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Aug. 6, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
36:57
Is Morality About Kindness?
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Well, good morning everybody, Stefan Molinu from Freedomain, freedomain dot com slash donate pinch punch first day of the month.
We are talking about August the first twenty twenty five.
Hope you're having a great day.
I wanted to tie up some loose ends in my brain, and you might as well bear witness, I think it'll do some good for the world.
But yesterday I did a show where we talked about the origins of evil, and people were talking about evil being the infliction of intentional harm.
The infliction of intentional harm to others.
Now, it's funny, you know, because I like to think of myself as a fairly rational guy, but I'm telling you a lot of it is just gut.
Now, the gut doesn't prove anything.
But my gut is like that is not that can't be right, that's not satisfying.
And not to compare myself, of course, to illustrious folks, but I always remember the story of Frank Sinatra, and that Frank Sinatra would be like singing with a full orchestra.
I don't know, like eighty instruments or whatever, right?
And Frank Sinatra would be able to pick out one, say, bassoon that was a little off.
Oh, oh, oh, think we've got a little stranger in there.
And I've always loved that story.
I mean, any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from magic, and any sufficiently advanced skill seems indistinguishable from psychic abilities.
So, of course, I have been studying and debating and reasoning for over forty over forty years now.
And it gives me good instincts about this stuff.
And yesterday my instincts were going off full tilt boogie and this argument about in the intention infliction the intentional infliction of harm, I pushed back against it by providing some counter examples where you have to say harm becomes complicated to define, right?
And the reason that it becomes complicated to define is because obviously if you need an emergency tracheotomy, you're pretty happy if there's a doctor around to do it.
The Heimlich maneuver I actually interviewed the woman who's the daughter of Dr. Heimlich, Janet Heimlich, many years ago.
And if you, since somebody needs to give you the Heimlich maneuver because you're choking and they break your rib, well, that's the intentional infliction of harm, but it's not sadistic and it's with the larger goal and good.
So then you have to balance present harms and future harms.
It all becomes very complicated.
And things that are very complicated become impossible to manage from a moral standpoint.
Right?
And we, you know, I always go back to this.
We expect maybe two, three, four-year-old little kids to be moral, right.
And if we expect kids to be moral, it can't be that it's so complicated.
A coach who's pushing you to run faster, harder, personal trainer who's telling you to lift more weights or whatever, is definitely causing you harm.
Ah, yes, but in the long run, all that kind of stuff, right?
Now, what does it mean by the long run?
when is the balance, all of these things are very complicated.
And I think they would have to do with aesthetically preferable behavior.
But it's really tough to say, well, you got to find just the right calibration and balance between short-term pain and long-term gain and so on, right?
And of course, these claims don't exist outside of assertion.
So for instance, a bully could say, well, the reason I'm bullying this kid is to toughen his Yes, it does.
So can a bully then say, I'm trying to to toughen him up sure is it true sometimes yeah does that make bullying okay or moral or good no no that doesn't that doesn't we We understand that doesn't work, right?
Sometimes if kids are really irresponsible with their property, the parents will take it away.
And this is to teach the kid to be more careful or to treat his possessions more carefully or things like that, right?
Can a thief then say, well, I'm just teaching him to respect his property.
I mean, he left something.
He left his bike out on the front lawn.
He doesn't ever put it away.
I'm taking it away from him to teach him a lesson.
See, these claims become virtually impossible to adjudicate.
adjudicate.
I mean, obviously there are clear ones where it's bad and there are clear ones where it's good, but there's a lot of gray areas.
And the reason we need principles is there are a lot of gray areas in life.
Most of the decisions that we make are not world-spanning Genghis Khan good or evil decisions.
They're little decisions to tell the truth or to hold our tongue, to confront someone, or to back away, to do something shady at work or not to do something shady at work all of these are those are the decisions that we normally have to make we don't usually have the decision to go to war or not, but just to tell the truth in the public square is the big decision that we have to make.
So anyone can claim that what they're doing is for the great good, right?
I mean, the communists do this all the time.
And the communist philosophy is justifying the use of violence in order to secure a happy, productive, peaceful, wealthy world for the proletariat.
So the communist submits a famous statement, you cannot make an omelet without breaking a few eggs.
You cannot achieve the good in the world without the use of violence.
And of course, the eggs are broken, the ominant never shows up, but the sadists really enjoy breaking the eggs, for sure.
So, I'm always suspicious of, and this is true within myself, not of others, I'm always suspicious when the examples are obvious, because morality is about the non-obvious examples.
There's no nutritional book that says, don't eat arsenic and gravel.
Because obviously you shouldn't eat arsenic or gravel, so you don't need a book.
For that, we need a book for the challenging cases, the non-obvious cases.
So when people say, well, evil is when you intentionally inflict harm on someone.
I mean, that sounds good.
But then of course you bring in the, well, you can harm people in the short run for the greater good in the long run.
I mean, totalitarian regimes that euthanize people are saying, well, we have to do this for the sake of preserving our scarce medical resources for others and so on, right?
COVID was a lot about short term sacrifices for the greater good in the long term, which, you know, in general, very often did not turn out to be the case.
So anyone can make that claim.
And since the proof of the claim resides in the future, how do you deny it now?
Right, so a bully who says, I'm bullying this kid to toughen him up, and coaches do it all the time.
Coaches push kids, sometimes make them cry, and they say, but it'll toughen them up in the long run.
It worked for me.
It'll work for them.
So the problem is that all moral claims that require the future to be validated can never be proved.
in the present.
That was an awkward way to put it.
Let me take another round at that sentence.
It is impossible to prove the current validity of moral claims when the proof exists only in the future.
The future isn't here yet.
So is this right or is this wrong?
Is this right or is this wrong?
Well, if the proof of the rightness or wrongness of the action lies in the future, then you can't ever have moral certainty in the present.
Now, UPB, abstract principles, give you moral certainty.
The initiation of force, respect for property, no rape, theft, assault, and murder, these are all validated universally and therefore they're not dependent upon time, whereas the intentional infliction of harm requires a couple of things.
It requires that you read someone's mind because everybody who will claim, oh, I didn't mean to.
That's what you always hear, right?
Oh, I didn't mean to.
I didn't mean it was an accident.
Right?
I mean, even somebody who, like, it's pretty wild.
Even people on X, they will, you know, say that I'm wrong and dumb and things like that.
And then I sort of call them out for their rudeness.
Like, I mean, I didn't mean to offend you.
I was just being blunt.
Right?
So, intentions are very difficult to read.
So, all moral systems that rely upon mind reading cannot be validated objectively.
So, He says, I thought he wanted me to have it.
I thought he was done with it.
I thought he wanted me to have it.
Okay.
How do you adjudicate that?
I mean, it's true, of course, that you could make that claim even under UPB.
But that is a specific instance.
that needs to be adjudicated, but UPB does not require mind reading.
It does not require an analysis of intentions.
I mean, as a theory, right?
Sometimes you have to, I mean, the difference between first degree murder and, I don't know, negligent manslaughter or something like that, negligent homicide.
No, homicide's just any death, right?
Anyway, some sort of manslaughter or negligent, whatever, right?
The difference is that one is willed, the other one is not willed, but results from negligence.
So there's a certain amount of intention there.
So you do have to, like murder is wrong, but first degree versus third degree crime of passion versus, you know, you hired a hitman or whatever, you planned that a week in advance.
Those are different things.
So UPB, in the theory, does not require calculating effects in the future as a theory it does not require calculating effects in the future and upp does not require an analysis of intention now specific adjudications of upp well i'm trying to think so specific so if you steal something from someone's yard and you thought it was that
they didn't want you to have it like maybe there was a sign that Next to a couch that says take me and then like 15 feet away there was a bike and you took the bike thinking that both things were being offered right so there could be something like that.
Again, pretty rare stuff, but the theory doesn't require that.
The adjudication of a particular instance may require that.
The theory doesn't require an analysis of intentionality, and it doesn't require the guessing of future effects.
Because if your moral theory requires that which can be lied about, you don't have an objective moral theory, and I think that's what I'm really talking about here.
I mean, this is the classic.
He said, she said stuff regarding non-interest.
Non-injurious rape.
So, I mean, sorry to discuss such an ugly subject, but rape is the unambiguous moral wrong.
Stealing, you could be stealing something back.
Assault could be self-defense.
Murder could also be self-defense.
But, or killing could be self-defense.
But a rape is, there's no ambiguity.
It's like this, it's just, it's evil.
In and of itself.
There's no self-defense rape, right?
So, with regards to rape, the big challenge societies have always faced is the he said, she said dilemma where she voluntarily went to the man's house, she had some a couple of drinks but not enough to be incapacitated,
they had sexual activity, and then the next and then there's no injuries of any kind, she stays over, she leaves the next morning, and then later she says that the sex was non-consensual, but there are no witnesses, there are no injuries, and there's no evidence.
And this is a horrible situation.
I mean, honestly, horrible because there are certainly times where the woman really felt bullied or pressured or the man made some kind of threat that was not recorded or something like that, right?
So this absolutely..
times where it could be non-consensual, and there are other times where it the man had every reason to believe or reasonable reasons to believe that it was consensual but later there's a withdrawal of the consent and it's just it's a big ugly difficult impossible really to adjudicate kind of mess so what do you do well of course society by not allowing men and women to be alone in those kinds of situations to for
them to be married and and so on that is really all that society can do because you can't adjudicate these kinds of things that's the he said she said, dilemma.
And so if you have a moral system that requires mind reading or the guessing of future effects, which is the intentional infliction of harm, then you have a problem because you have a non-objective, non-universal, non-rational, because it's relying on intentions in future guesswork.
The theory, right, the theory.
Now, again, I'm not, UPB does not adjudicate individual instances, right?
UPB says that sealing can never be universally preferable behavior.
UPB is the respect for property rights.
It doesn't adjudicate every complex land dispute or neighbor dispute over a tree.
Those things would have to be adjudicated.
So, but the adjudication, of course, adjudication exists because of ambiguity as a whole, but the moral theory cannot itself contain ambiguity.
And the moral theory itself cannot contain, which is why UPB doesn't contain ambiguity.
It doesn't require mind reading.
It doesn't require...
I mean, to take an example that, you know, sounds extreme, but that''s all right.
Somebody cuts somebody else's throat in a restaurant and then says, oh, I thought he was choking.
I heard him cough.
I thought he was choking.
I mean, that's a challenge, right?
Let's say the guy is a doctor or whatever, right?
It's tough.
You know, but then as I was trying to give him the tracheotomy, he writhed and, you know, the knife went in.
that's complicated stuff.
So that's somebody who's...
Like you won't choke to death because I'm giving him a tracheotomy or something like that, right?
So, or, you know, some guy gives a woman that breaks a woman's ribs giving her the Heimlich maneuver and then says, well, I thought she was choking and she said, like, I had a mild cough.
What are you doing, right?
So, UPB says, of course, that assault, the initiation of force is absolutely wrong, without regard to future results, without regard to mind-reading intentionality or anything like that.
These things are wrong.
The do-no-harm theory runs into complications even in the theory, not just the adjudication of individual disputes or questions.
If the theory is ambiguous and requires facts not in evidence, right?
Then the theory can't work.
The theory needs to be absolute, and then the adjudication deals with complex cases.
So the law needs to say that murder is wrong.
Every court trial is there to adjudicate individual charges of murder.
The law and the court.
And the court deals with all the complex.
requirements for proof beyond a reasonable doubt.
So if the theory requires mind reading and future harms, then the theory itself is ambiguous and requires facts not in evidence.
So that's a problem.
So there's a difference between the theory and the adjudication, between the law and the trial.
And if the trial deals with ambiguity, the trial deals with
I mean, if it was absolute, then, like, if there was video of the person actually killing, murdering the guy or whatever and it was unambiguous there wouldn't be a trial right I mean almost certainly or if there was a trial it'd be very short so ambiguity is for the adjudication it's for the trial to to unravel all of that.
If the theory contains ambiguity, then you can't know what is right or wrong in principle.
In other words, every examination of moral activity is a trial, which is like trying to build a bridge through trial and error.
rather than having principles of engineering that are absolute.
So you have principles of engineering in physics that are absolute, and then you have building a bridge, which, you know, you don't want to over-engineer it.
Make it too strong is a waste of resources.
You don't want to make it too weak because then it collapsed.
So that's the tension and the ambiguity.
What's the right amount of time and money and energy to spend on building a bridge?
I don't know.
It depends.
Is it a bicycle bridge?
Or is it a bridge that has to take a hundred trucks?
All of these things are different, right?
It's easy to over-engineer.
and to build a bridge that is too strong and the waste resources.
And it is easy to under-engineer.
So the physical building of a bridge is complex and ambiguous, and there isn't a final right answer.
There's just a right-ish answer, a good enough-ish answer.
Like you can't build a bridge and say, well, this bridge is objectively 0.5% over-engineered or under-engineered.
You can't say that.
You just come up with a thing, right?
You come up with a bridge.
Now, the laws of physics are universal and absolute.
building of the bridge, is to some degree subjective and ambiguous.
What is the Is that over-engineered or under-engineered?
I imagine it's quite over-engineered to be on the safe side.
Could you get away with something that didn't take four hippopotami but only 3.999 hippopotami?
Yeah, probably.
But it's a nice round number.
So that's what they do.
So you need objective universal rules.
And then sometimes the applications of those rules.
is going to have some subjectivity and some complexity and some ambiguity and you just kind of make make your best choice but if your theory is kind of a ambiguous, complex, multifaceted rule of thumb, squint, down the line, bunch of guesswork, then you don't have a moral theory.
And that's why feelings and consequentialist-based and mind-reading intentionality-based, quote, ethics aren't ethics.
It's confusing engineering with physics.
So if there's a medicine, for a particular illness, then sometimes people might need more or less of that medicine based upon their height, their weight, their size, or whatever, right?
So this medicine is good for this illness, it's the absolute, I mean, without allergies and stuff like that, just in general, but how much of a dose you give, that is a different matter.
So moral theories need to be absolute, which means self-contained, which means not ambiguous, not consequentialist, because if you say something is good or bad based upon its results, in six months, three months, five years, ten years, or whatever.
If you say that something is good based upon consequences in the future, then you cannot say at the moment whether it is good or not.
And of course, we have, morality is about the future.
Morality is about making decisions in the present to have integrity and virtue in the future.
But if you cannot make decisions about morality in the present because you have to wait for the consequences in the future, then you have no standard by which you can morally judge your actions.
You know, as we were talking about in the show last night, if I break up with some woman, then she's sad, she's going to cry.
and she could be sad for months.
So am I intentionally inflicting harm?
Well, I mean, my purpose is not to inflict harm, but harm is going to be the inevitable consequences of me withdrawing my affections.
Of course, the same would happen in reverse if I wanted the relationship to continue and she didn't and so on, right?
So your moral theory needs to be absolute.
It cannot rely on things that people can lie about.
I didn't mean to, it wasn't my intention, and it can't rely on facts not in evidence, such as the effects weeks or months or years or decades or centuries down the road.
Also, the issue is the seen versus the unseen, which is...
However, when you have a bunch of extra people in the country, the price of housing is higher, access to health care is diminished, and so on, right?
And traffic is worse, and people speed because they're frustrated, and then there's car crashes.
Like there's a whole bunch of harm that happens.
And the problem is the seen versus the unseen.
It's that if you're going to make decisions on what appears to be inflicting harm, then you are going to be seeing the most obvious harms.
but not the subtle, unrecorded, abstract harms, which are very real, but can't really be traced.
That's the old argument that if the government spends $5 million to create.
50 jobs, then the people who get those jobs are very happy, but the 100 people who didn't get jobs because the $5 million was taken out of the economy, they don't even know that they lost their jobs, right?
So, I mean, this is the scene versus the unseen was big under COVID, right?
In that there were people who lost their jobs, wasn't really recorded.
There were people who lost their businesses, weren't really recorded.
There were people who didn't go to the doctor or the hospital.
That wasn't really recorded.
And so, it's all sort of scattered and diminished.
And then there were people who died of COVID and those were recorded and vivid.
And so, if you have a moral system based upon not doing harm, then obvious harms will be opposed by that moral system, which will often create ripple harms that are not detected by the system, which are actually worse than the initial harms, right?
So, yeah, it doesn't work.
It doesn't work as a moral system.
and moral system, cannot have within it things which cannot be known at the time.
A moral system cannot have elements of decision-making that cannot be known at the time.
And intentionality cannot be known, because people can lie about it and fake it.
And the moment that intentionality becomes a big deal in a moral system, then people would just fake intentionality to make it impossible to prove that they had malign intent, right?
I mean, if you look at the libel laws in the United States, it says, well, you know, if you're a public figure, people can say whatever they want about you, as long as it's not done with actual malice or a reckless disregard for the truth.
And everybody knows that who's in the media, so they just make sure that they never regard.
They don't write themselves down sound saying, well, I i have a reckless disregard for the truth of this or i have actual malice towards this person right they don't do anything like that at all and so it becomes impossible really to protect yourself in many instances as a public figure according to American defamation laws.
So if intentionality becomes important when judging a harm, then people will simply say to all of their friends, oh, I hope to really do good with this.
And they write things in their diary saying, oh, I really want to do good with this.
And then they send emails saying, oh, I really want to do good with this.
And they create a whole trail saying that they really want to do good with this.
And then they have protection against the charge that they were intentionally inflicting harm.
So I don't know, I've got a paper trail a mile wide and a light year long about how I wanted to do good, right?
So you can just get around it that way.
And you can't oppose bullying because bullying toughens up some kids, some people, right?
Somebody could say, oh, I didn't pay my employees because I really want them to become entrepreneurs.
And I remember when I wasn't paid for a job when I was younger, I became an entrepreneur, which has been great for me, so I just decided not to pay my employees because I want them to become entrepreneurs because it was the best thing that ever happened to me.
Yeah, good luck with that, right?
So a moral system cannot contain a requirement for facts impossible.
to know ahead of time and of course the future result or future effect of a moral choice cannot be by definition cannot be known in the present so mind reading, you can't know.
You can't do it.
And so can't be part of your moral system.
And future effects, you can't know by definition in the present.
Therefore, can't be part of your moral system.
Which is why the do-no-harm stuff does not satisfy any of the requirements of a moral system and will be subject to enormous amounts of manipulation and corruption and also of course telling the truth causes people harm an obvious example is a doctor who tells you that you have a disease causes you emotional harm.
Okay, now you can get it treated, maybe you can get better, but it does cause harm.
And again, you're looking at the future consequences that are positive down the road.
And of course, sometimes the doctor tells you that you have a disease that you can't get cured you can't get better and if you tell someone who told a lie you told a lie that causes them harm and if a cop catches a criminal that causes the criminal harm and if someone believes that they're a great singer and you tell them that they're not a great singer you know this sort of Simon Cowell stuff if someone thinks they're a great singer and you tell them they're not a great singer they get very upset
and unhappy and that causes them harm and it might break their heart for months or maybe even years if there are a hundred actors up for a role only one actor gets chosen, the other 99, who aren't as good or appropriate to the role, experience harm.
And, I mean, honestly, this just can go on and on.
If someone believes that all humanity is a blank slate made out of silly putty that society can mold into whatever it wants, if people believe that, and then you prove to them that human beings are not a blank slate,
that there are built-in capacities that vary between people that they cannot surmount, then those people get upset.et about something and it turns out that it was not a bad thing but in fact a good thing, right?
I mean, you're mad because you miss a plane leaving, you're late, you miss the plane leaving, and the plane crashes, right?
So you think, oh my gosh, I'm harmed, my interests are harmed, things are bad, things are negative, and then you find out that things are positive.
You get fired from a job, you're very unhappy.
But it turns out that because you got fired from the job, you end up starting your own business, and that ends is how you feel better right i certainly had a lot of things in my life i i really work hard and pretty successfully at this point to not judge whether things are good or bad it was negative for me to be de-platformed but it opened up a whole bunch of other things that were very positive for
me.
So am I going to say that's bad?
Well, it's kind of hard to say that for me.
Every relationship that I had that didn't work out was negative as a whole because you want your relationships to work out.
So it was negative, but I would trade all of those relationships as I guess I did for the wonderful marriage I have with my wife.
So although it was negative at the time, it turned out to be positive.
know when I left theater school I was unhappy because I loved the acting world and so on but then it turned out to be put it put me into a much better and happier and more productive direction So, I mean, idea that in the infliction of harm and so on, it requires all of this mind reading.
It requires this guess about what's going to happen in the future.
And it is just a form of hedonism, right?
It is a form of hedonism.
Because if you say, well, causing people harm, the intentional infliction of harm, again, intentional is mind reading.
And people can just lie about it.
I didn't mean to.
So you don't have any objective moral standard.
People could just wriggle out of the moral standard.
You can't wriggle out of stealing can never be universally preferable behavior.
Like you can never wriggle out of that.
That is an absolute...
So if you're giving people all of these get out of jail free cards and all of this objectivism, you can't say that you have a moral standard.
It's hedonism.
And How does it rope in people who don't agree with you?
This is the most fundamental thing, right?
How do you deal with people who don't agree?
Well, a scientist, a scientific convention does not invite people who reject science, who are opposed to science, right?
That is not what they do.
I won't invite you to that.
So, UPB, because Just understand.
UPB is an erotite logic that children can understand.
And therefore, the only way you can.
reject UPB is to reject logic, reality, language, and embrace rank hypocrisy, because you can only reject UPB by accepting UPB.
It is universally preferable behavior.
To reject universally preferable behavior is a ridiculous self-contradiction, and so you would be revealed as incredibly emotionally immature.
You would be revealed as manipulative, you would be revealed as maybe insane, either epistemologically or morally, and you would just be rejected, right?
You would just be rejected from, you would be ejected from any rational debate.
And people would have no problem condemning you for your, well, mental issues, mental problems, immaturity, hypocrisy, manipulation.
I mean, you would just be kicked out and dumped from all of that, right?
So, and society having, like, because society, including children upwards, would accept UPB, people would have no problem if you acted to violate UPB using ostracism or coercion against you, right?
This would be fully accepted and fully understood.
Like, people who advocate for, oh, let's bring back, you know, they would say something crazy like, oh, let's bring back slavery, right?
Those people would be ostracized from decent or civil society.
They wouldn't be invited to conferences.
They would never achieve any particular artistic or social or business or political success.
And so this would be, that's how it's dealt with.
That's how it's run.
So it's just a form of hedonism, which is what I don't like to intentionally inflict emotional harm, which I don't either, right?
It's not like I wake up in the morning and say, ooh, who can I harm today?
But the way that I view it is that if people have irrational, anti-rational thoughts in their mind, that means they can't be happy and they need to be confronted on those anti-rational thoughts so that they can be happy.
And in the same way that if I'm at the gym, and somebody is exercising in a way that is going to injure them for sure.
They're just going to hurt themselves.
Then I would feel pretty honor bound to say, you know, you shouldn't do it that way because you know here's what's gonna gonna gonna happen right like in the when i was doing sort of labor physical labor if somebody was like lifting not with their knees but with their back right you know that sort of you just you just come up like one of those dipping birds i would say you should lift with your knees not with your back that's gonna hurt your back you know that kind of stuff right if somebody were to say to me i haven't I've
never jogged before, but I'm going to run a marathon this weekend.
I would say, that's a bad idea.
You're going to hurt yourself.
You're going to, you know, really have a bad time because you need to work your way up to that.
You can't just go and run 26 miles and change without any preparation.
And because I want to help people.
I want to help people.
Particularly, of course, having seen in my family, having seen how mysticism wrecks people's lives, and seeing in my own life and the lives of other people that I know, how my rationality has helped save and create great, wonderful, happy lives and all of that.
I mean, if you have the cure to an illness that afflicts most people, then why wouldn't you want to spread that cure.
I mean, if people are in chronic pain and unhappiness and anger and just discontented and frustrated and tense and can't fall in love, and you have a cure for that, which is free, all that costs is your pride.
The only thing that the truth costs you is your pride.
Well, then you should spread that.
I mean, I want to hoard it for myself.
I mean, for both selfless and selfish reasons.
Yeah, it's just a form of hedonism.
Let's say somebody does like or prefer inflicting harm on people.
Well, how do you prove to them that they're wrong?
That's the big question.
I think that's pretty good.
I think we're 80% of the way there.
I'm sure there's a little bit more, but that's...
Look forward to your feedback.
Thank you for this great conversation.
Hugely appreciate it.
Freedomane.com slash donate.
Love you guys.
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