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Holá, (?) señores. ¿Cómo está le?
It's Stef, welcome to the next version of ethics. We've got the magic hat of moral explanation,
which we will be using shortly. Just wanted to give you a taste of it first so it doesn't
startle you. What I'd like to chat about now is... We've already talked about how preferred
behavior exists, everybody displays it in one form or another, thus the question is
if we're going to put together theories which claim to organize and explain human behavior,
then it is incumbent upon us to actually come up with logical explanations for this kind
of stuff. We can't just make rules up and say that for Bob, this is the preferred behavior,
and for Sue, this is the preferred behavior, because if we want to explain things within
the world, things that exist, like gravity, or like preferred behavior, things we can
observe and see in the real world, we do need to be logical and empirical, we have to apply
logical, scientific, rational and empirical observations and theories to the description
and prediction of the phenomenon that we're describing.
What we then talked about was, if I want to come up with a theory called "an ethical theory,
a moral theory, a moral proposition, a Thou shalt, a You ought to," etc., then I'm no
longer in the realm of opinion. If I just say, I think everyone should speak Esperanto,
that's just an opinion. I'm not going to enforce it, it's not binding upon anyone else, it's
just like... I'd like you to donate to me, I take donations at freedomainradio.com, I'd
like some donations. It's not a moral absolute, but it's something that I would prefer. It's
not something that I'm putting forward as an ethical theory. I'd like to, but I can't
see my way to do it.
The moment that you say something about ethics, it's exactly the same as moving from an opinion
to a scientific proposition. It's exactly the same thing as trying to put forward a
mathematical or scientific or logical proposition; you now are bound by empirical verification,
the scientific method, logical consistency, etc.
So ethics is to opinion as science is to religion.
An ethical theory is something which must be universal, otherwise it's just an opinion.
The moment that you say an ethical theory is universal, it is required for that theory
to be valid (you've moved out of the realm of opinion and into the realm of scientific
propositions) it now must be logical, consistent, universal and independent of time and place,
reproducible, the effects of it can be predictable, etc.
That's something that's important to understand.
Ethics is a theory. Ethics as a practice is totally optional, as the scientific method
is optional, as eating well is optional. Just because lots of people eat badly doesn't mean
that the science of nutrition is completely subjective. It's an optional thing. If you
want health, then you should eat well, and it doesn't mean that everybody who eats badly
is automatically going to die within 5 days. It doesn't mean that everybody who eats well
is going to automatically have perfect health and live to be 95. It's not the way that biological
systems work. Biological systems have lots of unknowns, lots of variables, lots of gray
areas, etc. We'll talk a little bit about what that means as far as ethical theories
go in just a moment.
The moment that you put forward an ethical theory, it's a proposition which must be universal,
otherwise it's just an opinion. It must be universal, testable, logical, empirically
verifiable, etc.
This is the core thing that I'm saying about ethics.
Sure, ethics are optional. Sure, you can get by with neither much of an ethical theory,
nor any sort of ethical behavior, if we can determine an ethical theory and your behavior
deviates from it. You can absolutely run through life eating nothing but chocolate, lazin'
around on the couch, not thinking, not speaking. You can do all of those things, it's just
that most people don't. Most people do act, and I do believe that ethics is the very strongest
and most powerful theoretical construct that exists within the world. I think that human
beings are naturally drawn towards ethics because everybody justifies everything that
they do according to ethics.
Everybody always pursues ethics, everybody is always fascinated by ethics, bad people
when they want to gain control of a society always focus on ethics. To me, ethics is the
most important human theory. It leaves the scientific method, medicine, health, nutrition,
any of those other theories, it leaves all of those in the dust. Morality is the core
motivating theoretical structure that is within human beings' minds, souls, hearts and consciousnesses.
It is the most important theory that exists in the world, and it is the one that is the
least rigorous and the least logical. That to me is a desperate, desperate shame.
Of course, when you put forward the idea that ethics are objective — that ethical theories
have to be logical, can be proven, and can be non-subjective — then you will often
get, and I've had this countless times, people coming back and saying, Oh yeah? What about
abortion?
There was one posted on the board recently where somebody said "Yeah well, my girlfriend
thinks it's bad to shoot a deer, I think it's good to shoot a deer. We disagree, so how
could it be objective? You have nothing but disagreement about the question of abortion,
so how can ethics be considered to be objective?"
I'm gonna take two responses to that:
The first is to say that ethics describes, predicts, is part of the world of biology,
not of physics. There's no such thing as ethics for a dust particle or a rock or a river.
Those are just physical entities, neither good nor evil, they just do what they do.
They don't have consciousness nor free will, blablabla. You can't come up with ethics in
the realm of physics, you can only come up with ethics in the realm of biology, and more
specifically, only within the realm (pretty much, let's just take this for granted for
the moment, if you don't mind) of human beings. We can talk about ethics of monkeys or sea
slugs another time, but right now we're just gonna focus on the fact that the majority
of ethical theories pretty much are focused on the thoughts and actions, motivations of
human beings.
Once you get a theory that is part of the world of biology, the theory simply does not
have to have the same amount of rigor as it would have to if it were a theory in the world
of physics. As we've mentioned before, if you have a theory that says everything falls
down, even one exception to that theory means that your theory is not fully correct, certainly
not taking everything into account. If you say everything falls down, you come across
the helium balloon, then the fact that everything falls down now has an exception to it, and
of course exceptions are the way that science advances. If you can find an exception to
an existing rule, if we found something that went faster than light or approached the speed
of light without gaining mass, then obviously some Einsteinian theories would be in trouble.
In physics, a single exception invalidates the universality of the theory. That's the
world of physics because there's no free will, very little randomness, etc.
In the world of biology, however, things are quite different. I'll give you an example.
Biologists have the definition of something called a "horsey" (to use the Latin phrase).
So we have in the world, horseys. Horses have four legs, one head, one tail, etc. Every
now and then, some freaky biological occurrence will happen wherein a horse is born with two
heads. Does this mean that the science of biology is completely subjective and irrelevant?
That it's all just opinion, because there are deviations within biological systems?
Human beings, yeah, most of us have five toes. Every now and then you will come across somebody
(and I think Elvis was one) with webbed toes or six toes. This doesn't mean that there's
no such thing as a human being, and that there's no definition between a human being and a
sea anemone, or a human being and a dust mite.
Within the realm of the division of species into genuses and into zoological classifications,
there are such things as zoological classifications, although there are such things as mutations.
We don't say when a horse is born with two heads, "Oh my God, that's it. There's just
no way. There's nothing to do with it. Everything's random, there's no such thing as a science
of biology." We say, "Okay, that's a deviation from a standard, and we know that there's
a standard, like a horse is born with one head, etc. Yeah, freakily enough you'll get
a horse that's born with two heads from time to time. That's a deviation from a norm, and
we're all aware of that, we're all comfortable with that. That all makes sense."
So the fact that there are deviations within the realm of biology, the fact that there's
"random" (if you'll excuse the term") factors around genetics, for free will, etc., does
not mean that there's no such thing as any scientific or rational truths that can be
talked about with regards to human beings.
When you hear the word "horse," assuming that you're not thinking of somebody talking [hoarsely],
you have a different picture in your head. I think of a nice, brown chestnut horse, maybe
you think of a Palamino or a white horse or whatever. Maybe you think of a Pegasus or
even a unicorn, I don't know. But when we have an image in our head of the word horse,
we all have a different image, even if you think of a brown horse, it's not gonna be
exactly the same brown horse, it's not gonna have the same background. I always think of
one in a field or whatever.
So when I use the word "horse" and you use the word "horse," or you hear it, we both
have different images, but we still know we're talking about the same thing. You don't think
that I'm talking about like a rain cloud or a zebra muscle or something.
Although there is not the same degree of precision and absolutism and not the same intolerance
of exceptions in biological theories as opposed to physical theories (theories around physics,
where one exception invalidates the theory), in biology one exception or a number of exceptions
do not invalidate the theory. I just wanted to point that out, that in the realm of biology
there are a number of deviations or exceptions that are allowed in that world, and so asking
for the same degree of precision and certainty and absolutely no exceptions in the biological
world is irrational, of course.
Another example of this is that we're all pretty comfortable with the idea that there's
a difference between a child and an adult. Biologically, physiologically, etc., you know
that I'm not five years old and talking to you, because I've got a voice that's not squeaky,
I have a forehead that's shiny, I have height, and I have an intellectual (hopefully (laughs))
kind of ability that is slightly beyond what a five year old can manage.
So when you look at me you don't confuse me with a five year old.
We also have a process called puberty which involves lots of naught bits and lots of hormones,
and puberty is a process. So we know that a five year old has not gone through puberty,
we know that I myself have gone through puberty. In fact it was last week. And so we know that
there's a difference, puberty is a process, there's a before and there's an after. Puberty
is not one second. Puberty took, I don't know, it takes like six months or a year or whatever
it takes, I can't even remember. Puberty is a process, there's a before and after, but
there's no one single day or one single moment that we call "puberty" (***!). Puberty is
just like a bell curve, it trails off, etc., hits some people later, some people earlier,
etc.
The fact that there's a gray area around being a child and being an adult does not mean that
there's no difference between being a child and being an adult. We all understand. We
know that a child is pre-pubescent, we know that a 20-year-old is post-pubescent, so we
know that there are distinct differences, but at any particular moment, let's say that
puberty starts at 12, at 12 years old and 1 month is that person a child, an adult?
What of 12 years and 2 months? Right? There's no particular area where we say "Okay, at
11:59, that is a child, and at 12:00 that's an adult." We may make those distinctions
from a legal standpoint, like at the age of 18, you're considered to be mature, morally
responsible, or whatever. But there's no particular moment where something goes from pre-pubescent
to post-pubescent, but there's still a difference on either side.
If we accept that as a basic fact, that there are certain things which are processes, which
are not black and white, but which are not totally subjective. We can accept that, I
think, from an intellectual standpoint. We also would look at a human being who had an
IQ, say, of 70, somebody who was really below the curve as far as intelligence goes, and
say that that person may have (may have, not saying that this is the case, just we may
have arguments that would say that) this person is slightly less morally responsible than
somebody with an IQ of 100, 105, sort of around the average. But there's no "When they have
10 billion brain cells (no idea how many brain cells there are, so sorry if I got the number
wrong), they are totally morally responsible, and if one brain cell gets taken away, now
they're totally not responsible for their ethical behavior, or for whatever." There
are certain people who have an IQ, say, of 70 or 75, who we would not necessarily expect
that there's a huge problem with them not going out and getting a job, a career, getting
married, or whatever it is that's generally the accepted norm.
If somebody has an IQ of 120 and is living at home when they're 30 and don't have a job,
or whatever, we would say that person may be lacking in ambition, or may have certain
psychological blocks, or whatever you might say about him. But it would be a deviation
from what we would expect. Somebody who's got an IQ of 70 or 80, if they're living at
home at the age of 30, we can say, Well, I sort of understand that. We have different
judgments, but it's not like that's a black and white thing. Again, we may define that
in terms of law, but it's not like IQ 100 -- total moral responsibility, IQ 90, 80,
79 POOF! No responsibility. 79.999 or whatever.
There are certain gradations that are common in the biological world, and we're pretty
comfortable with that. We kind of understand that there's a semi-subjective kind of gut
feel areas that are complicated, and this is the same thing that's true for moral questions,
and we're not gonna get into a lot of them right now because we still need to define
something about what morality is and how to process or understand ethical questions. But
we would generally say that going and stabbing a kid would be a bad thing to do. You certainly
can't say that it's a good thing to do, because if you don't have access to a kid or a knife,
you can't then be moral. So we generally would say going and stabbing a kid is a bad thing
to do. So the initiation of the use of force against a child or whatever is a bad thing
to do. Going up and stabbing an adult is a bad thing to do. But stabbing an adult is
maybe not a bad thing to do if that adult is coming at you. We'll talk about self-defense
later, but if that adult is coming at you wanting to shoot you and you can stab them,
or whatever, then that may be a morally defensible thing. Maybe not so much if you've taunted
them and keyed their car and insulted their wife and provoked a fight, and then the guy
comes at you and you stab him, then it gets a little bit more ambiguous. Again, these
are pretty rare situations but let's be honest that there's no degree of precision and absolutism
and no-exceptions-whatsoever in the realm of morality, 'cause morality's a biological
concept and construct. You simply can't apply the same rules, because biology has lots of
randomness built into it. You've got free will, you've got mutation, you've got lots
of other things that are going on. You have dysfunction, etc.
Within the realm of ethics, there are gray areas. Totally comfortable with that. Every
single biological science has gray areas; still does not mean that biology is a totally
subjective science which has no possibility of rational classification or understanding.
In the realm of abortion, and again I'm not going to try and prove or disprove. I've got
an article about this on my website, but I'm not gonna get into the proof or disproof of
abortion, blablabla, but I think it's fairly safe to say that fewer people would have problems
with the morning-after pill. The RU-486 pill, where you may have possibly had conception,
the ***'s gotten into the egg, we don't know if it's implanted or not yet, you take
a pill which thins out the lining I think of the uterus so the egg can't implant. We
wouldn't say that that's morally the same as strangling a baby after it's been born.
I'm not gonna make the logical case for it, I'm just gonna ask you to look at your gut.
Aristotle said, and I think he's quite right, that you can come up with ethical theories
and you can do this, that and the other. If, however, your ethical theory can prove that
*** is a good thing, or *** is a good thing, then just based on your gut feel for
these things, you've probably made a mistake. Let's just say that fewer people, I'm not
gonna make the argument for either one being morally good, I think we can go with strangling
the baby is kind of evil, but fewer people are gonna have problems with taking a pill
to possibly prevent the implantation of a maybe fertilized egg. Fewer people are gonna
have moral problems with that, and more people are going to have problems with strangling
a baby that's out of the womb and sitting in its crib, etc.
There's obviously a gray area around which there's a general kind of consensus in the
realm of abortion. Few people, and especially those who aren't religious, are gonna have
problems with taking a morning after pill, and many, many more people are gonna have
problems with strangling a baby, and there's reasons for this. I won't get into it all
right now, but this is not just subjective. But there's no moment, even if you accept
the morning-after pill argument that that's a possible, it's a maybe, it's a potential
life, you're just preventing cells from forming, it's not a viable human being, nobody else
could conceivably take care of that, you can't take it out of your womb and put it into somebody
else's in the same way that you can give up a baby if you don't want it for somebody else
to raise... You could go into all these sorts of arguments, but basically if you don't have
a problem with the woman taking a morning-after pill, but you do have a problem with somebody
strangling a baby, there's a continuum somewhere in there. So you don't have a problem at day
1 of aborting or preventing pregnancy, not even knowing what the case is, but you have
a problem with strangling a baby. Somewhere in there the [switch flips] and it goes from
not immoral to immoral, or even if you think it's immoral to take the morning-after pill,
it's less immoral, let's just say, if you're not religious with the soul and this and that.
It's less immoral to take a morning-after pill than it would be to strangle a baby after
it's been born. It also would be, I think, pretty immoral to kill a baby right before
birth, coming down the birth canal, you inject it with something and it dies, that to me
is a pretty bad thing to do. If the baby can survive, you can give it up, it's a viable
life outside of your body, and blablabla.
Somewhere in there, and we have a general consensus, I think, around 16 or 20 weeks,
somewhere in there it becomes not good to abort the baby. That's not one second. It's
not like, Ah, at 19.9999 weeks it's perfectly morally acceptable to abort a baby, 20 weeks
(snaps) one second later, it becomes totally evil. We recognize that there are gray areas
which need negotiation, which need social consensus, which I would say need a distinct
absence of political coercion, but we'll get into that as we move forward into the realm
of politics. The fact that there are gray areas, that people disagree on ethics, that
there's stuff that's kinda can't be sorted out, doesn't mean that ethics is totally subjective.
Scientists — even physicists — disagree on the interpretation of certain results or
a certain model of the universe. Just read up on super string theory or certain forms
of quantum mechanics to realize that there's an enormous amount of quite contentious debate
within the scientific community. People disagree and there are gray areas even in the realm
of physics. This doesn't mean that the scientific method is completely invalid, because disagreement
occurs and there are gray areas which haven't been worked out yet.
There's two very fundamental things which have interfered with or, I would say warped
or undermined or in some cases even destroyed, people's capacity for clear moral reasoning,
one of course is religion, and the other is state education. We'll get into that as we
go forward, but when you came right out of the Middle Ages into the scientific revolution,
into the Renaissance and into the Enlightenment, it wasn't like history completely vanished
and everybody then became totally able to act in a perfectly rational manner despite
the fact that they'd been raised by priests or been exposed to this kind of crazy fundamentalist
indoctrination. It's not like the world just flips a switch and everyone becomes perfectly
rational. We have these very strong influences on, not exactly helping people clear up their
own ethical theories, religion and state education. Whether in the public school or sometimes,
I think even more dangerously, at the graduate school level, there's a lot of subjectivism,
there's a lot of whim-based stuff, there's a lot of "What does the Bible say?" and this
kind of stuff.
The fact that people disagree when we have these very irrational approaches to understanding
ethics is pretty much guaranteed. The fact that people disagree about ethics given that
we have these institutions which promote irrational thinking — completely inevitable. People
disagreed a whole lot more about the world, physical reality, the properties and behavior
of matter and energy, in the Middle Ages prior to the Scientific Revolution. Tons of disagreement
about everything, 'cause they're all just making stuff up and not validating it... Running
off to particular religious texts or running off to the Pope to ask his opinion. So of
course there was no empirical verification, no objective logic that could be brought to
bear on the situation that people would accept. The concepts within their own mind were not
considered subordinate to the evidence of the senses, and the rigors of logic, so yeah,
they just ran around making up all this stuff. Constant disagreements, endless religious
wars, one of the reasons why people gave up on the unity of church and state was because
for about a hundred years after Luther created the schism within the Catholic church and
you broke into Protestants, Anabaptists, Zwinglians and Calvinists, and all these sorts of people,
was that you had millions of people getting killed from religious wars, and so people
kind of gave up on the idea. For about 100 years, people got kind of tired of this and
said, You know, we've really gotta separate the church and the state, because this really
doesn't work so well.
During that whole time, yeah, there was no consensus, there was lots of argument and
disagreement about ethics, and people were willing to kill people for it, as they are
in the modern world. When people disagree about ethics, when they don't have reason
and empiricism to mediate their disputes, the guns, the knives, the swords, and sometimes
the airplanes, come out and wars and terrorism and all this occur. Absolutely completely
inevitable when you don't have an objective standard that the two parties agree on to
resolve their disputes. Then you're going to end up with endless war, conflict, escalation
of power, subjugation of the innocent, corruption of children, all of these sorts of things
are gonna go on. It's an ideological war that's going on that's fundamentally irrational.
The fact that people disagree is inevitable, because we think about ethics in such an irrational
manner, and we appeal to culture, to history, to gods, to devils, to priests, to popes,
to the state... We get all of this irrational stuff taught to us, so of course there's going
to be a lot of disagreement in the realm of ethics, just as there was about the realm
of science before the scientific method was brought to bear on the physical facts of reality.
This is, sorry, a slightly long way of saying it, but it's such a common objection that
I think it's worth spending a few minutes on, and I hope this has been useful to you.
It is absolutely inevitable that there are gray areas in the realm of ethics. It is absolutely
inevitable that people are going to disagree about ethics, just as there are gray areas
in biological sciences and some, based on incomplete information or incorrect interpretation
or questions about interpretation, just as there are inconsistencies, disagreements and
gray areas in the realm of physics, this does not make any kind of requirement for logic
or objectivity or classification of objectivity within the moral realm, doesn't make that
impossible. It took, what, 400 years to solve Fermat's Last Theorem — I think it was solved
(I read the book (laughs)) — but it took 400 years or so to solve Fermat's Last Theorom,
and so there was this whole gray area, unsolvable problem, people disagreed on how to approach
it. Didn't mean that the science of mathematics or the logic of mathematics was completely
invalid because something hadn't been solved.
I just think that's a very important thing to understand. When you start talking about
the need for logic, the possibility of objectivity and rationality within the science of universally
preferred behavior that we call ethics, the fact that people disagree, the fact that there
are gray areas, lots of contention, etc., all it means is that people aren't being rational.
That's all it means. It doesn't mean that rationality is invalid. If everybody eats
so much that they gain weight, it doesn't mean that nutrition is invalid! If nobody
exercises and gets flaccid and osteoporosis, it doesn't mean that exercise as a preferred
behavior is completely invalid. It just means that people aren't choosing to follow it.
It doesn't mean that it's invalid, doesn't mean the prescriptions of behavior which will
result in good health are then completely subjective, and you can make anything up that
you want. You can choose to run off a cliff, you can't choose whether you fall or not.
You can choose to not eat well and not exercise, you can't choose the effects that that's going
to have on your physiology.
You can choose not to be rigorous in your thinking, not to be philosophical, not to
subject yourself to logic and the scientific method and empirical verification. You can
choose all of those things, but you can't choose that you then stay mentally healthy
and happy. You can choose to fill your mind with garbage, just as you can choose to fill
your body with junk, and I don't say this from any sort of purist standpoint (I just
had a bag of chips for lunch), but at least I'm not saying that if I only eat a bag of
chips all the time that I'm gonna be healthy. (laughs) It's not like we can't tell a little
white lie, or, there's gray areas, things which we can do. Some days I don't even go
to the gym, and I don't even eat that well, but that's okay. At least I don't think that
I'm following a science of nutrition when I do that. I'm recognizing that I'm deviating
from that, so don't get a sense that I'm some sort of purist here.
This is a lengthy way to talk about this, but it's such a common objection. It's absolutely
inevitable that people will then say "Well, there's abortion" and "My girlfriend thinks
that I shouldn't shoot Bambi and I think that I should," etc. Yeah! All of these things
are questions, and they need to be answered. We need to focus on them as human beings (I
was gonna say "as a society" but that doesn't exist, as we know from the one on metaphysics
and epistemology).
This is very, very important if you are going to propose a theory that is going to be considered
more than opinion.
If you say "We should tax people to help the poor," just sort of an example. We'll get
into this when we get into politics, but if you're gonna say this, if it's just an opinion,
then it's like you coming up to me and saying you really like the new Jessica Simpson video.
"...Okay? That's nice, nice to hear. Doesn't mean that I have to like it, doesn't mean
that anything's binding on me, doesn't mean that I consider that it is true that it is
a good video," or whatever.
[ break ]
Hi, sorry about that, for some reason my camera turned off at 30 minutes, almost like it's
telling me to be concise. Almost! But I think I can overcome it! But I actually will be
concise.
If you're gonna put forward a moral theory that's considered to be universal, binding
on others, that you're describing something that's characteristic of human needs, human
requirements, human actions, etc., then it needs to be common to all people. Yes, there
will be a gray area where somebody's IQ is 75. To what degree are they morally responsible,
blablabla. Those are all gray areas that society needs to get into and debate, not under the
threat of coercion in the hands of the state, but just as something that we need to get
into and debate and continue to refine. Just because there are those gray areas doesn't
mean that things which are provable morally for the species as a whole, for human beings
as a whole, are invalid or subjective or made up or anything like that.
We'll get into laying the foundation for some ethical beliefs that can be considered valid
in this existing framework that we're working with, the scientific method, logical and empirical
validation, etc., and we'll get into those in the next video, and I'm sorry that I didn't
get a chance to use the hat. I followed a tangent, which you know is not unknown within
my experience of communicating about these things. But I think that it was useful and
I wanted to use some time examining the question of the subjectivity of ethics, because if
they are subjective, then there's really no purpose to philosophy. Because if ethics are
subjective, the scientific method is subjective, logic is subjective, everybody's experience
is subjective, and we're right back to the beginning where we were talking about the
three kinds of reality, and we have to reject the universal existence of an external reality,
and we end up not being able to communicate to each other. There are enormous consequences
if ethics are subjective, because they're all derived from things which come before.
I hope this has been helpful, thank you so much for listening. I really appreciate it.
I promise the hat will be on next time. Thanks so much.