June 12, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
06:28
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| Time | Text |
|---|---|
| All right. | |
| So, sorry, just for the sake of time and argument, I'm going to give you the answer. | |
| So, the problem with consequentialism is it is a mysticism because the future is, to a large degree, unknowable and because costs and benefits are particular to individuals. | |
| So, it is subjective. | |
| To say we should judge a system by its outcomes. | |
| Now, some systems are better than others, for sure, in general sense and trends and so on, right? | |
| I get that. | |
| But the problem is, is that the future is unknowable because of free will. | |
| General trends can be understood, but the future is unknowable because of free will. | |
| So if you say, I'm going to judge the morality of a system by its outcome, Then you're saying that morality is dependent upon variations of choice. | |
| And you wouldn't say that about science, right? | |
| You wouldn't say, well, the experiment will work or won't work depending on people's free will and choices, right? | |
| The other problem, of course, with consequentialism is it lends itself enormously to The power of sophistry, right? | |
| There's a big problem with consequentialism is that it lends itself. | |
| So sophists are really great storytellers, right? | |
| So I'll give you sort of the example we're all familiar with, global warming, right? | |
| So global warming is, well, if you burn too much carbon, put too much carbon in the air, you're going to drown, extreme weather, millions of people are going to die, billions of people might die, you're not going to have any crops, you're going to be melting in your own, like, There was a movie, what was it, The Day After Tomorrow and so on. | |
| I think Ian Holm was in it, God help him. | |
| And in it was just like, oh, the helicopters are going to freeze to death in midair and there's going to be endless amounts of snow. | |
| And I remember reading one of these books about the ice age coming in the 70s and so on. | |
| And I remember the passage where they were like, oh, their bodies are already beginning to adapt to the cold by storing more fat and this. | |
| And it was very vivid and very powerful. | |
| Very, very. | |
| So, if you can convince people hell is another one, right? | |
| You can listen to a portrait of James Joyce, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. | |
| He has an incredibly powerful depiction or description of hell. | |
| incredibly sadistic and horrible and horrifying and you name it, right? | |
| Now, the problem with consequentialism is... | |
| The consequences don't exist in the present. | |
| So it comes down to whoever is the best storyteller and the people who are the best storytellers are the best liars because they're claiming knowledge they don't have, which is a long-term outcome of a particular system. | |
| Yeah, some people are convinced of the value of carbon taxes, for sure. | |
| And so, or, you know, there were these, I talked about this in a show today that I did this morning, all these people who are like, you know, ZPG, zero population growth, right? | |
| We're just going to drown in a Malthusian starvation scenario. | |
| You've got to have fewer children, and then it turns out you just need a lot of immigrants because you didn't have enough children. | |
| The very sinister pivot in society that I've talked about forever and ever. | |
| Amen. | |
| So, the problem with consequentialism is the future is unknowable, and therefore, you tend to get swayed by the best storyteller. | |
| And the best storytellers tend to terrify you. | |
| Because people respond much more strongly to negative stimuli than positive stimuli for reasons that we understand. | |
| If your milk is only slightly rotten, you're going to taste it, right? | |
| If there's only, you know, three rotten peas in your mouth full of food, you're going to taste it and spit it out. | |
| Like, you need to be much more sensitive to negative stimuli than to positive stimuli, and therefore the future is dictated and dominated by... | |
| So, of course, the communists did all of this very powerfully and effectively, wherein they said, well, without communism, the world is going to be bifurcated into a massive amount of starvation-level poor and a few tiny wealthy capitalists at the top. | |
| And then they put this forward very passionately, very powerfully, and therefore they won. | |
| So consequentialism, since people are mystically talking about a future that they do not know, and it doesn't matter if they get it wrong, because when sophists lie to you about the future and get you to surrender your power, by the time it turns out that they're wrong, they already have your power, right? | |
| I mean, the Marxists got just about everything wrong. | |
| This is why they hate the bourgeoisie, because the bourgeoisie are not supposed to exist, and they became the most powerful economic and political force in the world. | |
| Certainly, boomer time, post-Second World War, sure, even before that, in many ways. | |
| But by the time you figured out that they were just lying to you, they already have the power. | |
| When I was a kid, it was global cooling, then global warming. | |
| Now it's just climate change, because climate, by definition, is going to change, so they're never wrong. | |
| But you see, they get all of these taxes and controls and all of that in, and then by the time you find out that they're full of shit, they're just a bunch of sophists, they already have the power and you can't get it away from them, except through, you know, well, things that we don't talk about here. | |
| So, this is why consequentialism is not immoral and is not rational. | |
| It's a claim of knowledge that doesn't exist, which is outcome for the future. | |
| It says a system can be determined whether it's good or bad, whereas Even the most brutal systems are positive for some people. | |
| You don't see the leader of North Korea waking up every day and saying, I can't stand it. | |
| I've got to liberate these people because blah, blah, blah. | |
| He loves having the power and it's good for him and so on. | |
| It's not good for the majority. | |
| But then you've split people into things it's good for and things it's bad for. | |
| And again, you have general definitions called a human being and then opposite benefits and costs to each individual. | |
| So none of it works. | |
| No, I think good is tied up with goal. | |
| Goal. | |
| Okay. | |
| I completely agree. | |
| All right. | |
| So good is something that manifests in the future if you're omniscient, which human beings aren't. | |
| In a sense, this is why |
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