rights and they can't violate anyone else's property rights.
It's not important.
It's irrelevant.
How do you treat the cancer of somebody who never gets cancer?
It's an irrelevant question.
Try proposing that at a medical symposium and see what happens.
People will scowl at you for wasting their time, which is about 99% of my job.
So, value judgments without the if or oughts without the if are the province of philosophy.
and They do encompass things like the scientific method versus revelation, faith versus reason, and so on.
Rationality versus irrationality.
But in terms of ethics, that is sole to philosophy.
And that is really important.
Methodologies in science and medicine, you know, rational theories with empirical verification replicated, Across others.
That is the methodology for science.
And a subset of that, which is rationally cohesive theories, that is the methodology for philosophy.
Most people will try to take the methodology of science, which is an incredibly successful methodology.
You know, science plus the free market are the two great gifts of philosophy.
thought to the world, the two greatest benefactors of human existence, which, since they were generated by white males, can almost never be credited.
But the scientific method has rational theories, consistent theories, and then followed by empirical verification, right?
Oh, I have fusion in a jar.
Oh, no, you don't, because nobody else can replicate it.
Of course, the great tragedy of modern science is that, like, half of peer-reviewed journal articles have information that cannot be replicated by other people, even when they try.
That's all.
It's just become another government program.
A scientific journal recently ended up publishing dozens of randomly generated Articles with graphs and crap and just all meaningless.
But they were published in a peer-reviewed journal because...
Anyway, it's a government program, right?
Science has become just another government program.
You don't want to mistake government programs for free interactions any more than you want to mistake rape for lovemaking, right?
You kind of don't understand it, what's going on.
And government science has as much to do with science as rape has to do with lovemaking, or mercantilism, or crapitalism, or crony capitalism has to do with the free market.
So there is a subset in philosophy.
I'm sorry, this is all kind of technical, but it is sort of important to get a handle on.
So, in philosophy, there is a subset of science in that you need rationally consistent theories, as in mathematics and engineering and so on.
Rationally consistent theories.
And medicine, too, to a large degree.
You can't have a theory that says, my cure relies on the heart...
Processing urine and the bladder pumping blood around the body.
It's not what the bladder or the heart do, and therefore your theory is not going to be correct, even if it's sort of logically consistent after those premises.
But in the realm of ethics, logical consistency is the only standard.
You cannot have an empirical standard of ethics.
Because to have an empirical standard of ethics, i.e.
we're going to try all these various ethical systems and see which works best for people, is wrong on so many levels.
Not just logically, but morally.
I mean, you're not allowed to experiment medical treatments on babies or prisoners and just see which one works the best, right?
That's...
Criminal behavior.
So, empiricism in the realm of ethics demands exceptions to universalization, which is logically wrong, improper, incorrect, inconsistent.
So you can say, the initiation of force is universally immoral, and now I'm going to violate...
That moral rule on certain people to see what the outcome is.
Well, if you're allowed to violate it on certain people, then it's not universal, is it?
It's like saying you cannot inject people with illnesses and then try and cure them.
You can't do that, except you can do it on prisoners.
Well, if you can do it on prisoners, then you can do it, and then you can and can't do it, and therefore it's no longer universal, and any proposition such as that must be rejected, of course, right?
So you can't say, listen, we're going to have one system that is a dictatorship and one system that is a free society.
We're going to see what happens, right?
Which society does better.
Well, I mean, on so many levels that's wrong, right?
Because you're saying the non-initiative...
Hopefully you're saying at some point we're going to at least experiment with the non-initiation of force.
So then you're saying, well...
There's an ethical principle, a moral principle, because if you're talking about which is best, what you mean is which has the best outcome.
So you have an ideal, which is the best, the UPB. And you then can't say, I'm going to have this universal principle, which I'm then going to allow the violation of in order to establish or validate the universal principle.
So that is simply...
Wrong, logically.
Immorally, of course, right?
Anything that's illogical in the realm of ethics becomes immoral in practice.
Here's another example.
So Vladimir Putin has like three yachts and 20 homes and makes billions.
It costs billions of dollars a year, he makes.
So he really likes the autocratic state in Russia.
He's a big fan of that, and people who have political power, right?
Barack Obama, his net income went from like a million five to like 13 or 14 million in a year.
So he's doing really well when it comes to the benefits of political power, I'm I mean, the man ran for office again after his first term.
So he really likes political power and it benefits him enormously.
He's super happy about political power.
Sadists really like working in prisons, I would assume.
I'm not saying every prison guard is a sadist, but if a sadist can get into a prison, particularly in a corrupt regime, he's probably pretty happy.
So, to say we will experiment and see which society benefits the most is making the mistake.
Irrational in theory, immoral in practice, is making the mistake of saying, well, all people are the same.
And so, those who benefit in general, right?
Literally, it's like lions and gazelle putting them all in the same enclosure and saying, well, we'll see which benefits who, right?
Lions are going to eat and the gazelle won't be able to get away.
Human beings are not the same.
Egalitarianism, in theory, is totalitarianism in practice.
Anytime you wage war against a fact, you must escalate to violence.
or give up the fact, right?
This is how mad things are that the Pope recently advocated the forcible redistribution of wealth by states because, you see, he's really into egalitarianism, but only the priests and the Pope can talk to God Nobody else can.
This is how insane the world is that people listen to this stuff with a straight face.
We should all be equal, but only I can talk to God.
Only God speaks through me.
But hey, equality is really great.
Man alive, how do people do this?
Anyway, we live in a deranged species.
So you can't have...
It's pragmatism or utilitarianism or let's try a bunch of stuff and see which works best in the realm of ethics because you've got universal principles or you're not talking about ethics.
You've got universal principles to allow the contrary to be experimented is to deny the universality of those principles.
The whole world must be painted orange.
Let's paint some of it red just to see what it's like.
Well, no, then if you're going to paint some of it red, then you can't say the whole world must be painted orange.
So you can't have empiricism as a methodology for validating ethics.
Now, which is not to say that empiricism has no value to ethics at all.
The fact that moral systems in general tend to produce more wealth and less violence and so on is helpful.
It doesn't hurt, right, I guess you could say.
But you cannot prove a moral system by its outcome.
Because you've destroyed universality by allowing experiments to the opposite, right?
Anyway, I think I've sort of made that case.
So ethics must be logical consistency.
And that's really about it.
Logical consistency in the realm of universality with regards to preferred behavior.
And again, in science, not really preferred behavior.
At least not universally preferred behavior.
You can use science or not, it doesn't make you good or evil.
But in the initiation of force or the imposition of violent will on others, well...
If you use science, you're not imposing science on other people.
If you build a store, you're not dragging people in and forcing them to buy there.
If you ask a woman out, you are not raping her.
Voluntary propositions are not the initiation of force.
Actions which only affect yourself are not violently imposed upon other people.
And this is why, in the realm of ethics, it is really only actions which initiate force or fraud against others that are relevant.
So, this helps us to answer the question, what is something for?
What is philosophy for?
Philosophy is for At its core, in its essence, philosophy is for the definition and pursuit of moral excellence because that is the one aspect of human thought and activity that is confined only to philosophy.
It's not part of medicine.
It's not part of science.
It's not part of mathematics.
There's no moral or immoral equation in mathematics.
There's no moral or immoral theory in physics.
There's no morality in the theory of evolution.
We don't say that the lion is wrong for eating the gazelle.
Sorry to be picking on the lions.
That's just how I roll.
What can I say?
They scared me in Africa, and that's obviously created a lifelong metaphorical scar machine that will continue to spew out shaggy-maned terrors from the depths of my imagination and history.
So what is philosophy for?
Well, philosophy is for the definition and encouragement of moral excellence.
Now, the definition of moral excellence is obviously very important, right?
Right?
You can't advocate that which you don't understand and be considered excellent.
Eat random things is not being a nutritionist.
Eat stuff that tastes good for you in the moment is also not being a nutritionist.
If you're advocating things that you don't understand, Then you're not going to be any kind of expert.
You're going to do more damage than good, right, in the world as a whole.
I'm a coach.
Run until you fall over.
Well, it's not really being much of a coach.
I don't understand anything.
So you have to, of course, define what virtue is.
And then you have to encourage the pursuit of virtue to be a philosopher.
And, I mean, to me it's an interesting question, which is, let's say you've got a great theory of ethics, but you don't do anything with it.
You don't even write it down.
You've just worked it all out in your head and you take it to your grave.
Are you a philosopher?
Well, who knows?
Who cares?
It doesn't matter.
A person has not written anything down or communicated it to anyone in any way.
Are you a philosopher?
I would say no.
Because philosophy is not the theory, but the cure.
And the cure is necessary.
Sorry, the cure necessitates the theory.
You have to have a theory in order to have a cure.
And the theory has to be accurate and true.
But the theory is not the cure.
So if I have worked out in my head a cure for cancer, but I never write it down, and I never tell anyone, and I take that to my grave, have I cured cancer?
I have not.
I have not, because not one single person has gotten better for my cure.
Right?
So, to cure cancer is to cure cancer.
And to be a philosopher is to promote virtue.
Now, you need to have a theory to promote virtue, but if you do not promote virtue, if you do not change anyone's mind, then you're not really a philosopher.
I mean, let's say that I do write down my cure for cancer in some incomprehensible language that nobody will ever...
a made-up language nobody will ever understand.
It would just be thrown out with my crap when I'm dead.
Okay, I've written it down.
Have I cured anyone?
I have not.
It sort of reminds me of that old story of the guy who developed the Ethernet standard of network transmission.
And he invites people.
He taught at college, and he would invite people to his giant mansion or whatever, and they'd say, oh, man, he'd invite the students, and they'd say, oh, man, I wish I'd invented Ethernet.
And he's like, well, the invention of Ethernet was nothing.
I spent 10 years crisscrossing the world trying to get people to adopt it.
That was the real value of what I did.
Not just the creation of the protocol, but it's the mind-bending labor of exhorting its adoption that is the difference.
Right?
I mean, lots of people, I'm sure, have invented stuff and never done anything with it.
you Maybe never even written it down, just had sort of idle thoughts, right?
I mean, if you have an idle thought for a story, does that make you a writer?
No.
If you write it down, does that make you a writer?
Not really, right?
If you get the story made and published and it goes out there, even if it's just on your blog and people can read it and it's in a language that people understand, then you're a writer.
Are you a professional writer?
Well, no, not until you get paid enough to live on it, right?
You know, either through ads or whatever.
So, you are a philosopher to the degree with which you achieve the pursuit of moral excellence in others.
That is what a philosopher is.
A doctor, the best doctors are those who actually heal people.
Right?
Right?
The best researchers are those whose cures are adopted by the most people and cure the most people, right?
I think we can all understand that, right?
The guy who Salk, I think his name was, who developed the vaccine for polio, well, he...
He's heralded as, you know, he didn't just develop it and then leave it sitting in his lap, otherwise nobody would have known about it.
He developed it, and he got it out there, and he got people to adopt it, and he proved it, and people made it, and it got into the blood of children and saved them from a terrible disease and so on, right?
So he cured, and the guy who came up with, he cured polio, or prevented polio, eliminated polio.
Same thing with smallpox, same thing with the guy who came up with penicillin and stuff like that, right?
They actually did it.
And actually doing it is a challenge.
So, the degree to which a thinker actively promotes...
True moral excellence and achieves true moral excellence in others is the degree to which that person is a philosopher.
A philosopher is not mere theorizing.
The theorizing is important.
Salk had to do experiments on his vaccine to see if it actually prevented the spread or transmission of polio.
But the theory is necessary but not sufficient to be a philosopher.
The development of a theory, like the development of a story idea, is a necessary but not sufficient requirement to be a storyteller.
You have to have a story in order to be a storyteller.
If you have a story but never tell anyone, you're not a storyteller.
It's the teller part that is the difference, right?
You have to have both.
You first have to have the story, then you have to tell the story in order to be a storyteller.
So to be a philosopher, you first have to have a consistent moral theory, and then you have to promote and successfully promote moral virtues in others, right?
So if you're a storyteller and you book A room to tell your story and nobody shows up and you tell your story anyway.
Are you a storyteller?
Well, no.
Because nobody's there to hear it.
And you might as well have just done it in your bathroom, right?
It's like saying, are you a filmmaker if you make a movie with no microphone on the camera and the lens cap on?
Well, you've just got black void, right?
No, you are not a movie maker.
You've gone through the motions, but you don't have the product.
You don't have the thing itself, which is the movie that tells a story.
And so, if you come up with a great moral theory, and you never write it down, you're not a philosopher.
In the same way that if you come up with a great cure for cancer, but you never tell anyone to write it down, you have not cured any cancer.
You are not a cancer curer.
A philosopher is an evil curer.
Right?
Right?
A physicist or a scientist is an ignorance curer, a subjectivity curer.
And a philosopher is an evil curer, which means that people have to change their actions.
They have to change their actions.
They have to actually become moral.
So the propagation of a moral theory that changes no one's actions does not make you a philosopher.
It's like saying, I'm a professional writer.
The definition of professional writer is you get paid, hopefully enough to live on, or let's just say enough to live on what you do.
You say, I'm a professional writer, but nobody has changed their actions based upon my writing.
In other words, they have never paid me.
They may have read my writing, but they haven't changed their actions in any fundamental way.
They haven't paid me.
Then you're not a professional writer.
And if you are a philosopher and you speak to people, but nobody changes their actions based upon what you say, then you are not a philosopher.
You are a chatterbox.
You may be a comedian, but you are not a philosopher.
A philosopher is somebody who has the right theory and promotes it in a way that causes people to change their actions.
And that is what a philosopher is.
You don't cure...
Like, let's say that, you know, if you eat some particular vegetable, you cure cancer.
And you tell everyone that, and nobody changes their dietary habits, then you've not actually cured any cancer.
You are not a cancer cure.
And you are not an evil cure if you tell people your moral theory, but nobody changes his or her actions.
Or if your moral theory is incorrect, and people do change their actions, in which case they will change them for the worst, right?
So if you have a theory that says eating chocolate cake is really great for curing diabetes, then you are incorrect.
And people changing their actions based upon your incorrect theory will get sick, yea verily, unto death.
So that's not good either.
So you have to have the right moral theory.
You have to communicate it in a way...
That causes people to change their actions for the better.
You know, welcome to why I focus on personal relationships and parenting.
Because that is a sphere in which people can, lo and behold, actually change their behaviors, right?
Woo!
Isn't that cool?
I can promote the pursuit of moral excellence In a realm that people can actually affect, that they can achieve, and therefore I can...
If child abuse is not only evil, but the root of almost all evil, then getting people to not aggress against their children is to make them better people, to have them act in compliance with their virtues and to spread virtue and to pursue an achievement of moral excellence throughout the world.
So what is philosophy for?
That's why I say it's the definition and promotion and achievement of moral excellence among others.
The best nutritionist is the one with the best theory who gets people to change their behavior for the best.
The best cancer curer is the one with the best theory whose cancer cure is the most widely adopted and most effective.
And the best philosopher is the one whose moral theory is the best and who promotes virtuous behavior on the part of others and Regardless.
And the theory is less important.
The theory is important to validate what you're doing.
But you can follow a dietician's advice without at all caring about the dietician's theories, right?
You can just follow the diet, right?
Just follow the diet.
That's all you have to do.
And if you follow the diet, even without understanding the theory, then you will be a lot better off, right?
So that's pretty important as well.
So I hope that this helps everyone at least understand what my approach is and why I do say I'm a philosopher, right?
I've got a great theory and I promote moral excellence among others.
And this is why I regularly post on Facebook and other places to people who've changed their behavior for the better based upon my moral exhortations.
So, I hope that makes sense to people.
Thank you, as always, so much for listening.
This is why I encourage you to donate, to change your actions, right?
Which is based on virtue, integrity, and so on.
So, I hope that you will donate.
FDRURL.com forward slash donate to help out the show.
Thank you, everybody, so much.
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