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July 14, 2019 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
27:33
Ethics Reloaded! - Universally Preferable Behavior
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Hi everybody, it's Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Aid Radio.
I hope that you're doing very well.
This is a short presentation on my rational theory of secular ethics, UPB Redux Ethics Summarized.
I hope that you will enjoy it and I hope that it will give you a little taste of the excitement of secular ethical definitions so that you will storm off and pick up your free copy of my audiobook or PDF or, if you don't mind shelling out a few shekels, the print version of the book.
So you can grab the work at freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
The website URL is just below.
Oh, and if you're having trouble seeing this presentation, there are high-definition versions.
I have one just off to the right of what you are looking at in the description.
You can click on that to get a more high-definition version of this presentation.
It's tricky at first, but it gets very easy as you get the hang of it, and it's good that it's tricky, because if we as a species have not figured out how to have ethics without gods, governments, biology, culture, tradition, bullying, and whatnot, then it would be kind of bad if it weren't tricky to begin with.
Let's go over some of the basic definitions again.
I'm not going to cover all the topics because it's a big topic, but I wanted to go over the framework so that you can at least begin to see the value of what it is that this is in terms of a leap forward in the definitions of ethics.
So, since material reality, that exciting place that I am streaming to you from, is objective and behaves in a rational and predictable manner, I mean this box, not the human being in it necessarily, If you make a statement that you claim to be true, it must describe something that is objective, rational, and predictable.
Science, math, engineering, and so on.
Those thoughts which are designed to define truth must be rational, objective, and predictable.
And again, I'm not saying all of this is proven.
We're just going over the framework, and then you can delve into the book if you're more interested in this absolutely gripping and absolutely essential topic.
So what do I mean?
Let's look at this graphically. Well, we have this shaded black bowling ball called material reality.
Clearly, we have a...
I don't know, some sort of Brahmin green smiley face called a mind.
And there is overlapping stuff.
There is stuff which occurs in the mind which does not occur within reality.
There is obviously stuff that occurs in reality which does not impact on the mind or the dark side of the moon through most of human history and so on.
And then there are places where the mind and empirical reality overlap.
So... In there, we have truth statements, statements of truth about material reality, objective statements that people who want to make claims about material reality have to conform to, this objectivity, this rationality, and so on.
In the mind, we have things that don't occur in reality.
There's dreams. There are various depths of self-knowledge about your history and who you are.
There's the unconscious.
And again, the mind is material.
I'm not saying it's any kind of magical elf.
But these processes that occur within the mind are not derived from external reality.
When I dream about an elephant, it's going on within my mind.
I'm not getting an amazing vision to some sort of Kunta Kinte planet.
And there are base physical processes, how we fight infection, and so we don't even know those, at least most of us don't.
They occur within the mind.
So those kinds of knowledges.
Now, in material reality, of course, there's stuff that's out there in material reality that we have not discovered and may never discover as a species, and so it occurs within material reality, but it does not occur within our own minds because we don't have the knowledge to describe or understand it yet.
So in this area, truth are concepts which can be valid or invalid.
So if I say I dreamt about an elephant last night, there's no real truth or falsehood value.
There's no way to test it. It's gone.
You're simply relying on my reporting.
But when I say elephants are warm-blooded, that's a different statement.
That's a statement about empirical reality.
So where the mind and material reality overlap, meet, interact...
Where we are making statements which are about objective material reality, we get concepts which can be valid or invalid.
Science, math, philosophy, and so on.
UPB really falls into this realm, really covers this realm where mind and empirical reality overlap, and we'll get into that.
And it is, in fact, a discipline or a mental approach or a mental understanding of the relationships between thoughts, truth, and reality that encompasses science, math, and moral philosophy.
So let's look at how this relationship, these overlapping circles, in a sense, get distorted in other ways of thinking.
If we look at relativism or subjectivism, this can also include postmodernism, and sorry for the small text.
Basically, we have an idea that material reality is a concept within the mind.
Plato has this same thing, that the true reality, the higher reality, what Kant called the nuomenal reality, or Plato's forms...
Or the Cartesian, my brain is a tank in manipulation of a demon approach.
Material reality is a concept within the mind.
There's no such thing as objective empirical truth.
It can also be that material reality is completely disconnected from the mind.
That's another approach.
So, you know, you and I see different colors.
Everything could be an illusion, man.
You know, we are the dream of the dolphin or whatever.
All of those would be relativistic or subjectivist views, that everything occurs within the mind, and then the mind is not subjected to external empirical reality.
So, if we bring back our fancy-schmancy overlapping balls here, We have material reality and we have the mind, and in the rationalist, or at least in my approach, we have truth, objective empirical truth, as the meeting of those two things.
And you'll see it doesn't cover everything, because we don't know everything about how the mind interacts with reality, of course.
But in the relativist and subjectivist view, the mind expands to absorb material reality.
The mind is larger than material reality.
Material reality occurs within the mind.
That's why we have this radical subjectivism.
And, unfortunately, that empirical objective truth, she doth vanish.
And this, of course, is why you can't have subjectivist ethics.
And this is, of course, a problem which modern academia is quite tortured about.
I guess as you can read about in my novel, The God of Atheists, also available for free on my website.
How does religion cock up these balls, so to speak?
Well, there is a concept within our mind called gods, elves, demons, hobbits, and so on.
But it expands or extends these concepts of gods into some kind of super-reality.
And also these people who say, well, there is an alternate reality where God could exist.
There's some super-reality that exists.
There is a hostility towards psychology.
Again, not to pump the free books, but How Not to Achieve Freedom talks about this and why.
There, of course, is an acceptance of material miracles because the mind, in a very similar way to subjectivism, is larger than reality, whether it's God's mind or your mind in communion with God or whatever.
But physical laws and properties can be willed into alternate states or things which would be impossible in the normal course of things.
Faith, belief equals truth.
What exists within the mind equals truth without having to go through that nasty, empirical, logical validation process, the scientific method or philosophical examination.
Of course, it's false.
God is a concept within the mind.
There's no evidence for gods in reality.
No evidence and gods are square circles.
Self-contradictory entities cannot exist.
There's no logical consistency in the concepts of gods, so...
What happens here is to bring our overlapping circles here.
We've got material reality, we've got the mind, we've got the intersection of those, which is truth.
But religion messes this up completely by taking this concept which exists within the mind called God, and we can have...
False concepts, right?
We can have the concept of a square circle which can't exist in reality.
And please don't talk to me about cylinders.
That doesn't matter.
So we've got this thing called God.
This could be God. This could be country.
This could be race. This could be patriotism, whatever it is.
We've got this concept. Which then we kind of blow up into this super concept which absorbs the mind, reality, truth.
And this is why, again, when you get religion, you cannot have objective or rational morality, which is why religious wars are so continual.
And we see the ungodly spectacle, or in this case, godly spectacle of people being blown up in the Middle East and throughout religious concepts as a whole.
Religion messes it up this way.
There's another philosophy which we can look at called determinism.
Let's go over some of the basic tenets.
The mind, what we call the mind, the brain, is a mere physical machine.
It doesn't create, it doesn't will in that way.
Free will is a magical illusion.
It's a ghost in the machine. It's an elf at the driving wheel and is not real.
And because free will is an illusion and choice is an illusion, there is no such thing as preferred states, right?
If two rocks are bouncing down a hill, there's not one place which is preferred for one of them to land and not preferred for another one to land.
There's no race that one should win and shouldn't win.
It's simply the unfolding of material processes with no choice.
And we don't argue with raindrops that are going down a window.
You know, you see them and say, oh, Go left!
Go right! No, that's bad!
That's wrong! So there's no preferred states in the deterministic universe.
This also includes compatibilism.
And of course, since truth is a preferred state, there's no such thing as preferred states.
There's no such thing as truth.
So determinism, let's get our balls up here again.
Determinism, we've got material reality, we've got the mind, we've got the truth, which is the meeting of the two.
And what determinism does, though, is it takes...
The mind out of material reality and puts the mind into material reality.
So it is subject to all of the exact same physical laws as every other piece of atomic matter or any other physical property or physical law in the universe and therefore there is no such thing as free will any more than a comet has free will in its orbit.
And because the mind goes directly into material reality and is a subset without will, without choice, without preferred states of behavior or thought There's no such thing as truth, and because we put the mind in material reality, it simply becomes the wet, rare brain, and what we think of as a mind, as moral standards of preferred behavior, ceases to exist.
So in determinism, you can't have moral states, subjectivism, religion, determinism.
This is why these philosophies do not produce empirical, tangible, material ethics, or even theories thereof, because it dissolves this relationship between mind and reality.
So, philosophy, at least the way that I work with it, gets it right.
So, we have material reality, we have the mind, we have truth, and the purpose of science, for instance, is to stretch this ellipsis of truth to further encompass, to bring the mind closer into material reality without co-joining the two.
Truth gets stretched out into material reality and psychology does the same thing for our inner life, for our inner states, so that we gain greater self-knowledge of our emotions, our core beliefs, our motivations, the value of our dreams if we can figure them out and so on.
So we're designed to stretch this and this is the increase in human knowledge into the material and into the self.
Generally, I would say start with the left, go to the right.
This is Aristotle and Socrates' first thing, the beginning of wisdom and self-knowledge.
So this is how philosophy, rational philosophy and the approach that I take in Freedom and Radio gets it right, of course.
And so UPB, again, is all of these states where there's objectivity, where there is truth, where people are saying things that are supposed to be valid about material reality and its principles and its properties and that which is objective.
So, let's take a quick step through examples.
Again, we could go on and on with this, but let's just touch on it briefly.
So, in the mind, you have an experience, oh, I dreamed about an elephant.
The truth claim you could make is, my dream elephant exists in reality.
The reality is that dream elephants do not exist in reality, but only within your own mind.
Now, you touch an elephant, you say, ooh, that elephant, she's warm.
And then you may make a truth claim, all elephants are warm-blooded, not just this one that I put in the microwave.
And then the reality is you would test that against fish or reptiles or whatever, and you'd say, yes, elephants are mammals and warm-blooded, and so on.
In the mind, you say, I have the experience of looking past Steph's distended forehead, the virtual Klingon brain of philosophy, and I see red.
The truth claim, I am looking at red.
The reality is I see the light wavelength 650 nm.
So that's more of the objective.
Red is obviously subjective, but the truth is the wavelength.
Mind, I believe in God.
Truth claim, I believe in God because God objectively exists.
My belief is a mere mirror or acceptance of the epistemological reality that God exists.
The reality is that God does not objectively exist.
It's a self-contradictory concept for which there is no physical evidence whatsoever.
Therefore, it's identical to non-existence.
In your mind, you get confused.
Four equals five.
And you say, oh, two plus two is five.
And then the reality is you put, I don't know, two rocks and two rocks together.
You count them and you find that there are four rocks.
And so, again, you're going through this phase of philosophical validation.
This is the scientific method in particular.
So, now we've got that tidied up, let's look at our good friend, our philosophical guinea pig, Bob.
And we are in a debate where we are correcting Bob about something.
Well, the moment that you tell Bob that he is wrong, you're saying that ideas within his mind, ideas within your mind, Bob, do not conform to objective reality or are illogical and thus cannot be true.
It cannot be true, because truth is the relationship between thoughts and either objective reality itself or the principles we derive from it, the laws of non-contradiction and the logical laws and so on.
So what you're doing is you're sort of opening up Bob's brain and you're comparing the contents of his mind to the principles or the empirical evidence of objective reality, evidence and reason.
And you're not stating a mere opinion.
If Bob says 2 plus 2 is 5, you're not saying, well, I don't like that you say that 2 plus 2 is 5.
I find it offensive.
I mean, that's not what you're saying.
What you're saying is 2 plus 2 is not 5.
This is all very, very important when it comes to ethics.
So implicit in correcting Bob is that there is a universally preferable measure of beliefs.
Of the truth value of propositions called truth, proof, evidence, rationality, these kinds of things.
Science. So truth requires at least logical consistency and or empirical evidence.
Truth is universally preferable to falsehood.
So if I say, Bob says 2 plus 2 is 5, and I say, no, 2 plus 2 is 4, I'm not expressing an opinion.
I'm attempting to align both.
His truth statements to that which is real, that which is true, that which is objective, that which is rational.
It is universally preferable to replace your false ideas with true or valid ideas, or ideas which conform to reality and to rationality.
So this is all implicit.
The moment you correct someone, this is all embedded in the correction of them.
Unless you use, I don't know, 2 plus 2 is 5 is offensive to me, which nobody ever does.
So, universally preferable behavior.
UPB is just a recognition of this basic reality, this relationship between the mind and objective reality.
The UPB is the reason, science, even evidence within a courtroom, cross-examinations, looking for logical inconsistencies, all of those kinds of things, all fall under the UPB. And UPB is only required if and when you correct someone.
If and when you correct someone.
I mean, if you just nod and say, how interesting, or that's nice, then maybe UPB doesn't really matter, you know?
If you say there is no such thing as UPB, you're contradicting yourself.
There's no possibility that you can go up to someone and say there is no such thing as universally preferable behavior because UPB is implicit in correcting someone with regards to objective truth.
What you're basically saying is it is universally preferable for you to correct your false opinion that anything is universally preferable.
You see, it is a complete contradiction.
You cannot correct anyone about anything Without implicitly accepting and using UPB. No possibility.
Can never happen. It's absolutely, completely and totally not possible.
So, the trick, though, is to remember that UPB applies to theories or propositions, not to specific actions.
And in this way, it's the same as the scientific method.
So, let's look at a moral statement.
Murder is wrong.
Murder is evil. Murder is immoral.
Whatever. Well, of course, someone's going to say, but it might be perfectly rational for a man to kill, or a man might benefit from killing, or this or the other, because what you're doing is you're looking at a guy stabbing another guy.
That's not how UPB works.
UPB cannot judge...
Individual actions, but only general theories.
So, UPB can't look at a guy shaking his moneymaker and say, dancing is irrational, dancing is immoral, dancing is moral.
But, if this guy's a witch doctor who says, my dancing affects the rain, then UPB can evaluate that statement, that truth statement, right?
I had a dream about an elephant last night.
It's not rational or irrational, moral or irrational.
It's not even really true or false because you can't verify it.
But if you say dreams about elephants cause people to win the lottery the next day, then you have a theory that can be tested.
So this guy killing another guy is bad or wrong or irrational.
That's a specific action.
UPB doesn't deal with specific actions because it is for evaluating logical propositions, theories.
So morality is a theory, one theory, like science, like logic, and so on, of universally preferable behavior.
So if you say murder, right, the initiation of actions which kill another human being who's not attacking him, self-defense all dealt with in the book, but if you say murder is universally preferable behavior, this whole theory leads to insurmountable contradictions which can't be resolved, and this is how you know The initiation of the use of force and theft and rape and murder and so on is wrong.
Theories which say they're universally preferable behaviors lead to insurmountable contradictions.
And again, I go through all of this in the book, so I hope you will take it for a spin.
I don't think there's any more important book than you can listen to.
It's not very long, about five hours or so, but really, really, and I try to read it in an entertaining way, but it's really, really important that you go through this.
Ethics is so central to the achievement and the attainment, right?
Reason equals virtue equals happiness, right?
So UPB is about the reason that leads to the virtue, and then living with integrity, which you can manage yourself, once you understand ethics as a whole, leads you to happiness, which is what I really want for you.
So judging moral theories is what UPB is all about, evaluating moral theories, just like the scientific method is all about evaluating theories about behavior of matter.
In a moral argument, we already accept the value of UPB, a universal preference for truth over falsehood, reason over inconsistency, and so on.
And always, always, always remember the scientific method.
When you get lost in ethics with regards to UPB, because there's so much propaganda, nonsense, mess, confusion, history about ethics and religion and determinism and relativism and other superstitions, it just messed it all up, right?
It clouded it. So when you get confused, when you get lost, it happens to me too.
Just go back to the scientific method, which is a great bookmark for helping to keep you on track with UPB. So, when someone says a murder is bad, that's like saying, like a specific murder, it's like saying, a rock falling is bad, a rock falling is irrational.
Well, that wouldn't make any sense to science, because it is a description of a specific event.
You can't evaluate that logically.
Now, if you say, only blue rocks fall, well, that's a testable observation.
Not quite the same as a universal theory, but it is a testable observation.
There's no why or math behind it.
So, you can test that, right?
Mass according to is a testable universal theory.
So a rock falling is bad or a rock falling is scientific or unscientific.
Well, a rock falling is unscientific if it falls because it has chosen to, which there's no evidence for.
So you can only use UPB to evaluate propositions, not specific actions.
If you say, well, stealing is bad, but what about the guy who steals bananas because he's starving?
Is that evil? It can only evaluate the theory, it can only evaluate the theory, not the specific action.
And people always go down to specific actions, and that's not possible in science, in mathematics, it's not possible in ethical theories as well.
Anywhere where UPB is involved, it can only evaluate propositions as a whole.
So morality, universally preferable behavior, one form of universally preferable behavior, it's not empirical, right?
So this man stabs you.
Is that bad? Well, what if he's a surgeon and I've agreed?
Well, then no, right? If he's a guy going after my wallet, then yeah, right?
I mean, so because universally preferable behavior would be able to evaluate those theories, right?
Morality is not determined from a fact.
Ooh, this moral rule leads to great benefits.
I mean, that's not how science works, right?
You know, like, hey, if this theory of gravity works, I can fly and I'd love to fly.
Well, that's not how science works.
You don't look at the effects of moral theories.
You look at their rational consistency and applicability and universality.
Morality is not applicable to specific actions, only theories.
Moral theories are judged by UPB, evaluated by UPB, not individual actions.
So just keep remembering that because that's where I see people take the greatest wrong turns.
Morality is not a cultural custom, a local opinion, an observation of human habits.
Everybody seems to dislike murder.
It's not a biological drive like altruism.
It's not a practical and functional necessity for society.
None of those things. Moral theories are universal, UPP-compliant theories about preferred behavior.
Morality is a theory or any theory that attempts to describe and define universally preferable behavior.
This includes science, because science is around having integrity rather than going off into fantasy.
Morality is judged, a moral theory is judged as true or false, first by internal consistency and then according to the general evidence.
Now, since I'm talking about interactions with reality, we can look at the effects of general theories on human behavior.
So, stealing simply cannot be universally preferable behavior.
Respect for property rights, self-ownership is universally preferable behavior.
I go into the proof in the book.
So stealing cannot be universally preferable behavior.
And therefore, we would expect systems that are founded upon violations of property rights and personshood to be failures, right?
And so we look at communism or modern corporate fascism.
We find increasing failures and so on.
So we can look for evidence, right?
It's just that the evidence comes after the logical consistency.
So... There are some essential questions to ask about UPB or about moral theories.
You say, okay, is this a moral theory or is this a moral statement?
Right? A guy robs you in an alley, is that good or bad?
Well, I don't know. I mean, is he getting his money back?
Who knows, right? So we're looking for universal general moral theories, right?
Stabbing guys in alleys is universally preferable behavior.
Well, that you can evaluate according to UBB. A guy stabs another guy in an alley, you can't evaluate.
It's an individual instance.
You can't have a theory about one thing.
You can't have a universal theory about a rock.
It has to be about matter or gravity or whatever.
So, first thing, is this a moral theory that's being talked about or just some question about a specific action?
Is it a moral theory?
If it's not a moral theory, it's, you know, who cares, right?
So, is this moral theory internally consistent and logical?
Can it be practiced independent of time, persons, and geography?
You can't have, you know, murder is great in San Francisco, but totally evil in Baltimore and so on.
And that would be like having a theory which says rocks fall down in San Francisco, but they fall up in Baltimore.
I mean, it wouldn't make any sense, right?
This is the universality requirement of any truth statement in a theory.
Is it universally applicable?
Well, if not, then it's just a local theory, right?
Is it without unchosen positive obligations?
So moral theories that rely on social contracts and cultural absolutes, family loyalties, patriotism, religious superstition, those things don't exist in the real world.
There is no such thing as unchosen positive obligations, so if it's based on any of that stuff, it is not a theory, or it's a false theory.
Does it pass the coma test?
And I won't get into that here, but simply to say, have a look at it in the book.
It's a good rule of thumb for evaluating moral theories up front.
So I hope, I hope, I hope that you will drop past the website, freedomainradio.com, to read the free book, The Universally Preferable Behavior.
It is, again, available for free, freedomainradio.com forward slash free.
You can download it. You can play it in the browser.
You can look at it online if you like.
You can also order the print copy at storos.lulu.com forward slash free domain radios.
Thank you so much for having a look at this.
I know that we're tearing through theories of ethics, but it's so important to get these theories down.
We simply cannot build a rational, healthy, and positive and loving society without basing our ethics upon science, logic, empirical evidence, facts.
Superstition isn't going to do it.
Government edicts aren't going to do it.
The biological imperatives of Dawkins altruism isn't going to do it.
We really have to work from first principles up.
I look forward to your donations, as always, to keep this whole thing going.
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