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March 30, 2020 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
02:41:26
MORALITY vs NIHILISM: Stefan Molyneux vs James Theodore Stillwell III
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*Mario's music* All right, all right, so I think we are good to go We are here together, James and I, and we are getting ready for the epic debate of virality versus nihilism.
And we're kind of in a unique position here because we agree on a lot, and I suppose we could say we're going to disagree on the most important stuff, but we agree on a lot of stuff, which I think is kind of important, and hopefully we can Make sure that we don't argue about the things we agree on and argue on the things we don't.
So we'll kind of stay with that.
We're just going to wait for people to crowd into the room.
I am, of course, here on YouTube.
And James, did you want to say hi to the audience?
Hey, how's it going? Do you want me to introduce myself?
You know, for those who don't know, I think that would be a very good idea.
Why don't you do that? So, I'm James Stilwell, and I am the author of Power Nihilism, A Case for Moral Political Nihilism, which is, I guess, will kind of come up in this debate, because that is the position from which I'm arguing from.
I'm arguing from a qualified Form of moral nihilism.
So this won't be any like, you know, kiddie, teenage angst kind of nihilism.
Just get all that out of your head. This is a meta-ethical position.
And do you want to tell people a little bit about your journey to your current beliefs?
Well, I guess I'm known on YouTube, I was first known as Open Air Atheist.
And I was a Christian apologist for quite a while, and then I became an atheist, and I just wanted to put my thoughts out.
And most of my videos in the earlier days of YouTube were all debunking theist arguments and stuff like that.
So that's around the time that I first got into philosophy, so that was quite a few years ago.
Yeah, pretty much, you know, I started out like a lot of people as a theist and with a lot of views that were not, that remained uncriticized and unscrutinized.
And over time, I, you know, just followed reason and ditched a lot of those beliefs and arrived at my current position.
Can you say if there was a particular moment that you...
Can you say if there was a particular moment where you changed most or was there a sort of road to non-Damascus?
No, there's no...
I mean, I can't say there's one particular moment.
There is a bunch of moments and a bunch of different realizations that, you know...
I'm sure you know that a belief system is a system that's got a bunch of pillars, and if one pillar falls, it doesn't mean you just drop the whole thing.
There has to be a series of pillars that are holding up those beliefs that fall away, and then you're, you know, I can't really trace it down to a particular moment or anything like that.
Alright, okay. Well, it's 7.08.
I think we are ready to start rocking and rolling.
And is there a place on the web, James, that you would like people to get a hold of what it is that you're doing?
I mean, you can check out my YouTube channel, Itheist, although I really haven't posted a lot of videos on there in quite a while.
There's like 300 and some odd videos, but Just due to censorship and a lot of stuff going on YouTube, it's not really that fun anymore to post videos like I used to.
So you can go to Itheist for right now.
Okay. And you wanted to mention the book and where to get a hold of it?
I mean, you can find it on Amazon.
You know, Amazon's a good place to find my book.
I think you can order it through your bookstore.
There's, you know, a lot of different ways to get a hold of it.
All right. Okay. Well, let's get to opening statements.
The first thing that I wanted to mention, so in a couple of debates that I've had lately, it's been a little frustrating.
Not to put you in that category, James, of course, but it's been a little frustrating.
Oh, yes. We do have to have a standard by which we are willing to change our beliefs, right?
Otherwise we're just like two TV sets talking at each other or one person yelling at a robot or whatever.
So there does have to be some methodology by which we're going to change our beliefs.
And to me, it's always been okay, like we go with reason and evidence, right?
And maybe there's some other thing or whatever, right?
So in my debate, say, with J.F. Gariepi, I would point out a contradiction, and he would just like, yes, but in another universe, it might not be a contradiction, which is there's no way to change someone's mind.
So I guess I would like to know...
What are the conditions that need to be met to change your mind in this debate?
There'd have to be some logical way in which you can bridge the is-ought gap and create a non-hypothetical imperative.
You'd have to create a categorical imperative.
What that might look like, I'm not sure how you'd get there, and that's why I'm a moral nihilist in the first place.
You know, non-naturalists like to argue for non-natural properties, which are, you know, there's some, it just is a fact that you ought not steal, or it just is a fact that you ought not do this, but this is all accompanied by non-natural properties, which are unfalsifiable and, you know, So hang on.
I mean, before we get into the technical, sorry to interrupt, before we get into the technical verbiage, I also wanted to remember, wanted us both to remember that we're speaking to a general intelligent, I dare say brilliant layperson audience.
So let's try and stay as close to, you know, Socrates never used the word epistemology or whatever, not that you did, but let's try and keep it as sort of common sense and accessible as humanly possible.
But if There's a rational argument, is that right?
If there's a rational argument, then you will change your mind.
We're not going to wormhole into other dimensions where the opposite of reason is somehow the truth, right?
Yeah, I mean, if I can't find any...
I mean, I'm not going to just, I'm going to say, yeah, I may say something like, yeah, that seems, for right now, that seems like that's going to work.
And later I may, you know, scrutinize a little more and then find some flaws.
Who knows? Well, yeah, there's nothing wrong with conditional acceptance to say, you know, for the purposes of the debate or within the confines of what we're doing.
This is how we're going to roll.
And, you know, you're perfectly, you know, you don't have to sign your name in blood to whatever it is we're talking about here.
So that's fine.
So, okay, so we've got, if there's a rationality, we're not going to go to other dimensions or anything like that, because, you know, that's always struck me as kind of cheating.
Like, we're going to play chess, and then I get checkmaked, and I say, yes, but in another dimension, I might have checkmaked you, so we call it a draw.
That just seems kind of like cheating, and I guess we're not.
There won't be any appealing to purple ponies on my part, or...
Or other worlds or quantum entanglements or anything like that.
Okay, good, good. So we're going to say common sense.
Good old British empiricism is the way that I like to roll.
Okay, so why don't you start off by...
And listen, the book is good.
I read the book, took copious notes, posted some excerpts on Twitter, and your book is good.
And, you know, passionately written, well written, and well argued.
And I would certainly recommend that people, you know, you've got to take your most cherished beliefs and put them right in front of the sandblasting gale of skeptical criticism and see, you know, what stands.
What stands is good, but if you think that your beliefs are so fragile that they can't take counter arguments, you know, you don't have much of a leg.
To stand on, you're like flamingo-style in a hurricane.
I just, and I'll put a link to the book below, but why don't you tell people a little bit, because it's going to be surprising to hear this perspective about ethics.
So if you want to just, you know, take it, you know, we got time, baby, you know, we are here for the evening.
This is like, I love doing this.
And we're quarantined, so we might as well take our time.
I will let you have the floor and you can, you know, and remember, look directly at the camera, not at me.
I know it's kind of weird, but it's better for the audience.
It's kind of weird in the device I'm using.
I apologize. My normal computer is having some problems.
So we'll just do the best we can.
Listen, if your arms get tired, just prop it up somewhere.
It doesn't matter if it's not a perfectly framed shot or whatever, but whatever helps you concentrate the best is good.
So I've made some notes on my other iPad.
I wanted to just read this statement just for the audience so that they can understand my position, because not all of them have read, I'm sure, probably none of them have read my book.
So I'm just going to first define what I mean by moral nihilism, because a lot of people have a lot of different ideas.
I'm talking about what it means in the field of metaethics, okay?
So moral nihilism is a series of views in moral skepticism, but in general, moral nihilism is the view that objective moral values and duties don't exist, that absolute morality doesn't exist, depending upon what one means by absolute or universal.
That only subjective reasons or oughts exist, and what it means by that too is not that You know, hypothetical imperative oughts are not objective.
They are, in a sense, like, there are objectively required things that you must do to fulfill a goal.
Okay. That prescriptive, that is normative morality, is subjective.
That there are no moral imperatives, only hypothetical imperatives.
That all oughts are either implicitly or explicitly contingent upon if clauses, that is, goals.
For example, in his book, Neonihilism, the Philosophy of Power, Peter Schertet H., also a good friend of mine, says, quote, an unconditioned by an if clause, ought, is a contradiction because a means, an ought, necessarily implies an end.
Thus, all moral prescriptions never express facts, but really Some moral nihilists state that moral terms and sentences are non-cognitive utterances,
as JF did in your last debate, While error theorists claim that moral language is false.
So when you make a moral claim, you're not just expressing emotion, you're actually making a propositional statement about the world that can be true or false.
There are also hybrid theorists who think that moral language is either false or non-cognitive depending upon specific contexts.
So like I mentioned before with the non-naturalists who have this idea that there's some moral properties that are unfalsifiable and they're just kind of in the universe.
So that's, as far as my introduction, as far as, I hope that brings the audience up to speed as to where I'm coming from.
I'm not saying that, I'm saying that only hypothetical imperatives exist.
So we can make rational inferences about life.
We can say, if I want goal, you know, why I ought to do X, Y, and Z. Where I think we come into conflict with a lot of secular ethicists is where you put the morality label on that.
Like, for example, Sam Harris or rationality rules on YouTube or things like that.
It's really just a dressed up nihilism in my view and the view of many others in metaethics.
Right. Okay, great. Sorry, I don't mean to interrupt.
I think you said you were ending the intro.
Yeah. Okay, great.
Now, let me ask you this.
So, since you became a nihilist, what is permitted to you that was not permitted before that you've acted on?
And, you know, I'm not saying, you know, twist the heads off puppies.
I'm not trying to sort of imply anything like that.
But... I'm always curious, and I've had this argument with determinists before.
What changes when you accept nihilism?
In other words, are you more comfortable with lying?
Are you more comfortable with theft?
Are you more comfortable with manipulation?
I mean, what happens when you become a nihilist that changes?
Well, I mean, theoretically, someone, I guess, could become more comfortable with those things.
But in general, I would say if you're a reasonable person, it doesn't because there are consequences to your actions in this world.
If we live in a society where everybody is stealing from each other, and I think this is Where me and you might actually agree, you know, this is not a type of society where, you know, people are going to want to have kids, people are going to want to build a future and invest in because it's unstable and people are uncertain about their future.
See what I'm saying? But that's a consequentialist argument, right?
So the consequentialist argument means that, well, we should be moral because the consequences of not being moral are bad.
But if you don't believe in morality, but most people do, then it's like not believing in property rights when most people do.
Because they believe in property rights, they'll go and produce all this cool stuff that you can go and steal.
So I'm just trying to understand what changes.
Consequentialism is not in itself a position in moral realism.
It is just a system of which, you know, if I want X, I ought to do Y. If I want to avoid the consequences of this or that, then if I don't want to go to jail, I ought not commit murder, right?
This is not really morality.
Morality has to do with universal and objective world-binding properties and whether a moral prescription is true.
Okay, sorry, sorry. I'm a little confused here, right?
So if I, I don't know, let's pick a religion, I don't know, let's say I'm going to worship Zeus, right?
So if I'm going to worship Zeus, Then I go to Zeus Church or whatever it is, right?
And I make my burnt offerings.
I pour one out for the big Z or something like that.
And then if I stop believing in Zeus, then my behavior is going to change.
I'm no longer going to go to the Zeus Church.
I'm not going to pour one out for the big Z. So that's always my question, right?
So what has changed? So if you say, well, I'm not going to, you know, let's just say steal.
Murder is obviously kind of volatile, right?
So if you say, well, I'm not going to steal because I could go to jail.
Well, clearly there are situations where you could steal where you're not going to go to jail, right?
I mean, it's just not going to happen, right?
I mean, we can come up with...
I'm sorry? A bunch of hypotheticals, like, for example, a doctor could molest a patient while they're sedated and no one would ever find out.
Okay, so things like that.
So, hang on, so...
So the idea that we shouldn't do something because there are negative consequences, well, A, it only matters if those negative consequences exist, and B, you want to talk people out of their belief in morality, which to some degree is going to talk them out of their desire to inflict negative consequences on people, because morality is a delusion, it's a shared fantasy, it's a matrix, so to speak.
So that's, again, back to my question, right?
Because I don't like to debate things when nothing changes, right?
It's like putting a diet book out in a prison, right?
They're just going to get prison food.
They can't change their food choices, really, right?
Or, you know, like talking about really great exercises to a guy in a coma.
He's not going to do anything about it.
So that's my question.
Okay, so let's say you convince...
Significant portions of the people watching this, that nihilism is the way to go, that morality is a delusion, and if it's good for you, then, you know, Raskolnikov in Crime and Punishment style or Bazarov in Fathers and Sons, if you can get away with it and it serves your needs and it serves your thirst for power and it benefits you in a very Darwinian sense, there's absolutely nothing To stop you from doing it.
That is what, as far as I understand it, that's what you're trying to convince the audience here to do.
Well, there's nothing you can do to convince somebody to value truth unless you can show them that there's some kind of, you know, advantage in some way to knowing truth.
But I think that's where me and you would disagree too.
I don't think truth is a universal...
Imperative, I think, that there are situations in which truth may not be valued, right?
And what I would say is that most of humanity, due to human evolution, share, in general, a lot of the same preferences.
And so, fortunately, the hypothetical imperatives, I think, suit most people.
Is that to say that There isn't going to be some Jeffrey Dahmer out there or something, but you're going to have that problem on morality too.
If moral realism is true, you're still going to have your Jeffrey Dahmers, you're still going to have your people who don't give a crap about other people and just want to do what they want to do.
But in my view, it's also I don't do certain things because I have evolved the characteristics of empathy.
That's a human in general.
I mean, it's not universal. It's probably near universal.
Most people have empathy.
And so we don't rob when we could rob or try to get away with certain things when we could.
In general, right?
In general. Maybe someone tells a lie sometimes and they figure out that they can get away with that lie, but eventually they're going to get caught, right?
And there are consequences to that.
And there are, I mean, psychological consequences to that as well, to yourself.
So, it's not like if you remove moral truths that somehow, you know, the world just devolves into chaos.
It practically doesn't work that way, practically speaking.
Okay, but that's a great speech, and goes, I think, a little bit against some of the stuff that you talk about in your book, but we can get back to that in a second.
But if the world is an amoral will to power, and if morality is a tool of enslavement used by the elites to permit them to do what they deny to others, like the Federal Reserve can counterfeit, but you and I would go to jail for it.
Taxation is theft, but if you and I steal for our own needs, we go to jail for it.
So if morality is a lie, And if will to power characterizes everything, then your aim is to convince people, as far as I understand it, and again, I'd like to be corrected just at a personal level, your aim, James, is to convince people that if they can get away with what are commonly called immoral actions, and those immoral actions serve their will to power, there's absolutely nothing that should stop them from doing it.
In fact, they should. That's an extreme if.
That's not the way it really works.
But, yeah, an extreme hypothetical, yeah.
I mean, if it is your will to power...
No, it's not an extreme hypothetical.
I mean, this is what your book argues for.
Right? You say, my brand...
I'm not trying to catch you out here.
I'm really trying to understand.
I'm not trying to sort of cross-examine you or catch you out here.
I'm really trying to understand, right?
Because I think that values should have real consequences, and a lack of value should have real consequences as well.
Like, I don't want to do all of this honor stuff and honesty stuff and respect for property and persons if I'm trapped in some delusion.
I want the truth here, right?
So you say, my brand of nihilism is a form of theoretical nihilism which states that no objective values exist In contrast to practical nihilism, which states no values exist whatsoever.
You say, I define power nihilism, it's the name of the book, right?
Power nihilism as a skepticism or disbelief toward claims of objective, absolute, or inherent meaning, morality, and purpose, and a recognition that moral dogma, along with religious and political ideologies, is a means of control or gaining power over others.
Religion, morality, and politics are all about power, not truth.
So you say there are no moral or immoral behaviors, only positive and negative attitudes or erroneous beliefs about behaviors.
You say the world is a battlefield, lacking inherent good or evil, wrongness or righteousness, and devoid of inherent intrinsic value or worth.
If the world is a battlefield—and listen, if this is the consequences of your belief—I mean, I may have issues with it, but let's at least be clear about what it is, right?
If the world is a battlefield and morality is a tool of control, then a man who wishes to be free must reject morality and pursue that which gains him power, regardless of any moral standards that may be floating around.
Because then if I drop out of the church of Zeus and I no longer believe in Zeus, then all of the morals that were dependent upon my belief in Zeus should also go away, right?
Or at least I should no longer feel bound by them, right?
So if you have said the world is a battlefield, there's no right and wrong, there's no good and evil, then as far as I understand it, this is why this debate is really fascinating to me, you do, like I want to convince your audience to not be nihilists.
You want to convince my audience to be nihilists, right?
So you want to convince them that if it serves their power and they can get away with it, they damn well should do it, right?
Well, here's what I'm saying.
My argument is, if you want to have as many true beliefs as possible, that's a big if, then you ought to correct your beliefs.
So if my thesis is true, And your value premise is truth, then you ought to at least give my thesis a consideration.
So it depends on where your power interest lies.
So I also state in my book, I'm sure you read that, you know, truth is power until it isn't.
There are certain circumstances in which A cult's dogma may grant an individual power or a belief in a certain religion may grant someone certain social status or some sort of power.
It's another way of saying power, social status.
Or, you know, social safety net is another way.
Benefit, another way we could put it is benefits.
If you can grant some kind of benefit from being a Christian and you're benefiting from it, then I don't know that there's any reason for you to perform For truth in that area of your life.
So if it is a lie, but it serves your power, then the lie is perfectly fine.
If your if-law isn't that you value truth.
Well, no, but you're saying that what matters is power, right?
Well, but sometimes truth is power.
Sometimes knowing the truth No, no, no, I get that.
But the truth is only valuable insofar as it serves power, right?
If falsehood, if lying, if cheating, if defrauding people, if that serves your power, then that's what you should do, right?
Hypothetically, yeah. But there are, again, there are going to be consequences and you have to consider whether you're willing to deal with those consequences.
Sure, no. So if I live in Zeus town and if I don't go to the Church of Zeus, nobody will have anything to do with me and I don't like being ostracized, then I may sort of suck it up and go to the Church of Zeus and do the Zeus stuff and, you know, born out for the big Z or whatever.
So I may do that, but not because it's true, but just because I don't want to be ostracized.
You could make it simpler and just presuppose that Christianity is true.
Let's say God exists.
Then he is the ultimate will to power.
What he says goes because he says so, and there's nothing anyone can do about it.
And he is his own definition of morality.
He says, my edicts are just moral because I say so.
And so, you know, that would be the ultimate expression of will to power.
And in that case, An extreme example, there's nothing anyone could do about it.
You're going to hell because you just disagree with his subject preferences.
Okay, so in this instance, even God would be an expression of the will to power, because as you write, all moral value judgments are merely subjective opinions about what ought or ought not to be.
There is no objective morality, nor moral high ground.
What one ought to do is contingent upon one's subjective goals, desires, wants, and feelings.
And this is what you want to convince the audience.
And again, I'm not trying to put you on the spot.
I mean, I'm Asking you to stand in the firm ground of...
I fully admit that there are some undesirable consequences.
I'm not saying that you're going to like this view.
I'm saying it's true. No, no, I get that.
Whether I like the view or not has no bearing on its truth or falsehood.
And you've got this great point where you say that when people say, you stole something, that they inject this moral horror into it, and they imagine that the feeling of horror that they have somehow generates an objective wrongness.
Out there in the universe, and of course it doesn't.
Projectivism. Yeah, good and evil do not exist in atoms.
They don't exist in material forces.
They don't exist in gravity or electromagnetism and virtues and values and the concept of truth.
They might. I'm sorry? They might.
There might, but if they do, they're not falsifiable.
We can't prove either which way.
You know, it's like God, maybe some God exists, but if he does and he's totally detached from this physical universe, there's no way we could ever know one way or the other unless there's some logical, you know, contradictions within the definition of this God.
Well, you know, we gotta pull back from the alternative universe hypothesis or the extrasensory, right?
We're gonna steer clear of that otherworldly J.F. Gary Eppie excuse realm, right?
Let's just stay in the census.
We just stay in reality. I'm not going back out there, man.
There's no air out there.
I'm not. I'm just trying to be precise because I wouldn't want a non-naturalist to watch this and say, well, you can't claim that there's no non-natural properties with any absolute certainty.
And he's right. I can't.
I can just say that's an unfalsifiable claim.
I have no way to verify or Oh, no, no, but I'm not...
Listen, I mean, if we want to get into metaphysics, we can, although it's not a very interesting subject, because basically it's just throwing sand in the senses, right?
So if something has no physical evidence, then that's identical to non-existence.
If it's either a self-contradictory entity, like a square circle, or it has no physical manifestation, either directly or indirectly, like we can't see infrared, but we know it's there because of the effects, right?
Right. So I'm not willing to go on radical skepticism grounds and say, well, a self-contradictory entity for which there is absolutely no physical evidence, indirectly or directly, it might exist.
It's like, no, that's the definition of non-existence.
I was just mentioning that in passing.
This wasn't meant to be a rabbit hole to go down.
Okay, good. So we're just going to stick in this universe, and in this universe, a guy can strangle his wife.
And the fact that he chokes off her airways is an objective fact.
The fact he's got his hands wrapped around her neck, he's squishing in her hyoid bone, the fact that her oxygen is being cut off, and a minute or two later, because she's struggling, her heart's beating, and she needs the oxygen desperately, then she's dead.
All these can be facts, right?
The guy comes home, he's angry, that's a fact.
The guy closes his hands around her neck, that's a fact.
He cuts off her oxygen supply, that's a fact.
She can't survive without oxygen, that's a fact.
She dies, that's a fact. Now, all of these are empirical and verifiable and objective facts.
Now, nowhere in the atoms or the biological requirements or the laws of physics is there anything inscribed upon the atoms which says, thou shalt not kill.
And that's the challenge before us, right?
Which is where the hell do ethics come from, if they do come at all, right?
I mean, that's sort of what I've been spending 35 years on and what you've been spending a certain amount of time on.
And that's the big question.
Where the hell do ethics come from?
And if they don't come from anywhere and they don't exist and they're merely a social convention, then we should put them in the category of potentially benevolent superstition or maybe a necessary lie in that sort of platonic form.
But the question of where ethics come from, or if they even exist, is really what is before us.
Now, I thought what we could do is...
Talk a little bit about failed attempts to create a system of ethics in the absence of God.
Because for Christians, for Muslims, for Jews, for Zoroastrians, you name it, pretty easy.
Because God exists.
God hands out the moral laws.
And that's why you ought to do.
That's why you ought not kill.
That's why you ought not lie. That's why you ought not cheat.
And so on, right? And so, if you don't believe in God, And this is a conversation I had with Dennis Prager some years ago.
If you don't believe in God, Then where do you get ethics from?
And so I thought we could run through, and you had a good summary of this, right?
So the secular moralists like Sam Harris, who wrote a pretty bad book, I think at least, called The Moral Landscape, and he says, well, what's good is the well-being of conscious creatures, right?
He puts conscious in there to exclude animals, I assume, to exclude creatures.
That's his if clause. Sorry? Right.
Yeah, so talk a little bit about the if clause and why it's so important.
So, as Hume noted, you can't derive an ought from an is.
This is Hume's guillotine.
But what you can do is you can derive a ought from an if-I-want, right?
A goal. Sam Harris' goal is the well-being of conscious creatures, however the heck you want to define that.
I mean, that's kind of murky right there, but...
That is why the if clause is there, because you can always derive an ought from a value premise, but not from a factual premise, not from a factual statement about reality.
Right. So, I mean, the well-being of conscious creatures...
Sorry, go ahead. I thought you were down.
Go ahead. No, I was just asking if there was anything more you wanted me to expound on that.
It's fine. Well, I mean, this well-being of conscious creatures, it's sort of an appeal to hallmark sentimentality and has absolutely no philosophical rigor to it, which is kind of like the opposite.
So, you know, I want to keep, let's say there's some single mom in the neighborhood who's had two kids by two different men, both of which have faffed off to wherever, and she desperately needs money.
Well, the well-being of her is to get my money through the state.
The well-being of me might be to keep my money, might be to give it to her if I think it's a good idea or whatever.
And so the well-being of conscious creatures, what does that mean?
It's like not all of our well-being is one big collectivist blob where we all have the same opinions.
If it was, we wouldn't need ethics at all.
And so this idea that you have some kind of pragmatic or consequentialist or this utilitarian argument, well, we'll do what will maximize happiness, For the greatest number of people, like happiness is a subjective state.
People can lie about it. It's scarcely anything that you should tie something as powerful as morality to.
And also there's a snapshot problem, right?
So, you know, if I smoke two packs of cigarettes a day, I can go to the doctor every day and say, hey man, I'm not sick.
So clearly there's no danger, right?
And that's all well and good until I get lung cancer and die, right?
And so what people say, like, I know what the calculation is for the welfare state, right?
So people say, hey man, so this woman, she's got two kids and she's really in a bind.
She needs like $5,000 a month of resources, right?
Now, let's say that there's some millionaire out there who's, you know, you got a million bucks or whatever, right?
And they say, look, if we take $5,000 a month from you, you're barely going to notice it.
Like your decrease in happiness might be from like 100 to 90.
But this woman's increase in happiness is going to go from zero to 90, right?
So you lose 10, but she gains 90.
So according to that calculus, it's a really, really good thing to have a welfare state because it generates far more happiness than it reduces or destroys, right?
Now that is complete nonsense because what it is is a snapshot and it's a failure to recognize this basic public choice reality that Redistribution of income changes behavior, right?
So what happens is if you're going to take from all the millionaires and give to all the single moms, you're going to end up with way fewer millionaires and way more single moms, and then what, right?
Then you've just created this whole incentive to have children without dads around and created an unsustainable economic system wherein you're going to have a lot of women with kids who are going to run out of money pretty damn quickly, and the whole thing's going to go to shite in a handbasket, right?
Yeah, go ahead.
It's just subjective slave morality is all it is.
What do you mean? So, slave morality, I mean, I'm not sure how familiar your audience is with Nietzsche, but there's master versus slave morality.
And basically, the slave, or the underclass, or however you want to refer to him, this type of individual desires things which are Utilitarian to him.
So values such as peace, humility, things like altruism, things like that, these benefit people in certain circumstances that are in certain circumstances.
They don't necessarily benefit somebody who is in a master class or in some position of authority or aristocracy.
So, there's going to be, you know, a different set of values for people in different positions.
So, I mean, you see slave morality right now with, you know, for example, the transgender movement, the feminist movement, all this is All this neoliberalism, all this stuff is just slave morality.
That's all it is. Well, and the other thing, too, is it invites an endless horde of emotional manipulators into your society.
Because if they say, well, listen, man, the absence of resources, it makes me so sad.
It makes me so unhappy.
And, you know, to the extreme that they might be dangling their kids over a bridge.
And suddenly now everyone has to be a slave to serve the, you know, vapid and notional narcissistic manipulation of the crime bully victim brigade.
Right.
And so all you're doing is saying to people, well, if you if you claim to be unhappy, we'll give you resources.
Yeah, like that's going to work out well.
And that's a very objective way to run a society.
So to me.
These pragmatism, you know, you judge a morality by its consequences.
And it's like, that is so completely insane.
I mean, I don't even know what to say about that other than the only people who can suggest that have never built a physical thing in their life.
I mean, can you imagine just going into the woods, you know, grabbing a bunch of branches, throwing them together and say, hey, let's see if that makes a table.
No? Okay, I'll throw them together again.
Let's see if that makes a table.
No? Okay. I mean, it just doesn't work.
And also, of course, if you're going to say, well, we'll just try a bunch of stuff and see if it works, what if it turns out that it's totally impractical and maybe even immoral?
Well, then you've just done a whole bunch of evil.
And you say, well, man, I didn't know ahead of time.
It's like, okay, well, then what you're saying is that You can either accept a vast amount of evil in doing things that turn out to be really, really bad, or you say, well, I'll know ahead of time whether things will turn out good or bad, in which case you're back to omniscience and people can figure out the consequences of all these kinds of things.
But it's like saying, well, you know, should we keep slavery or should we Not keep slavery.
Should we have slavery or not? People say, well, okay, but it makes the slaves unhappy.
But sure, it makes everyone else really happy because they've already invested in the slaves and they've got everything set up and people like the cheap goods and so on.
That's a terrible way to make moral decisions.
Or you say, well, but the consequences of getting rid of slavery could be really good.
Or, oh, the consequences of getting rid of slavery could be really bad.
And all you do is when you break that moral absolutism, You end up with this global warming crap or all of this stuff where people say, oh, so the way that you get things done in society is you say that the consequences of not doing what you want Are so dire and disastrous that they fall into, I guess, what...
Sorry, it's a little distracting.
Are you trying to find a more comfortable space here?
Sorry, no, it's my compressor turned on and I didn't want it to create a bunch of noise.
Okay. I know we talked about this before.
If you could prop it up, I'm feeling a little hypnotized by the constant movement.
Yeah, even if it's an odd angle, I think stillness is probably better for this stuff.
Alright. Alright, thanks, man.
So you get back to this, what Pascal's wager was, right?
Pascal's wager is, well, you know, if I don't believe in God, but there is a God, I could go to hell, and that's really bad.
If I do believe in God, but there isn't a God, well, I got some good morals, I got some good instruction, I maybe had to get a bit up early on a Sunday, but it's not really that bad.
So if you have this utilitarian consequentialism, like you judge something by its effects, then all you're doing is you're telling people, That the person who comes up with the most dire prediction is the one who's going to get his way.
And so this is where you get garbage like global warming coming out of where, you know, you've got to spend five times the amount of the American economy to change the temperature half a degree in 100 years and all that, but the consequences of not doing it.
So this consequentialism is a real moving target and it tends to promote the most manipulative.
So a lot of the...
Arguments that are put forward by atheists regarding morality are, I mean, they're worse than terrible, really.
And I thought you had a good critique of Rand, Ayn Rand, if you wanted to get into that as well.
Well, I mean, if I could, I've critiqued so many people in that book that it would be Difficult for me to...
I mean, I have to refresh, but...
No, no, no. I got it here if you want. I can refresh you if you want it, right?
Yeah, yeah. Go ahead. Okay. Another botched secular attempt you write to objectify morality is Ayn Rand's objectivism.
Rand defined value as, quote, the fact of goal-directed action, end quote, where, quote, goal-directed action, end quote, means, quote, That which one acts to obtain or keep, a successor, this is Leonard Picoff, claims such an understanding entails what values are always relative to agents and to their aims, Rand arrogantly claimed to have solved The is-ought problem.
She wrote, It cannot be judged as right or wrong,
but once chosen, it is the role of morality to help man to live the best life possible, and thus left the ought to choice and not to is.
Therefore, objectivism has failed to solve the is-ought problem, as according to Rand, moral prescription, ought, is contingent upon an amoral choice, an if-clause, and not upon descriptive facts, facts, is.
So that's a bit of a...
It's a bit of a complicated bunch of stuff.
I don't know if you want to break it out or have me break it out, but I do want to, you know, being a big fan of brands, I did want to put this argument forward.
If your goal is to live, there are certain things that you ought to do.
And at some point in there, I pointed out, as you noted, that she's making an is-ought error there, as far as talking about, because you can't derive oughts from characteristic facts about human beings.
It is true that human beings have both evolved the characteristic of aggression and The best you can do is pick one or the other and say, I value this one more than the other.
And that's what slave morality does.
It says, I value the altruistic side.
And most people do because that's how we spread our genes.
Altruism is a big part of that.
Not so much with Genghis Khan though, right?
Yeah, I mean, it could be either or.
It just depends on the circumstance, right?
Which is why we have both, because there are places for both.
There are times in which both characteristics can help one spread their genes.
So... Yeah, that's the problem.
And either one is fine. So, like, mass rape is fine because it's the will to power, right?
You get to spread your genes and you get the satisfaction, whatever sexual satisfaction you might take from it.
It's fine depending on how you define fine.
Well, from a nihilistic perspective, whether you choose to have children based upon love and pair bonding and altruism and kindness or whatever it is, or whether that's sort of the big parental investment side of things, or whether you just do that spray and pray of rape a bunch of women and, you know, maybe your offspring will survive, maybe not, but you're just going to, you know, it's quantity over quality, so to speak.
I mean, from a biological standpoint, both of those can be violent reproductive strategies.
And from a nihilistic standpoint, where there is no greater morality among humans than there would be among animals, it's also a perfectly valid choice, right?
Yeah, I mean, as far as logically speaking, yeah, it's valid.
I mean, sharks do it.
Other animal species do it.
There's no question of, you know, morality.
Morality, as you know, in my view, is just a convention that humans have come up with to get power in a way of saying it is to pass on our genes.
That's another way of getting power.
Well, or if you just want the pleasure of that sexual encounter, right, then, you know, I mean, dolphins rape each other all the time, right?
Yeah. Okay.
All right. Except that it doesn't work like that in the real world.
Most people do have the characteristic of altruism.
So most people, most of the time in the real world, altruism and building a family and loving people You're more likely to pass on your genes that way.
Are there circumstances in which there's a Genghis Kong type thing?
Yeah, of course. But overall, I'm saying in general, that's not the way to go.
Now, but in your book, you do talk quite a bit about how one of the arguments against We're good to go.
Moral statements around the world are tribal rather than universal.
Christianity and philosophy, at least UPB, which we'll get to.
So Christianity is universal, universally preferable behavior.
My sort of approach to ethics, that is universal.
But if you look at, you know, Islam, if you look at Judaism and so on, I mean, you have moral obligations to the in-group, but you have not necessarily any moral obligations.
In fact, you might be fine exploiting the out-group.
So universality versus tribalism is a big difference.
If you look at things like honor killings, if you look at things like female clitorectomies, obviously female circumcision, and sometimes even male circumcision, if you look at the prevalence of or acceptance of child rape, right?
So in Afghanistan or other places, they say, well, you know, women are for babies, but boys are for fun, right?
So there is a wide and wild variety of moral standards around the world.
So I don't know how you get and we kind of all have similar moral standards or we all have altruism or whatever and I'm happy to have you step me through it but it seems a little at odds.
Yeah, no, my argument isn't that there are differing moral standards throughout the world Therefore, objective morality is false.
My view is that there are some universal standards that are, you know, well, generally universal.
Like, they're generally accepted.
There is some amount of altruism you'll find in every society.
Yeah, they are towards an in-group.
Sorry, then you'll have to define altruism because maybe I'm missing the definition.
Okay, so like, There's a lot of amount of, you know, I also talk in my book how there's symbiosis, okay?
The world isn't just completely a battlefield of will to powers necessarily.
It's also symbiosis.
I give the example of organisms.
There are organisms that live within us that enable us to live.
And yet we're their hosts, and they live in our gut, and they help us break down food.
That is a symbiotic relationship.
Being a part of that relationship gives them power, but it also gives us power.
There are times in which these symbiotic relationships give us power.
That may be one way of classifying altruism.
You know, the world is full of symbiotic relationships.
It's also full of very adversarial relationships.
But we can't just sum it all as one or the other because that's not honest.
Do you see what I'm saying? We can't say the world is just, you know, barbarian bloodlust everywhere, you know, like, yeah, that happens throughout history.
That's a That's every country was founded by, you know, was Christian with blood.
Every inch of property that we have was once, you know, gained by bashing someone's skull in or shooting them or something, right?
Some sort of violent act.
But also, within that relationship, within a country, there's a certain amount of symbiosis.
And we live in a planet full of, you know, like finite resources.
So there's going to be a certain amount of adversarial relationship over that because resources mean power.
They mean will to life.
So it's not as simple as, you know...
Barbarian bloodlust versus altruism.
No, no, but what I'm saying is that you can't really make an argument against morality saying it varies enormously and then say, well, but, you know, there's a lot of common moral standards throughout the world.
I mean, if you look at America at the moment, right?
I mean, one of the big moral tensions is between immigrants, particularly illegal immigrants, who take a huge amount out of the public purse and the people who are paying those taxes.
Okay, so, I mean, the will to power argument is, okay, well, what we're going to do is we're going to come in and we're going to sit on the public purse, say the people from other countries or other cultures.
We're going to come in and we're going to sit on the public purse.
We're going to sit on the taxpayer's wallet and just suck it dry.
And our will to power is that anyone who objects to that is a racist and a xenophobe and a white nationalist.
We're going to use the media to smash their lives.
Now you're seeing how morality works.
This is where we're in agreement that historically morality is a pickpocket.
It's a way of stealing from you without you even noticing it or even with your enthusiastic participation.
Slave morality in particular, right.
Right. So very briefly, the argument that I've made in the past goes something like this.
Morality was invented so that rulers could steal from you while convincing you not to steal from each other.
There's no point ruling people who are stealing from each other all the time, as you mentioned earlier, right?
Because if people are stealing from each other, nobody produces anything.
And so there's nothing to steal from them.
So what you want to do is you want to convince people Of two things.
One, theft is wrong.
And two, taxation is necessary for the continuance of a civilized society, right?
And those two things is perfect because then you get this wonderfully productive population that you can steal from.
And so morality was invented as a tool of subjugation and as a tool of exploitation.
There is no greater livestock, no more valuable livestock to own than human livestock.
And so morality was not invented for equality.
Morality was not invented for universality.
Morality was invented for exploitation.
But so what? I mean guns were invented as a weapon of war, but you can still use them for self-defense.
You can wrestle morality from the hands of the rulers and try and turn it to a better end.
But if I understand it rightly, that's your analysis of history to some degree as well, right?
Well, yeah, as Nietzsche points out, the thirst for equality is really seeking yearning to overpower.
That is, if somebody is relatively weak, they value equality.
Once they get equality, they value to overpower.
So, really, equality is about...
Like, we've kind of seen that just in the last decade, even.
People who have gained equality now are just using it to beat the crap out of whites and to basically subjugate whites in their own homelands.
So, yeah, exactly, yes.
Am I saying, though, I don't want to get the wrong impression?
I don't want to say that...
Morality doesn't help an in-group, right?
Because it does. I think a belief in morality can help an in-group, just like religion can help an in-group.
A belief... Sorry to interrupt, but this is the challenge.
And you have this great bit in your book about morality is a truth claim that has a special emotional resonance to it.
I'm not putting it as precisely as you did, but it was very sort of powerful.
I'm sorry? Depending on how you define it, sometimes when I say morality, I'm just talking about a sentiment, right?
Because I'll use the word morality, and I just mean that I strongly disapprove or I strongly approve of something.
So it really kind of depends on the context.
But yeah, if we're talking about morality as a moral realism, then yes, people are making either People have some belief, and they are projecting that onto the universe, and they're saying there are these universal oughts, or there are these objective, full stop, you just ought not murder.
Yeah, but is that useful?
Can it be useful? Yeah, it can be useful.
Can it be useful to believe that there's a hell after you die?
It can be useful.
It just depends on what your goals are.
But it's not useful if you win, right?
So if you win this debate, if you convince through this, we've got like, I don't know, 1,500 people watching or whatever, right?
So if you win this debate, and let's say you convince 1,500 people, and they tell two friends in Pantene commercial, and next thing you know, half the planet has adopted moral nihilism, then morality is no longer...
That's not going to happen. No, but morality is no longer of utility.
It has become a superstition that we have outgrown.
And so morality is only useful if people believe in morality, but your goal, of course, through writing the book and through having this conversation, your goal is to liberate people from the ghostly delusion of morality.
Is that fair to say? No.
No, that's not...
I think you misunderstood something.
Again, I'm talking about those who find power in truth.
For me, in my particular, what I do, truth is important and it is a power interest to me, okay?
Not all people are in my circumstances.
And you're not going to be able to convince everybody, all 1,500 people that are watching.
No, no, no. That's not the point.
Even if your arguments are correct, not everybody values truth.
So my argument is I don't waste time on people who don't value truth.
If you don't value truth, there's no point in this even talking.
If you do value truth, then there's usefulness in talking to you.
And why do I do this?
Well, I just like to do it.
I love philosophy and I love truth.
And I'm not one of those alt-right people who says, who cares if moralism is true?
Who cares? No, God, I'm just going to act as though there is because for the white race or something.
I've never heard that argument before, but all right.
No matter what argument you have for them.
They are never, ever going to accept it because their power interest lies in some group, right?
Some... I think there are arguments to be said that we don't really need morality in some sense, but I don't think everybody has the cognitive abilities to accept that, if that makes sense.
You're chewing around at the edges of the example without overturning it, but you would like people to prefer truth to falsehood, and you would like people to accept the truth that there's no morality.
Is that fair to say?
Yeah, in a sense, yes.
I mean, in general, right.
I'm not... Yes.
I just don't want that to come off as a universal because it's not...
No, no, no. I'm not trying to trap you into this.
Aha! You now have a universal.
We'll get to that, though. We'll get to that.
Because you say here, you say this thriving blue planet would become yet another barren rock orbiting a spherical fire in the total absence of initiatory force.
Initiatory force, right? That's correct.
So you're pretty bagging hard on the non-aggression principle, right?
You say those power-hungry politicians and Wall Street cutthroats are never going to believe such ridiculousness.
Humans have and continue to fight and kill one another, not just to survive, but for power.
A healthy organism doesn't just seek to coexist, but to seize power.
So for you, healthiness is initiating force and killing, if necessary, to achieve power.
Is that right? In some circumstances...
No, no, I get that. You know, it's funny, like, you've got these statements which don't have any asterisks, right?
I read them back to you, you give me all these asterisks.
It's like, you know, there's a great saying from Nietzsche, it says, do not leave your arguments in the lurch.
In other words, don't just sort of dash past, do not leave your actions in the lurch.
I mean, this is what you wrote, and there were no caveats in what you wrote, so why are there in what you're saying?
You understand that I'm, in that particular instance, I'm talking about Nietzschean metaethics and will to power, right?
So, yes, if we define health in the sense that Nietzsche does, in the sense of strength, it depends.
See, if you have a slave morality...
So, we're talking about healthy organism, right?
And I was saying that According to mass immorality, the definition of what a healthy organism is and what slave morality's definition is going to be is different.
According to mass immorality, yes, the initiation of force, conquest, things like that, like the whole Machiavellian or things like that, that can be considered a kind of a virtue, if you will, a sign of health and virility.
So yes, I would agree with that.
And so if there is what we would typically call a predator within a society, right?
So if there is a serial killer who takes great pleasure in selling art to the Podestas and also takes great pleasure in torturing and murdering people, for him, in the nihilistic, amoral universe, He's exercising power by, you know, stalking, like a hunter, right?
Like stalking and capturing, kidnapping, torturing and killing people, right?
And in the will-to-power universe, and I know this is an argument from emotion, and I just want to know, you know, you wrote a whole book on this.
I assume this is what you believe.
Correct. I would agree with your summation thus far, yes.
Okay, so in the...
In the nihilistic universe, he is simply exercising his will to power by being a sadistic serial killer that gives him pleasure.
He enjoys the chase. He leaves these cliched cryptic statements with the police.
He bites off someone's face and uses it to escape prison or whatever it is, right?
So there's nothing wrong with what he's doing.
I mean, there is nothing wrong in moral nihilism.
There's no such thing as wrong except in factual wrongness, right?
There's no moral wrongness.
Right. And again, I know this is an argument from emotion, and I'm not trying to repel people from your beliefs, because you know what happens, right?
You start talking about no...
Wrong. And I talked about this with, was it Matt McManus or the Zero Books guy or whatever?
Oh no, was it? Oh, J.R. F. Gariepi, right?
Where it's like child torture, pedophilia and so on.
It's like, hey man, that's just your will to power, right?
I mean, that's That's what you believe.
And we've got to deal with this up front, right?
So what happens is you say, okay, so there's nothing morally wrong with a serial killer.
He's just exercising his will to power.
Now, his victims can also exercise their will to power and shoot him in the face, right?
And there's nothing wrong with that.
But they're kind of on equivalent moral planes.
So the serial killer wants to kill you.
You want to not be killed.
So you kill the serial killer.
But this is just like as a lion and a zebra, right?
If the lion catches the zebra and, you know, chews its neck off, That's fine, right?
It's not a moral question. We don't put the lion in a dock and say, hey man, did you kill that zebra, you bad cat?
Whereas, of course, if the zebra, while running away, kicks the lion in the face, it's kind of a big risk for the lion, right?
These flying patterned hooves or whatever, right?
So if the zebra kicks the lion in the face, Then the zebra has exercised its will to power by smashing the lions in the face.
Neither of these are moral.
So in the same way, if you've got a human predator, like a lion hunting a zebra, a human predator hunting another human being And let's say he chloroforms or overpowers or whatever and is able to torture and kill his victim.
There's no moral significance to any of that.
It's not right. It's not wrong.
Morality would just be kind of like a weird superstition to bring to that equation.
Because, I mean, that, of course, is the logical consequence that horrifies a lot of people.
And we might as well just tackle that up front and just say, that's fine.
I think one of the analogies I gave in the book was, if someone breaks into your house with the intent to kill you, And you pull out a gun and you shoot them in the head, right?
That is might is right.
Not in any prescriptive sense, but in a descriptive sense.
The gun is the power.
It is the might, right?
And it gives you the ability, which is power, power slash ability, to make sure that your subjective if clause, your subjective desire Is enforced rather than his.
So it's really not a question of who is right in this world.
It's a question of who has the most power to enforce their subjective desires.
Right. And if you're caught in the commission of a crime and you shoot a policeman and you escape, then in the moral universe, it's like, hey, man, you just exercise your power and your wish to remain free.
And there's nothing immoral about that either.
Obviously, there's no morality, right?
Right, exactly. Not in any objective sense.
I mean, I do, of course, find pedophilia, for example, to be repugnant personally.
I detest that kind of stuff.
I have personal, you know, values, right?
But they're not objective, and I'm not claiming that they...
No, you dislike pedophilia the same way that someone might dislike broccoli, right?
No, that's a little simplistic.
I would say that morality has to do with strong, very strong disapprovals.
Yeah, but as you talked about earlier, the addition of emotion to an observation does not make it any more valid, right?
No, we're not talking about validity.
We're just talking about, I didn't want the audience to think that We're making it absolutely synonymous with broccoli because it's obviously a little more than that, not as far as preferences are concerned, but as far as the intensity.
No, but isn't that something you would want to talk yourself out of as an emotional error?
Like, for instance, if you no longer believed in Zeus, then you may still have some sort of after-effect, you know, like when the flash goes off and your light has that after-image.
If you stop believing in Zeus, you would still have some residual momentum of your adherence to Zeus' teachings or beliefs or orders or instructions or whatever.
But you would sit there and say, well, I don't believe in Zeus anymore, so I should really, you know, I may have some emotional attachment, but it's not rational.
So in the same way, if all human choices are will to power, there's no such thing as ethics, you might have a kind of leftover revulsion against something like pedophilia, but it would not be emotionally in accordance with your particular beliefs.
Like if I was raised in a cult that said, liking chocolate ice cream is evil, Then, if I saw, like, I left that cult 20 years ago or whatever, then if I saw someone eating chocolate ice cream, I might have a bit of residual, oh, that's emotionally horrible.
But I would have to say, well, but yeah, I mean, it's not, right?
So I'd have to talk myself out of that, if that makes sense.
Yeah, except that that has to do with conditioning, whereas I'm talking about more or less evolutionary conditioning.
I can't help that I have empathy for...
You know, for example, I have ferrets, or I can't help but I have empathy for other human beings.
That's just an evolved characteristic that's hardwired to a certain extent.
And so, yeah, I guess you could, if you're like a soldier or something, after a while, if you're exposed to enough violence, you can become desensitized to some extent.
But you're still always going to have a certain amount of bad conscience, to use a Nietzschean term, over these things.
Because it's evolutionarily ingrained into you.
Well, no, but hang on, though.
You can't use really evolution, right?
Because evolution would be like pedophiles have hands and opposable thumbs and all that kind of stuff, right?
So they've evolved physically the same way that we do, but they have something different in their brain, which...
Very much involves a lack of empathy, right?
Which is to have sexual relations with children who can't possibly consent due to their youth.
And obviously, sexual activity with children is not only a violation of self-ownership and any reasonable moral standards, but it can also physically, it's psychologically injured, of course, but it can also, of course, physically injure a child whose body is not an adult's and all that, right?
So, but evolutionarily speaking, Clearly, we've had an evolutionary imperative, which is to have sex with children for some people, right?
Otherwise, there wouldn't be such a thing as a pedophile, or it would be so incredibly rare.
It would be like a guy being born with two heads or a Siamese.
I don't know about that. I don't know about the science on that.
I'd have to look into that further.
As far as would that be an evolution thing?
It probably is.
Who knows? But I don't have that.
And a lot of people don't have that.
No, no, I get that. But nonetheless, I mean, given that there are rapists and there are pedophiles and so on and serial killers and so on, the argument from evolution doesn't...
I think we're good to go.
Human beings exist in a predator-prey relationship with each other.
There's a reason why my most famous and now most buried video, The Story of Your Enslavement, talks about livestock and us being taxed livestock and there being human farmers and all of that.
Yeah, we are owned like cattle and we are traded like cattle and we are exploited like cattle and we are cared for like cattle.
We're given health care so that we'll stay healthy so that we can go to work in the same way that a farmer will put antibiotics Into the cow's feed, not because he cares about their health.
He just wants them to be able to continue to produce milk and meat.
And so when you have a human predator and you have human farmers and you have this predator-prey relationship that has to do with criminals as well as the state and so on, right?
Or Genghis Khan, right?
Predatory rapist, where it's like, what, one in 16 or one in 17 people in the region trace their lineage back to this massive spray-and-pray, pump-and-dump kind of guy.
And so if you're going to say common evolution, then it doesn't really explain why there's this predator-pray relationship in human beings, right?
In the same way that you wouldn't say that evolution explains both The lion and the zebra as if they're one species.
Now, you could explain, you know, well, the zebra gets faster, the lion has to catch up, and if the lion eats too many zebra, the lion starves and all that kind of stuff, but you still do have this problem.
And I don't want to get stuck on this too much, but if you're going to start talking about the commonality, I'm sorry, are you saying... Between species or within a species?
No, I'm saying that within a species, so one species that hunts its own species, so to speak, have a different species relationship, right?
I mean, we call them predators, right?
Like the serial killers and mass rapists and all that.
call them predators, right?
Because they're out there stalking and hunting and raping and killing.
And I, you know, some places in Germany, even eating, right?
They're actually stalking and hunting their own species, but within the human family, right?
There's owners, there's livestock, there's predator, there's prey, there's a whole ecosystem that's quite complicated.
And that's why for me, evolutionary arguments don't really help that much.
Yeah.
So some people have empathy and some people have sadism and some people have compassion and some people have masochism and some people, you know, want to be free and other people want to enslave them because it's so profitable.
So evolution within human society has produced its own complete I mean, I get that technically we're one species.
Of course, I understand all of that.
But just in terms of the predator-prey relationships and the complexities and the ownership and the manipulation and all of that, it's really complicated.
And evolution doesn't really help understand that complication.
If you say, well, human beings evolved with this or the other, it's like, well, no, then why are our relationships so predatory and complicated?
So, I'm talking about generally, we have evolved certain characteristics.
Of course, there are variations within a species.
I mean, of course, you're going to have, you know, your variations like sociopath, you know, psychopathy and different things, which are caused by, you know, some are probably...
Some of them are probably people that have been abused for a long period of time, and so they've been messed up that way.
I'm just talking about, in general, there are certain hardwired biological characteristics about humans in general.
There are always going to be exceptions.
That's all that I'm saying. Well, the exceptions rule, though, right?
I mean, you couldn't run central banking if you had any compassion for human beings, right?
Because central banking steals, through inflation, everybody's life savings, right?
And central banking kind of runs the world.
I don't know about that. I mean, I suppose there are some kind of reasoning in your own head that you could, you know, come up with trying to rationalize predatory behavior.
There are all kinds of reasoning.
That you could come up with to try to fool yourself.
But into why, you know, being a certain way, why you should be a certain way or, you know, whatever.
People are more likely looking out for their in-group.
And some people's in-group is very small.
You know, I could conceivably see a person saying, I only care about my family, people are my immediate family, and fuck everybody else, right?
Well, that's quite common.
That's quite common. Yeah, and I can conceive, and everybody's like that to some extent.
We, in general, do care about, unless you're a complete sociopath, but in general, humans do care about people within their in-group more than their out-group.
That's just a fact about humans.
It's not to say that we ought to be that way, just saying we are that way.
And that was in response to why, that was in response to You were saying something about pedophiles or something, but let's move on from that if you don't mind.
No, I just wanted to deal with, of course, a lot of people are going to have an emotionally strong reaction to you saying that a pedophile is just exercising his will to power and you really can't say anything morally against him or her.
Yeah, here to put it another way, if there's homeless bum on the street, right, and I think that he's wasting his life, you know, when I say, hey, dude, you're You're wasting your life.
From my position, there's no way I can objectively say that he's wasting his life unless he assumes my same value premises, my same if clause.
Because from his perspective, he may have a whole totally different set of values.
And from his subjective experience, it is just that way of living is more preferable to him or say preferred to him than...
Maybe he sees me as a tax slave or who knows what his reasoning or values are, but maybe being just stoned out of his mind all day is much better than...
Than my way of life, reading books and debating and writing and stuff like that.
Maybe to him, that's just all hogwash and he'd rather just stay stoned for the rest of his being.
From my position, there's no way I can argue against that.
There's nothing I can say to him.
Okay, now let me ask you this, James.
Since you don't believe in ethics...
What, if anything, prevents you from lying to me or to the audience, I guess, as well, in this conversation?
I mean, any answer I give you right there, how do you know it's true?
Well, no, I'm just, according to your philosophy, I mean, there's a bit of a, I mean, I know the answer to it, unless you want to change your philosophy, right?
But I know the answer, which is that there's nothing that prevents you from lying to me and to the audience in this, right?
If it's going to serve your will to power...
All I can say is you can just look at my arguments and see whether they're valid or not.
See whether they have holes and that's totally fine with me.
You don't have to take anything I say in faith.
You can, you know, check it out for yourself.
No, no, I get all of that.
But if I were to ask you something, let's say outside the scope of the debate, you know, how was your childhood or whatever, there's nothing that would prevent you from lying.
In fact, you would in some ways be encouraged to lie if it helped serve the cause that you want, which is perhaps to dominate or achieve your will to power in this conversation.
I just want to be clear, I'm not trying to catch you again, I just really want to be clear that there's nothing in your philosophy that would say, well I kind of have to tell the truth, because you're perfectly permitted, in fact encouraged almost, to lie in the pursuit of the will to power, right?
Well, yeah, but if I get caught, I mean, if I, let's put it this way.
I can't catch you because I don't know your childhood.
Forget that. Forget that, because we already went through that before.
I don't know what your childhood was like, and it's not like I'm going to have somebody phone me up and say, no, no, no, he never had a pony or something like that, right?
So if there's something that you could get away with lying about in this debate, you'd be perfectly fine to do that, right?
If it's somehow... Okay, so here's the part, and I've been really fascinated, and I appreciate you I feel like my eyes are singing when you blow out.
Although that's vaping, right? Okay. So I do appreciate you being, you know, pretty frank about what it is you believe and helping me sort of understand.
Now, I would like to...
This is the Socratic reasoning part, right?
I would really like you...
I would really like to rescue you from this.
Rescue you from this. I think it is a...
An incorrect position.
I'm not going to say it's in a moral position because that would mean nothing to you, right?
I get all of that, right? But this is why I said at the beginning, like if reason and evidence can rescue you from this or alter your perspective, then you would submit to that, right?
Sure. I mean...
Of course, you could be lying, but, you know, I don't know, right?
There are a bunch of notes that, you know, things that I think are some critical errors in your thesis that we could go over, and if you could answer those, you know, if you could resolve them, maybe you could convince me.
Okay. Listen, I've been examining your belief system.
I'm perfectly happy to unzip my kimono.
And open it wide to your critical examination.
If I could also just ask you to do me a favor and find a prop for your tablet, that would be great, because I really feel like we're either debating or surfing.
I keep veering off to my notes, and I apologize for that.
No sweat. So, yeah.
So, from looking at...
Some of your exchanges online and different things, different videos.
I wonder if you genuinely understand, and I don't mean this in any kind of insulting manner whatsoever, I really genuinely wonder if you truly understand the Izzot gap.
Here's a reason why I say that, and let me quote from you if you don't mind.
You say a quote in your rebuttal video to Rationality Rules where he, you know, I think it's like UPB debunked or something like that.
So you make a response video.
In that response video you say, if you can't get an ought from an is, you're getting an ought from an is, Which is, you ought not talk about getting an ought from an is.
Now here's my problem. My problem is, no, Hume isn't making a prescription.
He didn't say you ought not get an ought from an is.
He's simply making a factual statement that one cannot logically deduce an ought from an is.
It is simply a non sequitur.
It's like saying one plus one equals two, which isn't a prescription, but a mathematical description.
For example, one plus one equals two doesn't say one ought, right?
It doesn't say one ought equal to, right?
It doesn't say that one plus one ought equal to, it says it does equal to.
So it's just saying that it does equal to.
In your response video, you could be debunked, you also said, if you...
Wait, wait, sorry, can we do one of these at a time?
Sure, sure, we can.
Let's do one of these at a time.
Maybe you made a fumble or something.
I'm all ears. Okay.
So, when someone tells me that something is false, and that I should not advocate for or believe something that is false...
Then they have said that I ought to do something, right?
Like if I say one and one make three, and someone says, no, you're wrong, one and one make two, then they are saying I ought to be accurate, I ought to be truthful, and I ought to say things that are valid rather than invalid.
The moment they correct me, now if they'd simply think it and never correct me, well, you know, that's the tree falling in the forest that no one can hear, right?
So if somebody never corrects me, They never point out that I got something wrong and that I ought not to say things that are false or they say things that are erroneous, invalid, whatever we want to call it.
It doesn't really matter, right? It's a whole bunch of verbiage around this stuff, right?
But the moment...
I don't know what the dude's name is, Mr.
Shaggy, right? Rationality rules.
The moment that he says, UPB debunked.
Steph is wrong about UPB. UPB is invalid.
Steph is incorrect.
The theory is false.
It is self-contradictory.
It doesn't accord with reason and evidence.
Boom! The moment he's done that, then he has stepped into the arena.
Of accuracy is preferable to inaccuracy.
Rationality is preferable to contradiction.
Truth is preferable to error.
And not just a little bit, but infinitely preferable to error.
You don't sort of sit there and say, well, if somebody says one and one make three, well, you're 40% correct.
It's like, no, you're 100% wrong.
And that's why I say people who engage in debate and correct others, according to universal standards, are already engaging in universal.
Now, again, it's theoretically possible that somebody could be out there and think, I don't like UPB in the same way that I don't like ice cream.
But you know what? No one writes these big godforsaken essays about how Steph is wrong in his taste of Freddie Mercury as the greatest rock singer who ever lived, right?
Because it's just my perspective, right?
And if we engage in those debates, it's just kind of funny, right?
But people write these big, long essays and make these big, long videos, and I write, I do my rebuttal videos and so on, all based upon the premise that I'm objectively wrong and that it's infinitely preferable, that other people know that I'm objectively wrong, that I've made critical errors, and that truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood.
Okay. So what I would say is that I would...
I would caution you, depending on how you mean this, but I would caution you on the word preferable.
Richard Gardner in his book Beyond Morale notes that if you are aware of how great the step from The ED or ED to the able is.
Something that is desirable deserves to be desired.
It has certain features that demand a positive evaluation from those who see clearly.
Other phrases that express the same idea, intrinsically good, good as an end, good in itself, valuable, And worthwhile, moralists trade in these notions, but the amoralist, or the moral nihilist,
will insist that while there are many sensible uses of good and desirable, or preferable, the categorical, non-conventional, non-hypothetical uses adopted by moralists are devices we Our devices we can,
and if we, given that, you know, the if clause, given that we want to avoid deception, ought to do without.
So in other words, when you say that something is preferable, are you saying it deserves to be full stop?
Or are you saying is, if you're, if you value this, then it ought be this way.
So for example, When you say that truth is universally preferable to falsehood, for example, in your book...
Well, no, no, hang on, though, but you've got to give the context of that.
The context of that is somebody who is correcting me according to universal principles.
So somebody who is correcting me according to universal principles is automatically accepting those universal principles and automatically accepting that accuracy is better than inaccuracy.
When you say universally, okay, do you mean that most people, do you mean that it just can be applied?
No, no, no. Nothing to do with, no. Forget, it's not democratic.
It's not democratic. So, let's look at rationality rules and what he said.
This is from his video, March 15, 2017.
He says, over the last five years, Stefan Molyneux has risen to fame.
And while I personally enjoy a lot of his content, I maintain that a great many of his assertions are disastrously flawed, and his universally preferable behavior, otherwise known as UPB, is one of them.
What follows is a refutation of the five proofs that Molyneux offers, and hence, this is universally preferable behavior debunked.
So he says, for a detailed explanation, the flaws and fallacies within Molyneux's five proofs, blah, blah, blah, As always, thank you kindly for the view, and I hope this video helps you defeat those who would use Stefan Molyneux's universally preferable behavior against you, right?
So he's saying that I am objectively wrong in my assertions according to the universal principles of reason, right?
Because he says the first proof is flawed because premise two is a false premise.
The second proof is flawed because premise one is begging the question, and premise four unjustifiably smuggles in the word acceptance, right?
So when rationality rules So,
from what I understand from him, he made it pretty clear in his last video to you, which was his video he made after the one-year quote from him, where he stated that he's just talking about a subjective preference for truth in this instance.
So, as you stated before, there could be situations in which, at least on my view, or any other non-realist view, that when I say, you know, yeah, truth in this instance is not objectively preferable, it is preferred.
See, there's a distinction there.
It is subjectively preferred for this instance because I'm assuming that by coming up to this debate, You, in this instance, want to have a productive, rational conversation.
So I'm presuming that for the sake of this debate, you prefer truth over falsehood.
Not that it's preferable.
Not that there's some objective preferability to it.
It's just that for this conversation, you prefer Well, no, but that's not what he...
I don't know. Hang on, sorry.
I don't know this other video that he did.
But, no, he's not...
There's no asterisks here.
This is what happens, is people make these universal statements.
Stefan's completely wrong about this.
It's disastrously flawed.
He's incorrect, and blah, blah, blah, right?
And these are absolute statements.
These don't say, well, just for today, or only if you live in Paraguay.
Hang on. These are absolute universal statements of total error on my part, right?
And then, hang on, and then when I point out that these are appeals to universals, people say, oh, no, no, no, no, it's not universal at all.
It's like, I'm looking at his, then he should have gone back and revised his document.
And said that Steph is not actually incorrect.
It's just, you know, on Thursday afternoon at 4pm, or if you live in Paraguay, but he's not.
His original video...
So no one is, as far as I understand, and especially rational, and I've watched his videos multiple times, he's not saying that there is no universal truth.
Like, for example, if I say you're objectively wrong about something, Like, if you say 2 plus 2 equals 5, I'm saying you're objectively wrong about that.
But that's not a prescription, it's a description.
I'm not saying, I'm not prescribing anything to you in a universal sense.
I'm describing the fact that you are wrong about this in a factual sense.
Great. Okay, fantastic.
So we're in agreement about that.
That's wonderful. I'm with you there.
Okay. So he's saying that I am objectively wrong, because he doesn't say, I just don't like UPB. He's saying UPB is objectively false, right?
Yeah. Okay, great.
Now, if you're saying that something is objectively false, then you're saying something can be objectively true, right?
Yes. Okay, great.
So we have objective truth, we have objective falsehood, and there's no way that you would make an entire video, and he put a lot of time and effort into this video, which I really appreciated.
I enjoyed doing the rebuttal.
There's no way you'd put that in if it was just a matter of personal taste.
So he's saying he's objectively right, I'm objectively wrong, and being right is preferable to being wrong.
He's saying that you share a goal.
He's assuming that you share a subjective goal for truth.
A subjective goal? You subjectively value...
You subjectively have a preference for truth.
Okay? Wait, wait, wait.
Sorry, sorry. I'm sorry.
I'm very confused by that. A subjective preference is not something that connects to the external universe.
Like, if I say that's a tree and it's a tree, that's an objective fact.
If I say, I like that tree...
That is a subjective perception, right?
Or a subjective experience? Correct.
Okay. So a subjective preference for truth, where truth is something that is objective, right?
So how can you just have a subjective preference for truth?
Because a preference is...
By its very nature, something that it is a function of the subject.
And so it is because it's a function of mind, it is subjective.
Any kind of preference is intrinsically subjective.
That's what a preference means.
Oh, okay. So hang on.
So then I would say, well, I prefer universally preferable behavior to be true.
And no one can then talk me out of it.
But that's not what he did, right?
So the fact that I prefer...
Listen, I put a lot of time and effort into UBB. I've been proselytizing about it for like 12 years or whatever.
So I would really prefer that universally preferable behavior be true, right?
But rationality rules and you and so on, it's perfectly fine.
I mean, we're all big people in the arena of philosophy.
But you guys say, hey, story staff, your subjective preference that you be true is false.
It's incorrect. It's not true.
Right? So my subjective preference for truth doesn't matter because I prefer that it'd be true.
That's not what we're saying. We're not saying your preference is false.
Preferences are neither true or false.
They're not propositional. We're just saying that your statements...
Hang on. You just said a subjective preference for truth, and now you're saying subjective preferences can't be true or false.
I'm saying you can prefer truth, right?
Preferring truth is not a, unless I say I prefer truth and I don't, that's not true or false.
The preference itself, the internal, what it's like to feel, to value something, that's not something, that's not a proposition.
It's not propositional. Unless I say I value truth and I'm lying, you know, right?
I'm making a proposition. I say I value truth.
Or I'm telling the truth, then it becomes propositional.
But I'm saying the preference itself is not propositional.
It's just a non-cognitive function.
It's a non-cognitive function. I'm sorry, I really, maybe this is just getting too complicated for my little brain here, but...
Hang on, see, I'm not talking about, because this is, you asked me about the if-ought, the is-ought dichotomy, right?
You can't get a value from a fact, right?
Okay, yeah, I get that, and I agree with you.
Ethics don't exist. There's nothing inscribed in the nature of the universe that says we have to not kill or steal or rape or anything.
I get all of that, and I'm with you 150% on that, my brother.
I really am. I really am.
So, here's the thing.
We have to confine our discussions to, within a debate context, within a debate structure, because that's what we're having, right?
So it's like if you're playing chess, you have to confine the rules to the rules of chess, right?
And so if we're having a debate, then there has to be an objective standard, that's why I asked you at the beginning, right?
There has to be an objective standard, a methodology, That we are both willing to submit ourselves to, and we talked about sort of reason and evidence, which is my preferred way of doing it, right?
So forget about outside the context of debate because that never happens, right?
The moment we're debating, we've accepted a whole bunch of premises, right?
And the moment we correct someone, the moment we say, you are incorrect according to objective standards, Well, the only reason we would get involved in a debate about truth is if we valued truth.
And he wanted to reject universally preferable behavior because he said it was false.
And he wanted to destroy it, debunk it, and to rescue people from the delusions of UPB and so on, right?
So he, and not him in particular, right, but this is just the example here, right?
So he can't say truth is irrelevant because he's trying to correct me, right?
He can't say facts are irrelevant or contradiction is irrelevant because that's what he's using, as he thinks, to debunk UPB. So just forget about all of the stuff that happens outside of a debate.
You know, if I could just throw in Frisbee in the yard, that's not the situation that we're talking about here.
We're talking about when you go in and you correct someone.
You know, my daughter says one plus one is three when she was a toddler or whatever.
I go in and I correct her.
Now, I can't say truth isn't a value.
I can't say accuracy isn't a value.
I can't say objectivity isn't a value because I'm correcting her.
So you have to look at that moment Where you correct something.
That's where UPB sits, not in everything else that can happen.
You go into the bathroom with that UPB, right?
Maybe you could clarify something for me.
Maybe we're just arguing past each other.
When you say that X is a value, are you saying that you prefer X, right?
You have a subjective attitude, positive attitude toward no?
What are you saying then? Okay, so if you like vanilla ice cream and I like chocolate ice cream, can we have a productive debate about that?
I mean, no, it's not a propositional thing.
It's not a debate. Well, that's a subjective preference.
It's a subjective preference, right?
So nobody, if I had advertised this as James T. Stillwell III and I debate whether chocolate or vanilla ice cream is better, right?
Nobody would show up, right?
Right, because those don't value as much to people.
When you start talking about things that people value that are of importance, then they will start to do that.
When they strongly prefer something, when it affects their if clause in their life that they value, then it becomes, you know, whether someone prefers strawberry or chocolate, nobody really cares about that.
It's just an ice cream flavor.
When you start talking about things that impact your life, that's when things start to change.
Okay, well, that's fine, although there are lots of people who get very incredibly invested in whether Led Zeppelin is better than the Rolling Stones or the Beatles.
I mean, so, forget all of that, right?
But if you and I have subjective preferences that don't match, I mean, that's perfectly fine, right?
Like, there's no video out there where people say, Steph's preference for the band Queen is, I'm going to debunk it, it's objectively wrong, it's self-contrading, like, it doesn't happen, right?
It's a personal taste of mine, right?
Now, if, on the other hand, I were to say, ice cream does not contain dairy, right?
Then I'm no longer talking about a subjective perception, right?
I'm now making a statement of fact, right?
Correct. That would be a subjectivist view of how language is used.
No, no, please, let's not overcomplicate it.
Let's not Noam Chomsky this mofo up too much, all right?
It's not. No, no, let's listen.
It's totally bearing on the subject.
Ethics has to be something we explain to five-year-olds, so let's just keep this simple, okay?
I mean, you can retract all you want afterwards, but for God's sakes, let's not nitpick every goddamn syllable we take, because I'll just shoot myself here, right?
Not that that's an argument, but please, let's just try and make some progress, okay?
I'm trying to be precise.
No, no, you're not. You're just trying to, you're trying to, you know, it's not, it's not precision.
It's just, it's stalling, right?
Okay. So if I say, if I say ice cream.
In fact, I have a bunch more points.
No, no, that's fine. That's fine. I'm trying to explain the is ought thing, right?
So, if I say I like vanilla ice cream, you can't talk me out of it because it's a subjective perception.
If I make a truth claim about an objective fact, like I say, ice cream does not contain dairy, right?
Then, if you correct me, right?
So, let's Schrodinger cat this thing, right?
Nice and easy. If I never hear anything from you, it doesn't matter because it's not part of our discourse, right?
If you correct me, Right?
There's so much that's implicit and implied and accepted in you correcting me, right?
You're not going to correct me on a subjective taste, but if you correct me on an objective fact, you're a UP being right there.
So, that's where we would disagree, and here's why.
So, in your book on page 35, you state, if you correct me on an error that I have made, you are implicitly accepting the fact that I would be better for, that it would be better for me to correct my error.
Your preference for me to correct my error is not subjective, but objective and universal.
Now, that's pretty much what you were just saying, but here's my response.
But this is incorrect. I am not implicitly accepting the fact that it would be categorically better.
Because it isn't a fact that it would be categorically better, nor that you ought to make a correction.
I'm merely assuming that you have a subjective preference for truth or falsehood, at least if only for the sake of this discussion.
So I'm not saying it's a universal preference.
I'm saying it's preferred in this instance.
And I mean, I could think of Situations in which people, and we already have in this discussion, in which people don't prefer truth.
So it's not a universal preference, it's not a categorical imperative.
I'm sorry, I'm trying to follow what you're saying here, but I'm not really happy to be like...
Give me one instance, give me one single instance of a categorical imperative, of a universal preference...
Because I can think of all kinds of things that can be universally applied, like in theory.
Like for example, you shouldn't torture babies for your own personal pleasure.
That I think we can- Oh no, no, no.
Forget all of that. We're not talking ethics.
No, no, no. This is dragging me off in some other direction.
So yeah, you went to sort of baby eating and so on, and that's like way down the road, right?
But my sort of point is that if you are objectively correcting someone according to universal values, What does universal values mean?
What does that mean exactly?
Exactly what you agreed to at the beginning, which is reason.
But I don't agree that's universally preferred.
I mean, we've already discussed in this debate how there are certain people that...
According to their subjective values, there's no reason for them to prefer a reason.
Yeah, no, no. God, come on, man.
This is 101 stuff.
I mean, I've gone through this about 10 million times, so I really can't believe that we have to do that.
It's not universally preferred.
It's universally preferable. In other words, when rationality rule says that my argument is incorrect, he's not saying everybody is always rational and always prefers rationality all the time.
He's saying that my claims are not just subjectively wrong.
They're not just, well, I don't like the font that he used or the cover design of the book could have been better or something like that.
He's saying that I am objectively incorrect.
We agree there, yes.
And that truth and being correct is preferable to error.
He's not saying preferable.
Yes, he is. Yes, he absolutely is.
He absolutely is. Because why on earth would he make a video if he didn't think it was preferable?
You see, the very act of debating means that you think something is preferable.
I'm explaining that if you'll let me.
He's saying that he prefers truth.
He shares the same if clause that if you want to have a rational discussion, right, which philosophy is a rational discussion, we're trying to arrive at truth, Then you ought to change your opinion according to his because yours is incorrect and he gave the reasons.
Well, no, I shouldn't change my opinion to his because he's not saying it is my opinion that UPB is false.
He's saying it is objectively true that UPB is false.
You know what I mean. His true beliefs, his accurate statements...
No, the true... Yeah, the truth, okay?
How I want to put it, the truth, the factual claims.
He's saying, if you value truth, then you ought to make the corrections.
Beautiful. Yep, I agree 100%.
If that's what you mean, if all you're saying is, if I want X, I ought to Y, Then what we have here is nothing more than Kantian imperatives or hypothetical imperatives.
This is not moral realism.
This is not anything novel.
This is, I mean, Sam Harris does the same thing.
So does, I mean, I could think of a bunch of philosophers who do the same thing, but nobody would ever claim that this is objective morality, moral realism, objectual, you know, preferability or anything like that.
This is all just I mean, I don't know many moral nihilists who would disagree with this thesis.
I could see, like, there are certain things that you can universalize and apply consistently and some things that you can't.
Like you pointed out, we both agree, for example, we pointed out how theft is not going to work, right?
How what? Because theft, for example, is not going to work, right?
You can't apply that universally.
Okay, so hang on.
So if somebody says that theft is universally preferable behavior, that is an invalid statement.
And I've gone through this argument.
You've read the book, right? So I've gone through this argument before.
We don't have to go through it here.
But if somebody says that theft is universally preferable behavior, that is a self-contradictory statement and it fails.
Is that correct? You're going to hate my response, but my response is that it depends on what you mean by universally.
If you mean that it can be universally applied, then yeah, we would agree.
According to certain if clauses, like certain goals, you can't apply that consistently.
They're going to end up defeating your goal.
No, no, that's okay.
You don't understand the argument.
Sorry. I mean, listen, I get to say that because I am the expert on UPB. That's fair.
So the argument is not practical or consequential.
The argument is just entirely within the syllogisms, right?
So very briefly, theft cannot be universally preferable behavior because theft must mean for it to be universally preferable behavior.
For theft to be UPB, everybody must want to both steal and be stolen from At the same time, because that's what universally means, right?
Universally everywhere, all time, every place, blah, blah, blah, right?
That's actually what I was saying.
We agree there so far.
Okay. I think you just misunderstood, but that's fine.
So forget about consequences and whether it's practical.
It is impossible for theft to be universally preferable behavior, because theft is asymmetric.
In other words, if I take something that you want, you don't want me to take it.
And so if theft is universally preferable behavior, it ceases to be a category that can be enacted.
Because everybody must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
Because that's what universally means.
All human beings must want to steal and be stolen from at the same time.
But if you want someone to take your property, it's no longer theft.
Right, so theft is asymmetric in that one person must want it and the other person must not want it.
Rape is asymmetrical.
One person must want to rape, the other person must not want to be, not want to have the sexual activity, right?
Assault. Hang on, hang on, let me finish, let me finish.
One person, assault, one person wants to hit, the other person doesn't want to be hit.
It's not like a boxing ring where you can sit, right?
So rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior because they cannot ever, logically, it doesn't matter the consequences, it doesn't matter the long-term effects, it doesn't matter.
Theft, just staying with theft, it cannot be universally preferable behavior, and that's how we know that theft cannot be.
Be moral. And again, I know we go to moral and all that.
Just stay within the framework of universally preferable behavior.
Is it fair to say? Again, just stay within this framework.
We can jump out of it in a sec, right?
But within the framework of universally preferable behavior, can theft be universally preferable behavior?
So, if you mean it cannot be applied consistently by everybody, like a world in which everybody is stealing from each other, right?
I would agree with you because there would be conflict of interest.
Like, as you said, there would be conflict of preferences because nobody's going to want to get stolen from, right?
So we agree there, okay?
There's no problem.
No, it's not empirical. Nobody can want to be stolen from because if you want to be stolen from, it's not theft.
Do you understand? It's not preference-based.
It's a logical absurdity.
We can't have a world in which that No, no, no.
You're going back to consequentialism.
It's not empirical. I'm not talking about consequences.
I'm saying it's a logical absurdity.
It's just the fact that it's a logical absurdity.
No, it's not absurd. It's impossible.
It's not absurd. That's saying, well, it could never happen.
When I say it's a logical absurdity, I'm saying it's like a square circle.
It is impossible. I'm saying the same thing I'm saying.
The same exact thing you're saying.
The problem you run into, though, is You run into the same problem that Iran and others fall into.
And this isn't a problem. It depends on what your goals are, okay?
If your goal is to have some type of more realism, then I would say, yeah, it's a problem.
If your goal is to have something that's workable, that works, and that's logically consistent, I would say, sure, this is a great something that you've put forward here.
But there's no reason why anyone ought to accept UPB in an objective sense unless there's an if clause.
Well, sure. The way that you would reject UPB is either you would completely ignore it, which is certainly possible, obviously, right?
In which case I wouldn't know anything about you or your criticisms of UPB, right?
Or what you would do is you would say, as Rationality Rules did, as you seem to be saying, UPB is incorrect.
But the moment you say UPB is incorrect, as rationality rules did, then you're saying, within the context of that debate, forget about everything else.
Forget about showering or walking the dog.
Within the context of that debate, the moment you correct someone according to universal standards, that's UPB. That is UPB. And now then, once we cross that hurdle, and again, it's all within the context of debate.
It doesn't matter outside of debate.
It's all within the context of someone correcting...
Sorry, I'm just in the middle of saying something.
Do you want me to finish or do you want to interrupt?
I apologize. Go ahead.
No, it's fine. So within the context of debate, the moment you correct me, Right?
And you know that there's a difference.
Like if I say I like vanilla, you like chocolate, we don't have any problem because we can both coexist with those things.
But the moment that you say that I'm wrong, the moment rationality rule says that I'm wrong, then you are exhibiting UPB. It's universally preferable that statements be consistent with reality.
It's universally preferable that people be accurate and so on because it's not subjective.
It's not like, oh, you like ice cream?
I happen to like carrot cake.
It's perfectly complimentary and people don't write big essays or make, you know, long videos with rebuttals about my taste in food or music or anything like that because I'm making universal claims and they're rebutting them according to universal standards.
UPB, boom, right there, right there.
Now, he made tomorrow, I guess, I don't like the font in the UPB book, or UPB makes me feel icky or whatever, right?
But he's making universal claims of accuracy, consistency, truth, and its value.
And its value.
Now, within that context, that's UPB. Now, once we've crossed that hurdle of UPB being valid, which is encased within the very act of having a debate, the only question that remains is...
What is valid universally preferable behavior?
You can't say, well, universally preferable behavior doesn't exist, and therefore you should stop talking about it, or you should reject the theory, or you should...
Because he's saying here, I want people to stop believing Stefan Molyneux's theory.
What does he say down at the bottom here?
He says, I hope this video helps you defeat those who would use Stefan Molyneux's UPB against you.
Right? So he's hoping consequentialist effects, that he's going to rescue people from error, and all of that kind of good stuff, which is great.
Let's all rescue people from error.
But once you're debating according to universal standards and you're correcting people according to objective standards, that's UPB, then the only question remains, which behaviors are universally preferable behaviors?
You can't say, well, it's not valid because you're already correcting someone.
And once you get to which behaviors are universally preferable behavior, we have a wonderfully productive discussion about ethics.
But everybody, like J.F., Gary Eppie has this wormhole of other dimensions, and you have this wormhole of jumping out of an actual debate for something that's not part of a debate and saying that that destroys all of the principles engaged in a debate.
And the last thing I'll say is, and I know it's a long speech, so I'll let you have the floor after this.
It's sort of like this, like if I come up to you and I say, hey James, language is incomprehensible, the senses are completely unreliable, and you should submit to that, well, I'm wrong.
Now, do I sit there and have to prove this out of the...
No, I just look at the statement.
If I say language is incomprehensible, language can never convey meaning, but I'm using language to convey meaning, I've just detonated my own statement.
If I say the senses are full of error and never transmit anything accurately, but I'm using your sense of hearing, or sight if I've written it down, or, you know, we could use Braille or whatever it is, right?
But if I say the senses always deceive you, but I'm using your ears to transmit my argument, then I've just detonated my own statement.
You can't ever say to someone, language can never convey meaning because you're using language to convey the meaning that language never conveys meaning, which is a self-detonating statement.
We agree in all that. We agree with all of that, right?
So you can't ever, in the same way you can't ever correct someone according to objective standards and say there's no such thing as universally preferable behavior.
So, We can make factual claims about UPB and where it is incorrect, factually, not prescriptions.
And he's not saying, again, Rational Rally Rules is not making a prescriptive claim.
He was making a descriptive claim.
Yes, there were underlying value premises, but they were not universal preferences.
But we've gone through that.
So if I can, I would like to point out something else that...
has kind of bothered me and others, if that's okay.
So, this pertains again to the is-ought, okay?
So, on the same page, 35, you state, you don't say to me you should change your opinion to mine because I would prefer it, but rather you should correct your opinion because it is objectively incorrect.
Okay, however, this is a problem because this is an is-ought fallacy.
You cannot logically deduce an ought from the fact that an opinion is incorrect.
I'm sorry, can you just go over that again?
I'm not trying to interrupt you. I just didn't follow that.
You cannot logically deduce an ought from the fact That an opinion or a belief or statement is incorrect.
However, one could cogently argue that if one wishes to have as many true beliefs as possible, one ought correct, incorrect opinions, beliefs, statements, whatever.
But that's not an objective universal ought, merely a Kantian hypothetical imperative.
That's where we run into problems is when you start talking about that kind of stuff.
If you're saying to me, like, what your argument is, is we can't consistently have a world in which we have theft and all these other things.
And so your underlying premise is something like, if you want to be consistent, right, if you want to be rational, then you ought to accept this problem here that you cannot consistently apply theft, murder, rape, these other things.
We're in agreement there. As long as you have an underlying if clause, right?
No, it's not my if clause.
The if clause is somebody who corrects me.
If you're trying to correct me, it's your if clause, not mine.
And we share that if clause.
But I don't want you to wiggle out of this.
I want you to explain how you can...
Logically deduce an ought from the fact of someone's unfactual statement.
How can you logically deduce that someone ought change their mind or abandon their statement if it's false?
How do you logically derive an ought from falsehood?
Because if they're trying to correct me...
Then they are already accepting that there's universally preferable behavior.
But do you see my point that you cannot logically...
Look, dude, why are you asking me a question then immediately interrupting me when I try to answer it?
I'm sorry. Maybe there's a bit of delay.
Go ahead. All right. So the question is, how can I overcome the is-ought dichotomy?
Well, I overcome the is-ought dichotomy.
Because if I say...
To you, James, I, Steph, I can get an ought from an is.
You're going to tell me, no, you can't, right?
I'm going to list a couple of absurdities that you end up with if you do, as well.
Okay, so, no, but you're going to say, Steph, if you say you can get an ought from an is, you're objectively incorrect.
You're wrong, right? Mm-hmm.
Is that right? That's correct.
Okay, so we just got an ought from an is, which is you're telling me I ought not to get an ought from an is.
No. That's the same claim I corrected earlier.
I don't think you did. I'm making a factual claim.
I'm just making a factual claim that your statement is not logical, that it is incorrect.
I'm not saying that you ought to do anything.
I'm just making a fact. It's like if a police detective is describing a murder scene, he's not prescribing murder.
He's just describing what happened.
I'm just describing...
What your error is.
I'm not saying that you ought to do anything.
Now, I may have some underlying motives for why I'm doing it.
I may think that we both share a preference for truth.
And so I'm trying to help you reach that goal because I just like doing it.
I'm just a nice guy. Maybe I just like winning debates.
There could be a million things that I... Motives for why I'm doing it.
But that's where we run into problems.
No, but you are appealing.
You are appealing to universals.
You're not sitting there saying, I like to win debates and I'm just going to troll you or whatever it is, right?
You're saying, Steph, you are objectively incorrect.
You are objectively wrong.
You are making a claim to universals.
As far as facts are concerned, not prescriptive universals.
No, but the moment you correct someone and say, Steph, you are objectively wrong.
Then that is a universal right there.
No. Yes, because if I say I like vanilla ice cream, you're not going to correct me, right?
You will only correct me when I make a universal claim, and you will only correct me with reference to universals.
And then you sit there and say, well, but there's no universal preferences.
It's like, can you not stop and look at what you're actually doing?
You're... You're kind of comparing apples to oranges, because if I say I like ice cream, that's not a claim, so it can't be corrected or not corrected.
Do you see the problem there?
No, it is a claim. If I say I like ice cream, that's a claim, isn't it?
Why is it not a claim? It's a claim about your state of mind if we accept subjectivism, but I don't accept subjectivism.
No, no, no, it's not subjectivism.
It's a statement of subjective preference, right?
Yes, but nobody cares if you like chocolate ice cream.
Maybe there are some like...
People do care. Are you kidding me?
People's jobs hang on consumer preferences.
How much ice cream you make and what flavors all depend upon consumer preferences.
People use... They spend millions and millions and millions of dollars trying to figure out consumer preferences so they don't get them wrong.
People care enormously, much more than you and I care about this debate.
That people's actual jobs, how they feed their families, all depends massively on subjective preferences.
I think what is... I'm sorry, I think what is confusing us is that when, on my thesis, when someone says, I like ice cream or I like chocolate or something like that, I think they're just expressing, they're not making a claim, they're just expressing an emotion about a value for that, you know, like the taste that they have, the inner psychological experience that they have.
I don't think that's a, on my view, because I'm not a cognitivist, you see what I'm saying?
And I think that's where we keep getting hung up there.
I think you need to understand the distinction.
Sorry, that doesn't explain anything to me.
So you said that people don't care who likes ice cream, and I gave you a counterexample.
Do you accept that counterexample and withdraw that people don't care about flavors of ice cream?
Because they really do. In general, people don't.
You can't just say in general.
Come on. You want to be precise.
You can't just sit there and say, well, I made a claim, and you rebutted that claim, and I'm just going to retreat to in general.
You made a claim that people don't care about ice cream, and I pointed out that people enormously care about ice cream.
Because before I made this even more clear, when I said people care when these questions matter, but if you're a normal person and you're not in marketing and you're not worried about making money off ice cream flavoring, then it's not going to matter if someone says, I like strawberry and you like vanilla.
It's not going to matter. It's only going to matter when you're making money, when your finances are involved.
That's when it's going to matter.
That's what I meant. Okay, so it matters.
That's what I said before. Okay, so sometimes it matters.
Okay, got it. You said you want to be precise, so we're going to be precise.
All right. So, why would you not correct someone on personal taste, but you would correct someone on objective claims, if you wanted to?
Me, personally? I can only speak for myself, but, I mean, I just find it all interesting, and I do like...
I do have that value to have as many true beliefs as possible and to limit the amount of false beliefs that I have.
And that's just a personal subjective thing that I have.
Hang on. Are you saying that you like truth the way that I like ice cream?
I don't know how you like ice cream.
No, come on. Let's not get semantic here.
You said you have a personal preference for truth, right?
In the same way that I would have a personal preference for ice cream, right?
I don't know about the same way.
I mean... I wouldn't say it's the same in degree.
I agree. It's different, right?
It is different. Let's be honest about that.
You don't go around correcting people on ice cream, but you go around correcting people who believe in morality.
You say that they're wrong, right?
There's no morality. Boo socialism.
It's not a proposition.
It's just expressing an emotion about a fact.
Do you see what I'm saying? I don't know where we are here.
It just seems so simple to me, and I don't know why it's all so complicated here.
So you don't correct people on personal taste, but you correct people on objective facts.
For instance, there's no such thing as morality.
You should be a nihilist.
And that is not a thing that you say, like, I like nihilism, like I like ice cream.
You say nihilism is true, and morality is false, right?
And you go around correcting people and you wrote a whole book about it.
We're having this debate. So I'm honest.
I correct people for many different reasons.
For some people, I just like to debate.
I'm just going to be honest. If I think that there's somebody who just, they're like a dishonest apologist or somebody who's just dogmatic and they're never going to change their mind, I may be debating them because I'm debating them to show their audience that they're incorrect.
And maybe some people in their audience...
No, that's fine, but you still think that they're incorrect, right?
Yeah, if they're factually incorrect, they're incorrect.
It's a proposition. Okay, and if they're factually incorrect, is it better for them to be correct?
If they have a preference for truth.
Okay. I get it.
If they have a preference for truth.
Okay. We're all in a debate.
We have a preference for truth.
I get that. That's so boring.
Of course we have a preference for truth.
That's why we're debating. It's like saying, hey, let's play chess, but let's not have a preference for chess or any chess rules that are objective.
There are a lot of people who engage in debates who don't care about truth.
No, but they're not honest about that.
They put forward the pretense that they care about truth, right?
Yeah, I would say so.
Okay, so they just lie.
But there's a reason why they talk about truth.
So yes, everybody who's engaged in a debate pretends that they're caring about truth or they genuinely do care about truth.
They pretend that it's not personal.
They pretend that it's not subjective.
It's all with reference to objective facts and the objective value of getting to the truth.
That's what a debate is.
And they occur all the time.
We have a nice juicy one going on here, which is great fun.
It happens all the time.
It happens with negotiation for a price.
It happens with negotiation for going out on a date on Friday.
It happens, like, constantly going on, right?
And so when we're engaged in a debate, there is, in the very nature of debating, a universal preference and value for truth over falsehood.
Now, you can say, wow, but that doesn't exist in reality.
So what? The scientific method doesn't exist in reality?
Hang on, the scientific method doesn't exist in reality?
That doesn't mean that the scientific method is purely subjective?
No matter how many times I correct you on that word universal, it just rolls right off.
You just keep using it. I don't mean that as an insult.
I'm just saying... I've corrected you on that, and I've showed you why it's not a beautiful preference.
Good! Fantastic! Let's say, James, you have corrected me on that.
Beautiful! That's exactly what I'm talking about.
I'm wrong. You're right.
Truth is infinitely preferable to falsehood.
Accuracy and consistency is infinitely preferable to inaccuracy and contradiction.
Boom! You've corrected me.
Fantastic! We both want truth.
We both accept the truth is valuable.
You keep using that word preferable and infinitely, and I never said anything like that.
Nothing of that sort.
You corrected me.
And with good reason. You corrected me according to what standard?
Which standard did you correct me according to?
Is it a subjective standard?
My subjective standard.
Oh, come on, man.
You can't possibly say that you have objectively corrected me according to a subjective standard.
Come on. No.
I'm saying that the subjective standard that I have is the reason It is the motivating factor of why I corrected your...
No, that's your subjective preference, not your subjective standard.
Come on, man. Let's be precise.
You have corrected me!
Right. When I say standard, that's what I mean.
And a standard is something that people make up.
Like, there's a standard of care, right?
There's a standard of this and that.
These are subjective expectations that people have.
So how do you get to say that you have corrected me?
If it's a subjective standard, like I like vanilla and you like chocolate, right?
You can't correct me on that, but you can correct me on this because you're slipperily changing the definitions here.
No, I'm not. Yes, you are.
You say that you correct me and then you say, oh, no, no, it's just a subjective standard like ice cream.
No, I think you're totally missing what I'm saying.
I'm saying I like ice cream in my thesis, which is non-cognitive.
It's not a proposition.
It's neither true or false.
I can't correct you. Now, if you say that one plus one equals five, I can correct you on that because it's objectively false.
Beautiful. You've corrected me according to objective standards.
You just said objectively false.
I'm not prescribing any preference.
And you say that in your book.
You say... Hang on.
Why would you correct me according to objective standards if you didn't value objective standards?
You have two definitions in your book of what UPB is.
No, no. Hang on. Forget the book for now.
Let's just talk. Let's just talk.
Why would you correct me according to objective standards if you didn't value conformity with objective standards?
I never said I didn't value conformity with objective standards.
Beautiful! You value conformity with objective standards, and it's not subjective, it's an objective thing, right?
No, because I was using...
You're using standard right now, if I'm incorrect, please correct me, as in the standard of reality, what is actually out there, right?
So, like, one plus one...
No, it's an objective methodology, like reason and evidence, right?
I wouldn't say that reason is subjective.
If you mean logic, I wouldn't say it's subjective.
You wouldn't say it's what? Subjective.
I wouldn't say logic is subjective.
No, logic is subjective. So you're correcting me according to an objective standard, right?
Correct. I'm saying you're wrong and here's why.
No, that's perfect. Okay. So I am wrong, not just today, but tomorrow, right?
Like if tomorrow I say I'm totally right, you would say no.
And you already said this, right?
Because you've already said, hey, man, I keep disproving you on this and you keep not getting it.
So I am incorrect through time, right?
Now, let's say I shift a little bit to the left or a little bit to the right.
Am I still incorrect? Absolutely.
Okay. Am I incorrect on the moon?
Yes. Okay.
So I am universally, like, across space, through time, I am universally incorrect, right?
Yes. Okay.
According to objective standards?
According to logic, the way the universe behaves.
Yeah. Okay. So perfect.
We're engaged in a debate where we are appealing To the value of being in conformity with objective standards like reason and evidence.
And you correcting me because I have deviated from those standards, right?
I'm not appealing to a value.
I'm simply making this factual claim that you are incorrect.
There's no value involved.
There's a fact-value distinction in fact.
So I'm not making any kind of ought statement from the fact that you're wrong.
I get that. If you want to say something, yeah, and this is what I say in UPP, if you want to say something that is true and universal, it's kind of a tautology, but it's important, right?
If you want to say something that's true and universal, it has to be true and universal.
In other words, in conformity with reason and evidence and independent of space and time, right?
Total agreement. Okay.
Absolutely. Fantastic. So the if statement is embedded in the conversation.
It's kind of taken for granted, right?
And I'm just saying that in the beginning of our conversation, which is why I did this at the beginning, why I said, okay, well, how is it that we're going to change our minds and blah, blah, blah, right?
And I'm with you, man. I'm with you.
Like brother to brother, we are knee to knee and we're hugging in a truly cult-like fashion, right?
But it's a beautiful thing, right?
So implicit in the very act of debating, Is a preference for truth over falsehood and not a personal preference for something subjective, but a universal preference.
As long as you're sincere. As long as you're sincere, correct.
Well, sure. But people who are insincere, people who are coming in and lying about it, you can find them out pretty quickly by how they react when you prove them wrong, right?
Sometimes. Some people are better at fooling people than others, but yeah, I would say in general.
Right. So all I'm saying is that if we look not at the content of debating, but at the form of debating, in the same way that if you and I start debating on whether language has meaning or the senses can provide accurate information, we're jumping the shark, right?
We're jumping right over everything that has to be accepted in order for us To have a debate.
In order for us to have a debate, we have to believe that each other exists.
We have to believe that there's some universal medium that we can use to transmit ideas to each other.
We have to admit that language has at least some capacity for objective meaning because we're not just making up our own words.
And, you know, we haggle about the meaning and that's very productive and all that kind of stuff.
And we have to admit or accept that the pursuit of truth is of value And it is of value, of course, in this debate, but it's also of value because, as you said, if you corrected me, because my incorrectness is going to go on through time and across space, and so it's a universal if I'm incorrect, right, until I correct myself and whatever, right?
And then I was incorrect, although now I'm more correct if I take on a better position.
So all I'm saying, James, is that the way that you overcome the is-ought dichotomy, which I fully accept and I understand all of that, right?
The way that you overcome the is-ought dichotomy is you say, okay, what's implicit and embedded in the very active debate?
In the very active debate.
Now, if you sort of slow down the beginning of the debate and you say, well, what is it we're doing here?
Well, there's a whole bunch of things that we have to accept in order for us to have a debate.
That overcomes the is-all dichotomy.
That doesn't mean that the facts suddenly magically give rise to values in some weird alchemy, but we're accepting those values in order to have a debate.
In other words, we accept that language has meaning.
We accept that each other exists.
We accept that the census can provide some valid information.
Now, that's not magically getting an ought from an if.
That's in the very act of correcting people and debating it.
It doesn't have to be a sort of semi-formal debate like this.
It could be any number of things.
Can I ask you a question? Would you admit that it's getting an ought from an if?
I'm sorry? Would you admit that it's getting an ought from an if?
An if? From a goal, from a shared goal.
Well, I think that if you and I are both in pursuit of truth according to objective standards...
The ought is embedded in the conversation.
It's implicit in the conversation.
Right. That's a goal.
Would you agree we both share the goal for truth, right?
In order to have a debate, we're both sharing the goal for truth, correct?
Well, of course, because if, and sorry to interrupt, but the reason I wanted to say this is that if you were to say to me, and this is what I learned from my last couple of debates, and I'm really enjoying this.
I think this is great fun, and I think very productive.
But if you were to come to me at the beginning, James, and you were to say, there's nothing that can change my mind.
I don't care if I'm inconsistent.
I don't care if I contradict myself.
I don't care if my statements completely contradict empirical reality.
I don't care. Then what would I do?
Well, I'd say, well, you know, I'm going to do something else with my evening because, you know, that's like trying to play chess with someone who's going to call it an airstrike.
Like it may be something, but it ain't chess, right?
And so when we both have accepted that universality is possible, that truth is preferable to error, that consistency is preferable to contradiction and so on, we go and have a debate.
And the debate only exists if people do that.
And so with JF and other people...
I'll agree if you stop using the word preferable and start using the word preferred.
Because those have very meta-ethical meanings.
They have very specific ethical meanings.
And I'm very cautious about that.
Well, I'm happy to be corrected if you don't like preferable and preferred.
So tell me about it.
So, now, if you were conceiving, if you were agreeing with me, What I said previously in this discussion, that what you have here is Kantian hypothetical imperatives, Then you're agreeing that you're basically conceding my worldview here, my meta-ethical thesis.
I don't see anything wrong with that.
I think if you're honest enough to admit that, I would actually find that very honorable and I would admire you a lot for that because that's a very honest thing and I admire honesty.
So as long as you're willing to concede that, that what you're talking about here is if we share a goal, we ought to do certain things.
I'm totally in agreement, and I find a lot of, like I said, other than these little discrepancies, I actually found a lot of value in what you were saying as far as how things can be applied, like you noted earlier.
You know, rape and murder and other things.
There's a lot of agreement in there and I think that has a lot of value as far as how people live their lives and constructing a, you know, a kind of subjective code for how society or whatever should be run.
I think there's a lot of merit in that and yeah, that's what I wanted to say on that.
Well, I appreciate that, but that's not answering my question of why you prefer preferable to preferred or preferred to preferable.
Because preferable, as I read to you in that quote earlier, It has some metaethical connotations.
Something that's preferable deserves to be preferred.
And if I could go back to your book just to make an illustration of this, and maybe you could correct me on this.
Maybe it's not saying what it seems to be saying to me.
But you said truth is universally preferable to falsehood.
This is universal preferable.
Replace false ideas with one's – let me read that over.
I'm sorry.
Truth is universally preferable to falsehood, and it is universally preferable to replace false ideas with true ones.
But this begs the question, like, you know, why is it the case that truth is universally preferable to falsehood?
Because we had talked about there are some circumstances in which people don't prefer truth.
They don't assume our same if clause, right?
Sorry, sorry to interrupt. Oh, I get that.
And this is what I said earlier. Okay.
So, hang on, hang on.
Sorry. Let me just correct this part, right?
Because if we don't get this right, the rest of it doesn't matter, right?
Can I just answer your question, though?
I want to answer your question.
You're misunderstanding what it is that I wrote.
Hold on. I'll totally let you go back.
Just let me finish this.
It's very short. So, to return to the quote, right?
Something that is desirable deserves to be desired, right?
It has certain features that demand a positive evaluation from those who see clearly.
Are you making some sort of metaphysical claim that there's something about truth that it just deserves to be valued?
Or is truth, Justin, is?
And some people, due to whatever evolution or sociological reasons, whatever, they just prefer truth.
Are you making a metaphysical claim, or are you just saying, hey, look, some people prefer truth for whatever scientific reasons, and if you share that goal, then boom.
Do you see what I'm saying? Are you saying there's something about truth in itself, facts?
No, no, this is...
Okay, no, I understand the issue here, and I think I talk about this in the book, but anyway, it doesn't really matter.
Okay, so when I say that truth is universally preferable...
In the context of a debate, I'm not saying that everybody prefers truth.
I mean, that would be an absurd thing to say.
I mean, that would, like, no sane human being.
Are you saying everybody ought to prefer truth?
That it deserves, it has some kind of quality to it that metaphysically makes it true that someone ought to prefer truth?
No, I'm not saying that at all, because I don't even know what that would mean ontologically.
We're all totally set. Hang on.
Can you let me explain what I mean?
You're just going to keep giving options out.
I just wanted to say that we've made progress here and that I'm fine with you using preferable now because I know how you're using it, and that's fine.
I agree with that. That's fine.
So go ahead. So when I say in a debate, like you said, you corrected me, right?
Now, when I say that that is based upon the assumption that truth is universally preferable to error, what I'm saying is you didn't say, Steph, I've just corrected you at 9.32 on a Saturday night, right?
You're saying that, Steph, your error is independent of space and time.
It's universal.
If I say two and two make five, it's universally wrong.
It's wrong here.
It's on the moon. Wrong.
It's wrong on Jupiter. It's wrong in 1800.
It's wrong in the year 2525.
It's universally wrong.
I'm not saying, of course I'm not saying, that everybody universally prefers truth.
I'm not even saying that people ought to universally prefer truth, because I don't even know what that would mean.
I mean, does that mean that people who are sleeping should universally prefer truth?
Well, we all have these fantastic dreams and they're completely Lies, right?
So, am I saying that everybody should automatically and universally prefer truth, even if some monster comes up and says, I want to strangle your wife, where is she?
And then, oh, well, I have to universally prefer truth, and therefore I have to tell the truth.
No, I'm not saying any of that.
There are tons of instances where it would be a wonderful and good and productive thing to lie your freaking ass off, right?
I mean, no problem with that, and I've talked about that in the book.
So, no, when I say, in a debate...
The truth is universally preferable to error is that you're saying, Steph, you're wrong.
Rationality rules and a bunch of other people, David Gordon and so on, have said, Steph, you're wrong.
They're not just saying you're wrong today or here or now, but you might be right tomorrow.
They're saying you're wrong, independent of space and time.
And that truth, my correction of you, is universally preferable to your error.
In other words, it's independent.
of a particular moment in time or a particular location or a particular part of the weather or a particular hairstyle or anything like that, right?
So truth, when you tell me that I'm wrong and you're right, you're saying that truth is preferable to error.
And you're not just saying it's contingent, it's not just local, it's not today or tomorrow, which is why Rationality Rules has not gone back and corrected his original statement, which I assume he still stands by from 2017, that I'm objectively and universally wrong, and people should stop believing in what it is that I say, they should fight back against my errors, and he's going to give them the truth, which is...
Infinitely preferable and universally preferable to my era.
I'm not talking about the state of mind of everyone in the world at all times, what they do prefer or what they should prefer, because I've never made such a claim.
So I just want to make it clear that I don't know him, okay?
I'm just going off... No, that's fine, that's fine.
I'm just using him as an example because the text is handy.
Right, and you do say in your book that when you first give the first definition, Of UPB, you affirm Humes as Alt Gap.
But then in your second, on page 33, in your second definition, you say you're not just talking about what people do prefer, but what people ought to prefer.
And that gives a real perception that you are moving from But that's within the context of a debate, right?
Because I always say, the moment you correct someone, the moment you say to someone, you're wrong and I'm right, that's where the UPB kicks in.
That's always been part of, from the very beginning of everything that I've ever talked about, I talk about in the context of correcting people.
And of course, people aren't universally going around and correcting people, which is why you know it's not some universal statement of what people do or even should do.
If I say everybody should universally prefer truth to falsehood, what does that mean if they're taking a dump?
I don't know, is it true?
They're not actually engaged in the debate.
It's like saying, if you want to say true things about the universe, you should use the scientific method.
Now, that doesn't mean that everybody ought to use the scientific method at all times, or that everybody automatically should, whatever that would mean, use the scientific method at all times.
But if you're going to correct someone, you accept UPB, and then the only...
Discussion is, okay, what kinds of behaviors are valid as UPB? Because you've already accepted UPB by correcting someone.
And then we get into great discussions about ethics.
But that's how we avoid, or in a sense, overleap the is-ought dichotomy.
Okay, so you've read my book.
Where is it that you think that we contradict thus far in this conversation?
From what you've read in my book and from our conversation now, where is it that you think your thesis differs from mine?
Well, enormously.
I mean, there's a lot that we agree on, and because neither of us are religious, we can't jump into morals come from God.
Because We are universalists.
In other words, we can't say, well, we should have one set of moral rules for some people and the exact opposite set of moral rules for other people, because morality has to be universal.
That's how it gains its power.
Otherwise, it's taste or aesthetics or culture or whatever, right?
I think we disagree there.
I'm sorry? I wouldn't say that morality has to be universal, right?
I think you could have an aristocratic morality where you have one set for the aristocrats And pretty much like we have now in some places, or even in the United States, there's one set of rules for the elite, and there's another set of rules for us, right?
No, but it's not inscribed into law.
Hang on. It's not inscribed into law.
We're talking about a sort of habitual cultural practice, like most people can't get away with murder, but then there's the Clintons, right?
So, I mean, I get, but it's not in law, it's not inscribed, and it's certainly not in popular culture.
I think it's in your general understanding.
But there are two sets of rules.
Of course, if you're on the bed, you can print money.
If you are the commander-in-chief, you can go and commit an invasion of another country and murder and slaughter hundreds of thousands of innocent people.
So there definitely are two rules, but they're not put that way, right?
It's like there's the country and we're all...
I'm a civil servant and I'm serving the people and I'm here to defend you, right?
So... I think that morality has its peculiar power, which you talk about the emotionality, because it is perceived to be universal, right?
So, you know, I mean, this is the kindergarten example, right?
If you're running a kindergarten, you don't say to kids, okay, well, you can't hit each other until 4.30, and then you can just punch each other's lights out, or you can't steal each other's lunch except on every Wednesday, then you can totally go for it, right?
Because people will be like, wait, what are the rules, right?
So in general, in general, there's lots of people who might have some...
I think it's a pretty defensible thesis to say that a morality that is not portrayed as universal is generally not considered to be morality.
That morality has universality baked into its very conception.
Now then it's manipulated like hell, because people say, oh, thou shalt not steal by taxation and all the other exceptions that we've mentioned.
So people We'll constantly talk about the universality of morality while creating secret little escape chambers for themselves where they get to do the exact opposite, but that's why they have to reframe it.
That's why they have to say it's not theft, it's taxation.
They have to create a whole new language.
It's not murder, it's war.
You know, it's not invasion, it's migration, right, or whatever it is, right?
And so people have to create a whole separate language, a whole separate syntax to deal with it, because they can't say, theft is wrong for you, but other people in uniform can steal from you at will, and that's perfectly moral.
They have to create a whole other system that obscures that basic fact, because people, we have this peculiar susceptibility to universals, and they're used to exploit us all the time, and your skepticism of those universals is great.
That's why I wanted to have this debate.
But you don't want to throw the baby out with the bathwater, and just because evil people have used ethics, don't think that you can then throw away ethics and achieve anything positive in the long run.
It's like saying, well, you know, criminals use guns, so I'm never going to be armed.
It's like, well, that's just surrendering, right?
Yeah, but here's what I'm saying is, I'm not saying that you can't apply things universally, and that there are certain things that you objectively can't.
I'm saying that the will to have a universal morality or to define morality that way in the first place is a subjective preference.
Because you could easily have multiple subjective moralities.
You could have a moral system where one person is defined as having special privileges.
He can murder. He's the king.
He has different standards.
You can have a kind of master-slave relationship like that.
And no, it's not objective, but neither is any other morality.
But then you have to explain why, in order to justify aristocratic privilege throughout history, there generally has been something like the divine rule of kings, right?
In other words, that God appoints the king, and that's why he has different rules, because he answers to God, and blah, blah.
So again, in order to show...
This ripple in space-time that reverses morality for the rulers.
You have to invent all of this crazy stuff so that people will accept it.
But that just ends up in subjectivism anyways.
It doesn't solve the problem of opposing a god.
You just end up with a divine tyrant.
So you're not really creating an objective morality because you're still left with nothing but if clauses.
You're still left with, well, if I don't want to go to hell, I ought not...
I ought not covet my neighbor's wife or something like that.
You're still left with the if clause.
You're still left with a subjective morality.
If it's even really a morality in the first place, but You're not left with moral realism in any sense.
So, pausing a God, I don't see solved a problem.
No, listen. Invoking a God does not solve a problem in morality any more than it does in physics.
Like, where did the universe come from?
God made it. Well, you wouldn't really solve anything.
Where did ethics come from? God's rules.
Well... You haven't really solved anything that's not philosophical endeavors.
But I wouldn't say that you can have a whole series of subjective moralities in the same way that you can't have a whole series of subjective mathematics or science or a whole series of subjective rationalities or processes of reasoning.
Not if your preference is for consistency, no.
I'm sorry? Not if your preference is for universality and consistency, no, you can't.
We agree there.
But you have to prefer those things first.
Sorry, go ahead. Those things have to be preferred first, though.
Right. But you see, this is my whole point, is that anybody who doesn't believe in universality and truth will never debate.
Or if they do debate you, they're going to be pretending that they do, and then it's your job to kind of snip them out, right?
The counterfeit currency that they're trying to pass off, right?
The moment... People like that are my chew toys.
Good, good. No, and I appreciate your Cujo nature with those kinds of people.
And so that's, you know, that's sort of the tricky bit about UPB is people want to dive straight into the definitions, and I'm saying, no, no, no, stop, stop, and look at what you're doing when you correct someone.
Look at what you're doing when you say that someone is wrong.
Because there's a whole bunch of really dense philosophical premises and suppositions in there that if you slow down and say, okay, if I'm going to correct someone and tell them that they're objectively wrong, What do I have to accept in order for me to be able to do that?
So here's the funny thing, right?
So there's the bait and the hook, right?
Everybody likes the bait. Nobody likes the hook, right?
Me too, right? Me too.
So the bait is you get to correct people, but the hook is you have to accept UPB. Now, everybody wants to correct people.
It's like, I'm not saying you're a determinist, but I used to have these conversations with determinists all the time where I would say, okay, well, what changes when you become a determinist?
And that's what I was curious about with you earlier.
Like, okay, what changes if you become a nihilist?
And basically, this conversation would go something like this.
I'd say, okay, well, what changes when you become a determinist?
Oh, I'm kind of happier and this and that and the other.
I said, okay, well, do you have to give up on correcting people?
No. Okay, do you have to give up on morality?
No. Okay, well, do you have to give up on respect or love or admiration or virtue or anything like that?
And I'm like, no, no, no, it's all the same.
I'm like, okay, well, then I'm a determinist because you don't have to change anything to be a determinist.
Everything comes out the same way.
And so people want...
We all want to be able to correct what we perceive as error.
That's just... I mean, you could say that's human nature, but that, you know, go in front of someone.
Somebody posted a meme the other day.
It was a while ago, like me and the Taylor Swift egg thing.
And it was a picture of some guy like...
And it was like, you know, Steph not talking about eggs for five minutes.
Right? And so we do have like this...
This strike, like a Pavlovian strike.
We see error, we want to correct it.
We see error, we want to correct it.
And I'm saying, okay, so come into the arena and correct people's errors.
That's fantastic. But the price of admission is UPB. Because if you don't have UPB, then you don't really have any right to correct anyone, because everything's subjective, there's no universal standards, and truth is not preferable to error.
That's the price of admission. The price of admission to correcting other people.
is UPB and from there we can build a system of ethics.
Sorry, the last thing I'll say is maybe there are people out there who don't want to correct other people and they reject UPB but they're not part of the conversation and there's no one really alive except truly insane people or people who lost their minds from birth.
Nobody out there doesn't correct people.
Everybody corrects everybody all the time and the price of that is UPB. Okay, sorry for that long speech.
Go ahead. So, I don't know if I would agree with that last statement about Needing UPB to correct people.
I mean, if UPB, and I think we have greed here, is just a system of hypothetical imperatives, then yeah, in a sense, yeah, if they're assuming the same goal as you, then you can correct them.
If they're not, then you can't correct them.
Well, there's no debate then. Oh, I just lost your audio, brother.
Can you hear me? Are you still there?
Yeah, that's better. Can you hear me? Okay, so it's the same thing.
It's the same point that people like Sam Harris will make.
If you don't care about the well-being of conscious creatures, we can't have a debate.
No, no, no, no.
Do not put me in Sam's camp.
No, no, that's a totally different...
I don't want to stop this debate from here because it's been like two and a half hours, but I'm just not going to be put in Sam's camp as far as that goes.
I'm sorry, but it's just a factual statement.
No, it's not. No, it's not.
If you don't share the well-being of conscious creatures, you can't argue with Sam because that's all he cares about.
Well, no, but that's not a valid standard of admission because that's begging the question.
The question is, what is morality?
And so if Sam says, well, the definition of morality is the well-being of conscious creatures, and I'm not going to talk to you, then he's saying, you have to accept my definition of morality in order for us to debate morality.
That's called begging the question, right?
Wait, I'm sorry, repeat that?
So if Sam says, well, you have to accept the well-being of conscious creatures as the standard of morality in order to debate morality, but the whole question is, well, what is morality?
And if he says, well, you have to accept my definition of morality, then it's called begging the question, right?
It means, well, the whole purpose is we've got to figure out what morality is.
He says, well, I know what it is, and you've got to accept that to debate with me.
It's like, okay. It's like saying, well, does the earth go around the sun or the sun go around the earth?
And I say, well, my statement is that the sun goes around the earth.
And unless you accept that, I can't debate it with you.
It's like, no, that's the whole question that we're trying to figure out.
He's not saying I know what morality is.
He's saying, here's how I define morality.
And if you don't agree with that definition, then...
You understand, that's spitting hairs, right?
I mean, if he says, I know what morality, if he says, I know the correct definition of morality, then he's saying, well, he knows what morality is.
Or take Matt Delahunty.
Matt Delahunty has kind of the same, a similar position, but he won't quibble about whether you call it morality or not.
He doesn't give a crap. He just talks about, this is what's important to me.
If you're on board, then there are certain things that we have to do to get to that goal.
But see, that's an argument that a Christian would make.
Jesus is important to me, and if you're on board with that, we can talk, right?
I mean, Matt would never accept that from a Christian, right?
Anyway, let's not argue about third parties who are here to talk about it.
Yeah, you know, I'm just saying that there are...
I'm giving you different hypothetical imperative-based systems that all operate the same way, but they have different...
No, no, no.
Okay. We were so close.
And then unfortunately, we got here.
And I'm not going to keep going because it's been a long time.
But I will say this, that if I say you have to accept that language has meaning in order to have a verbal debate, is that a fair statement?
If you mean we have to agree on what the definitions are...
No, no, no, no. We have to accept that language has some capacity for meaning.
It has some capacity to effectively communicate.
But language only gets its meaning from usage.
No, I get that. From definitions.
Do we accept, like, fuck, it's so bloody stupid.
Not you, not you, just this perspective.
Okay, do we accept that we have to debate in a language we both understand?
Like, I'm not speaking Klingon here, you're not speaking Japanese.
Okay, we couldn't have a debate then, right?
Yes. Okay, so we both share a common language called English, and yeah, we can talk about some debates, but the language has some capacity to convey meaning.
Do we agree on that? Yep.
Okay. Now, that is a different thing from saying my definition of morality is the well-being of conscious creatures and you have to accept that.
That's a very, very different thing than accepting...
You're not saying you have to accept that.
No, no, no. I'm not saying you're saying that, but that's a different category, right?
So saying that language has to have some meaning, we have to accept that.
In order to have debate is different from the—because that's the methodology of having a debate, not the conclusion, which is what you're talking about with Matt Delahunty or Sam Harris or whatever.
They come to some conclusion about what morality is, and I'm saying, well, we at least have to accept that truth is preferable to error, that there are objective standards of correct or incorrect, that consistency is of value, and that language has meaning and the senses have some validity.
I mean, that's just saying there's a road.
It doesn't tell us where we go.
It just says that, you know, we have some way to get there.
And that's why I'm saying it's different from what Sam's saying.
Yeah, yeah. And just to be clear, I don't agree with any of those guys.
No, no, no. I get that. I'm on the same boat.
I think they're all dishonest, dressed-up nihilists.
They just don't want to call it that.
And that's fine. I mean, if that suits their will to power, then how about it?
Yeah, yeah. If only Steph could talk as fast as he could think.
Yeah, yeah. Okay, well, I'll start faxing next time.
Well, listen, James, I think it was a very productive debate.
I really appreciated the conversation, and I will put a link to your book below.
I do recommend that people read it.
It's a very challenging tome, and I don't mean by that it's hard to comprehend.
It's very clearly written.
But it is challenging because people do need to have that, as I said earlier at the beginning, this, like, sandblast of, like, contradictions to what it is that they hold dear.
And all of our assumptions must be challenged.
That's the essence of philosophy, right?
Accept nothing as true start from a blank slate.
So I'll put the link below.
And I certainly have enjoyed the debate enormously.
I think it was much more productive than the other debates.
So you win, whatever that might be.
You know what? I really respect you having me on.
Especially somebody with my specialties.
But I really appreciate you having me on, and it was a very honest discourse between us, and I appreciate that.
And look at that. We didn't take any wormholes or anything like that, and we stand over Hume's grave.
No, I'm just kidding! I'm just kidding, because I know that's going to get you tweaked and all that.
All right. Well, thanks, man. I'll put this out.
I guess it's already out. I'll send you the audio if you want to republish it anywhere.
And stay in touch.
It's a great chat, man. Have a great night.
Yeah, absolutely. You have my email.
All right.
Bye-bye.
Well, thank you so much for enjoying this latest Free Domain Show on Philosophy and And I'm going to be frank and ask you for your help, your support, your encouragement, and your resources.
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