Oct. 16, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux
19:20
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| Oh, just a little follow up to the call earlier today, which is a very, very good call. | |
| And I'm always amazed and impressed at how much there is after forty four years in philosophy, there's this endless cavalcade of obvious in hindsight and basic questions that need to be answered and deserve to be answered. | |
| And the one that the fellow today came with, which was about the ethics of emergencies was very interesting. | |
| So I think that the UPB framework handles this. | |
| I try not to sort of wedge things in too much, but I think that the UPB framework handles this. | |
| So in UPB, you have universally preferable behavior, that which is preferable and enforceable. | |
| And we have aesthetically prefer preferable actions. | |
| That which are specific and a universal and not enforceable. | |
| So for instance, being on time. | |
| It's a specific action. | |
| It's good for everyone to be on time, it's better for everyone to be on time. | |
| As a good and evil, better worse, it's better to be on time, but it's not enforceable through violence. | |
| Another example, of course, would be, let's say not swearing in front of children. | |
| To swear in front of children would be an aesthetically negative action. | |
| It's a specific action, swearing, like being on time. | |
| It is universal, it is always better to not swear in front of children, but it's not enforceable violently. | |
| It would be enforceable through ostracism or detachment. | |
| If somebody keeps swearing in front of your kids, then you just don't hang with them, you don't spend time. | |
| Being polite or swearing at people or something like that, being polite, being reasonably diplomatic and so on is better than being, you know, rude or horrible. | |
| It's universal in that it's better as a whole. | |
| And again, this is the initiation of action, not necessarily response to action. | |
| If somebody swears at you, you can swear back, that's sort of the equivalent of self-defense. | |
| But it's not enforceable. | |
| So not swearing at someone or not being being polite rather than rude it's not enforceable. | |
| Because it's better not good and evil. | |
| It's better worse, not good and evil. | |
| And the reason why is that if somebody uses violence against you, you don't have an option. | |
| If somebody is late every time you get together, you have the option to avoid that peacefully. | |
| If somebody pulls a knife on you and says, give me your wallet, right, you don't have the option to avoid that peacefully. | |
| You have no responsibility in the matter. | |
| But if you have a friend who's always late or swears around your kids, you have a responsibility in the matter because you're voluntarily bringing that person into your life. | |
| So aesthetically preferable actions, uh being nice, not swearing around kids, not swearing at people, being reasonably polite and not really rude, making a joke about someone's kid that's really harsh and cruel, you can't put people in jail for that. | |
| You can't, you know, shoot people for that. | |
| Because you're voluntarily bringing that person into your life, and therefore it is not coercively inflicted upon you. | |
| You can't have something inflicted upon you that is also your choice. | |
| You can't say I choose to have sex with this man, and he's raping me. | |
| Again, assuming that he's not got a knife your throat, in which case you're not choosing to have sex with him, you're choosing to not be stabbed. | |
| So in UPB under aesthetically preferable actions, APA, you cannot use violence against a person you have invited into your life repeatedly. | |
| You can choose to leave the situation. | |
| It's the same thing that if you're in a bar and somebody starts saying mean things to you, you can leave the situation. | |
| You can move, you can go to another bar, you can go home. | |
| But once somebody is using violence against you, then you're no longer in the situation where you are choosing to have this in your life. | |
| Now it's being inflicted upon you violently, and there's no escape. | |
| There's a sort of tried and true way to get someone in trouble, which is to verbally provoke them until they put hands on you in anger, and then In many places, this is not legal advice, this is just my amateur understanding. | |
| But what you do is you provoke someone verbally until they lay hands on you in anger, and then you can hit them, right? | |
| This is a friend of mine who was a bouncer many years ago and was sort of telling me about this. | |
| So the question of who you save in a medical emergency, does that fall under aesthetically preferable actions? | |
| So if you're a doctor, as the fellow said today, you're a doctor, you have one ventilator, and two patients who are dying, and they both need the ventilator. | |
| And let's just say, you know, they're equal in terms of danger and so on. | |
| Well, that situation is not being inflicted on you in the same way that, you know, Sophie's choice or, you know, some guy says uh I'm gonna shoot Bob or Doug, you tell me which, right, then the person who's gonna shoot someone is uh the he's inflicting that on you, that choice on you through violence, assuming that if you don't choose, he'll shoot you. | |
| But if you are a doctor, then the choice of who to give the ventilator to is not something that is coercively inflicted upon you because you chose to be a doctor, and you are being paid for these decisions. | |
| So it's not being the recipient of violence. | |
| So because it is not being the recipient of violence to be a doctor who has to choose who gets the ventilator, then it falls under aesthetically preferred behavior. | |
| Now I understand, saying uh it's like being polite or not swearing in front of kids and so on, in a sense, choosing who lives or who dies, but that is your job, and you're being paid to do it, and you studied for it, and you trained for it, and you got mentored for it. | |
| So this choice is not being inflicted upon you. | |
| In fact, you pursued it for many years and you're being well paid to make those kinds of choices. | |
| So it is not being inflicted upon you. | |
| It is a difficult choice, but it is a difficult choice that you have pursued the making of that difficult choice for many years, and you're getting paid hundreds of thousands of dollars a year to uh make these choices. | |
| So we are talking about better and worse, not good and evil. | |
| So if we have the ninety-year-old chain smoker and we have the six-year-old boy, they both need the ventilator. | |
| Who is the better choice for the ventilator? | |
| Well, obviously it's the uh the six-year-old boy. | |
| He's a better choice. | |
| So these are better and worse choices, and the fact that there are lives attached to them does not budge them out of the category of APA. | |
| And listen, I designed UPB and aesthetically preferable actions without this level of intensity in mind, so you know, maybe APA is not, you know, quite the right word, or aesthetically it's not the right phrase, whatever. | |
| I mean, that's but an evil is UPB, better and worse is APA. | |
| And let's see, can we get the ninety-year-old smoker versus the six-year-old boy? | |
| It is can we say that that is an aesthetic choice? | |
| Now aesthetic generally means artistic or standard of beauty or politeness or niceness or something like that. | |
| But it seems tough, and I don't want to obviously wedge something in unjustly, it seems tough to say that's an aesthetic choice, because that would be like saying who's prettier? | |
| Who's who's got the most sculpted abs or whatever, right? | |
| So the basis of the choice would be the standard pragmatic or utilitarian argument for the maximization of human happiness. | |
| If you save the six-year-old boy, he's gonna have eighty years ahead of him in you know, most of it in good health, but if you save the ninety-year-old chain smoker with lung cancer, he's only gonna have another six months of pain. | |
| So in this sense, you would be maximizing human well-being, human health, and human longevity, if that makes sense. | |
| Now is that an aesthetic choice to say more and healthier life is better? | |
| That's interesting. | |
| I mean I'm open to the possibility. | |
| I'm not sure yet because again the word aesthetic has kind of been grounded in my brain to be, you know, this is a nicer painting, this is a better painting, this is a more attractive person or you know, this car has a great aesthetic, you know, whatever it's got nice fins or whatever you like. | |
| So a doctor is focusing on quality of life and quantity of life. | |
| I mean a doctor could limit eliminate every disease by cutting your head off or shooting you in the head or something, right? | |
| I mean then the disease is gone, but so is your life. | |
| So the doctor is trying to make a balanced choice between longevity and health. | |
| And there are doctors who would say so oncologists and so on who would say things like, you know, eventually you get this sort of dreaded language. | |
| Usually so there are doctors who would say we could try another round of chemo radiation, but it's unlikely to do any good and it's going to make your last couple of months horrible or we can put you on painkillers and you can have a clear head and not be throwing up all the time and not be physically weak and right so that is a matter of more time is better unless it's not much more time and the cure is worse than the illness, | |
| so to speak Again, I don't know how doctors make these decisions, I'm just going off stuff I've seen is sort of a rule of I think a common sense rule of thumb So it is is it an aesthetic choice aesthetics being better then rather than good and evil it certainly is better to not swear around children It certainly is better to be on time it certainly is better to be reasonably diplomatic rather than brutally rude and is it fair to say that | |
| in the same category, it's better to work for or to work on the paradigm or the principle that more and healthier life is better than less and unhealthier life. | |
| Yes. | |
| Yes, because somebody who violates UPB is evil. | |
| But somebody who says, let's say that they get cancer and they're | |
| they say I don't want treatment even if the treatment is you know reasonably likely to make them better, they say I don't want treatment I want to have a quality of life rather than length of life and the treatment is going to interfere with my quality of life so I just want length of life right is that evil I don't think it is I don't think it is evil it may be very upsetting it may be a decision that other people wouldn't appreciate | |
| or like or value but it wouldn't be evil to refuse treatment the doctor will sign, but you don't go to jail for refusing treatment, which means that treatment is not a moral choice. | |
| Treatment is to some degree an aesthetic choice I prefer a longer life even at the expense of short term comfort, which is some horrible medicine but it is not evil to refuse treatment it may be a little incomprehensible, | |
| it may be unwise, but it's not evil you wouldn't throw someone in jail and force them to be treated Hashtag forget about COVID for the moment So treatment options and this is tentative like just understand I'm I'm just working through things here, | |
| I'm just sort of giving you the making of thoughts so to say I would rather have six months of good health and then die as opposed to six months of bad health and then have a ten percent chance of living or like whatever it is, especially if you're old, right? | |
| You would make you would make choices and those choices are better and worse, not good and evil. | |
| I mean I knew a guy once who had a hernia and he went to get the hernia repaired and the Doctor said, you know, you could just live with it. | |
| And I guess that's a choice, right? | |
| It's is it better to get the hernia operation? | |
| To get the mesh or the shoulders treatment, or like is it better to get your hernia repaired, or is it better to live with it? | |
| That was an option. | |
| Is it better to be muddle headed and take painkillers, or to be in pain and be clear headed? | |
| These are aesthetic choices. | |
| Again, I'm not super comfortable with the word aesthetic, because it sounds kind of Oscar Wilde, you know. | |
| But better or worse, that's not morally good or evil. | |
| Or maybe I know it's hard to say. | |
| Because I'm just thinking like we could have instead of UPB and APA, instead of universally preferable behavior and aesthetically preferable actions. | |
| Perhaps we could say universally preferable behavior and then just preferable behavior. | |
| So there's the UPB and then the PB, which would be a little simpler. | |
| Universally preferable behavior versus preferable behavior. | |
| I gotta tell you, I think that like almost 20 years ago, I think I ran through this in my head, but I thought it was going to be too confusing to have UPB and then just PB. | |
| I thought it was going to be too confusing to explain the difference, which is why I did UPB and APA. | |
| I think. | |
| I think that that's my memory of it. | |
| So that's interesting. | |
| So if you are saying I prefer, like as I was saying in the show with the fellow, I was saying that I prefer to work out, which means I need an extra six to eight hundred calories a day. | |
| I prefer to work out rather than donate the money that I use for my food to somebody who is really hungry. | |
| That is aesthetically preferable action, because it's not evil for me to work out and for other people perhaps to go hungry. | |
| Well, I mean, who knows, other people might step up, but let's just say other people let's just say other people go hungry because I work out, because I could take the money that I spend on the food that it's needed because I work out and instead use it to feed others. | |
| So that's aesthetically preferable actions. | |
| But it's see, in that case it's hard to say. | |
| For me, honestly, I'll be honest, it's hard to say. | |
| If I don't work out, my quality of life diminishes. | |
| But of course, if I don't work out, my quality of life diminishes, but other people's quality of life improves. | |
| And it improves, of course, because they are uh they have food in their belly, right? | |
| Having food in your belly when you're hungry, it's more important to your quality of life than for me to have my uh little muscles on my body. | |
| So human happiness would be served, a plus of human happiness would be served if I did not exercise, but instead, I donated the f the food that I need because I exercise to others. | |
| In the same way, everybody could conceivably live in a tent, and therefore if you have any housing over and above a tent, then you are taking away from other people because you could, you know, as Jesus says, right, take all of your belongings, sell them all, and then give your money to the poor. | |
| So for me, it's I would not force someone to give to the poor. | |
| You could say it's aesthetically preferable action to give to the poor. | |
| However, giving to the poor is complicated, and it's not just about giving resources. | |
| You know, uh my the argument that I sort of have with myself is the more philosophy I'm able to do, the better the world will be. | |
| That's the sort of basic equation that I worked with. | |
| The more philosophy I'm able to do, the better the world will be. | |
| Now, what that means is that if I exercise and eat well and get good sleep and so on, then I'm able to do good philosophy for longer. | |
| I'm able to do for philosophy. | |
| Let's say that working out gives me another three years on my lifespan. | |
| I'm just making that up, right? | |
| But Let's say so that's you know, that's a lot of shows. | |
| It's a lot of this you know, hundreds and hundreds of hours of quality philosophy that the world gets because they work out now. | |
| Of course you could say, ah, but what about the time that you lose from working out? | |
| I get all of that for sure. | |
| But let's say there's a net. | |
| There's a net of plus to it. | |
| Or let's say it's not necessarily three years extra of life, but it is three years extra of robust health. | |
| Right. | |
| And I can't do philosophy twenty-four hours a day, so I might as well work out when I can't be doing philosophy in perpetuity. | |
| So g and giving philosophy philosophy away for free really helps the poor. | |
| So it's not just about giving them their daily bread, it's also about being able to do philosophy, which really helps the poor, and so on, right? | |
| So that's uh I think I am working to maximize helping the poor, insofar as I'm giving good philosophy away for uh no no fee, no charge, right? | |
| So yeah, I think I think we could put this into aesthetically preferable actions, in that it's not good and evil, it's better and worse. | |
| That might actually fit and work. | |
| And uh of course I'd love to know your thoughts. | |
| Let me know what you think. | |
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| Hope you guys are doing well. | |
| Toket to your sonna. |
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