Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux - The Logic of Spanking

Nov. 25, 2025 - Freedomain Radio - Stefan Molyneux

32:37

The Logic of Spanking

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	All right.
	Good morning, everybody.
	Hope you're doing well.
	Stephanie Mollenew from Freedomain, freedomain.com/slash donate to help out the show and shop.freedomain.com for merch-merch.
	Just in time for Christmas.
	So, the spanking debate has re-erupted on X.
	And for those of you who are newer to my work, I will tell you my thoughts about it as a whole.
	And you can tell me what you think, and we can engage in a robust debate about these obviously very important matters.
	The use of force is one of the most powerful topics in all of human morality.
	So let's get into it.
	So if we look at the adult world, adults cannot use force against each other, except in self-defense, right?
	So the initiation.
	So when I say violence and force and so on in this conversation, just for the sake of clarity and efficiency, I will be referring to the initiation of the use of force.
	I'm obviously perfectly fine with self-defense up to and including death itself, killing someone in order to prevent rape and murder and grievous bodily harm and all.
	I'm fine with the common law definitions of all of that sort of stuff.
	So just to be clear, that is fine.
	Now, so human beings cannot use force against each other.
	A boss cannot hit a subordinate, even if that subordinate makes a grievous error.
	There was a trader who fat-fingered some big bank and traded a bunch of stuff he shouldn't have.
	It actually brought the whole bank down, destroying a decades-long institution.
	You cannot assault that person, right?
	You can get mad at them.
	You might sue them or whatever it is, but you can't go and assault that person for making even a grievous error.
	You cannot assault someone who talks back at you in a meeting, who disagrees with you, who yells at you.
	You cannot assault someone who calls you a jerk, an asshole, whatever it is, right?
	You cannot assault people if they make mistakes, if they're rude, if they're disobedient, if they whatever.
	You could fire them, of course.
	You can yell back at them.
	You can say, no, you're the asshole, but you can't beat people up.
	You can't hit people.
	If they make mistakes, if they are malicious, if they can't even assault people who spread rumors.
	Now, again, if it's really egregious, you might sue them for defamation, but you cannot assault people for language or mistakes or anything like that.
	So that's what we take as the standard of morality.
	Now, that reverses itself with children.
	That completely reverses itself with children.
	With children, again, not everywhere, but in particular, I have a fair segment of American friends as my audience.
	So in America, you can hit a child.
	In Canada, I think it has to be not the face and not below the waist and between the ages of 2 and 12.
	There's some restrictions.
	I'm not totally sure what they are.
	And of course, it's true in America as well that spanking or hitting is allowed, even with implements, I believe, but a beating is a different matter.
	So why?
	What's the difference?
	Why is behavior that would be not allowed to a boss hitting a malicious or negligent or foolish or disobedient subordinate?
	Why is that specifically disallowed for a boss?
	but is not just allowed, but encouraged for parents.
	I mean, you understand that's an interesting question.
	Why do we ban violence among adults but encourage it between parents and children?
	So people say, well, the reason is because children don't respond to reason, and therefore you have to hit them.
	Well, that's an interesting question, right?
	Because as a philosopher, we don't look at specific instances.
	We look at general principles.
	Like a physicist doesn't just say gravity applies to you and the earth, particularly a little bit more around Thanksgiving and Christmas, right?
	So gravity doesn't apply to just this ball or this tree or this planet or like gravity is a universal thing, right?
	So if we say that violence is acceptable, in fact, encouraged and necessary for those who are unable to reason or unwilling to reason, then clearly if you make a rational argument and someone denies it, you can hit them, except you can't.
	Again, with adults, we say, well, they are capable of reasoning.
	They're choosing not to reason, but you still can't hit them.
	So with children, if they're capable of reasoning, but they act in an irrational fashion, then they would be in the category of people who can reason but don't reason or don't respond to reason, but we can't hit those as adults.
	So why would we able to hit them as children?
	Say, ah, well, but children are not capable of reason, therefore we can hit them.
	And it's like, okay, so if people are incapable of reason, then we can hit them.
	Okay, how do you feel about hitting somebody who's elderly who has some sort of brain degenerative disorder, right?
	Some sort of Parkinson's or Alzheimer's or something like that.
	How would you feel about hitting people who are adults who are incapable of reason?
	Well, grandma just won't listen, so I have to hit her.
	Generally, we would say, well, no, that's wrong.
	But then we have a logical problem, and it's a significant logical problem, which is why do we forbid hitting people incapable of reason due to brain challenges?
	And, you know, childhood is a bit of a brain challenge, right?
	I mean, you say, ah, well, but the difference is that one is degenerative and the other is growth-based.
	Okay, I understand that.
	Of course, there could be a cure, right, for these things.
	And people who have these degenerative brain disorders, like everyone knows, like the sundown thing, the elderly or those who have these issues, they're better.
	They're better some days, worse other days.
	It's usually bad around sundown, better during the day.
	So given that it's highly variable, just as childhood reasoning, children don't just wake up one day able to reason, right?
	So given that it's highly variable, you say, oh, well, we can only hit them when it's at a low point, but not when it's at a high point.
	And again, people would have trouble with that.
	We would view, of course, people who are elderly with Alzheimer's and so on.
	We view these people, of course, and rightly so, with great sympathy.
	And we would try to treat them gently and not hit them, right?
	And the other thing, too, of course, is that they're called senior moments, like older people who just kind of forget where their keys are and, oh, where's my purse and so on?
	And that's just a natural process of aging, a sort of slight forgetfulness that happens here and there.
	And we don't hit the elderly for forgetting where their keys are or for taking too long to get ready or for forgetting what day it is.
	You know, and honestly, if you're retired and you're living alone in particular, and days are kind of a bit of a blur, it's not impossible to forget which day it is and to say, oh, were we supposed to get together Friday?
	I'm so sorry.
	I thought it was Thursday or Saturday.
	Like that can happen, right?
	But we don't hit people for their forgetfulness.
	So then we have the challenge of creating a category of why we hit children.
	We don't hit people incapable of reasoning, people who have, say, they're crazy.
	Let's say they have a sort of psychosis or schizophrenia or something like that.
	We don't hit them because they're not capable of reasoning, certainly in the grip of a florid psychosis.
	If you've ever tried reasoning with someone who's in the grip of a particularly strong or virulent mental illness, they won't listen.
	They don't respond to reason and so on, right?
	And so we don't hit them.
	We try to take care of them in some manner.
	And we might restrain them to prevent them from doing harm to themselves or others, but we would not hit them to, quote, teach them, right?
	So we have a problem, which is why are we creating a special category?
	Because everything that we apply to children, well, they can reason, but they choose not to.
	Well, that's most people in the world.
	We don't hit them.
	Well, they can't reason because their brains are not developed.
	It's like, okay, well, there are lots of people whose brains are going through challenges and we don't hit them.
	And even people who will recover, right?
	Somebody who's going through a psychotic episode, we don't beat them up or we don't hit them and they will recover, right?
	So childhood is a temporary state of pre-reason or unreasoning, which then grows into adulthood.
	So even people who are going to recover their reason, we don't hit them when they're being irrational.
	So again, the challenge is that this is basic Socratic reasoning.
	And I'm sorry to say basic because that sounds like, well, it's just basic.
	But, you know, if you're not trained in this kind of stuff and aren't experienced in this kind of stuff, you wouldn't necessarily know how to do this, right?
	I don't really know how to fly fish.
	So people can say it's basic fly fishing.
	I'm like, yeah, but it's advanced to me.
	So the problem is that every time you create a category or a justification as to why we hit children, you have to explain why it doesn't apply to others who fit the same category.
	And you can't.
	You can't.
	If somebody's incapable of reasoning, then we don't say we can hit them.
	If somebody can reason but doesn't, we don't say we can hit them.
	If somebody is reasoning, of course, there's probably no reason to hit them because you can negotiate with them.
	So that's the basic problem.
	And so then we say, well, the reason that we hit children is to teach them negative consequences for bad behavior.
	And it's kind of like an inoculation, right?
	I'll sort of hear this argument.
	And, you know, let's take it at face value and work with it with respect.
	So the argument is that you teach your children, you hit your children, you use force with your children so that they don't become criminals.
	They don't get beaten up by mouthing off.
	The world won't treat them gently.
	The world is a harsh, difficult, and ugly place.
	And you teach your children restraint, discipline, and respect for others by hitting them so that they don't get beaten up or arrested in the future.
	It is a small amount of violence, which is like an inoculation, like a small amount of inactive virus.
	It's a small amount of violence that we use against children so that larger, more deadly, or dangerous violence won't be used against them later, like in inoculation.
	In the same way, we say the two examples that are used, of course, is a pot of boiling water.
	You hit your kid who's reaching for it so that they don't reach for the pot of boiling water because if they spill the boiling water on themselves, it's really disastrous.
	Or if they are running towards the road with cars going back and forth, then you hit them to keep them away from the road because the hitting, the swatting, the spanking is far less dangerous and negative to them than being hit by a car, right?
	So it's a small amount of violence in order to prevent a large amount of violence in the same way that you will get a tumor removed, which will leave you with a, you'll be cut open and you'll be left with a scar, but it's better than dying of cancer, like a small scar and a week or two of recovery is far better than dying of cancer.
	Or if you have a hernia, you will get it operated on.
	They'll do the shoulders or put a mesh in because otherwise your intestine could come out and get strangled and get infected and bad things can happen, right?
	So it's a small amount of negative to prevent a massive or life-threatening or life-destroying amount of negative, like in inoculation.
	All right.
	So this is really coming down to is discipline best brought about by the infliction of a negative or the withdrawal of a positive.
	So do we deal with people who are late by hitting them or if you're an employer, right?
	Somebody keeps clocking in half an hour late, right?
	Do we deal with them by hitting them, which is the infliction of a negative, or by docking their pay, which is the withdrawal of a positive?
	I think in general, we would say that if we have the choice, the withdrawal of a positive is better than the infliction of a negative.
	If you have the choice, right?
	So if a woman doesn't like a man, she goes on a date with him, she doesn't like him, then she will simply not go on another date with him.
	So that is the withdrawal of a positive.
	And if he's, you know, smelly or rude or loud or obnoxious or talks only about himself, she might say that or whatever.
	She might say, you know, this is why it wasn't particularly great for me.
	So there's a certain amount of, quote, coaching, I suppose, that happens based upon the withdrawal of a positive.
	I'm not going to see you again.
	And then hopefully the man will change his ways or become better at whatever, right?
	In the same way, if you're coaching a team, you're coaching, I was involved very briefly, of course, but I was involved in coaching kids in soccer.
	And if somebody doesn't show up to practice, is surly, you don't beat them up, you just cut them from the team, right?
	So it is not the infliction of a negative.
	It is the withdrawal of a positive.
	In the same way, of course, if you do badly at work on a consistent basis, then what happens is you will get disciplined and then you will get threatened with firing and then you will get fired.
	So that's not the infliction of a negative.
	You're not beating the person up or stealing their stuff.
	You're simply withdrawing a positive, which is the paycheck, the job.
	So with children, the question is, do you inflict a negative or do you withdraw a positive?
	If it is possible to withdraw a positive rather than inflict a negative, then you should do that because it does not involve violence.
	The withdrawal of a positive does not involve violence.
	So if I go to someone's pool party and I act like a jerk and they say, you got to leave my pool party because it's my pool, it's my property, then that is the withdrawal of a positive.
	If I stay, I guess they could have me arrested or something like that, but the cops would probably just walk me off the property and give me a warning or something like that, right?
	So when I debate with people, and I had this, I think it was a week ago, Friday, I had a debate with someone and that person was not responding to reason.
	So did I hunt them down and beat them up?
	Did I hit them?
	No.
	I've been in live debates where people are not listening to reason.
	I don't stride from podium to podium and smack the person across the face or the butt or something like that.
	No, no.
	What I do, what I did, was I simply said, I am not going to continue this conversation and I removed the person from the speaking space.
	It was a spaces on X, right?
	So that is the withdrawal of a positive.
	Now, again, self-defense is fine if somebody's inflicting a violent negative on you, assault, rape, trying to kill you, you can absolutely use force in self-defense, but you cannot claim that dealing with children, let's just say toddlers, teenagers is another matter, right?
	But let's just say toddlers, you can't really say that, well, dealing with toddlers is a matter of desperate self-defense.
	The toddler is about to inflict grievous bodily harm on me, and therefore I'm right in using force.
	Now, you can use self-defense.
	It's a universal principle.
	So you can use self-defense on behalf of others as well.
	So someone can choose to intervene.
	They don't have to, but they can choose to intervene.
	If somebody else is being threatened with force, then you can use third-party self-defense.
	I mean, this is the whole principle of cops, right?
	The cops will come to your rescue, hopefully.
	They have no duty to protect, but they hopefully will come to your rescue if you're being aggressed against, even though it's not the cop himself who's being aggressed against.
	So if your child is hitting another child, then you can use force to restrain.
	You don't get to beat up the person, right?
	But you can use force to restrain your child from hitting another child.
	That's fine.
	In the same way that a policeman will use force to prevent someone from assaulting someone else if they have to.
	That doesn't mean they just get to willy-nilly beat the living hell out of them.
	So the infliction of negative consequences through pain, through hitting, is, of course, what is justified, or that's how it is justified.
	The use of force against children, that it is an inoculation to prevent them from doing greater harm later on or in some other context and so on.
	But, of course, the infliction of pain doesn't teach any lessons other than the avoidance of pain.
	It's how you would train a dog to not poop in the house.
	You inflict negative stimuli on the dog so that the dog learns not to poop in the house.
	But the dog is not learning empathy, respect for property.
	It is not learning how to be nice and kind and thoughtful and considerate and so on.
	The dog is simply saying, Well, negative things happen.
	Negative things happen if I poop in the house, so I'm not going to poop in the house.
	The dog has not learned anything other than the avoidance of pain.
	You have conditioned the dog to associate pooping in the house with negative stimuli, and therefore the dog no longer poops in the house.
	But the dog hasn't learned anything other than the infliction of pain.
	So when you hit a child, the child is only experiencing negative stimuli.
	And people say, well, it's a little swat, it's a little tap.
	Well, and that's cope, right?
	That's that's clearly cope.
	That's clearly cope, right?
	And it's cope because if it's just a little tap, then it's not negative stimuli, right?
	It's, I mean, it's not negative stimuli.
	It has to be negative stimuli that is strong enough to imprint upon the child's behavior and cause enough suffering that the child changes that behavior, not just temporarily, but in a more permanent fashion.
	So the little tap, the swat, the light, whatever it is, that's just cope.
	That's not a real thing.
	So if you're going to say, well, the child has to experience negative consequences to permanently change behavior, then those consequences have to be strong enough to permanently alter.
	Like nobody says, well, I spank my kid to change the behavior for 20 minutes or a day.
	You say, well, I spank my kid to teach them a lesson to change their behavior and to have that behavioral change last a lifetime.
	And you do that.
	You don't do that with a little swat or a tap.
	It has to be significant infliction of negative stimuli in order to permanently, or with the goal of permanently changing behavior.
	It's a tattoo, not henna, right?
	It washes off after a week or two.
	So the infliction of negative behavior, say, well, it's a little bit, it's a little bit.
	But the problem is, of course, that for a child, see, the parent knows what's going on and the child does not.
	And if you imagine you, I mean, let's take a sort of silly example, right?
	So somebody has legal control and custody over you.
	They're five times your size.
	You have to live with them and they can hit you at will.
	Five times your size, right?
	So we're talking about a 40-pound kid and a 200-pound man.
	It's five times your size and can hit you at will.
	I get angry at you at will and yell at you at will.
	That's terrifying.
	It's completely terrifying.
	I mean, I remember when I was a little kid, I was visiting, or my mother was visiting a friend of hers, and I was out walking in the woods behind her house.
	And I'm pretty sure it was a great Dane because for me as a kid, it was about the size of a horse.
	And it kept me pinned up against a tree.
	Like every time I moved, it growled.
	And eventually, I think someone whistled or whatever, it left.
	But I mean, it was terrifying.
	Now, I would still be nervous around a great Dane, but not as much as when I was just a little, little kid.
	Because, you know, when you're looking down at a dog, it's a little less scary than when you're looking up at a dog.
	And so, yeah, if I mean, you're five times your children's size.
	You have unimaginable size, strength, independence, and power.
	Your strength is incomprehensible to a child, right?
	So the fact that you are five times your, you know, you're infinitely more strong than your child from the child's perspective.
	You're infinitely larger or significantly larger, five times the size.
	You have incomprehensible strength and power, and you name it, right?
	So for you to hit a child, It can seem small to you, of course, because your child is much smaller, but you are crazy huge and crazy strong to your child, right?
	And the child doesn't know when it, I mean, maybe after a number of spankings, the child will have a sense of when it's going to end and so on.
	But for the child, it is terrifying because of your size and strength and the fact that you have total control over your child.
	You have total control over your child.
	Now, the other thing, of course, is that a lot of times people will hit their children because their children are being thoughtless or inconsiderate towards others.
	You said something rude, you took some other kid's toy, you took something from a store when you were too young to really understand what property rights were and so on.
	And so you're being rude, inconsiderate, and not thinking of others.
	So the best way to get children to do stuff is to model the behavior.
	And for children, of course, you know, one of the big challenges is that if you're saying, well, I'm hitting you because you are not thinking about the feelings of others and you're not taking the feelings of others into consideration.
	Well, then the problem, of course, is that you are doing the opposite of taking your child's preferences into consideration when you hit your child.
	Can you teach empathy through violence?
	Teaching empathy would be you have to really think about and work towards the reasonable satisfaction of other people's preferences.
	And you should expect them to do the same to you.
	Otherwise, you're just teaching your kids to be exploited, right?
	So you cannot teach children to have a positive response to the legitimate needs of others when you are hitting them.
	You can't say, well, you really need to think about what's best for others when the punishment is what is the most horrifying and painful to your child.
	In other words, you're showing the opposite of empathy because you're saying, well, my child doesn't want to be yelled at and hit.
	And so I'm going to yell and hit at the child.
	In other words, you're taking the opposite of empathy.
	You're taking cruelty as the norm.
	And you can't teach empathy through cruelty.
	You can't say, well, you should really take into account the feelings of other people and work to make them happier or at least keep them secure while you're taking the feelings of your child into account and doing the exact opposite.
	Because children mirror their parents, right?
	If I keep pointing at something and calling it a tree, my daughter ends up calling it a tree, right?
	That makes sense.
	So imagine how difficult it is for a child to learn language if the opposite is being taught.
	So imagine how difficult it is for a child to learn how to greet people pleasantly when you tell them that the pleasant greeting in English is hi there, F off.
	So you're saying you need to learn how to be polite and you're teaching your child the opposite of politeness, which is intense rudeness, right?
	Immense rudeness.
	And so you can't teach your child empathy through cruelty because empathy and cruelty are opposites and you cannot teach something by applying its opposite.
	It is incredibly confusing and this is why it doesn't work.
	This is why, you know, a significant portion of parents are still hitting their children into junior high school and sometimes even high school years.
	It doesn't work because you are acting on the basis of cruelty and trying to teach your children kindness and empathy.
	So how do you teach children?
	Well, first of all, you have to model the behavior, right?
	If you've been through this, if you've been a parent, you go through this phase, it's a pretty wild phase with language development where they're just, they're learning like 10, 20, 30 words a day.
	You don't even know exactly how.
	It's a wild process that goes on.
	There's kind of a window between the ages of sort of four and eight or four and nine where kids have to learn language.
	If for whatever reason they don't, they have a very tough time later on.
	There's this process of learning language that is really baked into our development.
	And so you just use consistent language.
	You will certainly teach some of that language, but you'll use consistent language with kids in order to get them to learn that language.
	And it's a largely automatic process.
	If you think of how difficult it is to learn another language as an adult, it's really not that way when you're a kid.
	You just imprint.
	And so if you want your children to treat others with empathy, respect, and kindness, then you need to treat them with empathy, respect, and kindness.
	And they need to see you treating your wife, your husband, others around you with empathy, respect, and kindness.
	And that's just how they'll be.
	I mean, we wouldn't expect a kid who grows up in an English-speaking household to end up not speaking English, but only speaking Japanese.
	That would be impossible.
	And it is equally impossible to imagine that a child who grows up among parents who are modeling empathy, respect, and kindness, and courage, and honesty, and integrity, like in keeping your word.
	And, you know, like it's impossible to imagine that a child who grows up in that environment will not end up replicating those values any more than they will speak a different language than the one they're raised with automatically, right?
	Without any outside intervention.
	So they need to be surrounded by people who consistently show empathy, respect, and kindness, and their children will internalize and repeat empathy, respect, and kindness.
	We don't just create our entire cultural and moral values.
	And we know this because, you know, children, let's say a Japanese, an ethnic Japanese child who grows up in the West ends up mostly with the values of the West and certainly speaks English without an accent.
	Whereas the same Japanese person who is raised in Japan will end up speaking fluent Japanese and will have a lot more in common with those Japanese values than if they're raised in a Western school and so on, right?
	So we, you know, I mean, there's some probably baked in.
	There may be certainly some baked in stuff, but there's a huge amount of variance based upon environment and certainly language is one.
	And language also has an effect on morality.
	Free markets seem largely confined or were largely confined to the English-speaking world for a variety of reasons to do with economic texts and even simply sort of having the words for these things.
	So if the parents are yelling at each other and not treating each other with respect and kindness, if there are grandparents who are yelling at each other or yelling at the parents, if there are dysfunctional people around treating others with disrespect or cruelty or things like that, well, then the kids will grow up with that.
	You can't have a lot of tense fights with your spouse around your kids and then say to the kids, well, you know, you've got to treat people with empathy, kindness, and respect.
	Because that's confusing, right?
	That again, it's like teaching children to say hi there f off to people and then say, well, you've got to treat people with kindness.
	Then it's like, well, or if you are really rude to people and then you say to your children, well, you have to be polite to people, that doesn't make much sense, right?
	And of course, a lot of times when people get angry at their children, they're angry at their children because the children are reproducing what the parents are actually doing rather than what the parents want to be doing.
	So if you have parents who yell at each other, then they get angry at the kids when the kids yell at each other because the kids are accurately modeling what the parents are doing.
	And there's the shame.
	Of course, that is associated with parents.
	Parents feel ashamed when the parents see the children doing what the parents are actually doing, rather than what the parents imagine or want or think or praise.
	So the withdrawal of the positive is actually not that complicated.
	If your children love you, then your disapproval will mean a lot to them, and so if you act in a manner that is, you know, moral and has integrity and and you treat people well and and so on, you treat your spouse well then uh, Your kids will love and respect you, and then your disapproval will be enough to have them change.
	But of course, a lot easier to hit kids than to act in a manner that will engender respect.
	So I hope that makes sense.
	I'd love to hear your thoughts.
	And I'll talk to you soon, freedomain.com/slash Denate.

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