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Affection for Infants and Animals
00:04:07
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| All right, this is second set of questions from listeners, the most important philosophical questions that my listeners tend to grapple with. | |
| This is number two. | |
| How does UPB apply to specific world, real-world moral dilemmas? | |
| This is from Grok. | |
| People frequently test the framework against everyday or edge cases, relationships, e.g., is love involuntary response to virtue? | |
| How does that work with infants and animals? | |
| Family obligations. | |
| e.g., do we have moral duties to parents slash family if they're abusive? | |
| Divorce inheritance, co-parenting with difficult personalities, or whether it's moral to give family advantages, a leg up. | |
| These tie into broader consistency checks on UPB. | |
| Now, of course, the reality is that we absolutely have to check morality and check our moral premises and how things apply. | |
| So with regards, is love involuntary response to virtue? | |
| How does it work with infants and animals? | |
| So infants we love because we have created them, because they are life, because they are half us, because they are acute, because they are affectionate, because they are responsive. | |
| They have not chosen virtues as yet, but we can have great affection for our offspring, a very passionate devotion, and part of that's biochemical as well. | |
| Animals share the same things with their offspring, so that's fine. | |
| Do we morally admire infants? | |
| No. | |
| No, of course not. | |
| But there's many different kinds of love. | |
| There is the love of attachment and helpless and dependence and cuddly and eye contact and babies are adorable. | |
| And so, but it's different from, I mean, obviously, obviously it's different from adult, mature, and in particular, romantic love. | |
| We would want these things to be very different. | |
| As our children grow and they begin to make good moral choices, we can admire their strength, their consistency, their integrity. | |
| Well, also perhaps taking a bit of pride if we've helped bring these things about in our children as well. | |
| With regards to animals, so our affection for animals, I'm really talking about Western Europeans here. | |
| It's a funny thing, you know. | |
| I have a very sort of passionate devotion to the welfare of animals. | |
| And, you know, the one time that a friend I knew grabbed a lizard and the tail came off, I was horrified, you know. | |
| And so we, as a survival mechanism, have a very strong protective mindset with regards to animals, because, of course, our ancestors relied on animals for their survival. | |
| We couldn't survive without them. | |
| We needed the dogs to protect our livestock and herd sheep and so on. | |
| We need cats to protect us from mice and rats, keep out of the grain, because if rats get in your grain, your whole family could be wiped out in one winter. | |
| So I have a sort of very, I have a very strong horror against any kind of cruelty to animals, except cockroaches for them, man. | |
| So as regards to our affection for animals, animals have bonded with us. | |
| Animals have great affection for us because of being social animals and so on. | |
| And so we have evolved to have a very positive relationship and strong affection towards domesticated animals in particular. | |
| Not so much wolves and bears, I suppose, except perhaps in Russia, where they do things quite differently in many ways. | |
| So, yeah, that's perfectly fine. | |
| But love in a philosophical sense is our involuntary response to virtue. | |
| If we're virtuous, affection and bonding and connection and all of these things, they're all fine as well. | |
| You could have a very strong bond with a person in war or in sports or in business and so on. | |
| And somebody in sports might be a very effective teammate. | |
| You feel very positive when you're around them, but that may not be specifically ethical or virtuous. | |
|
You Feel Very Positive But
00:15:02
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| So there's shades and differences. | |
| But in its foundation, what we usually mean by love is our involuntary response to virtue. | |
| If we're virtuous, I'm talking about this with regards to adults. | |
| Of course, the love that we have for adults is the love is different from the love that we have for children. | |
| And in particular, I'm talking about romantic love as a whole. | |
| So I hope that makes sense. | |
| Do we have moral duties to parents or family if they're abusive? | |
| I said this in a call-in today, and I'll repeat it here because it's, well, bears or is well worth repeating that it doesn't matter in terms of your future and your capacity for a loving pair-bonded relationship. | |
| It doesn't matter what the outcome of the story is. | |
| It doesn't matter what you think of your parents, really fundamentally. | |
| What matters is what your potential wife thinks of your parents. | |
| That's what really matters. | |
| And to sacrifice love with a romantic partner for the sake of pleasing dysfunctional parents is to take a flamethrower to the future for the sake of the icy tomb of the past. | |
| That is not a good, that is not a good plan. | |
| So to what do we owe our parents? | |
| Well, we owe them a truth, we owe them justice, and we owe them holding them to their own standards. | |
| That is really foundational. | |
| Because if your parents have particular virtues and values, then those virtues and values will be consistent for them. | |
| They will be held to them. | |
| So if your father is like, it's really, really important to be on time, but he shows up a couple of times late, you can call him on that and say, well, hang on, you said that it was important to show up on time, and you don't show up on time. | |
| This doesn't seem good at all. | |
| This doesn't seem good at all. | |
| And he can say, yes, you know, you're right, I did say that, and all this kind of stuff, right? | |
| And this is what teenagers are going through when they are holding their parents to their own standards, which is perfectly valid, right, and fair. | |
| Because it is absolutely essential to be a good person. | |
| It is absolutely essential that you figure out whether the morals you were subjected to as a child were based on virtue or power. | |
| Virtue or power. | |
| A love story. | |
| This was a podcast I did way back, like 20 years ago. | |
| It's really essential. | |
| So the rules that were imposed upon you as a child by your parents, were they imposed because the rules are good, or were they imposed because your parents had power? | |
| It's kind of a foundational question. | |
| Now, if the morals that were imposed upon you as a child were imposed because your parents had power, then it's important to understand that so you don't confuse them with morality. | |
| So the king imposes rules upon his subjects that the king himself is not subject to. | |
| The king can speak his mind no matter what, but other people are punished for speaking their minds. | |
| The king can start a war, nobody else can. | |
| The king can mint coins, nobody else can. | |
| The king can collect taxes, nobody else can. | |
| So these are not universal moral rules. | |
| These are manifestations of power. | |
| And as manifestations of power, they should not be confused with moral rules. | |
| Moral rules are universal and objective and bind everyone. | |
| Rules on power require that you have authority or the ability to either give rewards or punish. | |
| So if your father, say, is a big bully with you whenever he doesn't get his way or you inconvenience him or interfere with his goals or plans or slow him down or whatever, right? | |
| Now, if your father is a bully, when you inconvenience him or it doesn't get his way, then it's interesting to see your father when a policeman pulls him over or he has some inconvenience, say, with a customs official or with a border agent or someone at the TSA or somebody doing airport security and so on, then it's very interesting to see how he reacts to it. | |
| If he is nice and conciliatory and perhaps even a little obsequious or subservient, well, with the people who have authority over him, well, that's interesting, right? | |
| So then his impatience with you is not because you're doing anything wrong, because the policeman, the TSA agent, the border person, the customs person, they are all, quote, inconveniencing him too. | |
| But he doesn't have power over them. | |
| They have power over him. | |
| So it is not that there's anything wrong with you. | |
| The only reason that your father would treat you badly in these situations is you don't have any power over him. | |
| He has power over you, so he can treat you badly. | |
| When other people have power over him, you know, he's sweet as sugar, gentle as a lamb, very conciliatory, and so on. | |
| And everyone's seen this kind of stuff where, you know, a parent, an ill-tempered parent is driving the family over to some social gathering or business gathering, family gathering, and their mood switches and they go, hey, how's everyone? | |
| Blah, blah, blah. | |
| And, you know, they maybe even give you a glance over their shoulder, see, hey, it can't be nice, right? | |
| In which case, his ill temper is not foundational. | |
| It's not moral. | |
| It's not based upon any objective standard. | |
| It is based on the fact that he can have an ill temper with you and you can't do anything about it. | |
| And you can't judge him negatively. | |
| Or if you do judge him negatively, he can just punish you for that. | |
| But when he reaches the social gathering, then he's all bonhomie, right? | |
| He's all friendly and hard handshakes and back claps and hey, positive, because those people could judge him negatively or exclude him in the future if he is negative or hostile or difficult, right? | |
| Plus, of course, he often has to put on, as so many families do, he has to put on the view that everything's great and his life is wonderful and there aren't any problems. | |
| Whereas if he comes in kind of sour and negative, hey, Joe, what's wrong? | |
| Ah, you know, lots of conflicts with the kids, man. | |
| We're just fighting like cats and dogs. | |
| And oh, my wife is angry at me all day. | |
| But no, they have to, hey, everything's great. | |
| It's all advertising and kind of scurrilous nonsense as a whole. | |
| So it's really important. | |
| Your teachers, right? | |
| Your teachers, do they impose rules on you because those rules are objective and moral and good and universal? | |
| Or do they impose those rules on you because they have power over you and you have no power over them? | |
| It's really, really important. | |
| Do not mistake power for virtue. | |
| That's a very important thing in life. | |
| And so one of the best ways to figure out if someone is dealing with power or virtue is simply to ask them or to try and hold their, to try and hold themselves to their own arguments and perspectives and rules. | |
| All right. | |
| Divorce inheritance co-parenting with difficult personalities or whether it's moral to give family advantages a leg up. | |
| Yeah, I don't think there's any problems with giving family advantages. | |
| Sure, why not? | |
| I mean, you know your family very well. | |
| should know their skill sets. | |
| And if your family member is good at something, then you should help them. | |
| If If you raise your kid, let's say you have a convenience store and your child is around the convenience store a lot and you've talked a lot about the business of having a convenience store and so on, then why not give your child the ability to run the convenience store? | |
| I mean, they've grown up with it. | |
| They understand it. | |
| They've worked in it, perhaps. | |
| So I think that's perfectly fine. | |
| Again, UPP is no rape, theft, assault, and murder. | |
| There's a certain wisdom in trying to figure out whether the people who have power over you impose rules because the rules are good or simply as an expression of power. | |
| That's important, for sure. | |
| But as far as nepotism or giving family members a leg up, I think that's something that doesn't violate UPP, doesn't violate persons or property and so on. | |
| And of course, if your kid doesn't have any particular interest in the business or isn't particularly good at it, then it might not be wise, of course, but it's certainly not a violation of the non-aggression principle to give your family member some sort of advantage. | |
| Co-parenting with difficult personalities. | |
| I'm not sure that UPB has much to say about that other than, well, I suppose, yeah, difficult personalities are sort of defined by hypocrisy, rules for thee, but not for me. | |
| This is the sort of most foundational dysfunction in the world is for people to impose will through power, but claim that it is virtuous. | |
| So a woman in a marriage who's dysfunctional might say, you're not thoughtful enough. | |
| You're not caring enough. | |
| I don't feel loved. | |
| And then if the husband says, I feel also that you are not caring, she said, well, we're focusing on me, right? | |
| So she wants to focus on herself and what she's missing. | |
| And if the husband says, well, I'm also missing things and I would like to negotiate for more myself, then that's bad, right? | |
| So if the woman has standards, that's good. | |
| She's showing self-respect. | |
| If the man had standards, he's petty and controlling, right? | |
| So this is the most foundational dysfunction in the human mind is to have rules that only benefit one party. | |
| So again, to reference the caller from this morning, he was dating a woman who said, I need a man with a certain income in order for me to feel safe and secure. | |
| So generally, the way that women will phrase this, and obviously not women as a whole, but the sort of predatory gold digger type of women is they say, you know, a woman can really relax into her sexuality and her affectionate side and her femininity if she feels safe and protected. | |
| And the best way to feel safe and protected is for the man to have a good income and blah, blah, blah, which is a big florid way of trading sex for money. | |
| So I said to the caller this morning, hey, I've got no problem with people having standards in relationships. | |
| That's fine. | |
| You go to a job interview and you can say, I want $100,000 a year or whatever. | |
| And that's fine. | |
| They also have their requirements and standards, though. | |
| You wouldn't go into a job interview and say, I will feel very secure in this job if you pay me $100,000 a year and I will not tell you anything about my experience or history. | |
| Like, you just got to pay, because I'll feel good about it. | |
| Well, the employer would say, well, it's nice that you want $100,000 a year, but we need to know what we're getting from you. | |
| We actually need to interview you to find out about your experience and history and your education and so on, right? | |
| So the most foundational dysfunction is when you have rules for me. | |
| Sorry, rules for thee, but not for me. | |
| I don't remember if I said it right the way last time. | |
| But rules, well, it could be rules for thee, but not for me. | |
| You have to take care of me. | |
| Rules for me, but not for thee. | |
| I have to have standards, but if you have standards, you're controlling. | |
| So this manipulative flip is where the most foundational dysfunction is. | |
| So with regards to co-parenting with difficult personalities, then what you could do, of course, is work your best to try and have universal rules in your parenting. | |
| It's not likely it's going to work because the most foundational dysfunction, how you know someone's dysfunctional, like if they're crazy, they have no rules at all in any particular way. | |
| But if they are dysfunctional, then what's going to happen is they're going to have a bunch of rules and requirements for you, which they themselves would not follow. | |
| I mean, I remember a friend of mine years ago dating a woman, and, you know, she said, oh, you have to do half the housework. | |
| And at that time, he was paying all the bills. | |
| And he said, but I'm paying all the bills, so I shouldn't. | |
| And she had reasons as to why that wasn't valid and this, that, and the other, right? | |
| So you have to do half, but I don't have to do half. | |
| You know, this sort of this one-sided negotiation where there's no rules that apply to the other person, that sort of foundational. | |
| UPP can help tease that stuff out. | |
| Can't fix it. | |
| It's a free will thing. | |
| What about free will, determinism, and personal responsibility? | |
| This comes up a lot in intersections with atheism, morality, and behavior. | |
| Questions like, if no free will exists, how can morality exist? | |
| Or how does consciousness or free will connect to UPP and ethics? | |
| Often linked to critiques of societal excuses, e.g., victimhood ideology that undermined individual agency. | |
| Well, men coddle women and women coddle children. | |
| And there's nothing, Russ is not any kind of negative as a whole, but men protect women and women protect children. | |
| And that's just the way of the world. | |
| That's the way of evolution as a whole. | |
| And so somebody who is a victim will summon resources. | |
| So a woman who is a victim will summon male resources. | |
| A child who is a victim will summon female resources. | |
| And this is good and right and healthy as a whole, except it's a hack too. | |
| It's a way of getting resources by pretending to be a victim. | |
| And the way that you find out whether somebody is pretend victiming, right? | |
| They are posing the pretense of putting on the pretense of being a victim in order to gain resources, is you don't give them resources, but you tell them how to get their own resources. | |
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Compare Proposed Actions to Ideal Standards
00:05:48
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| Right? | |
| So a kid who's whining because they can't reach the apple, you can say, oh, there's a little foot ladder in the garage. | |
| You can go and get that, right? | |
| And if the kid then gets upset even more, it means that they don't want the apple. | |
| They want you to get the apple. | |
| And, you know, if the kid's tired or cranky, that's fine, but you do sort of have to teach your kids at some point about doing their own thing and being responsible for solving their own problems. | |
| And if a woman is complaining about something and has sort of repetitive complaints, then if you solve the problem and she gets upset, then she wants to complain, not solve the problem. | |
| And the complaining may be an act of dominance. | |
| It may be an act of getting sympathy or something like that. | |
| But that is a kind of problem. | |
| So again, this comes back to the most foundational human dysfunction is to create rules that do not apply to everyone, but you carve out special exceptions for yourself. | |
| That's really the definition of political power as a whole. | |
| So with regards to free will, free will is our capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards. | |
| A proposed action called tell the truth or lie. | |
| Well, the ideal standard is, in reasonable circumstances, to tell the truth. | |
| The proposed action is to, if someone has upset you, you go punch them in the face, or you don't go and punch them in the face. | |
| So you would run that through the non-aggression principle and say, well, somebody's just bothered you or upset you or said something. | |
| Mean, you don't go and punch them in the face because free speech and initiation of the use of force and that kind of stuff. | |
| So compare proposed actions to ideal standards. | |
| And that is what free will is. | |
| And people can't argue against it, right? | |
| Because if somebody says, we have no capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, this is a self-detonating statement. | |
| Because if you're saying free will is false because we cannot compare proposed actions to ideal standards, then you are comparing a proposed action called arguing for free will against an ideal standard called truth and falsehood. | |
| So you can't say, we have no capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, and therefore I need you to compare your proposed action to an ideal standard. | |
| It really doesn't make any sense at all. | |
| So it's a self-detonating statement. | |
| And anybody who argues against it has affirmed it. | |
| It's the UPB thing. | |
| I don't come up with these things by accident. | |
| I try to come up with definitions that are rational and cannot be argued against. | |
| And if human beings, if you say human beings have no capacity to compare proposed actions to ideal standards, then it would make no sense to debate someone and get them, try to get them to change their mind. | |
| This is a basic determinism argument that I need you to change your mind about whether you can change your mind and so on, right? | |
| I need you to compare proposed actions, arguing for free will, to ideal standards, truth and falsehood. | |
| And I need you to choose truth and falsehood, which means that you've accepted that human beings have the ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards and that you can change people's minds. | |
| And that solves the entire problem of a free will in that way. | |
| So if no free will, how can morality exist? | |
| Well, morality is really the ultimate example of comparing proposed actions to ideal standards. | |
| I mean, there are other ones, of course, as engineering, mathematics, and science, you know. | |
| I want to build a bridge. | |
| Well, I should compare the proposed action of how I'm going to build the bridge to the ideal standard of not spending too much money, but having a strong bridge that lasts a long time and isn't too expensive to maintain ideal standards for those things, right? | |
| So morality is the ultimate example of our ability to compare proposed actions to ideal standards. | |
| And so, given that that is the definition of free will foundationally, morality and free will are two sides of the same coin. | |
| How does consciousness and free will connect to UPB and ethics? | |
| Well, you cannot have free will if you cannot compare proposed actions to ideal standards. | |
| And this is also, of course, an example that applies solely to human beings. | |
| Because of our language abilities, reasoning abilities, and conceptual abilities, we can have and communicate and pursue ideal standards, right? | |
| We can do that. | |
| So what that means is that human beings can do it, babies can't do it, and animals can't do it. | |
| You cannot discuss morality with the dog. | |
| You can train a dog. | |
| You can train a dolphin. | |
| You can train an orca, a killer whale, but that's just the pleasure-pain principle, mostly the pleasure principle, you know, do what I want, and here's a nice, nice cheek full of herring. | |
| Not heroin. | |
| I guess it would work too. | |
| But you can train monkeys and so on. | |
| So it explains why human beings have morality and animals don't. | |
| So you have to have an ideal standard in order to have free will, in order to have morality. | |
| Morality is the ultimate ideal standard. | |
| And so UPB is the ideal standard by which we would compare moral systems to any moral system that is self-contradictory cannot be also valid. | |
| All right. | |
| Peaceful parenting and breaking cycles of abuse and trauma. | |
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Why Morality Requires An Ideal Standard
00:02:37
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| A huge recurring theme. | |
| Listeners ask how to apply philosophy to raising children without aggression. | |
| How moral responsibility starts with parenting. | |
| Why spanking or traditional methods fail ethically and how childhood experiences shape adult philosophy and morality. | |
| This often blends with personal stories of family dysfunction. | |
| Peacefulparenting.com for that one. | |
| Anarchism, the state, and aggression slash non-aggression. | |
| Court your work, is government inherently immoral? | |
| How do we resolve disputes without the state? | |
| Why is taxation theft and defenses against common objections? | |
| What about roads, police? | |
| These tie into UPB's non-aggression implications and critiques of statism collectivism. | |
| You know, I've often thought that, well, A, I've often thought, B, I've often thought that if you were in a free society, right, this is blank slate thinking, right? | |
| If you lived in a free society, the kind that I depict in my novel, The Future, which you should definitely check out at freedemand.com slash books. | |
| So if you were in a free society with no state and somebody came along and said, hey, what we should do, you know, this society appears to be functioning okay, but what we should do is we should get a small group of people, give them all the weapons in the world, and have them run everything. | |
| And they can pass their laws and they can impose their will and we want to give them control over the currency and the interest rates and the roads and the infrastructure and we want them to be able to create debt on the whim based upon the future earnings of the next generation and so on. | |
| And yeah, people can vote for them, But we also want very strict rules about whether you can even be a candidate. | |
| And although bribery of politicians we will make technically illegal, the bribery of the population will be totally illegal. | |
| Like you can promise people a whole bunch of free stuff and you don't actually have to deliver on it. | |
| And so, like, you know, we give them all the weaponry and so on, right? | |
| And then we can have they can prevent people from leaving the society by putting massive exit taxes on them and things like that. | |
| So if you were in a free society and somebody proposed this system, people would think that you'd unfortunately taken a severe blow to the head or something like that, because when you're in a free society and it proposed a society like we have now, people would look at you like, what the hell is wrong with you? | |
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Reason from Sensory Evidence
00:04:12
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| Why would you even think that could possibly be a real thing? | |
| And immediately it would be like, well, those people would be above the law. | |
| Those people would have no negative consequences of their action. | |
| The population would just be bribed. | |
| And the next population, the next generation would be enslaved. | |
| Somebody was pointing out, I think, in the Congress in America that children are born owing 104% of their lifetime earnings just on government benefits to the elderly, Medicaid and old-age pensions and things like that, entitlement programs. | |
| And so it's pure economic slavery, absolute economic enslavement. | |
| So if you were to propose statism in a free society, you would immediately be, I wouldn't say shouted down, but you would immediately be pestered with an array of questions that you couldn't possibly answer. | |
| And that's the way that I kind of look at things: is not how should a free system be defended, but how can you defend a system that is as corrupt as the one that we have? | |
| Like, how could you even imagine that would be the case? | |
| And imagine trying to justify the system you were proposing, i.e., statism, in a truly free society. | |
| Six, epistemology and truth. | |
| How do we really know anything? | |
| Skepticism, objective versus subjective truth, how UPB relates to truth-seeking, e.g., can UPB define truth? | |
| And avoiding nihilism or infinite regress in knowledge claims, listeners often want simplified explanations of complex epistemology. | |
| Well, I suppose epistemology can be complex, but I don't think in its foundations it has to be. | |
| We accept the evidence for objective reality through the transmission of the senses. | |
| And because of that, and the consistency and universality of the evidence of reality through the senses, we get logic and reasoning. | |
| Truth is the relationship between ideas in the mind and what they describe in reality. | |
| There's no truth in dreams because dreams are subjectively generated. | |
| They follow particular patterns. | |
| I mean, they're not completely, they're not just static, right? | |
| They do portray things in the world relatively accurately, but in a fantastical manner. | |
| And so truth is a relationship between ideas in the mind and things in the world. | |
| And that's what science is really all about, saying you've got conjectures which are ideas in the mind. | |
| And if they accurately describe what's going on in the world and they're internally logically consistent, then you have a valid theory that can be used to predict things and so on. | |
| If you think that balsa wood is stronger than steel, you will build some very bad bridges and some very heavy model planes. | |
| So evidence of the senses, objective, universal, consistent, gives us reason, which is a prerequisite for things being true that are used to describe things in the world. | |
| You have a theory that describes things in the world. | |
| Since things in the world are not self-contradictory, then ideas that describe things in the world cannot be self-contradictory. | |
| Since there's no such thing as a square circle in the universe, then any theory which requires the existence of a square circle cannot be valid. | |
| So reason comes through the evidence of the senses, and truth is a description of the relationship, the accurate relationship between ideas in the mind and things in the world. | |
| And reason comes from the evidence of the senses. | |
| So as far as epistemology goes, that's why logical consistency and empiricism are the only valid ways of ensuring that what you say is true. | |
| Can UPP define truth? | |
| I mean, UPB is a way of evaluating moral systems in particular, and it's a subset of reason and evidence, right? | |
| So any self-contradictory system cannot be valid. | |
| And UPB applies this in particular to morality. | |
| All right. | |
|
Moral Obligation and Virtue
00:05:19
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| Virtue, evil, and duty. | |
| Do we have a moral obligation to fight evil or pursue virtue? | |
| Questions about whether UPB demands action against wrongdoing, the role of humility/slash self-improvement, surrounding yourself with virtuous people and avoiding moral complacency. | |
| So do you have a moral obligation? | |
| Well, first of all, this is Grok, right? | |
| So it wouldn't do this. | |
| But the first thing we would have to do is say, what is a moral obligation? | |
| So do you have a moral obligation to not steal? | |
| Well, yeah, according to UPB, you have a theory of virtue, cannot include theft. | |
| Theft is self-contradictory. | |
| And so a moral system respects property rights. | |
| Morality respects property rights. | |
| Do you have a moral obligation to do what is moral? | |
| It sounds a little bit tautological, but you do have a moral obligation to do what is moral. | |
| So we understand this with regards to rape, theft, assault, and murder. | |
| But when it comes to do you have a moral obligation to fight evil and promote virtue? | |
| Well, I wouldn't say that you have a moral obligation to do that in the same way that you have a moral obligation to respect property rights and not assault people. | |
| I wouldn't say that you have the same moral obligation to promote virtue and fight evil that you have when you sign a contract, which is very specific. | |
| However, I would say that if you profit from other people's virtues and you do not contribute to those virtues, then that is kind of parasitical. | |
| It's selfish. | |
| If your father works very hard and you enjoy the fact that he made a lot of money and then you just grab his money and spend it without adding any particular value just in a hedonistic way, well, you're not violating property rights. | |
| I mean, it's your money. | |
| You can waste it and blow it and do all sorts of nonsense with it, right? | |
| But you appreciate your father making the money and you're leaving nothing to your children. | |
| So there's a kind of hypocrisy in that. | |
| And the problem with hypocrisy is it causes people to lie to themselves because people don't like to openly say, oh, yeah, I'm a total hypocrite. | |
| I'm a piece of crap. | |
| And I mean, some people will in a kind of performative way. | |
| If you benefit, as we all have, from the multi-10,000-year history of people promoting virtue and opposing vice or evil, then to pay it forward is a rational thing. | |
| We have some remnants of private property and free speech in the West, and to not fight for private property and to promote free speech is churlish. | |
| It is the consumption of something that we greatly value without adding to maintain or expand it. | |
| And the question is, and this is a bit of a Kantian thing too, right? | |
| Like, is it reasonable to act in a way that if it were universalized, you wouldn't be happy? | |
| And that's not a proof of morality. | |
| But if no one in the past had promoted virtue and fought evil, we'd all still be clubbing each other to death with the thigh bones of mammoths or something, right? | |
| And if nobody had sacrificed or fought for free speech, we wouldn't be able to have this conversation at all. | |
| So if you don't promote virtue and you don't fight evil, you have not violated any foundational moral contracts. | |
| You're not evil. | |
| You haven't broken a contract. | |
| You're not fraudulent. | |
| But you are a bit parasitical. | |
| Not you, but Bob. | |
| Let's say Bob, and talk to you like you're the issue. | |
| But Bob is a bit parasitical and kind of hypocritical. | |
| Oh, and the other thing, too, is that if love is our involuntary response to virtue, if you don't promote good and fight evil, which is an essential part of virtue, then you can't really be loved. | |
| You can't really be admired. | |
| Your children won't, in particular, admire you. | |
| And of course, you're leaving the world a worse place for your children. | |
| And they're also more likely to be susceptible to peer pressure if you cuck out of the necessary fight. | |
| Sorry, it's back to you. | |
| Forget Bob. | |
| And me, right? | |
| So I must have to. | |
| But if you won't do the necessary work to promote virtue and fight evil, then you really can't be loved. | |
| And you certainly can't be admired morally. | |
| And that's a great treasure in life. | |
| All right. | |
| I think that's good. | |
| And these are pretty good answers. | |
| So again, freedomain.com slash donate. | |
| I really appreciate your time, thoughts, and attention in this matter. | |
| And shop.freedomain.com and freedomain.com slash books to pick up all of the juicy tidbits of that. | |
| So have yourselves a wonderful day. | |
| I guess we'll talk to everyone in the morning, 10 a.m. for Sunday morning church. | |
| Our philosophy. | |
| Take care, my friends. | |