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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
45:07
498 Morality and Happiness
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Good morning everybody, it's Steph.
Hello and welcome back to those who have not joined us on the audio side, but I thought I'd do a little bit of video this morning because it's a topic that's very important and it's a topic that I haven't been very clear about hitherto or up to now.
So I'm going to read this excellent post and then we'll have a chat about it and you'll get to see the Glorious sunshine, warmth, and comfort of late Canadian autumn.
So this gentleman wrote, let me preface this post by saying a few things.
First of all, I have in the past very much enjoyed many, but not all, of Steph's podcasts.
And his ability to never shut up and yet never cease to be entertaining is certainly quite a talent.
There's damning with faint praise if I've heard it.
I'd also like to say that I do consider myself a libertarian of sorts, although I am the type that you would label a minarchist, for I believe that power will predictably corrupt, and a small, limited government is essential for maintaining a free society.
A minarchist, for those of you who are joining us late in the debate, a minarchist believes that a government is morally required and just and virtuous and necessary for a peaceful society.
And friction-free society and anarchists, of course, not so much, believe that all governments are morally corrupt because of the initiation of the use of force argument and also because the effects is that they will grow until they collapse.
The idea of completely eliminating the government, he continues, however, is one I would strongly oppose.
In my current opposition, however, I don't want to argue any semantic-type issues, gun control, police violence, drug war, Iraq war, blah, blah, blah, but rather I'd like to discuss the philosophical and moral stances that are being presented here.
Quite right. Steph argues that because morality is absolute, the very existence of a state is, in and of itself, immoral, and that force is also, in and of itself, immoral.
That's not quite correct, but let's not worry about that.
He also argues that in his belief, he is simply staying consistent with the absolute moral rules that exist, and that, in his words, there is no position.
In short, I find this absurd, and I think his logic is seriously flawed.
I welcome correction, as always.
On with it. Earlier today, I asked the free domainers to give me a definition of morality.
This is on the board. And welcome again to all the new people on the board.
In Greg's answer, he said that morality is based on, quote, universally preferred behavior, which is certainly a phrase of mine.
Now I, he says, happens to agree with this, but I'd like to take it one step further by asking this question.
What is preferred behavior?
Or rather, what is it about some behavior that makes it preferable to other behavior?
While this may seem like a difficult question, the answer is really very simple.
A behavior is preferable because it increases human happiness.
So this is what morality is.
It is a set of behavior rules designed to increase human happiness.
So to say that an action is, quote, moral is to say that it maximizes social happiness or that it minimizes social suffering and death, depending on which way you want to look at it.
To say that an action is immoral is to say that it minimizes social happiness or that it increases suffering and death.
To prove that this is a correct definition you simply have to accept that happiness is preferable to suffering.
I doubt anyone will argue otherwise.
What the above paragraph shows is that moral and immoral, in quotes, are just ways of describing the consequence or the effect of an action.
Moral simply means that it has a preferable effect, and immoral means that it has an unpreferable effect.
It has been said that there is no right and wrong, there is only consequence.
Shocking, as that may sound, there is actually some truth to this.
What I'm saying here is not just that the argument from effect, which is a series of podcasts and articles that I wrote last year, the argument from effect is more important than the argument from morality.
I'm saying that the argument from effect is all that matters, which means what are the consequences of particular choices, rather than are they implicitly right or wrong.
Or better yet, the argument from effect is the argument from morality.
Now once we accept that a moral action is simply one that has good effects, we can now examine whether or not morality is absolute.
The answer is a definite not.
Rather morality is relative, which is to say that it is situational.
Given different circumstances, people have to act different ways to achieve the effect of maximizing happiness.
To argue that morality is absolute, one would have to say that a certain action, regardless of the circumstance, will always have the exact same effect.
Hopefully I don't have to explain how silly this is.
It strikes me as odd that this here group has managed to cling to the idea of absolute morality for so long when examples disproving it are so easy to come up with.
I love the word cling. There's nothing like bitchy arguments.
Name any supposed absolute moral rule, and it's easy to show that it isn't absolute.
Take thou shalt not kill, for example, if a man was running towards your family with a machete and you had a gun in your hand, would it be immoral to kill that man?
If you think it would be immoral, I would question your sanity.
If you recognize that it isn't immoral, however, then how can you hold the belief of absolute morality?
If moral rules apply to all people at all times, then why did that one not just apply to you just then?
I mean, we've answered this before.
This is not a new question, but I'm not going to do it again here because we've got a lot of text and documentation and audio on that.
It's because morality is relative to situation.
I tells ya, he says.
The only thing absolute about morality is its goal of maximizing happiness.
That's it. So basically, the idea that there exists a universal moral law that says that coercion is, in any circumstance, immoral is just silly.
On a final note, let me throw a hypothetical in Steph's direction.
Here I catch it. Let's suppose, Steph, that you got your way and the government was eliminated.
It's not really that personal, but now let's further suppose that everything that your opponent said would go wrong in this scenario did go wrong.
Sorry. Now, let's further suppose that everything that your opponent said would go wrong in this scenario did go wrong.
I'm talking riots in the streets, corporate manipulation, nuclear war, and horrible stuff people associate with anarchy.
I'm not saying this all would happen.
I'm just supposing here for a second.
And let's say that all this bad stuff wipes out everyone on the planet except me and you.
Now, as we walk by the rubble that used to be civilization, would you look me in the eyes and say, hey, at least what we did was moral?
Obviously not. If it is true that the only way for a society to survive and remain happy and free is by having a government, then the existence of a government has to be called moral, even if, gasp, it uses force.
Sorry, Steph, but there is no doubt in my mind that by calling the existence of a government and the use of force immoral, you are making a big mistake.
Fantastic. I mean, I really, really hugely respect and appreciate the time and effort that it goes into Creating a post like that.
And I absolutely want to sort of express, let me just make sure all my power cords are together so I don't lose the whole dang podcast.
But I absolutely appreciate and respect the questions that are going in here.
And this gentleman is starting, if I can take a page from Socrates, this gentleman is starting in exactly the right place, if I may say so.
And I think that, obviously, he and I are on the same page insofar as we do not want a society that gets destroyed and just have him and I sitting there discussing morality in a radioactive rubble of prior civilization.
So I'll certainly go with him as far as that goes.
So we're on the same side of the fence.
Obviously, I'm not interested in maximizing abstract morality while destroying human happiness.
That would be, I think, a mistake.
But I think it's important to understand what The purpose of, and we'll just talk about moral philosophy here.
We won't talk about the other sort of aspects of philosophy that are a little bit more personal.
Things like integrity and so on, those are a little bit more personal.
But we'll just talk about moral philosophy at the moment, and so that we can sort of have an approach to understanding its role and its function, its possibilities and its limitations.
So I'm going to, as I often do in these kinds of conversations, I'm going to take the approach of analogies, because analogies are a way of self-instruction that takes advantage of a large amount of existing understanding, and so I don't have to always argue from first principles, which is tricky to do, A, while I'm driving, and B, with the limited amount of time and limited amount of your patients, I'm sure, that are available to me.
So, the first thing that I would say in this sort of analogizing is that let's have a look at how this corresponds to medicine, right?
Moral philosophy and medicine, I think, have a lot in common, if not, you know, almost everything in common.
And the question for me would be, would you go to your doctor and say, I'm perfectly physically healthy, but I'm unhappy.
Or rather, if you went to your doctor and said, Doctor, I'm unhappy, he would run a bunch of tests to test your hormone levels and to test your serotonin levels and all these kinds of things.
And then, at some point, he would say, Well, I can't find a dang thing wrong with you.
So I'm not the person that you need to talk to.
You need to talk to a psychiatrist or, you know, a psychologist or whatever.
Or here's the address of Freedom Main Radio.
Go to town. So, ooh, there's somebody coming in.
I guess they want to turn left.
But you would not go to a doctor and ask of that doctor that he or she provide you with happiness, right?
That wouldn't make a whole lot of sense.
That would be an inappropriate approach to the doctor's skill set.
So then we can sort of ask, and I think logically, what then is the purpose of the doctor?
Well, the purpose of the doctor is to maintain or restore to you your physical health, which I think is an entirely good idea, something that's absolutely natural.
I would also argue that it's not that there's no relationship between physical health and happiness, that I would say that, with certain minor exceptions, like having a cold or whatever, that a physical illness is a necessary but not sufficient cause of happiness, right? I mean, it's the old thing that you can be all the philosopher, you can be as great a philosopher as you want, it's still hard to be happy with a toothache, right?
Physical health is a necessary but not sufficient cause of happiness.
Happiness is an incredibly complicated thing, whereas medicine is...
I'm not going to say medicine is not complicated because that would be to diss a very noble profession, at least prior to its socialization by the government.
But it follows certain methodologies and procedural steps associated with the scientific method.
To some degree, it's input-output, symptom prescription.
So we wouldn't go to the doctor and say, I would like you to make me happy.
Similarly, we wouldn't go to a shoemaker and say, I want you to make me happy.
We'd go to the shoemaker and say, I want you to make me some shoes.
So, I'd sort of like to put forward the proposition that moral philosophy is not related or interested in or focused on or designed to elevate your happiness.
Moral philosophy, in many ways, It has very little to do with your happiness.
And I would say that a moral philosophy that is designed to maximize happiness is immoral.
And we'll sort of get as to why, or at least why I would argue that that would be the case, and you can see what you think of the propositions.
In the realm of economics, the purpose of a rational, laissez-faire economics, the purpose of that as a discipline, It's not to create wealth, right?
Mises said to his wife, I'm always going to be poor.
I'm much more interested in the theory of money than getting money itself.
And many times people will go to an economist and say, which stock should I pick?
And the guy would say, well, you know, that's not my job, right?
An economist is not designed to maximize your wealth.
And I would say that any time an economist is focused on maximizing your wealth, that economist is immoral because that economist can only promise the maximizing of someone's wealth through either a direct exhortation to theft or through the design of a government program that will itself cause an income transfer to occur through the coercive power of government agents.
So anytime an economist says, I'm going to make you rich, then you're either talking to a Marxist or a Keynesian or some sort of statist intellectual money slut, and you want to launch into the debate with all you've got, because if you back away holding your wallet, wallet, you'll find that he lifted it while you were blinking in confusion and horror.
So the basis is that you won't go to an economist and say, make me wealthy, or the economist doesn't say that the maximization of an individual's or the economist doesn't say that the maximization of an individual's wealth is anything to do with a rational science or
Because in that case, an economist will then say, well, I'm interested in making all the red-haired people in the world rich.
Then they can only do that by advocating the stealing of money from non-red-haired people and providing of it to red-haired people.
Which obviously would be a pretty immoral approach to economics.
And certainly not any kind of universal principle.
No, The Economist is really focused on removing the barriers of violence in economic activity.
Just as a psychologist is interested in removing the barriers in personal relationships, removing the barriers to happiness.
It doesn't mean that you get happiness, it just means that any more than if you're taken out of a cell, no one can tell you where to go.
Amnesty International doesn't sort of try and spring you from the Chilean prison and then, you know, put you to work in the Amnesty International offices, right?
The whole point of springing someone from prison is not to enslave them again.
I mean, if you're a moral person and the prison is an immoral confinement, but rather just to say you now have your freedom, do with it what you will.
And an economist is focused on removing the violent barriers to trade, with the knowledge, of course, that in many circumstances and situations that will result in a wealth increase.
It certainly will result in a net wealth increase.
I mean, that's been well proven historically that when you eliminate barriers to trade and to the accumulation of capital, Then wealth increases enormously rapidly.
Does that mean everyone gets richer?
No, of course not. Some people lose their shirt in business ventures that don't work.
Very many people do that. Some people choose not to participate in the accumulation of material goods because they're interested in the Buddhist spirituality or they are deferring current consumption because they want to be a writer or an actor, so they're working at low rent or no rent jobs.
So there's lots of people, you know, they have emotional problems, so they have problems interacting, so they work in a very solitary manner so that that limits their income.
There's lots and lots of ways in which people's income is not maximized at a personal level in a free market economy.
Let's not also forget that there are very many people who make an enormous amount of money in the current situation in an immoral way by grabbing a hold of the guns at the state and wheeling them around to point them at various groups to extort bribes from them and pay off money, extortion money.
And who are also involved in the massive wealth transfers that are associated with state power, the cash grabs.
And those people will do far worse off in a free market, right?
I mean, the foundation of the wealth of the elder, Elder Bush, I think Prescott Bush, the foundation of his wealth by, you know, certain fairly credible reports is that he made an enormous amount of money selling petroleum products to the Nazis in sort of mid-1940s, 1943, 1944.
And this, of course, is high treason supplying material, war materials, to an enemy in a time of war.
And this is one of the ways in which David Van Gurion managed to extort and bribe and threaten, mostly extortion and threaten people, to support the creation of the State of Israel.
The Promised Land, I ask, why doesn't God promise a little bit of oil as well?
One place in the Middle East with no oil.
But... So in a situation where there is a stateless society and a truly free market and a DRO-organized social structure, those people are going to do much worse.
Much, much, much worse.
How much money is Boris Yeltsin going to make in the absence of the state?
Well, not much. I mean, he's a vaguely charismatic, mop-haired old drunk.
He'd be lucky to be head security guard hoping to hang in And control his alcoholism to get through to retirement.
The man's going to be lower middle class instead of at the very top echelons of wealth.
So in a free market society, there's enormous, quote, redistribution of wealth back to those who actually create it in a voluntary manner through transfer, through the provision of value to others.
So again, a free market, yeah, in a very general sense, there is an increase of wealth within society, but the free market promises no individual happiness.
Now, enough with the analogies.
I think you get the idea.
Ooh, it's been a while since you've heard the over-explanations.
Isn't it tasty to get back?
But moral philosophy really follows the same pattern.
Moral philosophy is not about guaranteeing you happiness or promoting your happiness.
What it is is about removing the barriers to your achievement of happiness.
We can certainly say that it would be a pretty staunch and intellectual soul that would be able to find happiness in a 4x4 prison with no light.
Right? So the first thing that you have to do in order to give people the opportunity...
To achieve happiness is to remove the coercion that shapes and destroys their choices.
That would be, I think, the first thing that you would need to do.
And this is not a particularly new idea if you just look at the Declaration of Independence.
It is life, liberty, sadly, not property because that would have harmed the slave owners because your property can't own property.
Sorry, people can't, you can't, property can't own property and slaves are allowed to own things.
So the reason they left out property from that was because it would have undermined the argument that we should keep human beings like chained animals.
But it was life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness, right?
Not life, liberty, and happiness, but the pursuit of happiness, the freedom to pursue happiness and to achieve whatever it is that you want to achieve with your life, which nobody else can figure out for you, that's going to bring you happiness, right?
Moral philosophy is about eliminating rape, not promoting romantic love.
I mean, there are other branches of philosophy that would be associated with those things, but we're just talking, I mean, we're just looking at this post and talking about moral philosophy in particular.
And the reason that I chose those three magic words, my own personal little E equals MC squared, universally preferred behavior, Each of those words is important.
And the one way in which you can tell that the maximizing of happiness is not included in the definition of moral philosophy is the word universal.
And the reason that you know that it's not personal is that the personal can never be the universal.
That's why I talk about behavior, not thoughts, not emotions, not perspectives, not dreams, not states of happiness or sadness, but I talk about behavior, which is objective and measurable.
That's why intent is not a moral crime.
Fantasizing about raping, however repugnant it may be from an aesthetic standpoint, and however dangerous it may be to indulge in from a psychological standpoint, does not cross into the realm of objective crime until actions are put into action, into place.
Until you actually rape someone.
So universally preferred behavior, the universality of it is a good clue as to why it doesn't include things like subjective states that vary from person to person, such as happiness.
Now, medicine is the way in which we make sure that somebody's healthy, but the absence of disease is not necessarily the presence of energy and well-being.
So, for instance, somebody may be free of illness, but they are going to bed too late, and drinking too much coffee, and they are working too hard, and so they get lots of headaches, and they don't have any organic illness, but their lifestyle choices are undermining their sense of well-being.
And yeah, in the long run, it would probably produce some sort of organic illness, but the doctor won't find anything physiologically wrong with most insomniacs, but they're still not very happy.
So there are other branches of medicine around nutrition and lifestyle and so on that will promote the long-term maintenance of health rather than the cure, right?
So there's cure and then there's prevention and then there's optimization, right?
That's sort of in the realm of medicine.
You know, I've got a cold or I've got an illness.
You cure the illness. That's the cure.
The prevention is eat well and exercise.
And the optimization is, you know, you're short these hormones.
Sorry, you're short these, you know, you're not eating enough protein.
That's why you're not sick, but you're not eating enough protein.
That's why you don't have enough energy or whatever.
You're not having a protein, carb, fat balance.
So, in the realm of optimization, there are certain aspects of philosophy, just as there are in medicine, which would be more sort of a nutrition and lifestyle and so on.
There are aspects of philosophy which we, of course, talk about here, more associated with personal integrity.
Which are not universally preferred behavior because it can't be defined in a universal way.
What does integrity mean for everyone?
Well, there are general principles, living by your values, blah, blah, blah.
They don't really mean anything.
What does integrity mean for you in your life?
Well, the decisions that you have to make regarding integrity, which is sort of around the optimization of happiness, are very different.
And only the broadest principles can be included in that sort of definition.
But each individual is going to have very different choices, so you can't have, you know, you could say that it's universally preferred that everyone act with integrity, but that's, you know, it's like saying it's universally preferred that everyone be healthy.
Well, of course, that's why the science of philosophy and medicine, of course, exist to begin with.
Happiness is a subjective state that relies on very many personal characteristics and also is not an objectively pursuable at all times in a universal phenomenon kind of approach, right?
So I don't feel happy when I'm at the dentist.
I don't have any particular teeth problems, but I never like that drilling.
I'm always waiting for something horrible to occur, you know, the jolt of pain that kicks you out of your chair, although my dentist is good, but, you know, I still, you know, you don't go there for kicks.
Right? So, you know, the maximization of human happiness?
Well, of course, yes, I'm less happy in the dentist, but I'm more happy than if I didn't go to the dentist.
I mean, I get all of that, but there are times when we will sacrifice our happiness in order to achieve other goals, just in the same way as we will sacrifice our current consumption for the sake of saving for a rainy day or saving up for something else more expensive.
And so personal happiness It's a fluctuating thing, right?
There's no time when rape is a good thing, right?
There's no time when rape is a good thing.
So rape doesn't sort of fluctuate.
Nobody says, well, I'm going to rape now so I don't have to rape later, so that makes it good, right?
I'm going to rape one woman now so I don't have to rape ten women tomorrow, so that's maximizing human happiness.
Well, of course not, right? This is the Aristotelian mean that doesn't apply to this, right?
As Ayn Rand said, Aristotle did not Did not advocate only a just amount of axe-murdering, right?
I mean, so universally preferred behavior is thou shalt not, right?
It's a negative commandment.
It's a prohibitive commandment.
Thou shalt not initiate the use of force, right?
So there's a guy charging towards your family with a machine gun is such an old chestnut that any decent philosopher has already grappled with that probably the second day.
He was a philosopher, probably even the first.
Or maybe it was the question that started him down the road of philosophy.
I try not to go up to Jack Welch, one of the best CEOs in history, and say, Jackie Poo, I think that it's very important that businesses make a profit.
I try to respect his learning and abilities and not give him the obvious questions, but rather come to him with questions that hopefully are not so obvious I could answer them myself.
And the question of violence is always bad, even in self-defense, is such an obvious problem that, of course, it takes...
I've got to imagine this guy's pretty young, right?
It takes the newness of it all for a youth to imagine that nobody else has thought of these issues.
And rather than wanting to be the most intelligent person in the room because he's brilliant, he wants to be the biggest fish in a little pond and to ask the questions that somebody who's studied moral philosophy for 20 years I've never thought of.
Wow! Yeah, I never thought of somebody actually attacking and what I would do in regards to violence.
Wow! You know, gee, that does really destroy the theory.
I love that. I mean, I just think it's an adorable aspect of youth, but it's only occasionally trying on the patients.
But I just sort of wanted to point out that I know that we who are 40 and above, I've just turned 40, Look like the most ancient and bewildered fuddy-duddies at times, but I think that it might behoove you if you are starting to study something for the first time that you assume that your opponents or those who you disagree with are very intelligent.
I always try to, and I know that this guy is very intelligent, but I think that you'll go a lot further in convincing people if you assume their intelligence and benevolence and assume that they've answered the, you know...
I wouldn't go up to some major physicist like the guy who solved Fermat's last theorem and say, do you know there's this thing called the opposite angle theorem which says that opposite angles are equal.
I really like this 2 plus 2 is 4 thing.
Have you ever heard of that? I try not to do that.
But that's just part of the...
It's part of the endearing, mild arrogance of youth to think that what's new to them is new to everyone and that their first rush of knowledge and their first rush of questions is as new to everyone who's gone 20 years down the road ahead of them, or 25 in my case, as it is to them. So, I mean, I understand it, but...
It's just something you have to keep an eye on when you're young, right?
I mean, I know it's tough, but you'll learn a lot more if you don't lecture those far more knowledgeable than you about the basics.
And you'll enjoy it more because you'll recognize that it's a pretty deep field, that you can't overturn it in one day or a week or a month or a year.
In my case, it took, like, forever.
It took, Lord, I mean...
Over two decades to start coming up with original stuff, which is not that unusual.
It's not that unusual. Anyway, more power to you.
Maybe it'll work for you, but I would just suggest that you might want to take an alternate approach.
It's just a possibility. Now, the reason that I say that happiness is a very subjective state It's that happiness is like spending versus saving.
It's subjective to particular times in your life, right?
So there are times when going to nightclubs made me very happy and I'd go clubbing once or twice a week and, you know, boogie my little white hiney away for the evening.
And I guess the last time I went to a disco was probably about three years ago.
I don't know that I'll ever go again because the time of life has passed and there's no reason to regret it.
I have much more mellow and deep pleasures now.
So yeah, I was a club kid and I loved going to clubs and so on.
And there was also a time when I enjoyed going to karaoke.
I don't do that as much anymore for a variety of reasons, but these sorts of things change.
What is it that gives you pleasure?
And because it changes not only between person to person, but also from moment to moment, from day to day, there's simply no way that it can be a universal positive, other than in the most general abstract sense, which is tautological, right?
Happiness is pleasant, right?
Happiness is good, right?
Well, what is happiness defined as?
Well, things that feel good. So good is good.
So you don't really get anywhere with those kinds of definitions.
So you can't get universal positive prescriptions.
You can't make happiness universally preferred behavior.
What makes Sting happy is different from what makes me happy.
And there's lots of different...
I mean, some people would...
Christina, you know, not the one for doing a podcast or two every day.
It would make her exquisitely miserable.
She hated getting up and doing karaoke.
It's not her thing. A very pleasant voice, but she just doesn't enjoy the spotlight.
And I... Well, I'll let you come up with your own conclusions about that.
But what is it that makes somebody happy?
Well, some people prefer to live a life of less social interaction.
Other people, social interaction makes them very happy.
Some people stay at homes.
Some people go to work.
Sorry, some people like to go out.
Some people like to have kids.
Some people like not to have kids or prefer not to have kids.
Some people like reading a book.
Some people like going to a movie.
Some people like being dentists.
For most of the rest of the world, being a dentist would be a sentence from Satan, which would be karmic punishment for mass murder in a past life.
Who knows? I mean, there's lots of different things to approach it.
There are jobs that people do that I simply can't imagine how they get up in the morning and do it, whereas the job that I do, I'm sure there are other people who can't imagine how I could get up in the morning and do the job that I do.
So their occupation would be a sentence of perpetual misery, a forensic accounting or something, right?
Their job would be a sentence of perpetual misery for me, but it brings them great pleasure.
Think of the guy down in the morgue, right?
The sort of fish-eyed guy, often oriental, who's out there cutting up bodies.
Would that make you exquisitely happy every day?
For me, being a chef would be a nightmare.
But it makes other people very happy.
So, whereas, you know, to refrain from rape is always moral.
Not rape. It's a good thing, right?
Or at least it's not the commission of a bad thing if you don't want to go to a positive prescription.
Now, it is also true that despite the fact that, you know, certain evil people would get a momentary pleasure, a sort of savage, sadistic kind of pleasure from raping someone, which would, of course, give them happiness in that sense, or at least relief from a certain kind of hollowness and agony, We would not say that the increase of a rapist's happiness would be well served by handing him over some, you know, bounded and gagged women for him to have his way with.
So a sadist gains a great deal of pleasure, you know, a sexual orgasmic kind of pleasure from the infliction of pain upon others.
A masochist will gain a certain kind of, you know, it's horrifying and all that, but, you know, measurably it is endorphins and a pleasure rush and gives them pleasure.
And so we would not say to a sadist that the maximizing of a sadist's pleasure at the expense of other people's happiness would be a good thing.
So not only is pleasure very subjective and happiness very subjective and personal and changes from day to day and from person to person, But it also can't be a universal positive because there are times when the happiness of one person is achieved at the expense of other people.
And I've used a dramatic example, which is rape, but there are many more non-dramatic examples.
Just think of the Olympics.
If you think of the Olympics, then it's easy to see that, or any sort of sports event, that in a round robin or whatever it is that you're using to choose the winner, there's one winner and there are many losers.
I mean, that's the nature of competition.
That when a contract is out for tender among 20 companies put in a bid, one company is going to get that bid and 19 others are going to be unhappy.
So what does maximizing Does happiness mean in a sports event?
Does that mean, ooh, everyone gets the gold?
Well, that doesn't mean anything, right?
That's just saying that sports equals happiness, which was obviously falsifiable because for many people, you know, the pencil-neck computer geeks, sports equals unhappiness.
For people who don't have any coordination or people who are physically injured or in a wheelchair or whatever, in a coma, sports would equal unhappiness or an impossibility of happiness, so that doesn't sort of work either.
So there are many, many situations you can think of.
In my boarding school, there was the boys and there were the girls in sort of separate houses, but we would get together occasionally, and there was one girl who was like the prettiest girl, the princess, and everyone wanted to talk to her.
And so the boys would all sort of sidle up to her with terror in their hearts, wanting to talk to her and get a smile from her face and so on.
And it's amazing, eh? Like, 35 years later, 34 years later, I can still pick her out of her face from the school photo we all sort of sat in a row.
I just think it's kind of interesting. But that's the case, right?
In high school there were the, you know, the cute girls and so on, and the girls with boobs, and it was all very shallow and hormonal back then, but these are the girls that you'd want to go with you to the dance.
And many, you know, many would be called, and few would be chosen.
And so there, in that situation, um...
You know, 20 guys want to go out with the same girl.
One or none of them, let's just say one of them, are going to get to do it.
19 of them become unhappy.
But, of course, the only way to maximize the happiness of the 20 guys would be to rather minimize, to say the least, the happiness of the girl.
So that obviously doesn't work either.
So, and this is not to say even that when you remove the possibility of happiness and start to impose the achievement of happiness, it doesn't work at all because when you, happiness is like the price signal.
The price signal in economics is where should resources be most productively applied to?
Where are they most in demand? Well, of course, it's the prices, wherever the prices are highest, right?
So, you know, if there's a lumber shortage, I mean, this is Econ 100, but when there's a lumber shortage, then people will obviously try to, We'll come up with alternatives to lumber or the lumber price will go up, which means people will import lumber from elsewhere where it's not as much in demand.
You know, all these kinds of things will occur.
And so what that means is that more lumber is supplied and then the price of the lumber goes.
So there's these price signals which allocate resources.
And the same thing is true.
And if you impose price controls, you smash that mechanism of resource allocation.
And no amount of bureaucratic genius, quote genius, will ever end up solving the problem that the allocation of resources in the absence of the price signal simply cannot be achieved.
This is something that I think somebody got a Nobel Prize for sort of pointing out, and it's very true.
So, in that situation, you get rid of the price signal, which means that resources simply cannot be allocated.
If you get rid of the happiness signal in the world, then you end up with a large number of problems insofar as...
People simply don't get a chance to find out what makes them happy.
That sort of very important and basic choice with regards to happiness simply no longer exists.
Just to make it sort of silly, if the government hands a decree down that says everybody needs to do the tango in order to be happy, then everybody ends up doing the tango because they're kind of ordered to.
And, you know, there are going to be a few people to whom, maybe the people who teach tango, but there are going to be a few people to whom tango is the greatest joy in history, and those people will be well served.
But everyone else, by being forced to do the tango, is going to end up in a situation where they don't get to find out what actually gives them pleasure.
Because they're forced to do the tango, so they don't get to explore, and society doesn't get to explore what kind of happiness is really available to them that they can work with.
Similarly, if the government, I don't know, there's some popular show, let's just say Cheers or something, right?
I know, I'm not young.
So there's some popular show, and...
The government says, well, this show is obviously making everyone happy, so now this is the show that's going to be on until the end of time.
Well, all of the resources then go towards the production of that one show.
I would certainly say, of course, that the quality standards of that show, now that it's mandated, would dip enormously, that it's not competing, that the actors would just kind of show up and do what in theater circles is called a phoned-in performance.
Eh, you know, I couldn't really be there in person, but I phoned the performance in.
The quality of the writing would decline because people would say, hey, you know, we get money whether or not the show sucks or is good, so we don't need to pay for the best writers and the writers don't need to come up with the best ideas because we're going to get paid anyway.
So not only does the enforcement of sort of happiness diminish the capacity of people to create that happiness, but it also eliminates all other possibilities, right?
Normally when the quality of a show goes down, then the resources are released to other projects that people want more of.
But if we say, well, Cheers makes people happy because sure they laugh a lot or friends or whatever, and so we're going to make sure that that's now sort of enforced in a positive sense.
Not only does the happiness involved in that go out of it, but the other alternatives no longer come into being.
So other shows that would have taken its place no longer ever get created.
So, there are a few people in that situation who are happier, right?
The mediocre writers and actors who wouldn't be able to earn as much in other shows, who are sort of locked into their contracts because that's what gives people happiness.
The government censors the government control of the media.
Those people are going to be happy.
The advertisers are going to be unhappy.
The audience is going to be...
So, again, every decision that you make in terms of the use of coercion It's going to make some people happy and other people unhappy.
And even if you take coercion out of the equation, there's still going to be the problem that decisions that you make are going to make some people happy and some people unhappy.
Like all the free domain radio groupies, you know, that want the whole thing with the sheet goat and the baby oil.
I'm married. I'm not available.
So that makes them all desperately, desperately, almost, yay, catastrophically unhappy.
So I think you get where we're coming from from this standpoint.
So the problem with equating morality with happiness is that it fragments, makes subjective, and frankly passes into the control of somebody else responsibility for your happiness.
If you want to make money, but you're not making money because government regulations and coercions prevent you from making money, then that's a bad thing and you've been badly treated.
I think that's something we can all have some sympathy with.
But if you are in a free market and you want to make money and you can't make money, then that's your responsibility, right?
It's your failure or your problem.
It doesn't mean you're a bad person. It just means that you haven't achieved your objectives or whatever.
And so, from that standpoint, other people simply cannot be responsible for your happiness, right?
I mean, if you want to make a million dollars, and the only way you end up being able to do it is by lobbying the government, then that million dollars has been taken away from other people who presumably wanted it, otherwise you would have just asked them for it voluntarily and they would have given it to you.
But... That's not what's happened to be taken forcefully, which means that it's added to other people's unhappiness, made you happy, so that doesn't work.
The fundamental thing, though, is that other people can never be responsible for your happiness.
Happiness is like digestion.
Other people can't digest your food for you.
Other people can't urinate for you and say, oh, my blood is full.
Could you go drain the lizard a little over there to give me some relief?
It doesn't work that way. Happiness is a subjective personal state.
It's complex, and we can maybe talk about it a little bit more another time.
I don't think I've done a podcast on happiness as a whole, because really, when you think about it, all my podcasts are not just about happiness, but spread happiness.
Yay! Like fertilizer.
More than just a little like fertilizer.
But this sort of a question of happiness and its subjectivity is very, very important.
There are objective methodologies by which you can achieve happiness, but happiness itself cannot be imposed from somebody else, right?
You simply can't do it.
And even if you could do it for one person, steal all the money from a group of people, give it to the one guy to make him happy for a short amount of time until he realizes the corruption that's engendered in his very soul, The problem then occurs, of course, that the achievement of that kind of happiness always comes at the expense of others.
So you can't maximize human happiness without maximizing human unhappiness in other areas.
Whereas thou shalt not rape will only decrease the happiness of the guy who wants to rape for a short amount of time and hopefully will get him into some sort of treatment or whatever.
But that kind of stuff I think is very important to understand.
It's this very subjectivity and moment to moment changing of the questions of the goal of happiness that makes happiness so impossible to define and achieve for other people.
You can't create Positive emotions in others, right?
You can create negative emotions in others, right?
You can make them frightened.
You sort of point a gun at them or threaten to play them a whole bunch of freedom and radio podcasts.
So you can do all of that. You can make fear.
You can make horror. You can all of these things in people, but you can't make somebody love you.
You have to force someone to love you. You can rape someone, but you can't make them love you.
So just as you...
That's why...
A sort of moral philosophy focuses heavily on the thou shalt not because that's the only thing that can be achieved with regards to another person.
So you can't engender a positive feeling in somebody else.
You can't create that in any consistent and positive way.
Some people like the podcasts that I do.
Some people, you know, it's their definition of, you know, torture, nightmare, and, you know, drivel-voice British hell to listen to my podcast, right?
So who's right, who's wrong?
I don't know. Well, of course, they're wrong.
But unless they donate, in which case they're beautifully, beautifully right, and I want to hug them.
So I would say that you really are going to have a problem with this utilitarian definition of happiness, and I would suggest that it's worth a rethink because the moment that you take away the objective nature of it and the reproducibility of it and the ability to influence it from the outside, you fundamentally take away the universality of it, which means that it's no longer morality.
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