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April 28, 2021 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

01:46:46

DOES MORAL FREE WILL EXIST? Freedomain Debate

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	Before starting, I'm just going to say that I am very new to oral debates.
	I'm very inexperienced, that's why I prefer verbal.
	But I will be trying my best, my darndest.
	Alright. You have suggested that there are those who have lost their free will.
	Ugh. You said this is a possibility.
	However, you have routinely condemned those who have called into the show and talked about their abusers.
	You have condemned abusers.
	So my question to you is, are you going to make an apology to all these individuals that you have condemned because you do not know if they were post-free will like you suggested?
	You were operating with inconclusive evidence.
	So my question to you is, will you be apologizing to every single abuser that you have ever had in your call-in show?
	I guess I'm kind of curious.
	I mean, there's a lot of emotional intensity behind what I'd just like to clear the air emotionally before we get into the philosophy of it.
	Why is this such a passionate topic for you, do you think?
	Free will is the root of everything you just talked about for the past 15 years.
	No, but when you come on and sort of demand that I apologize to people, apologize to abusers, there's a kind of intensity to that.
	And I guess I just wanted to make sure I understood that side of things first.
	Because in my experience, if we sort of talk past the emotions, we tend not to have very productive conversations.
	Well, I am of the opinion that abusers should not be forgiven if they have not, how you say, made amends or made no inroads towards forgiveness.
	Right. Okay. But I'm just, why is this such a, I mean, there's lots of things that you could spend your time on on the internet.
	Now, this is a good topic and all, but I'm just curious why it's such a strong topic for you.
	I don't understand. It's a strong topic because it's important.
	It's important to philosophy.
	This is a philosophy channel. Free will and determinism.
	Because I agree with you whenever you said that free will is absolute, that it cannot be...
	It cannot be how you say...
	There's no room for determinism, for morality.
	There's just no room for it. You've said this for years and years and years, and I agree with you.
	So I just don't understand why now...
	Wait, no, you're talking about emotional intensity.
	Because there are people in my life that I will not refuse unless they make proper inroads.
	And since they will not make that, I will hold on to my lack of forgiveness, I suppose.
	I'm sorry to interrupt. I'm having trouble hearing you.
	I'm not sure what microphone you're using.
	I can go and get a better headset if this is the mic.
	I just want to make sure that if you're on some mic that you're not expecting to, because it's kind of hard to hear you.
	Currently using the built-in laptop, which is also part of the reason why I prefer to talk verbally as opposed to with audio.
	Laptop, built-in speaker.
	Yeah, no, that's fine. Hang on a sec, then.
	Let me just get a better headset so I can hear you better.
	I can hear him well, so I don't think it's his microphone.
	All right. Could you just count to five?
	Let me just see if I can hear you all right.
	One, two, three, four, five.
	Okay. Okay, great.
	So I'm happy to take this in whatever direction you feel would be most productive.
	My personal preference is to get a sense of your sort of background and history and why the topic is so passionate for you.
	And or we can go straight into the content, whichever you prefer.
	Two individuals in my life that I cannot and will never forgive because of what they have done in the past.
	However, if you were to say that determinism is what you would call is effective in that there are some individuals who are well beyond free will, well then...
	Where can my anger go?
	How can I direct my anger?
	Where does it go, Molyneux?
	They have free will.
	Free will has to stand.
	You cannot simply remove it.
	You remove it from someone who is cognitively competent.
	I can understand if you were to do it to a coma patient or perhaps a child but not a fully grown adult with complete autonomy.
	I can't fathom it.
	I'm sorry. I cannot fathom it.
	That's about it. No, that's fine.
	And listen, I appreciate the moral passion and I appreciate and I'm very sympathetic to the hurt you experienced.
	What was it that happened to you that is the barrier?
	And by barrier, I don't mean that you're intellectually or philosophically wrong.
	Again, just trying to understand the emotions behind it.
	What happened to you as a kid? I'd prefer to not get into that and I would prefer to simply stick to the topic of free will and determinism, please.
	Okay. Now, I didn't use the term determinism.
	I mean, maybe I did.
	I don't remember it in particular, but I guess the way that I would start is I would assume people have bodily autonomy as a whole.
	However, let's say that somebody pushes you down the stairs when you're a kid, right?
	So there could be three outcomes, I suppose.
	Probably more than three, but just for the purposes of illustration, there's sort of three outcomes.
	The first outcome is nothing really bad happens to you.
	You sort of get up and you brush it off and all that.
	The second is that you end up with a broken arm or a broken leg, and you basically can fix it.
	You can get repaired. You can regain your mobility and strength.
	But the third is, let's say, that you break your spine and you're paralyzed.
	Going forward, right?
	And if we can take that as a starting place for an analogy for the mind, I think it's possible that when you experience childhood trauma, Some of it you can kind of shake off.
	Some of it you can repair from, and at least from what I've seen and a lot of the studies that have occurred, you can't...
	Some people, like, they're stuck in a wheelchair, so to speak.
	So this is not a statement on whether everybody is in a wheelchair or everybody only has a broken arm or everybody can simply walk away.
	But that's, I think, the closest analogy from a physical standpoint To what might occur with people's minds as children, if that makes sense.
	Makes sense, but like you said before in the past, morality is not physics.
	It is not, it's not physics.
	Just because something happens does not necessarily mean that it will lead to the X conclusion.
	It does not mean the choice is invalid.
	But the brain is a physical organ, just like the body, right?
	And the brain can be damaged in ways that...
	I mean, it's part of the body.
	It's a physical organ. I mean, you understand.
	I mean, I'm sure you do.
	I don't mean to condescend. But you understand that the brain can be injured as well as the body, right?
	Yes, I understand that.
	Do you think that it's possible for the brain to be injured...
	By abuse to the point where free will becomes less likely or more difficult or perhaps even impossible?
	I'm sorry, I couldn't hear you.
	That would depend on how you define free will.
	Okay, so for me, free will is our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal or, for me, UPB or universal standards.
	Would it be safe to say that a murderer has free will?
	It is likely that they also experience a lot of trauma as a child.
	However, you give them full autonomy, we are jailing them.
	Why do we jail them?
	Is it not possible that they themselves, just as your mother, experience a ton of mental cognitive trauma?
	What do we do with them?
	Well, I mean, we also would put a dog down for having rabies, but we wouldn't say that the dog is morally evil.
	So there would be reasons to cage or kill a violent and dangerous criminal, which wouldn't have exact parallels to a purely moral judgment, if that makes sense.
	It's not a matter of cost-equestionalism as opposed to morality.
	Is that not saying we are doing this for the sake of protecting society from these ne'er-do-wells as opposed to saying we are doing this because they are immoral?
	Because currently, the way our society is built and the way a free society will be built, it will be essentially we are doing this because they are immoral.
	Well, I think that there's two arguments to this side of the law, right?
	It's an old adage.
	I think it came out in Australia or something like that, which is we jail horse thieves not just because they stole a horse, but so that horses aren't stolen, right?
	So if somebody has proven themselves to be dangerous and violent in society, I'm just saying it's possible to lock them up or even to apply the death penalty In the same way that we would for any violent animal where we wouldn't have a moral judgment that would be quite the same.
	And look, I'm a moralist.
	I get all of that, right? I'm just saying that I'm also an empiricist.
	And with regards to my mother, I saw no empirical evidence that she was able to make better choices.
	And again, I can sort of pretend that that is not what occurred for me or sort of, but I don't want to do that.
	I'm sure you don't want me to do that either.
	And so that's sort of my question is, are there people who are...
	Now, it could be, and again, if you remember, I divided my mom into before me and after me, right?
	Before I knew her and after I knew her.
	Now, my mom, of course, is a very unreliable witness to her own life.
	And so if I ask her what happened when she was younger, before I knew her, I would be very unlikely to get a direct or honest answer.
	And so I would say that from when I knew her onwards, which is I guess 54 years, since I consciously knew her, maybe 53 years I can remember from a little bit before a year old.
	So from the time that I knew her onwards, she's shown zero evidence of being able to compare proposed actions to a higher standard.
	Now, if you remember from the video that I did, and you took great notes, which I really, really appreciate that, I can, of course, say, theoretically, there was a time when she could have made better choices in the past, and I'm certainly, there's no way to prove or disprove that, and calling her as a witness, or even calling other people as a witness.
	The other people who knew her at that age are either dead or incoherent or impossible to find.
	My father died last year, so I can't really get much from him, and I wouldn't really have Judged his statements to be innately honest as well.
	So for sure, she may have had free will at some point in her life.
	But by the time I met her, I couldn't think of a single functional example of her comparing her proposed actions to an ideal standard.
	Now, I can, of course, say she still had that ability and it exists, even though there's no evidence for it whatsoever.
	But nonetheless, and that just doesn't mean that she's not responsible for the lack of free will that she ended up.
	So let's say she had free will as a teenager or in her 20s and she avoided the truth.
	She was violent.
	She was defensive.
	She didn't surrender to better criticisms or better arguments or better ideas.
	And then eventually it functionally became impossible for her to have free will in the same way that if you smoke from the age of 15 to the age of 35, you're probably not going to be a marathon runner at any time because you've done too much damage to your lungs.
	Now, saying that somebody can't be a marathon runner because they smoked for 20 years doesn't mean that it wasn't their choices that led to them not having the choice to be a marathon runner, if that makes any sense.
	So it's not determinism, and it's certainly not...
	We have no capacity to judge people who do evil unto us, but...
	I've always sort of disliked the ghost of the machine argument, which is that you can attach a conceptual entity to a human being who shows no evidence of it.
	I talked about this many years ago in the realm of the soul, right?
	That people say human beings have souls, and that's based upon a theological argument.
	There's no empirical evidence for consciousness that transcends matter and energy.
	And so I basically had to say for myself, okay, well, what's the empirical evidence?
	And this doesn't mean she didn't do me wrong.
	It didn't mean that she might not be perfectly responsible morally for doing me wrong.
	But from when I knew her onwards, if she was unable, Okay, let me give you a last analogy, then I'll shut up and you can tell me where I'm wrong.
	So another analogy might be, I'm really mad that my mother was in a wheelchair and didn't play with me in the way that you could play with a kid if you weren't in a wheelchair.
	Now, maybe she was in a wheelchair because something that was done unto her.
	Maybe she was in a wheelchair because she was drunk and wandered on train tracks, got hit by a train or slipped down some stairs because of what she did.
	In which case, I can say, well, she was...
	It was her fault that she was in a wheelchair, but it doesn't change the fact that she still can't play with me from any time that I knew her moving forward if she was put in the wheelchair before my birth or something like that.
	And so I'm not saying that there's determinism.
	I'm not saying that we can't be angry.
	I'm not saying that we can't judge the people who've done us wrong.
	But from the time that I knew her, I don't have any evidence.
	And it's not just my mother. I've thought about a lot of people in this context.
	From the time that I knew her moving forward, I can't think of a single time when I got clear evidence, or any evidence for that matter, of any capacity for better choices or free will, and that's a fact.
	And the last thing I'll say is that, I mean, the science is pretty clear on this stuff, which is that toddlers who have significant personality disorders, you know, incipient sociopathy or psychopathy or They have oppositional defiant disorder and so on.
	That the prognosis for those toddlers, I mean, sorry, two, three, four years old, the prognosis for those toddlers is almost uniformly terrible.
	Like, there's just no intervention that's ever seemed to work in any consistent way.
	And the personality disorders that toddlers have just follow them through life.
	And you can, you know, with incredible accuracy, you can predict who's going to be a criminal or a You know, a malevolent person in society, you know, just based upon personality tests that occur at two and three and four years old.
	And again, that's not to say we can't judge people, not to say there's no such thing as morality.
	In fact, we absolutely need morality as much as humanly possible.
	But there is a certain amount of science behind this as well.
	So I'll be quiet and you can go tell me all the ways in which I'm wrong.
	And I'm certainly happy to be corrected.
	It's suggested that your mother did not have the ability to make better choices, but the question becomes, better relative to what?
	Because it's quite likely that she was evaluating pieces of stimuli and then deliberating and then arriving to the conclusion that she herself perceived as better.
	Therefore, she was able to make better choices.
	She was not making better choices relative to the standard of morality, but what if there's a different standard that she's operating by?
	Well, yeah, I talked about all of that.
	Did you not hear that in the show?
	Are you talking about the one pertaining to your mother or this one right now?
	No, the one pertaining.
	I mean, you took detailed notes, which again, I hugely appreciate.
	But I did talk about the standards that my mother was using to evaluate her behavior quite a bit in the show.
	And it's fine. Look, there's no reason for you to have to memorize the show or anything like that.
	So I'll mention it again here.
	That's what you imagine.
	You were talking about self-preservation.
	You were talking about self-preservation, were you not?
	Those are the standards you were operating under.
	Well, I don't remember using the phrase self-preservation, but my analogy was, you know, the videos where the dog is doing something wrong and the owner turns his head and the dog stops doing it, or the shoplifter who suddenly notices there's a security guard or a camera on him and decides not to steal, these aren't moral decisions.
	These are decisions to Whatever, get what you want or not be interfered in pursuit of what you perceive to be beneficial to you in the moment or avoidance of a negative.
	Animals do this, of course, all the time.
	Plants even grow towards sunlight and away from shade.
	And so this idea that you will make decisions to benefit yourself or you will act in such a manner that benefits yourself, all animals do that.
	And so she had a standard, of course, for beneficial behavior, which is why she didn't punish me in private.
	And why she would abuse me only in private, so she would not abuse me in public and so on.
	But again, she would share these characteristics with the dog who won't steal the piece of bacon when the owner is looking, but rather wait until there's a better time.
	I am familiar with that argument that you used.
	It's just I can't really see How you can compare an adult woman with full cognitive capacities to a dog.
	It's an animal.
	They cannot reason. They cannot reason.
	They cannot articulate. They can't really do anything.
	It's a dog. Well, I mean, part of the analogies that I made did include humans, of course.
	I'm sure I just made them again, right?
	The shoplifter. What do you mean by shoplifter?
	You're talking about a catomaniac. What do you mean?
	I mean, I just made the analogy.
	I'm sorry, I'm not sure if we're on the same page here, or maybe my audio is delayed or not coming through.
	But I made the analogy of a shoplifter who's in a store who wants to steal something, notices that there's a camera or a security guard right by and decides not to steal, not because they've had a revelation about property rights, but because they don't want to get caught stealing.
	And so it's not just dogs.
	I mean, they're human beings.
	Now, again, we can say that there's still free will, there's still morality and so on.
	But at what point in an individual human being's life, at what point does no evidence for 50 years or more of any better choices or any comparison of proposed actions to universal standards, when there's no evidence of that, isn't it a little bit of ghost in the machine saying that, well, they still have this capacity, even though there's zero empirical evidence for it?
	Hold on. You just used a shoplifter example, but the shoplifter understands that the ideal standard is to not steal.
	However, they are stealing anyway.
	They are comparing the proposed action of, should I steal or should I not steal?
	And they're concluding this with, I am going to steal.
	Is that not comparing a proposed action to an ideal standard and doing it anyway?
	That is a comparison. What do you mean by compare?
	Do you mean compare and come to a conclusion that is moral or simply compare?
	Sorry, how do you know that the shoplifter believes that the ideal standard is to not steal?
	Universal standard? Because it's quite likely that, as a child, they were not told that stealing is acceptable.
	It's quite unlikely. I can't think of a single society where they're like, yes, steal, steal, steal.
	They must know that the shoplifting is wrong, which is why they're going through lengths towards avoiding detection.
	That's how they know. I can tell you all about that.
	I mean, I stole some stuff as a kid.
	I can tell you all about that if you want.
	It's not because, of course, I was told don't steal as a kid by teachers who hit me, by priests who lied to me, by a mother who beat me, and a society that failed to protect me, and a taxation system that caused problems in my family, and It was the transfer of property through force.
	So, I mean, society can say all it wants to people, don't steal.
	But, you know, my childhood was stolen, my mother's property was stolen, and people lied.
	So, you know, people just don't believe society when society says, well, don't steal, right?
	Because that's bad. And it's like, well, how is school paid for?
	Well, by property taxes.
	Are they taken by force? They certainly are.
	Right? So I can tell you, I mean, as far as stealing goes, it's not like people just don't believe society.
	They're just, what they do is they view property rights as a scam.
	So property rights are a scam in the way that they say, oh, counterfeiting is really bad.
	It's like, but the Federal Reserve can go and create a trillion dollars.
	By farting into a computer intake, right?
	So it's not that they've got this universal standard called stealing is wrong.
	What they do is they've just done, again, I can tell you this from purely personal experience in my early teens.
	I was not much of a shoplifter, but I stole a couple of things and I Of course, over the years, I've sort of asked myself why.
	And the answer is, like, I just don't believe any of it.
	I don't believe that society has any moral right to tell me what to do.
	They bully me. They beat me.
	They fail to protect me.
	When my mom calls the cops on me, the cops get mad at me and defend my mom, even though she's the violent one.
	I'm 11 years old.
	And so the idea that you would respect what society would say to you I mean, they tell you not to steal.
	The rulers, the powers that be, society as a whole, the government, they tell you not to steal so they can steal more.
	They don't want the competition.
	It's not that there's any big moral standard that's going on in society.
	Again, I can't fathom the mind of every shoplifter, but I can tell you when I stole a few things in my early teens, It was because I had absolutely no respect for the moral rules put forward by society.
	I thought they were just a ridiculous game and a scam, and anybody who believed in that stuff was just a complete sucker who was a sheep.
	I agree with you.
	I agree with you that shoplifers do not have the standard.
	However, your definition does not ask for the shoplifers to have the standard.
	It's simply asking them to have the ability to compare We're good to go.
	So the question is, is it inductive or deductive, right?
	Is it a priori or consequentialist?
	So in the past, and I'm still exploring this stuff, so bear with me, but in the past, it was just definitional.
	In other words, human beings all have to, except for, you know...
	People with serious brain damage, obvious insanity, or in a coma, or asleep, or whatever, or with a gun to their back, or hypnotized, or whatever, right?
	So people have, as a definition, the capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, right?
	And that was just so logistic.
	All human beings, again, with a couple of asterisks, we'll just say all human beings.
	We understand there are a few exceptions, right?
	So all human beings have the capacity to prepare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	And that's the...
	Definitional. It's all axiomatic, basically, right?
	And what I got to, I guess, a week or so ago, and this may be right, it may be wrong, but where I was at and where I still sit is, okay, what if I can't just define that but have to prove it?
	Okay, well, I certainly know some people who can compare proposed actions to ideal standards, but I know that the vast majority of people, you can say, well, they won't But I need empirical evidence that someone can compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	In other words, it's not definitional.
	I'll need some evidence of it.
	And again, there are some people who can do it, but there are other people who so consistently don't do it.
	And part of this is just the accumulation of...
	Data, right?
	I mean, when you're young, you start off with definitions.
	And when you get older, it doesn't mean you're right or wrong.
	Just saying when you're young, you start off with definitions.
	As you get older, you gather more evidence and empirical evidence of, you know, almost 55 years on the planet.
	The empirical evidence in my father dying had a pretty big effect on this as well.
	And also knowing that, you know, my mother is, I mean, she may still be maybe dead now for all I know, but my mother is not going to have any revelation.
	My father certainly didn't have any revelation.
	He didn't contact me.
	There was nobody in my family who contacted me other than to say he was dead.
	And there was no deathbed reversal.
	There was no tearful reunion.
	There was no information other than a kind of dig, like a kind of stab in the side of, oh yeah, by the way, dad's dead.
	You know, F you kind of thing, right?
	So, when you kind of gather that kind of information where, you know, you've been 54 years on the planet and the guy who was your dad has not acted, to me at least, with any free will that I can see, and your mother, of course, getting into her 80s, has not acted with any free will that you can see.
	And I'm not saying you would think I should do this, but I just can't throw away this empirical evidence that I've also been gathering as well in my philosophical career, in my public career, about people's conformity to their values, right?
	So libertarians, as I've said before, libertarians value the non-aggression principle, but won't take up with any particular strength anti-spanking.
	As a principle that they would pursue, right?
	Even though it's safe to do it, it's incredibly powerful.
	Spanking is the most widespread violation of the non-aggression principle and it has a huge effect on society.
	So do I say, okay, well, the libertarians, they do have an ideal standard of the non-aggression principle, but they still won't really compare proposed actions to that ideal standard.
	Okay, so what's the story?
	Are they all immoral?
	Well, I guess I could go down that route.
	But again, I'm just stapling a definition onto increasing empirical evidence to the contrary, which I would view...
	I've always said, like, I'm an empiricist first and foremost.
	And to me, it would not be super great service to philosophy to hold onto a definition in the face of...
	Pretty overwhelming empirical evidence to the contrary.
	That, to me, would almost be theological, if that makes sense?
	Yes, a lot of that makes sense.
	However, earlier you said that your dad has acted, they've never acted, but free will.
	But you keep using the term free will interchangeably with morality.
	Would it not be more accurate to say that your father is post-morality as opposed to post-free will, as in if he is an immoral person or if whatever...
	experiences that he experienced as a child led him to be an immoral person, while then all of his actions subsequent to those experiences will lead him to make the immoral decision over and over and over again, as opposed to saying, "Well, no, he simply can't make a good decision.
	How about he's immoral, therefore he's acting in a way in which an immoral person would act.
	So he's simply acting in line with his personality, with his beliefs." I think that went by a little bit fast for me.
	If you could just take another run at it, I want to make sure there's a lot of deep stuff in what you're saying, and I want to make sure I sort of grasp it all.
	If you could just take a run at that again.
	You suggested that your father had not acted with freedom of will, or rather, that he'd never done it.
	You have no empirical evidence that he had the ability to.
	However, would it not be more accurate or more...
	We're more accurate to say that he was post-morality as opposed to being post-free will.
	Okay, sorry. Back up for a second.
	I'm sorry to interrupt you. I really am because I know you let me talk.
	I just want to make sure. I didn't say that he had no capacity to act with free will.
	I said that there's no empirical evidence that he had the capacity.
	Because one is just dealing with the facts, the other is trying to inhabit his brain, which we're, you know, not very good at doing as a whole, right?
	So I wouldn't want to step into my father's brain and say, well, I've examined it top to bottom, back to front through all the possibilities of time and history, and I've determined that he had no capacity for free will.
	What I'm saying is that I don't see any empirical evidence that...
	He did. And to take a silly example, right, if you had somebody, oh gosh, you can think of the movie What's Eating Gilbert Grape with a very young Leonardo DiCaprio, and he plays a mentally handicapped young boy, and he was very, very good at that. Now, to take a crazy example, let's say somebody just decided their whole life to act as a mentally handicapped or mentally challenged person.
	And you did a brain scan, their brain was fine, but nonetheless, you say, well, all the evidence is that this is how...
	Now, if there's a brain scan, there's big parts of their brain that are dark and dead, and that's, you know...
	But let's say their brain is normal, but everything they do, and there's no way to change this that you can see, is them...
	And maybe he's just a brilliant actor who's decided to spend his whole life acting as a mentally challenged person.
	But you could say, well, all the evidence is that he's a mentally challenged person.
	And it's the same thing. Like, all the evidence is that there's no free will that I can see.
	I can't see the actions of free will.
	There's no evidence of free will.
	But that's not quite the same as saying they have no free will, never had any free will, and it's deterministic, if that makes sense.
	Sorry, I interrupted you, and I just wanted to clear that up.
	up.
	But you were saying sort of post-morality, and I wanted to sort of make sure I understood that.
	My evidence is that he is using his free will to act in an immoral manner.
	Not that he does not have free will, but that he's an immoral person.
	Therefore, he's acting in a moral manner.
	That is the evidence. Simply just because he never chooses a moral manner.
	Inclusion does not necessarily mean that he does not have the ability.
	I was about to say it again about the capacity or the ability.
	It simply means that he is consistently choosing immoral standards or immoral things because the person himself is immoral.
	Why can that not also be a conclusion of free will that he's using his free will to be immoral?
	Would you say that morality does require the capacity to choose better?
	Morality requires, yes, but what if he's doing that which he believes is better?
	That is the question. Better relative to what you believe?
	Yeah, sure, he's doing worse, but relative to what he believes, well, then he might be a great guy.
	Who knows? Maybe he's doing better relative to what?
	Well, so hang on, but are we trying to define morality now in an objective sense or just saying everybody's doing what they consider to be the right thing?
	Everyone is doing it. I would assume that he does not believe that he is an immoral person, so in his actions, he is actually doing things that he perceives of as moral.
	Therefore, he has the ability to choose between what...
	There must be things that he believes are moral versus immoral, and I would assume that he is choosing things that he himself believes as moral, because why would someone want to do things consciously that they believe to be moral?
	People typically do not do that.
	They go for morality. Well, okay.
	Just to talk, I mean, return to my mother because I have much more experience with her.
	My mother did not believe that what she was doing was the right thing because she would consistently hide it from public view.
	So I don't think that we'd look at my mother and say, oh, she thought she was being a really great parent.
	And also she did feel regret at times.
	I'm sure of it. At least I'm fairly sure of it.
	And so with regards to my mother, I don't think that she was doing what she thought of as the right thing.
	I think that she would blow up, she would act out, she might feel some regret afterwards, and she would certainly hide it from public view because she managed to make it through 15 years of parenting me until we parted ways.
	She managed to make it through 15 years of parenting with me with never being arrested, even though the acts that she performed were criminal on a legal basis consistently.
	So, I don't think we could say of my mother that she thought she was doing the right thing.
	That there's some other reason, or reasoning behind it, but it's not that.
	She suggested that she was doing those things for the sake of self-preservation, that animals themselves will simply react to stimuli in order to protect themselves, but like, are you not assuming it goes to the machine and that she believed that it was the wrong thing and thus avoided those actions in public?
	What if she viewed it as the right thing to avoid detection of abuse?
	Or rather, what she believed to be just parenting.
	What if that was just her parenting style?
	She believed that it was fine to hide it in privates.
	Oh, like in the same way you'd hide a persecuted person in your attic kind of thing?
	Repeat that. Well, in the same way, you might hide somebody who's being persecuted in your attic.
	If they're being unjustly persecuted, that you would hide them, and you would hide that from the view of the authorities, but you wouldn't think that you were doing the wrong thing.
	Is that what you mean? Certainly a possibility of rationalization of that sort do exist.
	Yeah, no, listen, I mean, I'm not taking it personally.
	I'm just trying to understand the thinking here.
	Well, I mean, the two pieces of evidence that would go against that is that she felt significant regret at the time on occasion, and also that later when I confronted her about the abuse, she did not defend it.
	And so if she suffers significant regret on occasion, and then when confronted and hides it, and then when confronted about it does not defend it, I mean, she gas lit and all of that, but she didn't say, oh yes, no, I beat you against the walls, I threw things at you, I punched you and all of that, and that's because it was good parenting.
	She didn't do any of that.
	So, she felt regret, she hid it from the public view, and she did not defend it when confronted.
	So, that to me is evidence enough that she didn't think she was doing the right thing.
	And again, we can attach something, to me, it would be anti-empirical, against the evidence to attach something to her that, despite all of this evidence, she thought she was doing the right thing.
	So, if she had enough information, enough verbasol to avoid, how you say, incriminating herself as simply being quiet, does that then not mean that she has the ability to propose No, because again, any behavior that she would share with a dog can't be defined as innately moral, right?
	So if dogs have the ability to hide punishable actions from their owner's view, Then a human being engaged in the same behavior can't be defined as innately moral, because if a dog can't be moral, and a dog does it, then if a human being is doing it, we can't assume that it's moral.
	Are we currently moving beyond the definition?
	Are we moving beyond the definition you outlined?
	Because that's primarily what my arguments are based around.
	I feel like we're getting close to an agreement here, and then the goalposts get moved or the topic gets moved, which I always find kind of annoying.
	So, let's just back up to the last point.
	And listen, agreeing with me on this doesn't mean that I win.
	Listen, we can't lose the argument.
	Nobody can lose the argument because if you prove me wrong about something, I'll thank you.
	I appreciate it. And you obviously don't want to be laboring under error either.
	But just because my mother hides something from public view doesn't necessarily mean that there's a moral element to that hiding by definition because dogs will also hide Behaviour that they would get punished for from public view.
	You know, like you've seen these videos, I'm sure, online where someone comes home and the dog is guilty and hiding, and it's because the dog has ripped apart the mattress or ripped apart the couch while the owner is away, which they would not do while the owner was there.
	Or a dog that's about to take a piece of sausage and they see that the owner is watching them and they get back away slowly because they don't want to get into trouble for that, right?
	So if a human being is doing that which a dog does...
	It means that there's no guarantee that what the human being is doing is moral.
	In other words, if a human being, like my mother, is avoiding punishment for child abuse by hiding it from public view from the authorities, and I have no idea whose authorities she was hiding it from.
	I have no idea because the police came and blamed me for...
	The policeman referred to it as a generation gap.
	There's a generation gap, and that's the problem.
	You've just got to listen to your mother, right?
	So I don't know who she was hiding it from.
	The teachers all knew. My friends' parents all knew.
	And everybody in the buildings that I lived in knew.
	Hundreds of people knew. And the teachers saw that I was coming to school hungry, with my clothes torn, and sleepless, and all of that.
	And... With body odor when I got older until somebody intervened.
	So everybody knew.
	I don't exactly know who she was hiding it from, but it doesn't really matter.
	There was this perception that this is the thing that you don't do in public, and she didn't.
	So just because she's hiding behavior that could cause negative results for her doesn't mean that she's comparing it to a moral standard because, again, dogs do it.
	It doesn't mean she's not, right, because we are not dogs.
	So there's this overlapping...
	There's these two circles, right?
	The two circles overlap, right?
	Dogs can't be moral, even though they hide negative behavior from public view.
	Human beings also hide negative behaviors from public view, but can be moral.
	But in the intersection of these two circles are the human beings who are hiding things from public view with the same level of moral sophistication as a dog, which is to say none, if that makes any sense.
	It's possible, right? What makes someone uniquely human?
	I don't think that my argument is debunked just because a dog has the same ability to engage in the same behavior.
	Because dogs also breathe and humans also breathe.
	Is breathing no longer human?
	Because dogs do it as well.
	I don't think that's a reasonable standard.
	What makes someone uniquely human is the question.
	No, but we're talking about the exact behavior, which is hiding things from public view for fear of negative consequences, which both dogs and my mother did.
	And again, you can attach moral judgment to my mother.
	You may be right.
	You can attach moral judgment to my mother, but I'm just telling you that as a guy, and age is not an argument, I understand that, but I'm just telling you that you have an uphill battle because I've now accumulated 54 years of evidence, and I keep waiting for this evidence of some people, not everyone, of course. I believe in free will.
	I believe in morality. But...
	I don't see it in a lot of...
	I always say the number of people, but sort of looking at my life, my history, my circumstances, the people I know the best, I am not seeing That there was any evidence of comparing proposed actions to an ideal standard.
	There was cunning, right?
	Just as dogs might have cunning, or a shoplifter might have cunning.
	In other words, oh, there's a security guard here I won't steal.
	But an abstract standard of universal morality, I didn't see that.
	My mother didn't go to church. She didn't read philosophy.
	She didn't have any of this stuff.
	Now, you can say that's her choice, and she chose not to go to church.
	She chose not to read philosophy.
	Christianity has fallen to a large degree, and UPB has not risen to take its place, not through any particular lack of effort of mine.
	I mean, I put years into proselytizing about UPB. And, of course, my mother was pre-UPB, post-Christian, pre-UPB. And so what standard was she?
	You say, oh, like the shoplift, you say, oh, property rights.
	Well, okay, but society, a current society exists founded on the violation of property rights.
	So who on earth is supposed to take property rights seriously without something like UPB? So that's just the breathing thing.
	Yes, they both breathe, but we are talking about very specific actions, which is hiding decisions from public view for fear of negative consequences.
	Yes, but your argument as to why when your mother hides things in order to avoid public consequences is that, well, just because a dog does it as well, that means they cannot.
	It's not uniquely human, so we could just toss that out in terms of morality.
	But, like, dogs also breathe.
	That's not enough of a reputation.
	It's not enough of a debate. Look, I'm not saying human beings are dogs, obviously, right?
	I mean, let's try and stay up in the higher echelons of debate and not try and score silly points.
	You're using it as a reputation.
	You're saying since dogs also act in this capacity, that means that it is not indicative of morality.
	It's just, you know, response stimuli.
	That's essentially what you're saying, though.
	Well, sure. And do you not think that there are some human beings who operate at the level of response stimuli?
	Yeah. At times, yes, but the question becomes, are they in control of that response stimuli?
	As in, for instance, if you were to give your mother a million dollars to stop acting in that capacity, to stop acting in the stimuli of seeing you and then feeling the urge to abuse you, would she take that million dollars, and in that time, would she then avoid abusing you, or would she just leave you alone?
	The chances are she would, so she is able to control.
	It's not simply response stimuli with her.
	She has a deliberation period.
	She can't think. She can't reason.
	Oh, my God. I feel like we're just going in circles here.
	Oh, my God. But back to the dog thing.
	The dogs wait until you're looking away in order to steal the sausage.
	They're not just response stimuli or stimulus response.
	It's not Pavlovian in that sense.
	They're making decisions about when they can get away with it.
	And then they steal the sausage when you're not looking or they wait to tear up the couch cushions when you're not home.
	And then they feel bad about it or they feel afraid of your response or something like that.
	So it's not just stimulus response like you tap someone's knee and the leg jerks up.
	I mean, they're still biding their time and waiting.
	Like the tiger waits until it's close enough to the spring walk in order to take it down, right?
	It doesn't just run from the mountains growling at the top of its lungs.
	My point is simply that just because dogs do it as well does not mean that it is not a matter of morality.
	if your mother does it as well.
	Does not mean that it is no longer a moral question, but it's simply, you know, a response or et cetera, et cetera, et cetera.
	Like, you're using that statement, that idea of, well, since a dog is doing it, therefore I cannot just apply it to humans.
	It's just something an animal would do, but that's not enough.
	No, but here we're back to the problem of definitions versus empirical evidence.
	So you have a definition that all human beings possess free will, which I understand.
	I absolutely understand that definition, and I respect it.
	That's not my definition, but thank you.
	Continue. I'm sorry. Okay, well, please don't let me get your definition wrong.
	I thought you were arguing for human beings having free will.
	I am not arguing that all human beings have free will.
	There are babies. Babies are human beings.
	Oh, yes. No, sorry. I mean, yeah, sorry.
	I mentioned earlier we've got the asterisks of things that you and I would both agree with.
	People in a coma, people with a gun in their back, and babies.
	Okay, but human beings as a whole, right?
	Have free will. That's one of the definitions of humanity, right?
	And there's people who don't have free will for temporary reasons.
	There's people who have had, you know, spikes through their brains.
	There are people who are in a coma.
	Okay, so we can put those people aside because there's no reasonable person who would say that somebody in a coma has free will.
	But you and I are, because the standard you have is, you know, an adult woman with regards to my mother or maybe my father, an adult male.
	We'll just say humans have free will, and we got the asterisk, because if we have to caveat it every time, we're both going to slowly go insane or not so slowly, right?
	So you believe that humans have free will as a definitional thing, and I say, listen, I'm with you on that.
	I love the idea of humans having free will, but I also have accumulated evidence of people who show no evidence of free will.
	And... Again, since I've known them, I can't scan my mother from the womb up until the present.
	You know, obviously a woman who drinks alcohol like crazy while she's pregnant and the child is born with fetal alcohol syndrome that gives them an IQ of 65, that kid doesn't really have free will through no fault of his or her own, right?
	That's just bad on the mom's part, right?
	She's an alcoholic or whatever.
	So I'm with you. Human beings have free will, but if I apply the evidence or if I apply the definition Human beings have free will.
	And I say, okay, but how does that compare to my accumulated evidence of seeing people on this planet for 50 plus years or having known my mother for 50 plus years, my father for 50 plus years and other family members and other people I've known for a long time.
	What evidence do I have that they have free will?
	And again, doesn't mean they never had it.
	Doesn't mean they're not responsible for losing it.
	But in terms of my mother, since I was born, what evidence do I have that she has free will?
	And other than a definition human beings have free will, I'm just telling you, I'm coming up short.
	And that's just an empirical fact.
	And you can wave that away with a definition.
	But that's basically the same as a Christian saying or a religious person saying all human beings have souls.
	It's like, okay, well, where's your physical evidence?
	It's like, no, no, no, it's by definition.
	And it's like, you know, as an empiricist, I just can't go by definition.
	And that's sort of what I'm trying to work with, if that makes sense.
	That's the issue, though. You keep saying things like, show no evidence of having free will, but what I'm arguing is that she is showing no evidence of being moral.
	No evidence, like not free will, but of morality.
	As in, if she is immoral, then she's doing her free will to act in a moral capacity, consistently doing that.
	This definitely is going in circles, but that's the issue.
	I'm literally disagreeing with you on that one key point.
	You were saying, you keep using the term free will and morality somewhat interchangeably.
	When you say she has shown no evidence of having free will, you're essentially saying she has shown no evidence of being a moral person.
	So it's like, these terms are not interchangeable, is my issue.
	If you're able to amend the free will postulation to something like she has shown no evidence of being a moral person, then it's like, oh yeah, no problem, bro.
	Totally agree, yes. But to say she has no free will, she has no ability, not no ability, but there's no evidence of her ever choosing the better decision, it's like, better relative to what?
	And then we're back in circles. Well, I mean, so the question is, what is the relationship of free will outside of morality?
	Is that what you mean? Not necessarily.
	Not necessarily. I'm simply, like, repeating your statement of she has shown no evidence of having free will.
	But, like, she has shown no evidence of being a moral person and is thus acting in an immoral capacity.
	In a moral way. Why is that not more logical than, well, she's lost her free will, therefore she's not responsible.
	No, no, but I mean, I love the question, what is the importance or value of free will outside of the realm of morality?
	Because as a philosopher, I mean, and I put you in that category, we're talking philosophy, right?
	So morality is the whole deal, right?
	Morality, that's the thing about philosophy.
	It's not science, right?
	It's not biology, it's not physics.
	So morality is the whole point of philosophy because it's the one thing that philosophy studies that nothing else, you can be a scientist and not study morality.
	Unfortunately, it seems to be the case a lot of times these days that scientists aren't even remotely interested in morality.
	And so the question for me is, when it comes to free will, the only thing I really care about, and it's just a statement of personal preference, I'm not saying it's some objectively reasoned out thing, but the only thing that I really care about is free will in the realm of morality.
	Because you could say about somebody who's wanting to understand the universe that they can either go to a religious text or they can use the scientific method.
	Now, the scientific method is infinitely superior, in my view, with regards to understanding the physical universe.
	The scientific method is infinitely superior to a religious text.
	But you could say somebody has the choice.
	Do they compare proposed actions, I want to understand the universe, to an ideal standard called the scientific method or not?
	Or they would say, well, no, but the religious text is the ideal standard, and then you have all of the challenges of 10,000 gods and all that kind of stuff, right?
	And I think that's really interesting.
	I think it's an interesting question. But to me, it's significantly secondary, or at least down on the list, relative to free will regarding morality.
	And I think the same thing is true with you, because one of the things that you talked about was people who'd harmed you as a child, and You want to judge them morally.
	You don't want to judge their relationship to the scientific method.
	You want to judge their relationship to don't abuse children, which is a moral standard.
	So I think if you're saying, well, there's free will that exists outside of the realm of morality, and Steph, by judging your mom's moral actions, you're also saying something about The free will that is occurring outside of morality, I would say that really what I was talking about with regards to free will was morality.
	Now, I'm not saying that the two are completely synonymous, but that could be one of the definitional issues that we have.
	So then, would it be safe to assume that when you say...
	Some people might lose their free will when they experience a ton of trauma.
	You're strictly seeing that when it comes to morality, that there are some individuals out there who have acted in such a way and they were so deeply traumatized that they have no reasonable capacity to choose otherwise, to choose the quote-unquote better option, that they will always, due to their prior experience, I always go with the immoral choice.
	I wouldn't say, see, if they lack the capacity to choose morals, they can't choose the immoral choice.
	Because morality, I mean, morality applies objectively, but you can't damn them as immoral if they have no capacity to choose morality or immorality, if that makes sense.
	Now, that doesn't mean that they're not immoral, or what they do is not immoral.
	I mean, somebody who steals, steals, right?
	For sure, right? And so when you say somebody has no capacity to make the moral choice, and so they end up choosing the immoral choice, I would say that's not...
	Great. Sorry, that's not a very specific philosophical argument, but if somebody can't choose better, can they really choose worse?
	Because if they can choose something we would define as immoral, and we say they're immoral because of that, then we give them moral responsibility, and we're back to, do they have that at all?
	So then they have no choice in the matter.
	Is that a safe statement?
	Well, I'm sorry.
	Now, if we're going to start to use choice and free will, that's, I don't know, man.
	I mean, this is where the language gets really, you have to be really precise.
	So if we can stay with free will, and if we say free will, and we can talk another time about free will versus scientific method or free will versus other things, right?
	You know, maybe there's, somebody's planning a road, right?
	right.
	And they say, well, I can either have the road go the shortest distance from here to here, or I can listen to the politicians who wanted to go through every small town.
	Right.
	And so there's an ideal standard, which is a straight and efficient road.
	And then there's a standard that's corrupt, which is having it go through every town to, to please the people who vote for a politician.
	Maybe that's a moral choice.
	Maybe it's not or whatever.
	Right.
	Um, but if we could just stick on free will and morality, cause I think that's where our disagreement is.
	Uh, Sorry, I shouldn't say absolutely believe.
	The evidence to me is pretty overwhelming, which is not to say it's absolutely because it's a problem with deductive stuff, right?
	So the evidence is pretty overwhelming that I've now seen people from their 30s to their 80s Who've not once made a choice relative to an ideal standard.
	And listen, we've got people listening in here on the...
	I just poked something in here.
	We've got people in the call-in.
	We've got all kinds of cool stuff.
	And it's great.
	So let me just ask you guys here...
	How many people from your past...
	We can go into call and feedback here.
	Sorry, let me just put it here.
	And this is not... I'm not trying to sort of gang up on you.
	I'm genuinely curious about this.
	Maybe I'm just a really tough person to apologize to or something.
	I don't know, right? But let's go to everyone here.
	Feedback here, please.
	And, you know, this is not...
	It's just some empirical evidence, right?
	It's not certain proof of anything.
	So please let me know if you've ever had someone who's done you great wrong in the past voluntarily call you up Saying, I had a revelation.
	I'm so sorry.
	I did wrong.
	I need to make amends.
	I throw myself at your mercy.
	I just did a bad thing and it wasn't your fault and it's all me.
	Just let me know.
	Hit me with a why if you've had someone do that, which to me would be an indication of the emergence of free will, right?
	So the free will would be somebody who, through some process, maybe they read a book, maybe they get therapy, maybe they just mulling this over, and they come up and they say, oh my gosh, did I ever do you wrong in the past?
	I'm so sorry about this.
	Okay, so I'm just going through here.
	And again, please understand, this is not proof of anything.
	This is just some evidence, right?
	Uh, somebody says, uh, once.
	Somebody says, can't think of a single person that my parents, aunts, uncles, grandparents, or even cousins that have done this.
	No, no, no, no, no.
	Once, not any family members.
	No, once. Well, I've been the person to do wronging, unfortunately, and I did reach out this way.
	Okay, why once? Why?
	Why? Okay, so, um...
	Now, most of us here, oh, somebody says yes, but they shifted to no.
	Oh, yeah, well, that can happen too, right?
	They say, I did you wrong.
	And you're like, I certainly did.
	And they're like, whoa, whoa, whoa, right?
	That can certainly happen.
	So I'll repeat the question.
	So the question is, and let me just type it in too.
	Has anyone from your past, from your past, I have to move.
	Hang on.
	I'll move my mic for a second.
	Did you wrong?
	Okay.
	So the question is, has anyone from your past voluntarily reached out to you to apologize if they did you wrong?
	Thank you.
	Now that to me would be evidence of free will.
	Evidence of free will.
	So somebody says, my mother currently, she's also doing self-improvement with talk therapy.
	That's great. If it was all no, that would be bad for my thesis.
	If it's all yes, that would be bad in other ways.
	But let's see here. I can't think of one.
	Somebody says, yes. Now, we mostly know hundreds of people when we're growing up, right?
	We mostly know hundreds of people.
	And that would be my question.
	My brothers apologize for picking on me, but only when they saw me experiencing hardship.
	But we would also assume restitution would be the case as well, right?
	Somebody says, I'm the Y, and...
	So we've got hundreds of people, maybe a third of people have got a yes here.
	And sorry, if you could ask a number of people who apologized and made amends.
	And made amends.
	And again, just gathering data doesn't prove just, you know, the evidence is...
	If we have a theory that goes against significant amounts of data, it doesn't mean the theory is wrong.
	It just means that... It's been a real challenge, right?
	Okay, so we all assume that we know hundreds of people over the course of our childhood, and maybe dozens of those people have done us some significant wrong, or with the adults who didn't intervene when they saw wrong being done to us, we probably got a couple of dozen adults, maybe more, teachers as well, and priests and other authority figures who may have had contact with their family and so on.
	And I'm just getting the data here, right?
	So to me, if somebody says, oh my gosh, I did you wrong.
	I mean, it's a funny story while we're getting the data, right?
	So when I first came to Canada, I was 11 years old, and there was this girl who, shortly after I came to Toronto, asked me if I would go steady with her.
	I was probably 12 at this point.
	And I didn't know what she meant.
	Honestly, I didn't know what she meant.
	And I kind of said no because I didn't know what that did.
	I have to give her a kidney. I don't know what I meant, right?
	But rather than say, I'm from England, I don't know what you mean, I'm just like, no, right?
	And I actually did, I pinged her some years ago saying, sorry about that, I just didn't know what you meant.
	And it probably doesn't mean a lot to her, but it probably was the, it was a big thing to ask a boy out, I think, back in the day.
	And I just didn't want her to sit with it.
	So, let's see here.
	And this is what my friend here in the debate partnership, you also said, you know, Steph, are you going to apologize to everyone That you said was immoral if it turns out that they didn't have free will and weren't immoral.
	And that's very important, right?
	So, let's see here.
	Somebody says, now that I think about it, there have been more than one.
	A few, maybe four or five.
	That's good. One. No.
	Zero. Restitution for my mother's case is being worked on.
	I think there's a level of self-knowledge that will need to be developed more.
	In the culture I come from doing this as a display of weakness is somebody else.
	Zero, I think. One has made amends and one is in the process.
	TBD. Oh, yeah.
	I mean, I have had zero.
	Yeah, it's been zero. It's been zero.
	And, you know, I remember someone who did me significant wrong many, many years ago and ended up killing himself.
	I hadn't been in contact with him for many years, so I didn't have anything to do with anything like that.
	Yeah, boy, that's really being committed to not making restitution or not apologizing.
	I mean, that's really being committed to that, and it's really tragic.
	It's really just tragic.
	So, I'm sorry, I'm just going to get a couple more, and thank you for your patience.
	I appreciate that, and thank you for your time today.
	One has made amends, and one is in the process.
	TBD, I've only had people apologize if I brought it up a day a week before.
	No, no, it's got to be something that comes from them, because otherwise they're responding to your stimuli, so to speak, right?
	Yeah. So, of the people who've done us wrong or ignored wrong being done unto us, which, you know, is something you should probably apologize for as well, from this audience, I mean, it's obviously not a random selection of people, but we've got a couple dozen people listening to this, most of them have responded, and we've got a hit rate of probably...
	1%, 2% of people who either did you wrong or knew about the wrong being done.
	And as far as genuinely apologizing, making restitution, I mean, I think you would say, I'm sorry, just to get back to you, I think you would say that if you've done someone wrong, then you should apologize and try to make amends.
	That's a moral thing to do, right?
	Hello, are you still with me?
	Yes, I responded with a yes.
	Yeah, sorry, your mic takes a second to kick in.
	Okay.
	So, so we have a hit rate of morality in this, and this is not, nobody's asking you to come in and stand and, and watch, um, uh, while, while you take a stand against immoral violent armed people or anything like that.
	I mean, this is simply, I'm sorry, I did you wrong.
	Uh, how, how can I make amends?
	Uh, I apologize for the wrong that I did.
	So we have a hit rate of a fairly minor bit of morality.
	It's not minor emotionally, but in terms of, again, you're not saying go march against the fascists in Hong Kong or anything like that, or storm the beaches of Normandy.
	But here we have an example of Morality that is being exercised by maybe 1 or 2% of the people.
	And so you can say, well, we all...
	And again, I'm with you, man.
	I love the idea. I really do.
	And maybe you're right. But if you're going to say to me, well, morality is free will in morality.
	We're going to make these things synonyms for the case of this discussion.
	Well, it's innate to human beings, but if you're going to say, if we have some evidence here that only 1 or 2% of people are acting morally, then I just have a question.
	And that's the question I've been wrestling with.
	The question is, how can I say that something is innate to human beings if 98 to 99% of the people don't have that characteristic?
	Did you see what I mean? I see what you mean, but I am not arguing that free will and morality...
	Hold on. Yeah, hold on.
	I've been listening to you quite a bit. Earlier, you made the statement.
	You said you had not seen that many people who have made a choice relative to an ideal standard.
	But, like, it's relative to an ideal standard of morality.
	People have made choices relative to an ideal standard of fitness, of health, of things of that nature.
	So then, would you like to amend this definition?
	This is a definition that's mostly giving me trouble.
	So they have not made a choice relative to an ideal standard of morality.
	Would that be a safe...
	I mean, I wouldn't need to forgive my mother if it wasn't a moral issue, right?
	Forgiveness is for morality, isn't it?
	We're talking about the immoral things that my mother did and my capacity to forgive her.
	And so it would seem to me that this is obviously kind of confined to the question of morality.
	And you talked about the people who abused you as a child and your anger towards them, which again, I respect and honor.
	So I think we're all talking about moral stuff here.
	And I don't really see how we're going to drag it off into some other topic.
	Talking about free will, though, is the term free will.
	Free will is applicable to a lot of things.
	Let's just stay with morality, because that's where our fundamental issue is, right?
	Because people who make bad choices outside of morality don't generally affect others that much, right?
	So if somebody says, well, I want to understand the universe, but I choose not to use the scientific method, I choose to use the Old Testament, they're not directly, physically, verbally, emotionally, sexually abusing other people.
	So the people who exercise free will or don't exercise free will or choose badly in the realm of free will, but it has nothing to do with morality.
	Morality, by definition, is the stuff that overlaps and harms other people or helps other people.
	And the non-aggression principle focuses on the actions that harm other people.
	So I really don't care about the people who are making bad free will calls in the realm that has nothing to do with any negative impact on others.
	So if we can just stick on the morality topic, I think we're going to get a lot further.
	And we can talk about the other topics some other time, but our disagreement here is around the morals.
	And my entire podcast was about the morals.
	This is a philosophy show that focuses on morality.
	And your issue with what I said was around morality.
	So I think we're okay sticking in that ballpark for the moment.
	15 minutes ago or 10 minutes ago, I'm not sure when, you said that we should get free will nailed down.
	Not choice, but free will.
	We are talking about free will.
	That's why I'm trying to get this definition nailed down.
	As to what exactly you mean, because so far you said that one to two percent of people have shown nobility to realistically have free will.
	So then we are strictly talking about free will and morality, but they do have free will in other elements.
	So then People have free will, just not free will in terms of morality.
	It's just a definition that I really want to get into.
	Okay, how do you know they have free will in other areas than morality?
	I mean, if you don't have free will in morality, it would seem to me less likely you'd have free will in other things, because morality is pretty important to us, right?
	It's sort of like saying, well, if I can't lift 50 pounds, can I lift 5 pounds?
	So, I mean, we can talk about some abstract level of free will in some other context other than morality, but my entire topic, and you're moving the goalposts, right?
	Because my entire topic was about forgiving my mother for immoral actions that she had taken, and your issue was with the morality of it.
	So if you say, well, I want to talk about free will outside of morality, it just seems to me like you're dodging the topic that we're dealing with here.
	Really not dodging.
	My issue here has strictly been with the term free will and its usage of it.
	Not necessarily morality, it's just the term free will as in are people morally responsible for their actions.
	You stated that there is no real evidence that maybe 1-2% of people are actually able to make better choices relative to an ideal standard.
	But like, an ideal standard of morality is strictly morality.
	I am repeating this because I feel like it needs to be repeated.
	Okay, so let's go back to your original text here, right?
	So, okay. Do people have free will?
	Do people have free will when they not have free will?
	Okay, the standard of, so this is your criticism of me, which is fine, right?
	The standard of better choices is something, this is what you wrote, the standard of better choices is something that you criticized and ran for in her suggestion of her standard of morality being that which promotes life.
	Okay, so that you've got standard morality is the issue, right?
	And what else have we got here?
	Sure, matter was the issue.
	Subjectivity. Then you say here, would it not be more reasonable to suggest that the categories by which the two of you inhabit are that of moral and immoral?
	As opposed to having choice and not having choice.
	So you're the one who wanted to talk about morality and immorality, okay?
	So you can get mad at me if you want, but it's kind of annoying because you're the one who centered this.
	Don't say having choice and not having choice.
	Say moral and immoral, right?
	And I could go on and on, but everything you're talking about here is relative to morality.
	So it seems to me like if you...
	And look, we just stay on the topic of morality.
	I said we can talk about the topic of free will relative to the scientific method or...
	Whatever it is some other time.
	But my entire argument was about morality.
	Your entire response focused on morality.
	The stimulating emotional thing that had us have this call was about morality.
	And so now you want to sort of not talk about free will and morality.
	It's just like, well... I'm talking about free will, because if we determine that people do not have free will, then they are not responsible.
	Therefore, they are not morally responsible.
	That is the thing. We have to focus on free will, because if we say that, okay, no, they do not for sure do not have free will, and they're not responsible.
	That pertains to morality.
	That's why I'm focusing on free will.
	That if we say they do not have it, well, then they're not responsible.
	But if they do have it, well, then they are responsible.
	And now you're going to say, oh, we're going in circles.
	I'm sorry, I don't quite follow your argument.
	Are you willing, at least for the purposes of this conversation?
	Because look, if we deal with free will and morality, we've done a whole lot of good here, right?
	Now, if there's some percentage of free will that's not related to morality, okay, that's fine.
	That's not particularly a philosophical topic.
	That may be relative to psychology or medicine or physics or science as a whole.
	But I think if we can just confine ourselves to morality and free will, Which is really the topic.
	I think that would be great.
	So if we could just agree, just a handshake agreement, doesn't mean we've resolved everything to do with free will.
	But if we can just focus on free will and morality, I think we're going to do some pretty great things in the call.
	If we get dragged on into other definitions and possibilities and so on, then we're just going to not make any progress because we've got to focus on the topic of the debate.
	Great, but earlier you just said that I wasn't really conservative morality and it was just freedom of will.
	No, they are both related.
	Like, freedom of will leads into morality, so I'm not trying to avoid morality or move the goalposts.
	I'm simply talking about that if someone is not...
	What do you want to say?
	What's next? I'm sorry, I'm not sure what just happened in our conversation.
	I got slightly bored.
	Oh, you got bored? Slightly, I was...
	Okay, well, I won't keep you then if you're bored.
	I certainly don't want to bore you.
	I will just... If other people in the call want to join in, I think that would be great.
	We can talk about this. Because, again, the empiricism, I think, is really, really important, right?
	The empiricism is really important because...
	When I look at the behaviors that have accumulated over time in my life, and I look at, and the people who've had the apology stuff, or not had the apology stuff, that's really important too, because most people would not necessarily say, oh, spanking violates the non-aggression principle.
	Some people would, but most people probably wouldn't.
	I mean, empirically, we know they wouldn't.
	But most people would say, if you've done something wrong, if you've wronged someone, an apology is a good thing.
	An apology is a good thing.
	So even by relatively minor moral standards, 98% in this obviously highly informal survey, but 98-99% of people are simply, we could say unwilling, but I don't know what the difference.
	We can say that they have not Done the right thing according to their own moral standards, which come at no cost to themselves, right?
	So you could say, well, I oppose...
	Sorry, just one sec. So you could say, I oppose X or Y or Z, and maybe it comes at some big standard.
	You know, you oppose the lockdowns, you're going to go in March, but you might get arrested.
	But this is just, can you make a phone call and admit fault, which by your own standards you should do.
	Again, 98, 99% of people just aren't doing it.
	And I'm telling you this, at least from my experience, you can get to past a mid-century of life and nobody does it.
	So then 98% and 99% of people are simply immoral.
	Not that they don't have free will about morality, but rather they're just immoral.
	They're either immoral or they're just immoral.
	Yeah, immoral. Sorry, hang on a sec.
	I'm going to mute you because you did say that you were bored and I did want to get other people to...
	I did want to get other people in on this topic, and I'm certainly happy to open it up to other people who might want to chat about this.
	But, you know, I mean, if you're bored, I don't want to, you know, I don't want to bore you or anything like that.
	And bored means that you don't find the conversation productive or enjoyable at all.
	So unless it's a manipulative tactic, in which case it's too immature for a mature discussion.
	But yeah, I'm just curious, what has other people's experience been just like with the conversation With the apology stuff, what's been going on with people.
	Don't forget to unmute yourself if you want to chat.
	Hey, Steph, this is Jared.
	Sorry, it's been a...
	I'm just late to the chat, and Yuri let me know what the general content of it was following up from this.
	But the thing is, I thought it was kind of interesting some of the...
	I didn't even read the wall of text, but I kind of made some jumps on where he assumed some of the places he was going there with his arguments.
	And I was like, okay, yeah, there's some interesting content here.
	It's a shame that it was presented that way.
	And so it does, on its face, I can see it seeming like a...
	And I'm sorry if this stuff was already covered and I'm just late and I didn't hear it, but I can see how it could come across as like, oh, now you're making an argument for determinism or something like that, as opposed to...
	To me, that wasn't overt.
	I didn't hear you saying overtly that you actually had forgiven your mother.
	I certainly wasn't making a deterministic argument because if I say, well, you need to have access to universal standards in order to have moral free will – Then one of the first things that I would do is work to develop and promulgate universal standards, which was UPB, right? I mean, it is the creation of a moral free will for the majority of people who've been abandoned in the retreating wreckage of religion, right?
	So if we lose, and this is where all of this woke bullying and stuff comes from, it's people who are just programmed to attack and destroy anybody who disagrees with The material interests and power lust of leftists and so on.
	And so I sort of recognized like, oh my gosh, we are, you know, the objectivist argument is not valid, doesn't work.
	In fact, it's kind of dangerous. Because the objective of this argument says that which is good for man's life.
	But of course, there's diversity and something can come at somebody else's expense as opposed to yours.
	It's good for Barack Obama had a great time being president and he had a great time being fated all over the world and he bought his multi-decker million dollar mansion in Martha's Vineyard and he got huge amounts of money for Netflix and he's famous everywhere.
	He had a great time with the state.
	And so on. And so that argument doesn't work.
	The religious argument is less credible to people as a whole, which is really the purpose of UPB. The purpose of UPB was to restore people's capacity for what it is to be human.
	the purpose of UPB was to grant the capacity for choice to people who had lost it because the highest standards had been erased, right?
	Which is why now the highest standard is survive one more day without an attack from the leftist mob.
	Unfortunately, that's appeasement, is what happens with all of that.
	So I certainly would not say, oh my gosh, people don't have any free will, but if I say free will is contingent upon comparing Comparing proposed actions to ideal standards, if people don't have those ideal standards, they don't have any functional moral free will.
	And again, we talked about moral free will, but when I began to close in on this argument, he moved the goalpost to free will, not including morality.
	And it's like, okay, well, once somebody moves the goalpost and doesn't admit it, I don't chase them because then they just move the goalpost again, right?
	So, no, for sure.
	But the question is, how much empirical evidence do people have?
	That those around them have moral free will, have the capacity or knowledge to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	Now, I will say that in the Christians that I've worked with, the Christians that I've dealt with, there have been times where I've seen them, you know, what would Jesus do?
	I have an ideal standard, it's a universal standard, and they compare their actions to, this is the whole point of what would Jesus do, right?
	So they do have free will.
	Now, I would have some disagreement with some of the ethics, but it's not particularly important.
	They do have free will, which is why Christianity was so focused on ending slavery as it matured after it basically survived the end of Rome and the assault of Islam for the Dark Ages.
	So Christianity was like, well, look, if you don't have a choice, you can't be good.
	I guess, you know, Calvinists with their determinism excluded and so on.
	The general tradition that I grew up with, the Protestant tradition that I grew up with, was you have to have a choice in order to be judged morally, which is why if somebody's got a gun to their back and they do something bad, we hold the guy with the gun to their back responsible, not them.
	And so, yeah, I mean, so I would like it if people had come up with UPB long before I was born so that my mother would have reference to some standard other than immediate narcissistic ego and gratification.
	Base mammal gratification, if that makes sense.
	But I can certainly see that, you know, if you look at a lot of people and you say, well, they're not really making choices, the temptation then to say is, oh my God, there's no free will.
	But if you invent the capacity to make choices, which is the promulgation of UPB, then that's because you want people to have choices, if that makes sense.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	And it really, really helps to clarify it as specifically in the category of morality, like the absence or presence of free will in this way.
	Yeah, I mean, we can talk about free will outside of morality.
	It's just, that's not, that's a topic for psychology or science or physics or, you know, whatever it is.
	It's because philosophy, as I've always said, is that which is focused upon free will.
	Certainly fair. Now, have you had to answer the people who've done you wrong over the course of your life?
	Have you had anybody, without your prompting, just call you up or come over and say, you know what, I was really thinking about this thing that happened and I'm really, really sorry and what can I do to make amends and all that?
	Nothing immediately comes to mind.
	I think you'd remember.
	I feel a bit of sadness at the acknowledgement, but no, nothing comes to mind to think about it.
	Don't get me wrong. I've got some immediate personal life now.
	I've got some people that were minor You know, conflicts against each other.
	Someone will stop and reflect, like, hey, you know, I did this the other day.
	That may have been, you know, not the best thing.
	Or, you know, and be curious or offer an apology outright, you know.
	One I forgot. I was a bit snappy in an Among Us game a couple of days ago, and that's because, I mean, it's still my responsibility, but it's because Canada's considering and pushing martial law, and I was feeling a bit hemmed in.
	So sorry about that, everyone.
	That was unfair. But anyway, so go ahead.
	But yeah, like, I just...
	God, I don't know.
	No, no one's ever done that before.
	And yeah, it does feel like we...
	For me, it feels like we do live in a world that's largely absent moral free will.
	And the free will that people do have, it's just like a flame.
	Our biology generates free will as human beings, and they are trying to stamp it out as much and as quickly as they can.
	For some people, not everyone, of course.
	And, you know, that's kind of the way I see it.
	Like an engine turns over and there's the spark and a boom, you know, you get another cycle.
	And for a lot of people, they're stamping that light out as quickly as they can, you know.
	Right. Anybody else want to jump in?
	I was really interested in this issue of do I owe an apology for people who have, through inattention or maybe original trauma in childhood, when I've said to people, through inattention or maybe original trauma in childhood, when I've said to people, "Your mother abused you," and that's wrong, and she's a bad person for doing that, do I It's a very good question, very interesting question.
	Do I owe an apology to the people who I've branded as immoral if they were post-morality, if that makes sense?
	Now, my answer to that is, I'm not sure just yet.
	This is a very interesting question. It's a very deep question.
	I would say that...
	If anybody feels that I owe them an apology, it's sort of a definitional thing.
	So let's say there's a woman, Sally, right?
	And Sally abused her kid.
	Her kid called in as an adult.
	We talked about it, and I said Sally was immoral for abusing you.
	So if Sally then says, you owe me an apology, then the problem, of course, is then that Sally is saying, well, if you do something wrong to someone, you owe them an apology, in which case she should not be demanding an apology from me.
	She should be Giving an apology to her child, right?
	I mean, obviously, because I simply called an immoral action immoral, and a person who did it immoral, I didn't actually abuse anyone.
	And so actual abuse against a helpless child is something you would apologize for.
	So I'm not sure it's particularly an important issue, but it is a very interesting question.
	The other thing, too, is I don't know...
	Again, my mother may have made choices that resulted in her not having any effective moral free will.
	I don't know. So I can still call what she did immoral.
	I can call her immoral. It doesn't mean that I have to...
	Believe that the immorality and the choice continued all the way to the present.
	And that's a really, really, you know, knowing when to give up on people is really important to having a happy life.
	And so if I'm just forever waiting for the phone calls, which are never coming, that's pretty exhausting and kind of debilitating.
	So I can still call people immoral who do immoral things, even if they're post-choice, because it could be their prior choices that had them become post-choice, if that makes sense.
	That certainly makes sense to me in the sense that, like, they still are the cause of their state of immorality in those circumstances.
	And there's a great relief. So it's a great relief in just saying, you know, whether that relief is partly what's driving me, I don't know, but I don't think so.
	But one of the side effects is if my mother was post-choice by the time I knew her, then it had nothing to do with me whatsoever.
	And there was nothing that I could have done and, you know.
	A rock's bouncing down a hill and you think that by behaving one way or another, like you're tied to a tree, a rock's bouncing down a hill towards you, you don't sit there and say, I should have done something different.
	That's just physics at that point.
	Do you think there's any functional difference?
	I know it's a new theory for you, but I think I might have talked with my mother for the last time just recently.
	And I kind of had that feeling like I wasn't sure, like, oh, I don't know if you have free will.
	Like, I kind of felt sorry for her.
	But at the same time, I felt like it didn't make a difference because I can never know either way and it still doesn't change whether, like, it's toxic to have a relationship with her.
	Right. Right.
	I mean, you can view something as dangerous to you without a moral judgment.
	I mean, I could put sunscreen on before I go outside.
	I don't view the sun as malevolent to me.
	It's not immoral. It's not evil.
	It's, you know, put a parachute on before you jump out of a plane, which I did once in my life.
	Jumped out of a plane with a parachute on.
	Not because I think that I take the precautions.
	Gravity is dangerous, even though it's not personal to me.
	Do you know if there was anything in particular?
	I know that things can be tough to tell.
	Do you know if there was anything in particular that gave you that thought or feeling that your mom was not a choice person?
	Oh, well, it specifically came down to...
	I mean, there were small things here and there, but I said, realistically, the relationship between us is...
	Never gonna get healthy if you're not able to, like I did, go through the pain of looking at your childhood and, you know, your relationship with your parents.
	And she said, You know, that's too painful for me, but she wouldn't do that.
	Right. Now, again, maybe she'll change her mind, but generally, and this is what I've said for many years, that if people owe you an apology or something and it doesn't come within the next 48 hours...
	I mean, it basically never comes, as far as I can tell.
	I've certainly never experienced it.
	And that's why I'm sort of asking that question.
	I'm sure for some people it has come many years later.
	I mean, that's when it comes to...
	I've done the theory of morality, for sure, with UPB. And I've done the empirical evidence of morality historically.
	But as far as...
	This is just a very interesting exercise for me, and I really recommend it to people.
	Just survey in your mind.
	The people in your life, maybe they've done you wrong, and have they ever?
	I had a guy who treated me really terribly in the business world.
	And, yeah, he got sick, and he took a long time to die.
	The guy never called me to apologize.
	Actually, that was two people. Two people.
	And, I mean, it just doesn't happen.
	It's like expecting a robot to make up his own mind.
	And, again, I know people say, oh, well, that means determinism.
	It's like, no, no, no, it doesn't. It doesn't.
	It doesn't at all.
	Because if it meant determinism, I wouldn't have written UPB. UPB was an attempt to reclaim the glories of free will that characterized Christianity.
	In a relatively post-Christian world.
	Now, there will be people who say, and you may very well be right, the empirical evidence for UPB taking the world by storm is not very strong.
	But people who say, well, we can't do it without Christianity.
	The only way to regain the glories of Enlightenment-era free will is to restore the soul to the seat of consciousness so that you have something with a universal standard and a God-given morality that's outside the realm of mere physics.
	And you may be right.
	But I can't base things on consequentialism.
	All right. Now, here's the other question to ask, which is, have you yourself done the things wherein, if you've done someone wrong, have you reached out to apologize?
	And that's an important thing, right?
	Because it's kind of tough to blame other people for not doing stuff if you yourself have it as a standard, if you do, and you haven't done it yourself.
	So that's an important thing to recognize and think about.
	All right. Any other lost thoughts?
	I'm happy to hear if people have any thoughts.
	And I do thank the person who came by for the debate.
	I always do enjoy a good debate.
	It's very productive and fruitful.
	And I do, you know, I take people at their best selves in that people are coming in to help me out of error, which I really appreciate.
	And I'm always sort of aware that it may go the other way, as it often does.
	But I really do appreciate the caller who came in Lucius, I think it was, who came in to correct me and I wish we'd gotten a little bit further, but I'm afraid his yawn interrupted our philosophizing, which was a real shame because I thought we were on a very fascinating topic.
	But if people wanted to sort of give feedback or thoughts or what you thought of the conversation or the debate, I'm happy to hear.
	Just don't forget to unmute yourself.
	I thought you were being very patient despite his attitude.
	Well, you know, sometimes you have to dig sideways to get at the gold, right?
	You have to go a little...
	And I thought he had really good things to say.
	I just... When ego gets involved, you can't get to the truth almost ever, right?
	So... I appreciate that.
	Thanks, thanks. I mean, do you think I should have continued?
	When somebody says, I'm bored, after talking philosophy for an hour or so, either they are bored, in which case...
	We're not in the same space, or they're being manipulative, in which case, I don't want to disrespect philosophy of pretending this in conversation.
	And he'd already indicated that he didn't want to talk about anything personal, because otherwise I would have said, well, what's your emotional resistance and all that?
	So I didn't really feel there was anywhere to go, but I could have been wrong about that, of course.
	Well, as far as should you be more tolerant of that stuff, not to say I can't be you, but I do look at you as an example of how to be in a lot of ways.
	And I've always loved from the get-go with your content, getting this stuff out there, engaging with people is incredibly important, but there are people out there who are going to sabotage that process and not having tolerance for that.
	And so it's very nice to see that line.
	Like, you do a great job, like Atraminda said, with, like, being patient, but also there's this line where it's like, look, you're just, you're making this process so painful, you know, that's just a bad precedent to set.
	And, like, we've got evil to fight in the world.
	I can't be, you know, having a horrible exchange with you right now.
	Well, yeah, if somebody says to me, basically, you're boring me, then...
	I mean, I know the topic's not boring.
	We got like dozens of people in here listening.
	There'll be, you know, tens of thousands of people listening to this.
	And I think it's a really productive debate.
	I know it's not boring. And I also know he's not bored.
	I knew he wasn't bored. But since he'd already said he doesn't want to talk about anything personal, I can't just let someone say to me, you're boring.
	I can't just let that pass like they didn't say anything.
	But the only other thing to do is talk about their emotional resistance, which you'd already said there wasn't, he wasn't willing to do.
	So there was nothing to say anymore to the guy.
	Yeah. Yep. Which was a shame.
	I think you were being unfair or anything.
	Like, you were just holding him to what he said.
	And maybe...
	I think it made him upset because he left soon after that, but...
	Well, no, I muted you. Well, he also left the chat, I think.
	No, no, no. He tried to come back.
	So I said, okay, well, this debate is done, right?
	Because I knew he was being emotionally manipulative and very immature.
	I also knew he wasn't going to admit it because he already said he didn't want to talk about anything personal.
	So we were just going to get stuck in some tortured, bottom hole with no bottom, twisted nonsense, right?
	And so I then shifted the conversation to people as a whole because, you know, it's a community and it shouldn't just be one person.
	I wanted to get you guys feedback. And then he came back in the conversation with great energy and wanted to continue without apologizing for...
	It's kind of funny, right?
	Without apologizing for being pretty snarky and saying he was bored.
	So, because he came back in, we'd already talked about, you know, how many people do someone wrong and then don't apologize, right?
	And he kind of did me wrong. It's kind of rude, right?
	Not a huge wrong, obviously.
	It's like he killed my dog or anything, but he did me a minor wrong and then came back in with great energy, completely ignoring that he'd done me wrong without apologizing.
	And we'd already said that that would be one of the definitions of not having free will morally, right?
	You understand how this stuff works, right?
	So we'd already said that if you do someone wrong and then don't even apologize or acknowledge the wrong or offer to make any kind of restitution, Then you don't have moral free will.
	It's an evidence that you don't have moral free will.
	So what did he do? He was rude to me.
	And then he wanted to come back in as if nothing had happened.
	He didn't apologize or attempt to make any restitution, not that there would need to be any big restitution for a fairly minor thing.
	But so he was very much demonstrating to me, his unconscious was demonstrating to me that he himself does not have moral free will.
	Because we just had the whole conversation about if you do something wrong, then you should apologize and all that.
	So he was saying, hey, I don't have moral free will, which is exactly why the topic bothered him so much, because he knows he's trapped by his immaturity and his lack of capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards.
	The price of coming back into...
	The price of coming back into a conversation with me, if you've just called me boring, is to apologize for calling me boring, right?
	I mean, that's just a basic self-respect thing, right?
	I'm not going to pretend it didn't happen, and I'm not going to drag the guy through the mud or anything.
	It's like he says, look, I'm really sorry.
	I kind of blew up and called you boring.
	That's not what I felt. I'm really sorry.
	That was kind of immature. It's like, oh, yeah, no problem.
	I appreciate that. Thanks. Let's move on.
	But yeah, so he doesn't have moral free will.
	So when I was talking about people not having moral free will, he overreacted because...
	And it's just a self-knowledge issue.
	Again, he's a young guy, it sounds like.
	And yeah, he did call someone an absolute failure of a friend.
	He's very, very aggressive in his text and just doesn't have this kind of self-control that does give you moral free will.
	So... Yeah, so he believes in free will, and he believes that you should—he didn't ever say to me, oh, there's a bad standard to apologize if you've done someone wrong, right?
	He accepted to all of this, right?
	And so he claims to have moral free will.
	He accepts that you should apologize if you do something wrong, and then the first thing he does is insult me and then pretend that nothing happened and not apologize.
	I mean, you understand? It's funny just how complicated and dense some of these interactions can be.
	And I say this with affection to the guy.
	He's smart. He's passionate.
	He cares about these topics.
	I think it's just a self-knowledge issue.
	And, of course, he does sound like he was pretty traumatized as a kid, and I enormously sympathize for that.
	So I'm not trying to make him into a bad guy or anything like that.
	But that level of volatility is very much against...
	A free will. And if you say free will is your capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards and you say, well, if you do someone wrong, then you should apologize.
	Then he would say, I'm sorry, it's kind of rude because he wasn't bored.
	I know that. I know he wasn't bored.
	It was completely obvious. So when he came back in, no, I want to talk about the next topic.
	It's like, I'm really energetic and excited.
	The first thing he would do is say, I was a little rude.
	Sorry about that, right? So anyway, it's just, to me, it's all fascinating.
	It's absolutely fascinating how this stuff all sort of ties together and how demonstrative people can be and how much people reveal without even knowing it.
	Any other last thoughts, comments, issues, questions, problems, mad praise, whatever you like, savage criticism?
	A little bit I wanted to chime in.
	Even if we're taking the position, kind of like what he was, that a person still has free will, in some circumstances as a person's mental capacity is compromised, for example, you brought up spike in the head from your age.
	If the person doesn't have the necessary mental faculties at the time to really comprehend the issue, they can't really consider it in a moral context, in which case, for example, someone who's, even if we're saying that someone who's completely insane and seriously needs help, they don't really have an accurate enough understanding to be able to make choices in such a way that They can really choose morally.
	They're effectively an amoral agent, even if they still retain free will.
	So in that sense, in a moral sense, yeah, they kind of lack free will, even if they still technically have free will.
	And in terms of some other cases, how do I put this?
	If, for like the ideologically possessed,
	as you meant products, for all the people who steal as you meant products, for all the people who steal or something, if they've got in their head that that's okay, whatever metric, like with what you brought up about shoplifting, that they're all just suckers, I'm effectively justified in doing this, then until you let go of that belief...
	You can't really choose otherwise, in which case until even if you still have free will, technically, or at a metaphysical level or whatever, then you've effectively forfeited your free will in moral terms until you relinquish that belief, in which case you can kind of, even if you still have belief, for what in which case you can kind of, even if you still have belief, for what you're talking about with in regards to your mother, I think the difference is kind of
	If you think of the media as a whole or Wikipedia or whatever, they're completely eviscerating people's capacity for free will by only ever presenting one side of an argument.
	This is why this guy has a big criticism.
	He's like, yeah, let's talk about it.
	Yeah, that'd be great.
	I want you guys to hear the other side of the argument.
	So the mainstream media and Google and other places, right, just suppress information, distort information, only provide one side.
	And so if you're only getting one side of the story, you don't have any free will.
	It's stripping people of their humanity, their capacity to choose.
	And that, of course, is when you censor people, you de-platform people, you silence people.
	What's happening is you are diminishing people's capacity to have what is the most essential human gift at all, which is a choice.
	And crushing free speech and hate speech and all of this stuff is actually stripping people of their essential humanity, which is having enough information that you actually have a choice.
	You actually have a choice. We all know that gravity is not optional, right?
	It's a fixed...
	If somehow tomorrow it turned out there was a big conspiracy and gravity was optional, you just had to say some word in your mind that you could be eliminated from gravity, then you'd have a choice about how to travel, where to go, right?
	And we can actually physically see this in people's brains.
	You can physically see this in people's brains.
	So, as you know, people on the left, I've heard various numbers, the latest I heard was like 63% of them have a diagnosed mental illness, and I think part of that is due to the fact that they're simply not challenging themselves with contrary information.
	Everybody who's on the right, not necessarily smarter, not necessarily brighter, any of those things, but if you're on the right, you've automatically been exposed to the opposite information, so you have a greater free will, and plus you're more likely to be Christian and therefore believe free will at a metaphysical level.
	And the people on the left, and there's actually been studies who've done this, that if you stick in an echo chamber, and really the big echo chamber is the left, because the right is always exposed to the left through media, through just about every Twitter feed you can think of, through Hollywood and all of this, right? And so...
	You can see that people who only get one side of a story, people who only give it to propaganda.
	Propaganda is, this is the truth and everything else is heresy.
	Wokens is just the new religion without any responsibility to get up early or love your neighbor or do anything productive to your society at all, other than keep tattoo parlors in business.
	So, the brain damage, and I'm not being allegorical here, like the literal physical brain damage that is done, and they can track people's brains exposed to propaganda, it goes, their brains go dark, like they lose brain matter, they lose brain connectivity, they lose neural connectivity.
	It actually, it is brain damage.
	And through that level of brain damage, How many people and how much trauma did my mom go through?
	Did it damage her brain to the point where she could not form new associations, new choices, which is why she's had the same repetitive stories.
	You ever have those people? I had a boss like this.
	Oh my God. Like the boss literally like would tell you a long story and then the next day he'd tell you the same long story and you'd say, oh yeah, you just told me.
	And he's like, you just tell it again.
	That to me is evidence of some kind of brain damage.
	Now, whether that's I don't know.
	We can come up with all these kinds of stories for it.
	But my mother had the same story about my father for the 40 years that I knew her.
	And my mother had the same story about what happened with her life for the 40 years I knew her.
	No capacity. That I could see to come up with new explanations, new associations, nothing.
	It was all a train track. There was no wandering the fields.
	So, yeah, that's one of the reasons I fight back so much against media bias is they're actually stripping people of what it is to be human, to get contrary information, to make your own mind up, and to view things from more than one perspective.
	Yeah, in some cases you can make the argument that they're even making people into no longer human even literally with the brain part.
	As regards to, like, your mother, even if you want to say that she still has free will and she can still operate, she can still might be able to still make some tiny choices where the particular parts of her that's related to whatever she was indoctrinated into, like the propaganda and such, she might be able to make choices in some small like the propaganda and such, she might be able to make choices in some small scale, not related to that, but as soon as you touch on that, it's kind of, there's too much cycle, there's too much biological and psychological momentum for her to make a different choice,
	You might be able to help her improve and heal somewhat to be able to make moral choices in that kind of context, again.
	Yeah. Yeah.
	Who wakes up one morning, he's 20 years old, and he says he can't feel his legs.
	And he can't move his legs.
	So you put him in a wheelchair, you take him to the hospital.
	The hospital can't find anything particularly wrong with him.
	They don't know for sure, but they can't find anything because you can never really know for sure.
	And let's say he spends the next 60 years in a wheelchair.
	And again, they can't find any particular medical damage.
	But again, body's a complex thing.
	Just read brain on fire for how long it took to diagnose this woman who had some sort of infection.
	And so, he's 60 years, he's in this wheelchair, right?
	He never got out of the wheelchair.
	He never, right, never moved his legs, never moved his toes, ever, for 60 years, right?
	Now, are we justified in calling him paralyzed?
	Uh... You could say, but the doctors didn't find anything wrong with him, so theoretically he could still move his legs, right?
	Let's say the guy doesn't...
	He's effectively paralyzed.
	Well, I mean, so that's my question, right?
	I can attach something called, well, he still can move his legs, he's just choosing not to.
	But where's the empirical evidence for that?
	Say, oh, well, it's psychological, it's psychosomatic, whatever, right?
	But let's say he's not mentally ill.
	I don't know. Is he paralyzed?
	Well... I mean, to all intents and purposes, he is.
	And there's no empirical evidence to the contrary.
	And you understand that if he wasn't paralyzed, sorry, if he genuinely was paralyzed and the doctors just couldn't find out why, and you said he was faking it, that he was malingering, that he was a hypochondriac, that he was just imagining things and he was just lazy, that would be really unjust, right?
	Really unjust. Yeah.
	So that's what I'm saying.
	Like, my mom's now been in a wheelchair.
	So, I mean, she's been in a wheelchair as long as I've known her.
	Yeah, my basic point was, even if we take the argument, the stance that she did technically have free will, within that context, the caveat there is functionally irrelevant.
	You can functionally consider to have not had free will.
	Yeah, again, I'm just looking for the evidence.
	And people can say that the guy, 60 years in a wheelchair, he had the ability to move.
	And it's like, okay, so the guy lived and died in a wheelchair, basically.
	And you're telling me he had the ability to move.
	Where's your evidence? Because the overwhelming evidence is he didn't have the ability to move, because who the hell would want to spend 60 years in a wheelchair, right?
	Right. And you can say, no, but I've attached this thing called he could move to him with no empirical evidence.
	So, ah, but the doctors couldn't find it.
	The doctors often can't find stuff, right?
	So, yeah, I mean, again, it's not all final stuff.
	And maybe my mom made choices that resulted in her having no choice.
	I don't know. Maybe she did have choice.
	Maybe I'm wrong. I'm just saying that this is where I'm at.
	And I always want to stay as true as possible to the evidence.
	Because I've always said, you know, evidence trumps theory, right?
	The empirical evidence will always, always, always trump the theory.
	This is the whole point of the scientific method, that the physical test trumps any conjecture, any hypothesis you might have.
	Whatever your math says, how high the ball bounces doesn't matter.
	It matters how high the ball bounces.
	That's all. That's all.
	Yeah, yeah. I'm not arguing that.
	I just wanted to get the point out that for like For people who still, like him, may have had an issue with the concept that people might not have free will, what you're saying with regards to your mother can still effectively be true, even if they want to hold on to that caveat.
	Right. And my mother's wrongs were vastly more so than the people we just did the informal poll with, where 1% or 2% of people in people's lives actually did the right thing and apologized for doing it wrong.
	And that's not a very big, I mean, I get that there's a certain pride element in all of that, but it's not like a physically dangerous thing to do.
	It's not going to get them deplatformed or anything like that, I guess, unless somebody apologized to me and it leaks out or I don't know, whatever, right?
	And so, yeah, that's just, and that's my big question, you know, where's the evidence that there's choice when people accept certain standards and just never functionally act on those standards?
	Never. It's pretty wild.
	And I think then it gives us some comfort as to how early we are in the development of what it is to reclaim Enlightenment era levels of Free will that resulted in the greatest society that lasted for maybe 100 years, right?
	So then maybe 19th century, early 20th century, but...
	So yeah, I guess UPB is an attempt to give people back the humanity that modernity and materialistic atheism, secular humanism kind of stole.
	And as you can see, it's...
	It's got a ways to go.
	All right. Well, thanks, everyone.
	A real great pleasure to chat, and I really do appreciate the fellow who came in and started the conversation.
	It's always a great pleasure to talk these issues, and he had fantastic points.
	I would really, really strongly recommend that you continue with this line of thinking, with philosophy as a whole.
	You care about it a lot, and you've got a huge amount to offer, and I really do appreciate.
	Your conversation. He did say in the chat that he shouldn't have said he was bored.
	He should have said that his brain was fried and he was hungry or something like that.
	It doesn't absolve you of the obligation to apologize if you said something rude to someone.
	It's kind of rude in the middle of a debate with someone to say, I'm bored.
	It's kind of rude. When I've taken sort of, this is an unscheduled show, I sort of took time out of my day.
	And you did too, right? But I didn't kind of insult you, right?
	So just for future reference, you know, if you want to do the right thing, then, you know, if you say something in a state of being hangry, hungry and angry, hangry, then you come back and you say, oh, man, I was out of line.
	I'm sorry about that. I'm not bored.
	I was, you know, and just apologize.
	It's no big deal. We could have had a great conversation after that, but maybe next time.
	All right. Thanks, everyone.
	I appreciate that. Have yourself a wonderful afternoon.
	We will see you, gosh, it's Tuesday.
	We will see you tomorrow night. At 7pm Eastern Standard, I've got some really, really good topics.
	I think we're going to do... Well, there's a couple of...
	I want to do women part three.
	I want to do women, baby.
	And also, somebody had a great suggestion, which is where's the analysis of men?
	Where's the analysis of men?
	That's a very, very good question.
	So I'll be working on that as well.
	All right. Thanks, guys. Really, really appreciate it.

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