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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
01:00:59
'Morality Unravelled' - An E-Leadership Webinar
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Now, I'm pleased to introduce our speaker for the evening.
Stephon Molyneux is a philosopher currently living in Canada and host of Freedom Main Radio.
Stephon will also be participating in Libertopia and Porkfest this year, and more information on that can be found at Libertopia.org and freestateproject.org, respectively.
Students for Liberty will also be participating in both of those, and we've participated in the past.
They're great events, and I really highly recommend people participate.
Now, one of the many free books Estefan has published is called Universally Preferable Behavior, a Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, which details a powerful solution to the problem of modern morality.
In this engaging webinar, Stephan will introduce his theory and take questions, criticisms, and corrections from the audience.
And all of Stephan's resources, podcasts, and writings, including this discussion, is available at freedomainradio.com.
Now, this is going to be a pretty interactive webinar.
If you have any questions at all, simply type them into the little question area on the GoToWebinar box.
That will send the question to me, and then I will interrupt Stephan and make sure it's addressed.
Now, without further ado, I present Stefan Molyneux.
Thank you everybody so much for taking the time to come to a seminar on ethics.
It is my absolute favorite topic in the whole wide world and just really appreciate people's time.
I think it is the most important thing that we need to get sorted out.
As a community, as Freedom of Peace, we need to have, I think, a really strong grounding In moral theory, because what we really are proposing is a moral revolution in the respect for property rights and the dissemination and universalization of the non-aggression principle.
And I don't want that to just be a flag that we plant in the ground.
I want it to be something that is able to be proven and derived from first principles and argued for and established in a thoroughly grounded kind of way.
So can everybody, I just want to double check that my screen is up.
Can people see all right?
Yep, looks pretty good. Yeah, fantastic.
Okay. So, ethics is one of these incredibly slippery topics.
And I don't think it's because it's so innately confusing.
I think that ethics is a really slippery topic because there's so much accumulated historical confusion and mess and junk and contradiction and so on.
So it so often makes our brain go pretzel or get kind of short-circuited.
There are two ways that ethics is traditionally approached in society or in philosophy.
The first is through commandments, which is, you know, thou shalt not do this or you go to hell or do that or you go to jail.
So it's commandments that have consequences.
And there's also utilitarianism, or sometimes called consequentialism, which is we want good things to happen, and how do we do it?
And the how we do it isn't as important as the good things we want to have happen.
So if you want education for the poor, of course, a lot of people think, well, we take money from people who have more money, and we give it to people who have less money in the form of public education.
And so the consequences are good, and so it becomes a good thing.
And these two things, these two approaches to ethics are really messy because they both contain contradictions, many, many contradictions within by their very nature.
Commandments, they're a little bit arbitrary.
Even if we agree with them like thou shalt not steal, they are sort of arbitrary because they're not reasoned from first principles.
And consequences, well, consequences are good for some people and bad for other people.
So the people who receive free goodies from the government, they think the consequence of statism is good.
People who lose things to the government, they think it's bad.
So ethics as a whole tends to come down with commandments and consequences, which doesn't really help us, and tend to be manifested either in commandments backed up by some sort of deity or by some sort of government aggression to enforce them.
And this amalgam of superstition and culture mixed in with violence and sort of contradictory commandments creates a big electrical storm in our minds when it comes to ethics.
It's so complicated and messy that often we just throw up our hands and say, okay, here are my rules and that's where we go from.
And I think that's not particularly good.
I think one negative consequence of the historical approach to ethics is that, again, we just have to say, okay, there's a non-aggression principle and that's good.
However, people who are interested in ethical theories, you know, they tend not to be axe murderers or IRS agents.
They tend to be pretty nice, good people to begin with.
So you have axioms like property rights and the non-aggression principle.
They tend to be rejected by evil people.
And what do we do about that?
That's a big problem.
So ethics tend to be only interesting to people who are already pretty good.
So I call it, it's a diet book for thin people.
So only people who are already thin, well, if you're already good, you don't need ethics.
And if ethics can't be used in a fundamental way against people who are already bad, then you have a diet that can't ever be applied to people who are overweight.
It's not too helpful.
And also, very briefly, ethics has historically, this is the Socratic-Platonic axis, right?
But it generally is presumed that ethics is a lack of knowledge, right?
So evil is a kind of deficiency of knowledge about virtue.
So if Socrates or some wise man comes up to you or a wise woman comes up to you and says, this is the good, and explains it to you impatient, then you go, oh, I should cast aside my evil ways and become a better person.
I think that we can, well, I shouldn't say we can.
I can pretty safely say that I think that's not true.
And the reason I think it's not true is because if you look at the arguments put forward by evil people, power-hungry people, by manipulators, by politicians and power seekers and so on, They show a very deep knowledge of ethics, a very deep knowledge of ethics.
And to take one extreme example, Hitler, of course, asked all of his soldiers to swear an oath of loyalty to him because he understood the power of keeping one's word and these kinds of manipulations of virtue are constantly used by evil people.
So I think it's tough to say that evil people don't know anything about ethics.
So these are some of the challenges that make it so tough to talk about.
And we're going to switch to looking at science.
And the reason that I think that's so helpful and so important is that science is something we all kind of generally understand and we all have a pretty good knowledge of how it works and what it is.
And the great thing about science is it's a great template for understanding ethics.
There's so much in common between the two that, in my view, philosophy, of course, is like the all-discipline because it talks about metaphysics and epistemology, like reality and knowledge and truth and falsehood.
And so philosophy is bigger than science.
And so, since ethics is really core to philosophy, if we can drill up to ethics from science using those same approaches and validating them, I think we're going a lot further.
Before I get lost, you know these electrical storms that I was talking about when it comes to ethics?
They strike my brain with depressing regularity whenever I get lost or baffled or confused or frustrated in the field of ethics.
I always take a step back and say, okay, let's go back to science.
How does that work? And let's bring those same ideas forward to ethics.
Now, this is general, obviously this isn't about the philosophy of science, but here's some just general principles that I think are important to think about in terms of science.
So when we think about physics, well physics can't be cultural.
You can't really say that Greek physics is different from Armenian physics or Muslim physics is different from Zoroastrian physics.
Science is not cultural.
Science is not localized in some sort of geographical area, right?
So New York should not have different physics from Los Angeles and so on.
It should not be time specific, right?
A physical law like gravity should not be different in the afternoon than it is in the morning.
And science should not rely on hearsay.
I mean, if you remember, a couple of years ago, more than a couple now, there was this fusion in a jar thing that was going to be the big thing in science, and people heard that it was true, but whenever they tried to reproduce the experiments that supposedly proved it, they found that they couldn't, and therefore it was regarded as unproven, if not false. And so science can't rely on hearsay.
It has to be on reproducible experimentation.
This is all very useful for ethics.
Science has to be objective, universal, reproducible, empirical, all these kinds of things.
And I would say that when you're talking about ethics, you have to take these things into consideration.
Can't be subjective, can't be local, can't be cultural.
And the reality Is that people say, well, ethics is subjective because a lot of people aren't ethical.
Or ethics doesn't mean anything because a lot of people choose to do bad things.
But science is optional.
I mean, you can claim if you want, I suppose, that your squidgy green toe elf is telling you exactly the laws of the universe, which is, I imagine, not particularly scientific.
But it just means that whatever you're saying is not particularly valid.
It's not proven. It's not true. It's not part of the scientific method.
So the scientific method is optional and ethics are optional.
But it doesn't mean that they're subjective.
Just because you choose not to use a rational discipline in your exploration of truth, it does not mean that everything then becomes subjective.
It just means that your conclusions become subjective and irrational.
Now, I talked about ethics as being separate from culture, and that's an important thing to remember.
So if I say murder is wrong, And you say to me, well, Steph, that's just because you come from an Anglo-Saxon culture.
That's kind of an insult to most people when they make ethical proclamations, because ethics is supposed to be larger than culture.
But, of course, the reason it gets confused is that we throw a lot of quasi-ethical things into culture.
Be proud of your Greek heritage, say, whatever.
Pride is then supposed to be virtue in your heritage, but the heritage is merely cultural.
Or patriotism is considered to be a virtue, though for many of us I'm sure we agree that it is the last refuge of a scoundrel.
But we throw a lot of ethical things around that sort of fog of culture.
But if you say to someone that their ethical view is merely culture, they'll usually take it as an insult because we assume or we hope that our ethical viewpoints or ethical rules or theories are more than just the inherited accidents of culture.
Now the essence of ethics is really around corrections.
Correcting people. Telling somebody what you're doing is wrong.
What you're doing is immoral.
What you're doing is evil. Heaven help us, right?
So if you can't correct someone, it can't really be called ethics.
Again, this is pretty basic and I'll just touch on it briefly.
I'm sure everyone here understands this very well.
We look at things like color preferences.
I like pink, you like blue.
Well, can we correct each other?
No. Well, we really can't correct each other and say, no, that's incorrect, you're wrong, you need to fix that color preference.
Musical tastes, I think, with the rational exception of country and rap.
Musical tastes, I like jazz, you like blues, who's right?
Well, there is no such thing as right and wrong in that because it's just a taste.
Food preferences, quiche, scrambled eggs, whatever.
You can come up with a million amount of these, things which we can't correct in other people.
And that, of course, they have nothing to do with ethics, and that's really, really important to remember.
Now, of course, why can't we correct other people on these things?
Well, if I say I like pink, I'm not stating an objective fact about the world.
I'm stating a subjective preference of my own.
I'm not saying pink has a wavelength of X. I'm saying I like pink.
And so the difference is I'm simply stating something that is subjective.
I'm not claiming a truth outside my own mind.
So I can't really be corrected on that.
Compared to things that can be corrected, things like two and two equal five.
Well, I'm now stating something that is rational and testable.
In the outside world, you get four rocks together, and you count two, and you count two, and how many did you get?
Well, you get four, not five.
So you can correct someone who makes an erroneous statement or a claim about the world as a whole.
If I say red is the same as blue, well, maybe I'm colorblind, but you can show me the wavelengths and say, no, no, no, see, the wavelengths are different.
Sorry you can't see the difference, but I have to correct you that red is not the same as blue.
Maybe it just looks the same to you.
If I say pi equals 1 rather than 3.1415927.
Yes, I had a calculator watch when I was younger.
And we can correct these things because people are not stating a subjective preference.
They're making a universal claim about truth and reality and logic and knowledge, and it can be verified, and that's more than just their opinion.
So ethics has to be on the right-hand side of the screen here.
Ethics has to be In the realm of can be corrected.
Someone can be corrected if they say something that is incorrect or do something that is wrong.
And again, here, people will say, well, do ethics exist?
It's a very important thing.
And of course, the answer is no.
Ethics do not exist. Other than as, I guess, ideas within her mind, which may have Chemical electrical traces in our brain.
But they don't exist in a way that a rock exists.
And people have this thing.
I understand it, but it's important to recognize and actually oppose it.
People have this thing where they say, well, if it doesn't exist, then it's subjective.
You know, like dreams don't exist, and therefore they're subjective.
Well, that's true. But science and math don't exist either, but they're not subjective.
Numbers don't exist.
Like the number four doesn't exist in the same way that four rocks exist.
That doesn't mean that the number four is arbitrary.
You can make it be whatever you want.
So I think it's important to accept that, yeah, ethics don't exist.
Ethics aren't real. The scientific method isn't real, but that doesn't mean it can be whatever you want it to be.
So I think that's really important stuff to remember, that corrections and the lack of subjectivity, the claims of universality are really important to ethics.
Ethics Must have something to do with preferred behavior.
And that's really important.
Ethics is a way of saying this is better and this is worse.
This is preferable and this is not preferable.
And there's lots of human behaviors that we can put into these sort of categories.
And it's important to know what you're talking about when you're talking about ethics.
Because there's things that we prefer that really aren't ethics.
So being on time, right?
So I say I'm going to meet you at 7 o'clock and I show up at 8 o'clock and you've been standing on a street corner with hail and lightning and I don't know, frozen frogs flowing from the sky in some biblical end times weather pattern.
So I'm an hour late.
Well, is it preferable for me to be on time?
Well, of course it is. Is it the same as ethics?
Is it virtuous? It's better.
Is it the same as murder?
No. I mean, we understand that being on time is nice, it's preferable, but it's not quite as important as, say, murder or rape or theft or something like that.
And there's ways in which we can reason this out and find out why philosophically.
Politeness. Saying please and thank you.
It's preferable. It's good.
It's nice. Is it the same as virtue?
I think most people would say no, and I would agree with them.
Self-defense. Well, I think most people would say that's an optional thing, right?
So I can choose to not defend myself if some mugger wants to take my wallet.
I can choose to defend myself, and people would support that, and reasonably so, I think.
I can say, no, you know, I got three bucks in my wallet.
I don't care. Go for it, right?
So self-defense is optional but not enforceable or necessary, I think.
And there's good reasons for that as well.
Helping strangers, right? A guy has a flat tire in a blizzard.
Are you going to stop and help him?
Well, I think most people would say it's nice to help.
But we wouldn't enforce it in the same way that we might enforce getting our property back from somebody who took it.
And there's good reasons for that, too. Charity, yeah, I think it's a good thing to do.
Would we enforce it? Most people would say no.
Now, when we start to get into something like rape, or murder, or theft, assault, and those kinds of things, we all, I think, instinctively understand that we've crossed over something.
Right now, we're not just talking about things that are nice, things that are preferable.
We're talking about things that fall under the umbrella of ethics, of good and evil, right and wrong, in a very fundamental way.
Respect for property, respect for other people's persons, and so on.
Rape, murder, theft, these are all things to do with ethics, and there's really good reasons why, at an instinctual level, we understand that there's a big...
A big difference has occurred, and we're going to talk about that.
But I think it's really important to recognize the difference between these two kinds of preferred things.
I mean, there's other things, too, that are neutral, completely neutral, right?
I'm sitting on the couch. Is that good or evil?
Well, it's not preferable or non-preferable.
So, you know, there's things which are neutral, things which are nice in the book I call aesthetically preferable actions, and then there are things that fall into the realm of ethics and virtue in a very fundamental way.
So, with all of that in mind, let's start looking at judgments around ethics and theories.
One of the ways in which we get very confused in the realm of ethics is we look at instances rather than theories.
And that's really, really dangerous.
And it's a slippery slope to just complete paralysis and bafflement when it comes to viewing ethics.
And I'll sort of talk about what I mean by that.
So I come up to you and I say, this guy's charging $10 for an egg.
Is that too high? Well, that's just an instance.
That's just a moment. That's just a snippet.
There's no context. Is it too high?
Well, if it's a farmer's market where there's mountains of eggs, yeah, it's too high, probably, right?
If it's a Fabergé egg, then it's, by golly, it's too low and I'll take a dozen, right?
If there's only one egg in the neighborhood and some guy's really desperate for it, then I'm sure it's a fine price.
So without context, you can't really judge that.
A rock falls.
I say to you, a rock falls.
And then I say, is that science?
Because it's not a theory. It's merely an observation.
It's an instance. It's an example.
It's not a theory. If I say objects accelerate towards Earth at 9.8 meters per second per second, then that is a theory.
But a rock falls? My sort of cutoff for science is, if a dog can do it, it's not science.
A dog can know when a rock falls.
A dog knows you throw a tennis ball, the dog can race and catch it, knows the physics of when the tennis ball, where the tennis ball is going to fall, or a frisbee leaps himself into the air, trailing doggy spittle and catches it perfectly.
That's not science, even though the dog is aware that something's flying and where it's going to fall and calculates all of that in its doggy brain and so on.
That is not a science, and so you've got to stay away from these instances.
So I say to you, a woman shoots a man.
Is that right or wrong?
Good or evil? Neutral, good or evil?
There's no way to know, right?
I mean, if he's a stranger who's done her no harm, well, yeah, that's pretty evil, I would say.
But if he's coming at her with a chainsaw, it's self-defense, and I think it's fine.
It's like going to a nutritionist and saying, should a man diet?
Well, the nutritionist can't answer that.
It's too localized. It's too much of an instance.
You have to have more of a theory around that.
So avoid judging instances.
It's one of the oldest tricks to discredit any theory or rational approach.
Now, valid theories can be applied to instances, right?
So if I say objects fall to earth at 9.8 meters per second per second, Then we can measure a rock falling to test that.
But you can't go from the rock falling and judge that.
But you can take the theory that's been validated logically and judge an instance.
So this is the kind of typical stuff that this combats.
And we probably all, everyone who's been involved in any kind of ethical argument has heard these at one time or another.
So people say, OK, so there's a moral rule called don't lie.
OK. Moral rule called don't lie.
That's more of a commandment, not really a theory.
But let's just say.
So there's a moral rule called don't lie.
Okay, so a guy comes barging into your house with a gun and says, where's your wife?
I want to kill her. And you know where she is.
And assuming that you like your wife, you're not going to tell this guy.
You're going to lie. I don't know where she is.
I don't have a wife. Right?
I'm Brian and so is my wife.
Or something like that.
And... You're not going to tell him the truth.
And then people say, aha, you see?
There are times where you should lie.
And therefore, there's no such moral rule called don't lie.
Or another one, you know, so don't steal is another rule.
Yet, would you say to a starving boy passing an unattended banana stand that he should not take a banana but instead should starve to death?
And so people say, well, of course the starving boy shouldn't starve to death.
Aha! You see, there's no such thing as absolute property rights and need trumps property, and therefore we need a welfare state.
Well, the welfare state is morally justified.
These are various lifeboat scenarios.
A couple of years back, I wrote an essay.
You can find it on my website.
A lifeboat scenario someone proposed, you know, a guy's hanging from a flagpole, and he's going to fall to his death unless he kicks in a window and climbs inside someone's apartment.
And, of course, no one's going to say, yes, to respect property rights, he should plunge to his death.
Everyone's going to say he should kick The window in and climb into the apartment.
And then people say, aha! You see?
So need Trump's property.
And therefore, the redistribution of income by the government is morally justified.
And if you don't want that, then you're saying he should jump to his death.
These are not theories.
These are instances and scenarios.
And always push back with those kinds of things and say, no, no, no.
Give me your theory.
Give me your theory. Don't give me an instance.
Don't give me an example. I need to judge a theory, because you cannot judge an instance So I approach morals as a theory, not as a scenario, not as an instance.
My approach is...
I mean, I say my approach.
I hope it's not my approach any more than science was Francis Bacon's approach, right?
It's supposed to be the right approach, and that's my idea.
I'll just talk about it as mine because the theory is still pecking its way out of its dinosaur egg to some degree.
There's preferable behavior, like being on time, and then there's universally preferable behavior.
Now this is an important distinction I want to make right up front, that when I say universally preferable behavior, I do not mean behavior that is already universally preferred by everyone, the whole world over, at all times.
It means that it's behavior that should be preferred universally, not that is.
So we should respect property rights.
Of course, that doesn't mean that everybody does, because if everybody did, we wouldn't need ethics.
I mean, if everybody ate perfectly, we wouldn't need nutrition and so on.
So it just means that it should be preferred for the sake of rational consistency and empirical evidence.
Now, universally preferable behavior is a concept It cannot be evaded.
It cannot be dismissed. It cannot be rejected.
It cannot be opposed. So if I propose universally preferable behavior, nobody can reject that proposition without proposing some other universally preferable behavior.
So if I say corrections require universal, so correcting someone requires a universal standard.
So it's not just me imposing my will on you.
It requires a universal standard.
I say that to you and you say, no they don't.
So you're correcting me.
But it must be according to some universal standard.
And this is really trippy.
Once you get it, it's really clear, but it pushes our brains right into the middle of that cultural, relative, historical fog of ethics.
You cannot correct anybody rationally without reference to a universal.
Because if it's me imposing your will on them, then the universal of that is they can impose your will on you and nobody corrects anything.
So corrections require universal.
Science requires, correcting someone in science requires the application of the scientific method.
Correcting someone on 2 and 2 make 5 requires the universals of math and reason and so on.
And the other thing which I get From science and math and reason as a whole, philosophy as a whole, is you test the logic of a theory before its application.
Test the logic of a theory before its application.
And we all know what that means, right?
If you're an engineer and you say, I'm going to build a bridge to do X, and here's all my calculations of the tensile strength and the load-bearing whatever, so I'm no engineer.
People are going to check those numbers first.
They're not going to build the bridge and see if it stands.
They're going to check your numbers first.
And this is true in science as a whole.
You put forward a hypothesis.
And if at the beginning of your hypothesis you say all of this is based on 2 and 2 equaling 5, people are going to say, well, I don't care what you did after that because right here is where we part ways as far as validation goes.
And people will always want to drag you over and around the logical test of their ethical theory.
And they'll try and give you scenarios after scenarios and paralyze you that way.
Avoid, avoid, avoid. Say, give me your theory and let's see how it works out logically before we look at how it might be applied in some other way.
So let's jump out of theory and talk about some examples.
In my experience, There are two major kinds of moral theory failures, and we'll keep your eyes peeled for these because they show up all the time if you look out for them.
I call them this self-detonating failures and contradictory or contradiction failures.
Self-detonating statements is where the content of the argument is opposed by or contradicted by the form of the argument, right?
Let's say some dude, appropriately enough, standing in front of what looks like a presidential podium.
Some dude says, self-ownership, you see, is invalid.
Self-ownership does not exist.
It's an invalid concept.
It's no work, as they say in philosophy circles.
Well, the form of the argument contradicts the content.
The content of the argument is that self ownership is invalid.
The form of the argument is here you have a man exercising self ownership to make the argument that self ownership is invalid.
You don't need to do anything else.
You just need to point that out.
Sir, you are exercising control over your breathing, your voice, your gestures, your words, your tongues.
You know, you are exercising self-ownership to make an argument that self-ownership is invalid.
That is a self-detonating argument and he needs to just drop that position because it doesn't make any sense and you don't need anything outside the argument.
The man is contradicting himself in the very utterance.
Let's look at another one.
Property, as we know, is derived from the idea that we own ourselves and also that we own the effects of our actions.
Whether those actions are building a house or making an argument or snapping our fingers or strangling a homeless guy, we own the effects of what it is that we do.
So if I strangle a homeless guy, then His death is on me.
I have created a death.
I own his death, which is why I can be punished or receive sanctions for this evil behavior.
So if somebody says a man does not own the effects of his actions, then the only rational response is, well, who the hell said that?
It's a very, very important thing.
These are self-detonating arguments.
So the person who makes the argument, he's making an argument that he is responsible for.
The argument is an effect of his actions.
So if you're standing in three people, person A, person B, and person C, you're person B. Person A says, a man does not own the effects of his actions.
You can turn to person C and say, I can't believe you said that.
And the person A is going to say, wait a minute, I said that!
It's like, oh, so you own that argument?
That was your argument? Because that's the effects of his actions.
These are kind of things where you can get to the core of a problem in ethics very, very, very quickly.
It's really important to keep your eyes out for self-detonating statements.
Look at the form of what someone is saying before you address the content.
There's so much philosophically that is embedded in the form of an argument that you need to be characteristic of.
But let's say somebody satisfies the first standard.
They're not just rankly self-contradicting themselves, like they're yelling in your ear that sound doesn't exist or whatever, right?
Or they're saying to you, words have no meaning.
It's like, wait, did I understand that?
Then they do, right? So the second is contradiction.
So I'm a cat burglar.
I'm in neoprene or something truly slithery.
And I go up and I steal a Fabergé egg.
And I put it in my backpack.
And I go home on the subway.
And I get home. I open up my backpack.
And it's like somebody has stolen the egg from me in the subway.
What am I going to say?
I'm going to say, damn, I'm really angry.
I'm really upset because someone stole from me.
Now this, of course, is pretty contradictory.
It's pretty contradictory. To steal is to say, I wish to have ownership of something I have stolen, which is both a simultaneous rejection and affirmation.
Of property rights.
Nobody's going to steal any if they don't ever get to keep what they've stolen.
I mean, nobody's going to do some Bruce Wayne climb up 40 stories on the outside with suction cups, get the Faberge egg after going like Catherine Zeta-Jones through 12 million lasers with a great butt.
Nobody's going to do that if they're just going to have the stuff stolen from them right afterwards.
So you only steal with the expectation that you get to keep what you're stealing.
And so you are saying, I wish to own, I wish to have property rights, I wish to keep what I'm taking from someone else.
I'm violating their property rights only based on the expectation that I get to maintain my property rights over what I steal.
That is an affirmation and denial of property rights and is a contradictory theory.
Others have no right to property, but I do.
Taxation, of course. Government says, others cannot steal, but I can.
That's a contradiction. Rape.
Well, I can impose my sexual will on others, but they cannot impose their sexual will on me, i.e., I do not want to have sex.
War. Murder in peacetime is evil.
In wartime, it gets you a medal and a pension.
These are contradictions, and they need to be resolved by any ethical theory.
Sorry, let me just go back for a sec.
Now, contradictions are really important.
And as far as ethics goes, there is room for gray areas.
I mean, this is really, really important.
There is room for gray areas.
Because ethics is a discipline that has to do with human beings.
Human beings are living creatures. It's a kind of biology, in a sense.
Or it's related to biology.
Now, biology does not need the same level of absolutism that physics does, right?
So in physics, it's pretty absolute, right?
I mean, you've got to be bang on.
But a horse is, you know, defined as a quadruped with one head.
I think we all understand that.
Now, every now and then, I'm sure, a horse is born with two heads.
Every now and then, I don't know, maybe once every hundred years, a horse gets born and has got two heads.
And that doesn't mean that the science of biology is rendered completely subjective and meaningless or that you can't ever define what a horse is because occasionally, once every hundred years, they're born with two heads.
There are some animals that biologists had a tough time figuring out whether they were mammals or lizards.
Sorry, mammals are warm-blooded or cold-blooded.
But that didn't mean that there was no difference between a lizard and a whale, right?
So there are some gray areas.
I mean, common gray areas are, when do children achieve moral responsibility?
Well, you know, if they're mentally healthy, at least.
By the time that they're 20, we assume so.
When they're two, we pretty much assume not.
But so somewhere in the middle.
And yeah, that's a little bit of a gray area, but that does not mean That everything is gray and everything is subjective and there's no way to figure these things out.
Some of them are going to be social conventions.
Some of them are going to be pretty obvious.
And some of them are going to be more individual cases.
But if you're going to propose a difference in an ethical theory, again, go back to science.
Think of it like science. I can say that a lizard is cold-blooded and a mammal is warm-blooded.
Okay? Because those are objective standards, right?
So I can say that somebody with an IQ of 60 is not very morally responsible, or somebody who's genuinely and legitimately insane is not morally responsible, but there are tests for that.
It's not arbitrary. In the same way that there are tests for warm-blooded versus cold-blooded, it's not an arbitrary distinction.
Now, if I say that blue lizards are cold-blooded, but green lizards are warm-blooded.
That is clearly an arbitrary distinction because the color of the lizard does not determine whether it's warm or cold-blooded.
The external shell of the lizard, the skin color, doesn't determine that.
What determines it is the whole blood system and all that.
In the same way, I can't say that a man not in a green costume is evil for initiating force, but a man in a green costume, like a soldier's uniform, is moral.
I can say that somebody who is insane is not morally responsible, and somebody who is sane is morally responsible, because there's an objective test, relatively objective test, to differentiate these two.
And it is actually really key for moral arguments.
But I can't use an inconsequential Aspect of a human being and say, this is the moral distinction.
A blue uniform, i.e.
a cop, can initiate the use of force against somebody not initiating the use of force against someone else, like a drug user or somebody not paying taxes or whatever.
Because he has a blue uniform on, he now has opposing moral rules.
That's truly arbitrary, because the costume of a human being is not relevant to the moral status any more than the skin color of a lizard is relevant to its designation as a lizard.
So these contradictions are very important, and you need to, and I hate to say sort of keep hammering on those, although it can obviously get kind of exciting to have moral arguments, because it's so fundamental to what we do as a species.
But it's really important to focus on these.
If somebody's creating arbitrary moral distinctions, you really need to call them on it.
Alright, so in the interest of time, make sure we have enough time for questions.
Moral test. Is the debater violating the rule through his actions?
Look at the form of the argument before the context.
Somebody says the senses are invalid.
Well, he's telling you that using your senses in some form.
Somebody says, well, force is necessary in society.
Well, the person is debating this.
He's not enforcing it. So he's contradicting his argument with his form.
He's not putting a gun to your head saying force is necessary in society.
I could respect that if not like it.
So that's important as well.
So let's get down to the real nitty-gritty of ways to look at ethical theories.
I call this the Bob and Doug test.
You can call it whatever you want, but it's named after two fairly funny Canadian hosers.
So take somebody's universals and imagine two guys in a room and see whether or not they can achieve it.
So let's say that somebody says, murder is universally preferable behavior.
It is the highest moral good or amoral good of any kind to murder.
Well, obviously that's nutty, but why is it nutty?
That's the challenge, right? Well, so the question is, okay, so two guys in a room, Bob and Doug, can they both murder at the same time?
Because it's universal. You can't just have one guy with murder as UPB because it's universal, so it's got to be everybody.
Can two men steal from each other at the same time to get truly kinky?
Can two men rape each other at the same time?
Well, the answer, both practically and logically, is no.
And how is that? Well, let's see.
Murder as UPB. Logic fail.
Let's take our nicely tanned Bob in a room and pair him up with the delicious-looking Doug.
And give Bob a nice blue laser gun and have him shoot it at Doug's head.
Okay, so Bob is achieving the highest moral good by murdering Doug.
Yay, good for him. Murder is good.
We like murder. However, it's universal, which means that Doug must be achieving the same thing at the same time, or it doesn't work, right?
So Doug simultaneously gets his red laser pistol and shoots lightning bolts as Bob's tasty midsection.
Now, murder is bad.
Murder is good, murder is bad.
What I mean by that is, murder must be something you don't want.
Otherwise, it's euthanasia.
Which, again, we won't get into the ethics of that, because that's a separate discussion, but we understand that if I want someone to kill me, it's not quite the same as murder.
There's a different... I mean, some terminal illness or whatever.
It's not the same.
Murder must be bad or not wanted by the person being murdered, clearly.
Otherwise it's not murder, it's something else.
Like in the same way that if I want someone to cut my leg off because I'm pinned under some building or whatever, that's not the same as some guy just hacking my leg off with an axe, right?
And I don't want him to. So if Bob is murdering Doug because murder is the highest good, Bob can only murder Doug if Doug desperately does not want to be murdered.
In other words, murder is bad for Doug in order to make it possible for Bob.
And this doesn't even take into account the fact that they can't both murder practically at the same time, not going to both die at the same time and so on.
The fact that you can't sustain it, it's not universal in time because murder is an instance.
Murder, even if they both kill each other at exactly the same time, it's a moment, an instance.
Are they evil while they're shooting, but good when the other person dies?
It can't be sustained through time.
So it fails that test of universality, not just geographically, but also through time.
So murder completely contradicts itself as a universally preferable behavior.
It doesn't work. The theory doesn't work at all.
And that's all you need to say, is the theory self-contradicts.
Same is true for assault.
Same is true for rape.
Same is true for theft.
And this is really important.
This is why I think this approach is such a breakthrough.
Aristotle said many years ago, look, if you come up with a moral theory that says rape is good, I don't care what you said, you've done something wrong.
This approach, UPB, universally preferable behavior, the rational analysis of the theory, validates The most commonly held libertarian philosophies.
Property rights and the non-initiation of force fall completely and perfectly into UPB. Initiation of force does not, and neither does the non-respect for property rights.
All right, and we're racing, racing through, and I hope you'll read the book, and I hope that you'll pester me with lots of questions now or on the Sunday shows, which is 2 p.m.
Eastern Standard Time. Come attest.
We'll just go through this very quickly.
We'll go to questions. It's not perfect, but it's a pretty good rule of thumb.
In UPB, there's no such thing as unchosen, positive moral obligations.
Thou shalt, right? Thou shalt be thy brother's keeper, take care of the poor, or whatever.
We all understand, like, a dude can't be evil if he's in a coma.
I mean, he can't be evil if he's in a coma.
And what that translates to is that in a coma, you can't fulfill positive obligations.
I mean, you can't. You can't go and help the poor.
You can't pay for Joe's education or anything like that.
And so it's a good rule of thumb.
So is the rule being proposed?
Can it be achieved, in a sense, by somebody in a coma?
Well, someone in a coma is respecting your property rights because he's not stealing from you, he's not raping you, he's not killing you, so he can at least achieve the bare minimum of good behavior, or at least of UPV, by being in a coma.
But he can't pay his taxes and help the poor with their education or whatever, right?
And so that's sort of just a rule of thumb practical test to let you know whether there's something wrong.
The way it works out in terms of UPB is that if one human being has the right to inflict or create unchosen positive obligations in another, like the politician says, you have to pay your taxes.
Well, that's not universal because it's only the politician.
Universality requirement of ethics means everybody, everybody gets to create unchosen positive obligations on everyone else.
But if everyone can do it, it cancels out and becomes completely impossible and pointless fundamentally.
So look at the social contract.
You've got to pay your taxes. Well, that means everybody gets to say to everybody, you have to pay your taxes.
You tax me $1,000?
No! I tax you $1,000.
You tax me $2,000.
I tax you $2,000.
It obviously doesn't work.
It can't be universalized and therefore it fails.
So that's it for the admittedly mad cocaine-fueled sprint through the ideas behind universally preferable behavior.
A lot of what I've talked about is not particular to the book except for the Bob and Doug example of the coma test.
It's free, free, free if you go to FDRURL.com.
You can get the free audiobook, a PDF HTML. There is a print book available for pretty cheap.
And, of course, I've done a number of podcasts and videos on ethics, which you can find at freedominradio.com.
And that's it for the...
Good Lord, I actually stayed on time.
Who am I today?
I don't know. But that's it for my presentation.
If you would like to, questions, comments, mad criticisms, I am completely open and happy to hear what you've got to say, so I'll turn it over back to the moderator for any feedback.
All right. Thanks a lot, Stefan. Our first question comes from Zach Slaback, and I'm actually going to unmute him so he can ask his question.
All right, Zach, you're unmuted.
Go ahead. Okay, thanks.
So since we ought not to look at theories by instance and instance, where does this kind of philosophy fall on the utilitarianism versus deontology kind of spectrum?
Well, I'm not at all a fan of utilitarianism.
Utilitarianism basically says that if it achieves a good end, then it's a good thing.
And so people say, well, look, indoor plumbing is a good thing, and so if we tax everyone in a region to get indoor plumbing, then it's good, and it bypasses the free rider problem, and therefore it's a good thing.
But I don't think that that is an argument for universalized ethics at all.
Because, yeah, it's good for some people, but it's bad for other people.
And so it can't be universalized.
So I'm not a big fan of that at all.
And you'll have to tell me a little bit more about what you mean by deontological.
I just want to make sure that we're on the same page as far as that goes, if I'm going to answer that accurately.
My understanding is the idea that one value is supreme across the board in all situations.
No, I don't think that's a valid approach to ethics at all, unless the value is reason and evidence, like logical consistency and empirical evidence.
I don't think you can just say, like the objectivist idea that man's life is the highest standard of value and that is just the flag that you plant, that's the axiom, Well, I don't like axioms because axioms are arbitrary.
Axioms are, okay, if we all agree on this, then we can go to ethics.
But the whole point of ethics is that people don't agree.
So if I just say, well, look, man's life isn't the highest standard of value, I'd reject that.
Well, what do people say?
Or they say, well, look, reason equals virtue equals happiness.
So if you want to be happy, you need to be rational, and you need to live a virtuous life.
Well, I don't want to be happy.
I'm a masochist.
Well, what are you going to do with someone like that?
They've thrown the whole thing out because they're not standing by your flag.
So I think it's sort of pointless to say to people, if you already agree that there's this really important thing called virtue, then we can all be virtuous.
But the whole point is that people don't agree, and so it doesn't solve that problem.
All right, thank you. Thank you.
Okay, the next question comes from.
He doesn't have a microphone, so I'll just ask it.
How would you counter the argument that the use of nuclear bombs in Japan saved lives?
Well, first of all, the facts are that it didn't, and it wasn't even close.
Japan had offered to surrender before Hiroshima and Nagasaki.
The only thing that they asked was that the emperor be allowed to stay on the throne, and America rejected that.
And nuked them without warning.
And after the settlement was done, they allowed the emperor to stay on the throne anyway.
So Japan had already offered to surrender, and that didn't save any lives at all.
But even if it had saved lives, the issue with that is not the effects.
Again, you don't want to just look at a snapshot.
You will want to say the initiation of force is immoral.
It's wrong, which is in UPP terms, so the initiation of force cannot be universalized.
The whole reality of the war was that it was based on the initiation of force.
So America started a war and Japan started a war with each other based upon the initiation of force against their own citizens in the form of taxation, in the form of public school indoctrination, in the form of property taxes and other forms of theft, and most fundamentally through the draft, which is obviously just murder enslavement.
So you don't want to just look at that particular question and say, here's the instance.
But you need to look at the theory, which says if the initiation of the use of force is wrong, then you need to start to go to the root of the problem rather than look at one specific manifestation, if that makes any sense.
Okay, the next question is coming from Joseph.
I'm going to unmute him real quick.
Hey, Joe, you want to give it a go?
Alright, go ahead, Joseph.
Okay. This is kind of stealing from the Wilt Chamberlain argument.
Since everyone cannot be wealthy without someone else being less than wealthy, does this mean that wealth gain in and of itself is a logical failure?
And if that is the universal approach, then invalidating this idea Does that mean people should not even want to gain wealth or property or anything over that because essentially they're taking from their fellow people, which that would be like two people holding guns at each other, even though it's a voluntary exchange, you say, well, it's impossible to voluntarily exchange bullets.
So are you saying that people are willingly euthanizing each other for wealth gain?
And either way, the whole concept of UPVs, are they applicable to specific societies, or Earth, or everywhere?
And if so, what about things like a cannibalistic society or whatever?
All right, hang on. You've got a whole bunch of questions there, so please don't ask any more, because I can spend a lot of time on those.
That's fine. I appreciate that. But the Wilt Chamberlain argument is interesting because obviously Wilt Chamberlain achieved his prodigious height without taking away anybody else's height.
I'm not shorter Because Will Chamberlain was taller.
And so there is, I think, a very important and powerful economic argument which says that self-ownership plus property plus free trade, which is the natural result of those arguments, creates wealth.
And you do not become richer by somebody else becoming poorer, but both parties in a voluntary transaction get a benefit.
So if you want a pen and I want $5 and you pay me $5 for my pen, we're both happier.
And we know that because it's voluntary.
When it's involuntary, when it's forced, then that can't be even remotely guaranteed.
In fact, quite the opposite can be guaranteed.
So I think you really want to differentiate between voluntary trade, which is total UPB. UPB is like property rights and self-ownership and voluntary trade and all of that.
That is a net gain for the two parties.
Logically, by the very fact that they're voluntarily engaging in that, it is a net benefit for both.
That is very different from the forced redistribution or forced transfer of wealth, which occurs through the state and occurs through other forms of predation, like a mugger in an alleyway, The second, you know, the initiation of force to transfer property,
including fraud, is not at all UPV. It is virulently opposed by UPV. And should be morally condemned, whereas voluntary exercise of free trade and property rights is completely UPB compliant and is not at the expense of others.
So I just really want to differentiate those two.
Cannibals? Well, cannibalism is the initiation of force, unless you're eating dead people, in which case it comes down to the property rights of the body, which would have something to do with the will and so on.
But that would be my answer, at least, to the wealth transfer question.
And that's a great question. Thank you.
Well, then bring them back to life.
Bring it back to life. You know, if you could do that, then economics might be somewhat of a moose point because you have godlike powers and could just, you know, snap your fingers and have wealth come into existence like Bill Gates.
Anyway. Okay, the next question is coming from Don.
Go ahead, Don. Hi, just wondering what your view on the general Buddhist view on ethics.
The actions are neither right or wrong, but beneficial or not beneficial.
Like murder for example, if I go kill someone, someone may eventually kill me.
Like if I live in a society where we think it's okay to kill people, I might get killed myself.
So therefore, we consider killing someone to be wrong.
Yeah, I mean, I've heard of that argument and I think it's very interesting.
I have a little bit more respect for the Buddhist approach to self-knowledge than I do for the Buddhist approach to ethics.
The problem, of course, is that it's just not true.
I mean, the empirical evidence is so strongly against that, that if I go kill someone, I'm afraid that I live in a society where murder will occur.
Well, the reality is that, you know, think of any totalitarian tin-pot dictatorship in the world, they live in a murder-based society, but they're on top, so they're very happy.
And we assume that they're happier than any other alternative, because that's what they're doing.
So if you're going to say that, then what you're going to say is, well, okay, so murder helps me.
I just need to murder as many people as quickly as possible so everyone becomes afraid of me and I need to tax them and I need to pay, you know, thugs to beat them up if they disobey me.
And then I'm on top and I get all of these goodies and all of this money and all of this power and that's great.
So I don't think it solves that problem at all.
I think that in personal relationships, in terms of being nasty to people, I think that can have many more repercussions.
But it is not an argument against murder to say, well, what if you're afraid of getting killed?
I mean, obviously some people don't care about that.
I mean, the guy who just shot Giffords, Luckner, his name is, I think, Jared Luckner.
I mean, he obviously was pretty aware that he was fairly certain that he was going to die, and that certainly didn't stop him.
So it doesn't, you know, these consequentialist arguments don't work in terms of the evidence that is around us all the time.
But if we were to use that Faces for, say, a set rules, then we could work together to prevent people who break those, you know, simplistic rules, you know, don't murder, don't steal, don't rape, possibly don't lie to some extent.
If you know what I mean, like work together to prevent people from breaking such rules.
Yeah, but all we've done is we've invented some rules that we prefer, and we're enforcing them upon others.
That, to me, is not a basis for ethical philosophy.
Because you and I may both say, oh yeah, you know, killing is bad, and lying is bad, and so on.
But if it's arbitrary, then all we're doing is inflicting a prejudice on others.
The fact that a prejudice happens to be, you know, right in some way, It's not a good reason for imposing it on others.
It needs to be reason from first principles.
It needs to conform to evidence.
It needs to be philosophical.
It can't just be a bunch of stuff that people agree on inflicting upon others because that's just a kind of democratic model that doesn't work at all in the practical sense in the long run.
Well, I think the emphasis will be is that the rules will be practical as opposed to just be simply ethical.
But, you know, the general point of view of ethics is just simply a way that we describe as action, but the emphasis will be on the practical nature of all the rules.
Yeah, but no, look, the problem is that practical doesn't mean anything.
Because what's practical for Robert Mugabe is not practical for his citizens, right?
It's practical for him to gain as much power and as much wealth as possible.
It was practical for Idi Amin to do what he wanted, to keep people's body parts in his fridge or whatever.
Retire to some island with a billion dollars up his pants.
I mean, that's all very practical to those people.
It's practical for Barack Obama to pursue the presidency because he obviously really likes power and microphones and teleprompters.
So it's very practical for these people.
It's practical for somebody who wants to go overseas and shoot people to join the military.
It's practical for them. So practicality is far too subjective to be used.
It can't be universalized at all.
So practicality doesn't work.
It only works among people who already agree, but if you already agree, you kind of don't need ethics any more than you need a contract if everybody's going to keep their word.
You don't need lawyers if everyone's going to keep their word.
Ethics are for where people don't agree on the fundamentals and need to have some methodology for working it out, and that's what UPB is designed to provide.
Okay, we have time for one more question.
This one's coming from David Bachman, so go ahead, David.
Thanks. Hi, Steph. My question concerns the ethical gray areas.
If I understand UPB correctly, there are certain actions which are neither have the distinction of being moral or immoral.
My question concerns voting.
If I understand the UPB correctly, Voting cannot be resisted ethically with violence, but at the same time, it's in the same moral category as tardiness or rudeness, and that to me doesn't, it feels different to me.
I was curious if I could get your thoughts on that.
Well, I mean, ethics doesn't apply to a situation of coercion.
So once you're in a situation of coercion, to me, and I think this is pretty defensible philosophically, you just, you know, you can't identify ethics.
So if somebody sticks a gun in your ribs, I don't think there's a human being alive who has a shred of integrity or empathy who's going to say, you must fight back on your evil.
Because, you know, the evil is occurring as some guy sticking a gun in your ribs.
That's where the evil is occurring.
And so, when it comes to voting, I mean, if people want to vote defensively, I mean, I believe that practically it's pointless, and I've got lots of videos and podcasts about why, with lots of evidence, but I'm not going to say to somebody, it's evil for you to vote, because what's evil is the fact that you even think that you have to vote to begin with.
And the reason for that, the reason you think you have to vote is because there are people who are preying on you using the violence of the state, people taking your money, people locking you up for non-crimes.
And so you feel, OK, well, I've got to take judo because there's a lot of the guys who want to beat me up for no reason.
And it's like, OK, well, maybe you should take judo, maybe you shouldn't.
But what we really should focus on is the guys who are going to beat you up, because they're the ones who are doing the actual evil.
It's not the response to evil that should be evaluated morally.
It is the evil itself.
So whether people vote or not, I think there are practical realities to voting that are important.
It's not evil to vote, for heaven's sake, of course.
I'm not saying you're suggesting it is.
I don't think it's virtuous. It is in a state of non-morality.
Because you are responding to the initiation of force with strategies that hopefully are going to serve you in some way that you think is positive, whether that's not voting or voting.
But I say let's always turn the moral spotlight on the initiator of force and the theories that are used to justify the initiation of force and forget about the people running away from the rampaging robot monster of the state and turn our focus on the initiation of force that is the state.
And that's where we need to focus our moral energies and forget about the victims and what they're doing, if that makes any sense.
Yes, absolutely. Thank you.
Alright everybody, thank you again for participating and Stephan, thank you so much for coming and spending an hour with us today.
As mentioned before, all the information will be available both on Stephan's website as well as the Students for Liberty website.
I hope you guys will join us next week when Lawrence Reed does Great Myths of the Great Depression.
It will be same time, same day.
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