All Episodes
Previous Next
June 3, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
30:15
The Philosophy of LOVE!
| Copy link to current segment

Time Text
All right, good morning, everybody.
This is Van Molyneux from Freedom, Maine, and great questions.
This is from Facebook.
I will get straight into them.
I did ask people for their philosophy questions, and you're provided in a magnificent fashion.
Thank you very much.
Matt asks me, "How did you come to the conclusion that love is based upon finding virtue in your partner?" Well, there is usually in the best formulations, there is both theoretical proof and empirical experience.
So, My wife is a wonderfully virtuous and courageous and steadfast and wonderful companion in this sort of life journey.
And I found that I just responded so positively to Strength and depth and insights and wisdom and virtues and all of that.
And so I had the empirical experience of responding to my wife and her virtues for many years before I became a sort of public philosopher.
So I had that experience, good nature, good humor.
Honestly, I could do hours praising her, but I think you get the general idea.
Her virtues inspired my virtues.
My virtues inspired her virtues.
So I had that experience for years before I became a public philosopher.
So having had that experience gave me sort of the empirical grounding for the theory as a whole.
Now, of course, I had dated and been in relationships before I met my wife and got married.
And those relationships were based upon, you know, attraction, fun, travel, and I mean, some virtues, of course, right?
But not the sort of really noble and consistent ones, not the sort of ones that a theory, it's really only consistent theory that allows you to have those kinds of virtues as a whole.
So, from that standpoint, those virtues that I saw before, In relationships, we're not consistent, or at least consistent enough to maintain that kind of love.
So, I mean, if you look at, let's talk romantic love, if you look at romantic love, you have to sort of ask yourself, what is the purpose of romantic love?
Why do we have it?
Now, the purpose of romantic love is a pair bonding for the sake of raising children.
Right?
That's other kinds of love and so on.
But the purpose of romantic love is to create a noble pair bonding for the having and raising of children.
And the purpose of raising children is the transfer of morality from parent to child.
I mean, the one thing that defines us as human beings, really, I would say the essential thing that defines us as human beings is our capacity for abstract morality.
Universal.
I mean, all, certainly all mammalian, or most mammalian parents teach their children some skills, right?
I mean, I guess, well, rabbits, there's just food everywhere, but if you look at wolves and other K-selected animals, they teach their children, or they teach their offspring how to hunt.
clients do the same thing.
And so, And so the transfer of skills is not what defines human beings.
the transfer of abstract concepts, and in particular, abstract morality.
We can talk about, of course, primary instance of that would be religion, in that, at least to our knowledge, it's not like a bunch of orcas or hyenas or porpoises are They're not teaching their children about abstract morality.
They're not teaching their offspring about gods and virtues and so on.
Ten Commandments.
And so what is uniquely human about romantic love is our capacity to process and understand virtue and then the purpose of romantic love is to create a stable pair bond wherein the transfer of abstract virtues is most efficiently transferred from the parents to the children.
And in this way, if you transfer your virtues from the parents to the children, then the children have the greatest chance of being loved.
Now, virtue, as I've proven in my 2008 book, Universally Preferable Behavior, A Rational Proof of Secular Ethics, morality is universal and rational.
It is objective.
And so the values or the virtues that we transfer from parents to children, the values and the virtues that we admire in our romantic partner are objective and universal and not subject to mere cultural whims and localized preferences.
It's like science.
The scientific method is universal and objective and morality is universal and objective.
So, in the formulation, love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous, is based upon that which is most human about us, which is our capacity to transfer moral values.
And, as a philosopher, the essence of philosophy, and I've got a free book you can get at EssentialPhilosophy.com, but with regards to philosophy, the one discipline that philosophy Well, I mean, architecture is about logic.
Science is about logic.
Physics is about logic.
Math is about logic.
It's not enough to say it's about logic.
Is it about Socratic reasoning?
No, I mean, lawyers do that all the time.
And it's one of the first things you're taught in law school, or at least used to be, is sort of Socratic reasoning, which is to say, if this is your That's how you test the universality of the proposed rule.
So, but the one thing that physics does not contain within it, morality, the scientific method does not contain within it, morality, mathematics, biology, all other disciplines that you could talk about, architecture, I mean, an architect could as easily create a concentration camp.
As he could an office building.
A sort of famous Monty Python sketch about the guy who's tried to merge the apartment building with an abattoir.
So, the one thing that philosophy deals with, in its essence, is morality.
And this is why, to destroy philosophy, you simply make morality subjective, and then philosophy becomes irrelevant.
You would destroy science by turning it into a cultural wimp.
The way that you neuter philosophy is to say that morality is relativistic and subjective.
And philosophy is not fundamentally about truth.
I mean, certainly truth is an essential methodology, but there are lots of disciplines that pursue the truth.
I mean, obviously courts try to get at I mean, the practice of farming was empirical for thousands of years, or tens of thousands of years before it became theoretical.
In other words, they just did what worked before they understood in an abstract sense why things worked.
With regards to philosophy, the truth of universal morality is the essence of philosophy.
And philosophy is the one thing that human beings do that is the most human.
That is the most human.
I mean, animals can count.
Obviously, they can't do abstract mathematics, but animals can count.
Animals use physics in order to get what they want.
A fish that will squirt water at hanging bugs to get them to fall into the water, and crows, of course, famously use particular physics principles to get at food that's hard to access, and so on.
So, what we love as humans must be the most human thing about us, otherwise romantic love would extend to include animals, which would be bestiality and so on.
So, we have to love what is most human about us.
What is most human about us is virtue.
And the best way to practice virtue consistently is to have a robust understanding of moral abstractions.
In the same way that if you want to be a consistently good farmer, then you need to have a good abstract understanding of soil and sunlight and nutrients and winter crops and crop rotation and all kinds of you need to have a good theoretical understanding in order to be an effective farmer.
So, the other thing So, you know, when everyone's young and hot, then lust, and, you know, nothing against lust.
It's a fine aspect of human nature or animal nature.
So, when everyone is young and hot and in sort of peak, Physical condition and lust is very, very important.
But how does love maintain itself as people age out, as you get, you know, less sex at times over the course of your relationship, you know, especially when there are young children involved and people get ill and, you know, just as you age and so on, right?
So, love, in order to sustain itself over the course of, you know, a 50 or 60 year relationship, Love has to hook into something that grows, not something that fades.
I mean, if a woman, quote, loves a man's beautiful hair, well, you know, 80% of men are losing their hair in late middle age, right?
And even if you maintain your hair, it doesn't stay as lustrous and colorful as when you're young.
If a man loves, quote, loves a woman's, you know, hard body, hot body figure, it's fine.
She's not going to have that when she's 80 or 70, right?
So, if a woman or a man, more so woman to male, if she loves a man's potential, well, by the time he's 70, 80, he's either manifested his potential or he's not, but either way, his potential is not ahead of him, but rather behind him.
So to love someone's potential.
You could sort of go through the list of all of these things and you can...
Now, what is it that grows over the course of our life?
Assuming that we, you know, learn and have self-criticism and self-knowledge and so on and take feedback, what is it that grows over the course of our lives?
Well, what grows over the course of our lives is wisdom and virtue.
I mean, I'm a wiser man now than I was 10 years ago.
I'm certainly wiser than I was 30 years ago or 40 years ago.
When I was in my teens, so wisdom grows over the course of life.
Wisdom, moral courage, and strength in the advocacy, consistency with and pursuit of virtue.
And so, what is it that replaces youthful beauty and energy and all of that?
And, you know, the robust health that generally comes with youth, what is it that replaces that?
Well, virtue.
So if you love...
And if a romantic and sexual love is tied into an admiration of virtue, then you get, you know, great romantic and sexual love over the course of your life that grows in strength and depth.
And you can worship someone for the manifestation of that which is most human, which is So it just seems like a massive win-win at every conceivable level to hook things into virtue.
Now, of course, and this is why I sort of add that love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous.
So the reason I formulate it that way is, I have to say, involuntary.
Because There are, of course, a large number of people, I mean, it seems sometimes an overwhelming majority of people, who will tell you that you must love them, that you owe them love.
You know, this can happen with parents, you know, but I'm your mother, you must love me, and so on.
And I have to say that it's involuntary.
It cannot be willed.
Now, of course, we understand this with a wide variety of other things, both physical and mental.
If you don't like math, you can't will yourself to love math.
I mean, maybe you could get better at it and be less, I don't know, resistant to it.
But you can't, if there's a particular food you don't like, like I found when I was growing It would make me nauseous.
And I couldn't make myself like a food that I did not like.
You can't force yourself to understand a language that you do not speak or know.
You cannot, with regards to, say, sexual desire or lust, if, let's say, you prefer slender women, you cannot force yourself to have a lustful or sexual response to women who are morbidly obese.
You can't will that kind of stuff.
And that's really important, because if you believe that love and respect If you say,
or if you have in your belief that someone can tell you that you have an obligation to love him or her, and you believe that love is something that is willed, then people will exploit you.
Because, of course, it's a whole lot easier.
Like, if you are, let's say, a morbidly obese woman, it is a whole lot easier to lecture a man that he should find you sexually desirable rather than lose a couple of hundred pounds.
I mean, losing a couple of hundred pounds is a very big and difficult thing.
And then, of course, keeping the weight off and dealing with all the excess skin.
It's a very big and deep and horrible challenge to achieve and maintain.
So, it's a lot easier if you're morbidly obese to lecture a man that he should find you sexually desirable rather than to lose the weight and have the kind of figure that a man might be drawn to if he prefers slender women.
So, in the same way, it's a lot easier to lecture and bully and manipulate and harangue and nag someone into, quote, loving you than it is to be consistently virtuous and have love be drawn from them.
In the inevitable consequence of this formulation of love, that love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
It's a lot easier to steal than to create.
It's a lot easier to exploit than to trade.
It's a lot easier to harangue someone into believing that they should love you than it is to perform the acts of consistent virtue that will generate love in and of itself.
A virtuous heart, bullying, It's easy.
Destruction is easy.
Creation is hard.
Production and trade is difficult.
Ex theft and exploitation is relatively easy.
So I want to say involuntary.
Involuntary.
I mean, if you smoke, and don't, right?
But if you smoke cigarettes, if you believe that you can just nag your lungs into being healthy, then it's going to be very hard for you to quit smoking, right?
Because what happens in our lungs is beyond our willpower.
Right?
If you smoke, then you're harming your lungs.
If you eat too much and don't exercise, most likely you will gain weight.
That is an involuntary response.
Right?
If you hit your thumb with a hammer, you will injure your thumb regardless of your opinion on things.
And assuming you have a functioning nervous system, it'll hurt like hell to train you to not do that.
So if we look at...
quote, love because someone tells you that you owe them.
The creation of imaginary debts is the foundation of exploitation, and the creation of imaginary debts is usually based upon You are a bad person if you don't, say, love your mother.
Now, of course, if your mother is virtuous and kind and loving and morally good and strong, then you'll love her.
That will be a natural response to that.
So, it is to protect you from exploitation that I tell you that love is involuntary.
So, if somebody says, you ought to love me, you owe me phone calls, you owe me time at Christmas, you owe me a card on whatever, right?
Then you look inside and you say, what are my feelings about this?
And the way I've communicated this to listeners, as I say, so if you're having a difficult relationship with, say, your mother, the way that you can figure out your emotions about that is, you know, that the phone rings and now, you know, maybe you have a personalized ring term for your mother, maybe the imperial theme from Star Wars, or maybe, you know, it says, your mother is calling, and then how do you feel?
Or you pick up the phone and say, mother's calling.
How do you feel in that moment, right?
That's a good summary of, I mean, when my wife calls, I run across the room to pick up the phone and eager to chat.
And my daughter too, friends.
But how do you feel in that moment?
That is your evaluation of that situation.
And rather than saying, well, I'm a bad person for having a negative response to my mother calling, and I owe her, and I got to pick it up, and I got to talk to her, even though I don't want to.
Well, that's just a form of bearing false witness.
And what you should do, in my humble opinion, is tell the truth.
Pick up the phone and say to your mom, you know, I'm kind of having a negative response to you calling, and I'm not saying that you're doing anything wrong, but I'm not really looking forward to these phone calls.
Can we talk about that and figure out what's going on?
I mean, you should have that honest conversation, right?
Do not bear false witness is foundational to philosophy.
I mean, honesty is a virtue.
And you can't have love in any relationship that's founded upon falsehood.
So if we're virtuous, it's important as well.
I mean, if your store is being robbed and a policeman comes in, right?
I mean, I don't know if it's true, but I remember hearing these rumors that one of the reasons that donut stores give out free donuts to cops is that cops will then drop by and they get a certain amount of protection because the thieves won't know when the cops are dropping by.
I don't know if it's true or not, but maybe that's one of the reasons for that cliche of the cop with the mustache and the...
So if your store is being robbed and a policeman comes along, comes in the door, you are very relieved and happy.
And you say, officer, I'm being robbed.
And then the officer arrests the thief, right?
So you want to protect your property.
The cop is there to enforce property rights for the most part, at least in this instance.
And so if your store is being robbed, cop walks in, Thrilled, happy, and relieved, right?
However, the thief is not thrilled, happy, or relieved.
The thief is very unhappy because the thief, rather than robbing you, is now going to get arrested.
So, if you look at these two responses to the cop walking in, the store owner, you as a store owner, very happy and relieved, the thief is very unhappy because you want to protect your property rights, the cop's there to do that, and the thief wants to violate your property rights, the cop is there to stop that.
So the cop walking in is positive for you and negative for the thief, in the same way that if you are a virtuous person, and again, this is like, we all aim towards it, like, I don't know if there's such a thing as perfect health, but there are people who eat well, exercise, maintain a healthy weight, and so on, and generally they tend to be healthier than people who don't exercise and are significantly overweight and eat badly and smoke and drink and blah blah blah, right?
I mean, the healthy person could get sick, and the person with bad health habits might live for quite a while, but in general, the odds are in your favor.
It's the same thing with virtue, right?
I mean, I don't know what it means to be perfectly healthy, but I do know the difference between healthy and unhealthy practices, and I don't know what it means to be perfectly virtuous, but I do know the difference between virtuous and good and evil practices.
So, Love is our involuntary response to virtue if we're virtuous, which means that if we value virtue, then seeing virtue manifested will give us a positive experience in the same way that the shop owner wanting to protect his property rights sees a cop who comes to protect his property in a positive light and the thief who wants to violate the store owner's property rights sees the cop coming by in a negative light.
He dislikes it.
In the same way, if you're trying to pass counterfeit bills and it turns out that the The store owner that you're trying to pass the counterfeit bills in, the store owner has a handy-dandy counterfeit detection machine.
He just waves it in front and it tells the store owner whether the bill is good or bad.
Well, you will have a negative experience as a counterfeiter if you see that machine, right?
Because it's going to expose you, particularly if you've already handed over the bill.
Otherwise, you can pretend you left something in your car and not come back.
In the same way, I'm sure that You know, when you go shopping every now and then, somebody will ask you to show the contents of your bag, right?
And my personal experience is, yeah, I paid for everything or I didn't buy anything.
You are welcome to look at the contents of my bag.
And by the way, thank you for providing this service, which keeps the costs low for the things that I'm buying.
I have no problem with that, right?
And immoral generally means antimoral, because immoral means that you are a predator, and morality is the defense or the exposure of your predations.
So if you are immoral, which is to say antimoral, then moral virtues become your enemy, right?
If you're a counterfeiter, the counterfeit detection machines become your enemy.
If you are a thief, then the cops become your enemy, and so on, right?
Or, I mean, I guess if you want to break into people's houses, then the Second Amendment becomes your enemy and self-defense laws become your enemy and so on.
So the natural enemy of virtue is anti-virtue and the natural enemy.
But the natural enemy of good is evil, and the natural enemy of evil is good.
So you will have a positive relationship.
To virtue, to manifestations of virtue, theories and practices of virtue, if you yourself are attempting to achieve a virtue, right?
If you are trying to get a gold medal and you come across a really great theory and practice of training that is going to vastly increase your chances to get the gold medal and maybe you're the only one who has it, then that's going to be a positive experience for you, right?
If you have bet against a particular athlete winning A gold medal.
Then that athlete coming across a great training and diet and exercise regime that is going to really increase his chances of getting the gold medal, that becomes a negative thing for you.
Because you want that athlete to lose because you bet against the athlete.
So, if you're the athlete or you want the athlete to win, you have a positive experience of a really great, new, powerful, and innovative diet and exercise and training regime if you want the athlete to lose as evil wants virtue.
To lose, then you will be unhappy.
Which is why, you know, this is why some people really rail against my work on universal ethics, universally preferable behavior, the rational proof of secular ethics.
And they also rail against the voluntary relationships that I talk about, and they also rail against this idea that love is our involuntary response to virtue, if we're virtuous.
And it's one thing to say, virtue, but it's another thing to define it, right?
So, all of these things sort of combined give you the capacity for love, that we love the virtue that we each manifest.
And, of course, we're going to each manifest it in a different kind of way because we're all individuals with individual strengths and weaknesses and so on, right?
So it's not like you're just loving some sort of template or some sort of like, oh, I found UPB in somebody's behavior, therefore I'm actually loving UPB and I'm indifferent to the person because everybody manifests virtue in their own way.
Some people do it personally, some people do it more abstractly, some people do it more empirically, some people do it locally, some people do it in a more universal sense or a worldwide sense, and some people manifest it with regards to taking care of animals or Like, there's so many different ways to manifest virtue that we do love the individual.
We love the individual combined with virtue.
We love them, or sorry, to put it more clearly, we love the manifestation of virtue which varies for each individual.
Your manifestation of UPB is going to be different from mine, my wife's is different from mine, and so on, right?
So, to me, it fulfills that which is most human.
It grows over time.
The involuntary nature of love protects you from love being demanded, which is...
It's like rape being voluntary or theft being charity.
It's a contradiction in terms.
Love is like health.
You can't will it.
You have to earn it.
You can't just have terrible health habits and will your body to be healthy.
You can't will abs.
You have to do some sit-ups.
And you can't will health.
You have to But you can't will health.
You can only will healthy habits.
You can't will love.
You can will the manifestation of virtue in your life, and then hopefully that will get you love.
So, I hope that makes sense.
I just wanted, I know it's a long explanation, but it is a really, really important topic and I really appreciate the person who brought that up and I hope And hopefully that, of course, will give you love in your life.
You get love in your life, and it is the greatest thing that is.
And so I hope that you will pursue that.
And of course, if you find what I say to be of value and helpful, if you could help me out at freedomain.com slash donate, I would really appreciate that.
You can help the show out.
Massively, gratefully, humbly, and deeply appreciate it.
And also, You can subscribe.
You can go to fdrurl.com slash locals to subscribe on the Locals platform.
You can try it for free for 30 days if you like it.
And there's a lot of really great premium shows only available to subscribers.
I hope that you will check that out.
Also, you get access to the AI that is trained on, you know, I mean, hundreds and hundreds of podcasts and my books and articles and so on.
So you can get really great stuff out of that.
There are premium shows, premium live streams, and so on.
So I hope that you will check that out.
You can also achieve the same thing at subscribestar.com forward slash free domain.
All right.
Lots of love, everyone.
Thank you so much.
I will get to the other questions.
I knew this one was going to be a long one, but I really do thank for your questions and time.
Lots of love.
▲
Export Selection