Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - The Philosophy of Danger!
Aired: 2025-02-15
Duration: 24:08


=== Instincts vs. Modern Reasoning (03:18) ===

[00:00:00]  Well, good morning, everybody.
[00:00:00]  Hope you're doing well.
[00:00:02]  Stefan Molyneux from Freedom Main.
[00:00:03]  So, a couple of interesting questions have come down the pipe.
[00:00:07]  One is something that I've had recur over the course of the show, and it is this.
[00:00:19]  Somebody says, well, Steph, you're pretty pronatalist, but how do I deal with the possibility That I have genetic issues that could transmit itself to a child.
[00:00:32]  And I find that a very interesting question.
[00:00:35]  I'm very sympathetic to the challenges of that question, of course, right?
[00:00:39]  But it is a very interesting question which brings up the relationship between reason and probability.
[00:00:47]  I don't think there is much of a relationship between reason and probability.
[00:00:53]  So, With regards to moral questions, of course, I mean, I've got this in the art of the argument.
[00:01:00]  My book, the first, is deductive reasoning, which is absolute, right?
[00:01:07]  All men are mortal.
[00:01:08]  Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is immortal.
[00:01:11]  And the other is inductive reasoning, which is probabilities.
[00:01:16]  If you see a woman, you know she has 20 cats, right?
[00:01:20]  She lives next door, she's got 20 cats.
[00:01:22]  You see 19. Of her cats are white with a dark spot on their chest, all 19 of them.
[00:01:30]  You can assume, without 100% proof, that the 20th cat is the same, right?
[00:01:37]  She's got a fetish or a preference for that kind of cat, right?
[00:01:40]  So, you can't know for sure, but it's likely, right?
[00:01:43]  If you had to bet, right?
[00:01:44]  If you had to bet.
[00:01:46]  I mean, when it comes to pattern recognition, there's this horrible thing in the modern world.
[00:01:51]  It's truly horrible.
[00:01:52]  The modern world is all about disarming.
[00:01:55]  It's all about disarming the righteous.
[00:01:58]  It's all about disarming the righteous.
[00:02:00]  So, you see this all the time in movies and TV shows.
[00:02:06]  It's the counter signal.
[00:02:09]  It is the anti-reasoning, anti-deductive reasoning.
[00:02:14]  So, for instance, if there's a woman, she wants to catch a bus at midnight, then She sees a guy, I don't know, he's got a swastika carved in his forehead.
[00:02:27]  He seems kind of twitchy.
[00:02:31]  He's dressed like a punk and so on.
[00:02:34]  And she's got this instinct to not take the bus, right?
[00:02:39]  To wait until this guy leaves, to grab an Uber or a cab or wait or walk or something like that, right?
[00:02:45]  So she's got this instinct to avoid him.
[00:02:48]  And in just about every...
[00:02:51]  Modern movie and TV show.
[00:02:55]  Her instinct is absolutely wrong.
[00:02:57]  It turns out, don't you know, she's just prejudiced.
[00:03:02]  She's got these cliches and these stereotypes in her mind, and it's just wrong.
[00:03:10]  He's really the nicest guy, and you see this all the time.
[00:03:14]  Guys with, like, weird tackle bait hooks on their face, and they're like...

=== Instincts vs. Reality (05:29) ===

[00:03:18]  You know, really nice and sweet, and they like to help her move, and so on, right?
[00:03:23]  So this is the disarming of your instincts.
[00:03:27]  Like, all of your instincts are prejudicial, right?
[00:03:30]  All of your instincts are prejudicial.
[00:03:32]  All of your gut sense is bigotry, and so on, right?
[00:03:38]  And what they're doing is they're counter-programming you to disarm you, right?
[00:03:46]  If you look at how teenagers are portrayed, this is a constant theme.
[00:03:53]  How are teenagers portrayed?
[00:03:55]  Well, teenagers are portrayed that the nerds are super, super, super nice people.
[00:04:03]  They're kind of disparaged and excluded, and the nerds are just really nice and thoughtful and caring, like the Anthony Michael Hall thing, right?
[00:04:15]  The jocks, the athletes and so on, well, they're just mean, terrible, awful, wretched bullies, right?
[00:04:23]  That's just pretty much a constant of media and has been for, I don't know, I mean, I think Revenge of the Nerds and so on.
[00:04:33]  This goes back to, I guess, Eddie Haskell, who was the rather skeevy friend of the Leave it to Beaver brother.
[00:04:41]  And he was portrayed as pretty, pretty askance, right?
[00:04:45]  And bullies are always just mean and terrible and so on.
[00:04:50]  They're not a reaction to degeneracy or dysfunction or, you know.
[00:04:56]  I mean, if you look at, in my experience, and again, it's just anecdotal, but, you know, anecdotal doesn't mean invalid, right?
[00:05:05]  So, in my experience, the...
[00:05:08]  The jocks, and I spent a fair amount of time around the jocks because, I mean, I wasn't a jock myself in particular, but I was on the swim team, the water polo team, I was on the cross-country team, I played soccer and squash and tennis and baseball, and, you know, I was never at any particular elite level.
[00:05:25]  I guess I did pretty well in swimming.
[00:05:26]  I was seventh fastest in Ontario back in the day.
[00:05:29]  So, but I wasn't like, you know, the letterman jock, right?
[00:05:36]  But the athlete guys were always really nice.
[00:05:40]  And being an athlete is often associated with higher intelligence.
[00:05:46]  It's often associated with a little bit of conformity, for sure.
[00:05:50]  But it's often associated with, you know, obviously to be an athlete, particularly in team sports, you need good social skills.
[00:05:57]  And you also need to be able to manage your aggression.
[00:06:00]  So you need to be aggressive.
[00:06:03]  In the game and shake hands afterwards.
[00:06:06]  So you need to both have aggression and manage aggression.
[00:06:11]  So there's this counter-signaling that, and, you know, to be honest, if not a little too brutal, do the school shooters come from the football team, right?
[00:06:22]  Or are they the nerdy, weak, excluded people?
[00:06:26]  So you're counter-signaled all the time.
[00:06:29]  The purpose of media is to instill Disarming anti-instincts in you.
[00:06:36]  In that, the pretty girls are cold and mean and nasty, right?
[00:06:41]  That sort of mean girls thing.
[00:06:43]  And the plain girls are nice and thoughtful and lovely and wonderful.
[00:06:48]  And this goes to Clerks, right?
[00:06:51]  The Kevin Smith movie.
[00:06:52]  And I have never found the pretty girls to be particularly nasty.
[00:07:00]  I mean...
[00:07:01]  I do see them as a little aloof, for sure, but that's natural because we live in a society where the pretty girls stay pretty for 20 years.
[00:07:10]  Or more, right?
[00:07:11]  Obviously, right?
[00:07:12]  They stay pretty forever and ever, amen.
[00:07:15]  And in the past, like the really pretty girls were supposed to get married off in their teens, have a bunch of babies, and, you know, what's that horrible line from Raging Bull?
[00:07:26]  You ain't so pretty now, right?
[00:07:27]  I don't mean this in any negative way.
[00:07:30]  I'm just saying that beauty was supposed to be like a Lucifer match.
[00:07:33]  A Lucifer match is a giant match that you use in theater so the people in the back can see that you're lighting a match.
[00:07:38]  It was supposed to burn bright and short.
[00:07:41]  That was the purpose of...
[00:07:43]  And this is why the beauty is so intense.
[00:07:46]  It's that it's supposed to...
[00:07:47]  You know, you're not supposed to get Botox and face sanding and whatever the hell they do.
[00:07:54]  I saw this one the other day where they put five...
[00:07:56]  Needles deep into your cheek.
[00:07:57]  It's like it's revolting.
[00:07:59]  You're not supposed to be this biochemical cyborg of plastic surgery into your 50s.
[00:08:05]  So the pretty girls can't be too friendly because the guys take their friendliness as invitations to become attached, right?
[00:08:17]  I remember the prettiest girl in school, a very, very nice woman, a girl, I guess, back in this is in junior high school.
[00:08:24]  She and I I became friendly, and she went to Florida with her family, and I paid her $5 to buy me some shark jaws, because I was really into sharks at the time, and she did, and I did ask her out, and she was very polite about it, and so on, but she didn't want to go out with me, and so not, I mean, I've never found them to be nasty.

=== Cautious Shark Encounters (06:45) ===

[00:08:48]  I mean, certainly not more than the average, right?
[00:08:50]  So all the attractive people are mean and nasty and vicious.
[00:08:54]  And all of the losers, outcasts, and excluded are warm and kind and wonderful, and it's just not true.
[00:09:02]  It's not the exact opposite, but that is not true.
[00:09:08]  That is not true.
[00:09:10]  But people consume so much media that their empiricism is propaganda, right?
[00:09:18]  What they think of as real is just other people programming them.
[00:09:21]  It used to be the function of Theology now is the function of leftist ideology.
[00:09:28]  So, we work with probability, right?
[00:09:32]  If you see a shark in the water, then you probably, like a, not a nurse shark or something, right, but something that's dangerous, like a bull shark or carcaridon carcarious, hey, I told you I was into sharks, a great white shark or something, even a blue shark could be, but...
[00:09:49]  Something that is very aggressive and will eat a human.
[00:09:52]  If you see a big great white shark in the water, I mean, unless you're literally going shark-watching, right?
[00:09:59]  In which case, I hope you're in a cage, but you don't get in the water.
[00:10:02]  Now, you could say, well, but, you know, the odds that the shark is going to eat me are pretty low.
[00:10:09]  I mean, he might have just eaten.
[00:10:12]  But you play these odds, right?
[00:10:15]  Always you play these odds, right?
[00:10:17]  If you're walking in the jungle and a panther is following you, you'd probably be a little nervous.
[00:10:23]  You'd be a little cautious, right?
[00:10:24]  Or very cautious.
[00:10:25]  But you could say, well, he's just curious.
[00:10:27]  I'm sure he's just eaten and he's just curious.
[00:10:31]  Right?
[00:10:31]  It's the old thump in your house in the middle of the night, right?
[00:10:34]  I remember once living in a new house that was settling and it was creaking and growing like the hold of a pirate ship.
[00:10:40]  And, you know, the thump in the house, you know.
[00:10:43]  Odds are almost certain that it's nothing.
[00:10:45]  But do you take that risk?
[00:10:47]  Now, philosophy has developed deductive reasoning, but evolution has created inductive reasoning because most of evolutionary choices are about inductive reasoning.
[00:11:04]  So, if you want a child, if you meet a woman who's 40, And she hasn't had a period in six months.
[00:11:16]  Maybe she lost a bunch of weight or something like that.
[00:11:18]  Then you're not going to get a kid out of her.
[00:11:21]  Like you have to go because the choices are binary, but the reasoning is inductive, right?
[00:11:29]  Or the instincts are inductive, right?
[00:11:31]  So if a bear is running towards you in the woods, you're scared.
[00:11:37]  However, you could say, well, the bear is just curious, really curious or whatever, right?
[00:11:41]  And it could be.
[00:11:42]  Probably not, but it could be.
[00:11:44]  But survival means that you have to play the caution side of the deck, right?
[00:11:50]  The caution side of the hand you dealt with.
[00:11:52]  You have to be overly cautious.
[00:11:54]  People who were not cautious died at a higher rate than those who were cautious.
[00:12:00]  Now, those who were too cautious, overcautious, ended up kind of paranoid and unpleasant, and maybe people didn't mate with them.
[00:12:06]  Or maybe they were so stressed that they had heart attacks.
[00:12:09]  I don't know, right?
[00:12:10]  So...
[00:12:11]  All of that is pretty foundational.
[00:12:14]  So, philosophy is not about, moral philosophy is not about inductive reasoning.
[00:12:23]  Moral philosophy is not about probabilities.
[00:12:26]  Because moral philosophy is particular to humanity, to human beings, and yet all animals deal with the question or the problem of probability.
[00:12:38]  So, for instance, If you've ever, I mean, if you have kids, what do kids do?
[00:12:43]  They try to feed squirrels and chipmunks, right?
[00:12:46]  And you can see the chipmunk or the squirrel, if it's a wild chipmunk or squirrel, which I guess they are, peanut excluded, RIP. If you see your kids trying to feed the squirrels, you can see the squirrels trying to calculate.
[00:13:00]  They want the food, but they're afraid of getting caught.
[00:13:03]  It's the same thing with birds.
[00:13:04]  I remember being in northern Ontario with my daughter with a plate of french fries.
[00:13:09]  And we were trying to feed all the seagulls, right?
[00:13:13]  So the seagulls wanted the french fry, but the seagulls were afraid of being caught.
[00:13:20]  So they are weighing probabilities.
[00:13:23]  I mean, animals as a whole spend a lot of time weighing probabilities, right?
[00:13:28]  A lion chases a zebra.
[00:13:30]  And if the zebra runs really quickly or gets too much of a head start, the lion might run for a few seconds and then calculate.
[00:13:38]  Deep in his instinctual sense, his gut, that he's going to expend more energy trying to catch the zebra relative to what he's going to get, right?
[00:13:48]  Or, you know, he's going to risk tripping.
[00:13:51]  The ground is too uneven.
[00:13:53]  You know, if he breaks his leg, that's it for him as a hunter.
[00:13:55]  He's just going to die in agony.
[00:13:57]  So he creeps up close and he weighs the probabilities.
[00:14:01]  Well, if I get any closer, they're going to smell me and run away.
[00:14:05]  But if I'm...
[00:14:06]  This far away, it's going to be really hard to catch them, you know, all of this kind of stuff, right?
[00:14:10]  So lions, I mean, we can see this all over, all over the place in nature, right?
[00:14:17]  And so they're constantly working with inductive reasoning, so to speak.
[00:14:24]  Now, we wouldn't call it formally that.
[00:14:26]  So if the woman of your dreams, let's say you want three kids and the woman of your dreams is 35, right?
[00:14:34]  You meet her, she's 35, right?
[00:14:36]  Well, if she's 20, you might still not get your three kids, right?
[00:14:42]  Because a 20-year-old can be infertile, and a 35-year-old could conceivably get you three kids, right?
[00:14:50]  So, you have to play the odds, though.
[00:14:53]  If you want three kids, you're better off going with the 20-year-old than the 35-year-old.
[00:15:00]  And if you are concerned about...
[00:15:04]  Again, this is not medical advice.
[00:15:06]  This is just my vague memory of it, so don't take anything I say with any seriousness at all.
[00:15:11]  But if you're concerned about the genetic health of the fetus, you can get a sample, but that means piercing the amniotic sac, which has risks to the baby.
[00:15:21]  So we all have to weigh these probabilities, right?
[00:15:25]  I mean, I enjoyed and found it important to do politics for many years.

=== Cost-Benefit Dilemmas (08:34) ===

[00:15:33]  And then the cost-benefit changed, and I no longer found it as valuable.
[00:15:41]  Like, every time you drive for something that's not essential, right?
[00:15:45]  Like, heaven help us, heaven above help us, my family, we all drove into Toronto to go to Casa Loma.
[00:15:54]  Now, that was not an essential trip at all, and we risked Dying in a fiery car crash.
[00:16:00]  Well, maybe not fiery because traffic was moving at a snail's pace, but that was the reality, that this was a non-essential trip and we risked death in order to see a castle.
[00:16:13]  When you fly, non-essential, right?
[00:16:15]  You understand, right?
[00:16:16]  So, we're all weighing these things.
[00:16:20]  If you want to gain a lot of muscle, then you may exercise to the point where you get injured, right?
[00:16:26]  So, again.
[00:16:28]  But these are all things that animals do, and because it's things that animals do, it is not the province of moral philosophy.
[00:16:36]  So, when people say to me, what risk should I take?
[00:16:41]  That is not the job of a moral philosopher.
[00:16:44]  I hope that this is hopefully not too long a way of explaining why I understand why people ask me this, for sure.
[00:16:52]  I really do.
[00:16:53]  But it's not an appropriate question for A moral philosopher.
[00:16:58]  Because a moral philosopher will tell you good and evil, right and wrong, in absolute terms, right?
[00:17:06]  Rape is absolutely evil and wrong.
[00:17:09]  Theft is absolutely evil and wrong.
[00:17:10]  Assault is absolutely evil and wrong.
[00:17:12]  And murder is absolutely evil and wrong.
[00:17:15]  So there's no ambiguity there.
[00:17:18]  But in terms of what risks you should take, that is a matter of a cost-benefit analysis.
[00:17:26]  Now, a cost-benefit analysis can lead you to great evil, right?
[00:17:30]  So amoral or evil or morally repulsive men might say, well, I'm not having any luck getting a woman to mate with me, right?
[00:17:41]  So this evil guy would then choose to rape.
[00:17:46]  Now, does this pass along his genetics?
[00:17:48]  Well, not very well because his victim will not want to care for the offspring.
[00:17:56]  But it's a higher chance than zero, and it's zero if you can't get anyone to mate with him, right?
[00:18:01]  So that's a cost-benefit analysis at a biological level that leads to the great evil of sexual assault and rape.
[00:18:08]  It's the same thing with theft.
[00:18:10]  A theft is generally pursued by people who are unloved.
[00:18:15]  Because if you're loved, you just ask people for things, right?
[00:18:19]  Freedomain.com slash donate.
[00:18:22]  Show me the love.
[00:18:22]  Show me the love.
[00:18:23]  Right, so, no, if you're loved, right, the people who are homeless have burned every bridge in their life, right?
[00:18:29]  There's nobody who wants to take care of them anymore.
[00:18:33]  There's no couch for them to crash on.
[00:18:35]  There's no one who'll give them a job.
[00:18:36]  Like, you know, maybe they're addicts or other people with dysfunctions who, there's nobody left to love them.
[00:18:42]  And so people steal or end up in these kinds of situations because they are unloved.
[00:18:47]  And love is the great shield against these kinds of misfortunes and disasters.
[00:18:51]  So, it's like the question that people could ask me and say, well, should I start my own business or should I work for someone else?
[00:19:01]  Right?
[00:19:02]  So, I mean, if you're a male, particularly a white male, you know, you may have some difficulties getting hired, so maybe it's better for you to start your own business and so on, right?
[00:19:12]  So, I can remind people of the various factors involved, but I can't tell anyone what to do.
[00:19:20]  So if people have really messed up parents that are putting them down and so on, right?
[00:19:25]  Obviously, it's not immoral, it's not evil to be in contact with abusive people.
[00:19:32]  It may be immoral to put your children under the care, quote, care of abusive people.
[00:19:41]  Like if you have abusive parents and they babysit your kids and they yell at your kids or hit your kids, that could be immoral.
[00:19:47]  Or certainly the hitting, yes, because you're delivering them.
[00:19:49]  And to evil.
[00:19:51]  But if you yourself, and I've said this before, like you don't have the right to put your children in abusive situations, but now you yourself, it's your choice.
[00:20:01]  If you want to spend time with abusive people, I don't recommend it, but it's not a moral question like good and evil.
[00:20:09]  It may be a functionality question, it may be a happiness question, and so on, but it's not a foundationally moral question.
[00:20:16]  It certainly is.
[00:20:18]  A question of love, if people care about you and then don't seem to care that you spend time with people who put you down or insult you, well, that's a lack of love, right?
[00:20:28]  That's a lack of love.
[00:20:30]  So, I can point out the costs and benefits, right?
[00:20:34]  So, I can say, well, if you spend time with abusive parents, that's going to really hamper the quality of the man or woman who's going to date you, right?
[00:20:44]  It's going to affect your self-esteem and your confidence.
[00:20:46]  It's going to have negative effects.
[00:20:48]  On things, right?
[00:20:49]  It's like the doctor will tell you, if you keep smoking a pack a day of cigarettes, you're very likely to get sick.
[00:20:59]  Like 50% of smokers die from smoking, right?
[00:21:02]  So, but he can't knock the cigarette out of your hand all the time.
[00:21:09]  So, when people come to me for a moral answer, I will give them the moral answer with great certainty and hopefully some vivacity.
[00:21:17]  And convincibility.
[00:21:20]  But when people come to me with a cost-benefit analysis, I will point out the costs and benefits, but I won't tell them what to do because the costs and benefits have to be weighed within the mind of each person.
[00:21:32]  Right?
[00:21:33]  So, should you spend time with abusive parents?
[00:21:36]  Well, let's say that your father is dead, your mother is on her deathbed, and you are going to inherit $10 million.
[00:21:45]  And you are going to devote that to the spread of peaceful parenting.
[00:21:48]  And, you know, does the cost-benefit mean that you can go visit your mother a couple of times on her deathbed and not confront her about the wrong that she's done, but instead take the money and do some good with it?
[00:22:00]  You know, given that it's not immoral to go and see your mother on her deathbed, and given that you can do great good with the money, this is not a crime and punishment Raskolnikov situation, right, which is who kills a porn broker and her sister to get money to, quote, do good, right?
[00:22:14]  So, you can see the cost-benefit.
[00:22:18]  So, I can't tell people what to do with regards to cost-benefits.
[00:22:21]  I can tell them what to do with regards to morality, sure, yes, but that's UPB, right?
[00:22:27]  But I can't tell people what to do with regards to weighing costs and benefits.
[00:22:32]  And when you have a cost-benefit, such as, I have a genetic disorder that has an X percentage chance of transmitting to my children, should I have children?
[00:22:43]  That is not a moral question.
[00:22:46]  That is...
[00:22:47]  Now, obviously, if it's a 99% chance that your child will die before six months of age, that would be a pretty gruesome thing to go through.
[00:22:57]  And obviously, the odds...
[00:22:59]  I mean, that's an easy decision to make.
[00:23:00]  Not a pleasant decision to make, but it's like, that's no good, right?
[00:23:05]  If it's a 1% chance that your child might have eczema by the age of 50, well, that's, you know, slightly different.
[00:23:12]  Cost-benefit and, you know, very different odds and so on, right?
[00:23:15]  So, I can't give you that answer.
[00:23:19]  I think it is important to take all of the factors into consideration, but it's like trying to design policy, government policy, based on cost-benefit analysis rather than morality, right?
[00:23:33]  Well, if the government takes $5 million and creates 50 jobs, there's 50 jobs.
[00:23:37]  Ah, yes, but what about all the jobs that weren't created and so on?
[00:23:39]  It's like, well, how about the government just doesn't take their money in the first place?
[00:23:42]  That was the moral answer, right?
[00:23:43]  But yeah, cost benefits, not the province of moral philosophy.
[00:23:47]  And really, the only job that philosophy can do is not tell you the answer to cost-benefit calculations, but to remind you of the various factors and stakes involved so that you can make a more informed decision.
[00:23:57]  But the decision, of course, finally has to be yours.
[00:23:59]  All right.
[00:24:00]  I hope that helps, freedomain.com slash donate.
[00:24:02]  If you would like to help out, I would really, really super-duper appreciate it.
[00:24:05]  Have yourself a wonderful day.
[00:24:07]  Lots of love.
[00:24:07]  We'll talk to you soon.