Stefan Molyneux takes on Immanuel Kant's moral philosophy, zeroing in on the categorical imperative—the idea that people should only act on rules that could apply to everyone. He brings up a letter someone sent him, pointing out that while the imperative has its place in history, it doesn't hold up as a real foundation for morality, especially against the bigger mess of shaky moral ideas that prop up whole societies.
He starts by laying out the categorical imperative simply: think about your actions as if they set a rule for everybody. But then he asks, why bother following it? He nods to the golden rule—treat others how you'd want to be treated—as something that helps with personal clashes, but says it misses the wider damage from moral systems that end up causing harm on a large scale. For him, the real danger isn't lone bad actors, but contradictory moral ideas that catch on with crowds.
Molyneux pushes harder, saying Kant didn't even stick to his own rule, like when he backed obeying the state or a prince. If the imperative applies to all, he argues, then princes and governments can't claim special rights or powers that regular people don't have. Unlike Kant, Molyneux insists moral theories have to work the same for everyone, no carve-outs, or the whole thing falls apart.
He keeps coming back to how sticking with bad moral systems leads to tyranny and oppression, pulling in examples from history. Mistakes in moral thinking do more harm than random bad deeds, he says, because flawed ideas build systems that allow injustice and violence to spread. That's where his Universally Preferable Behavior (UPB) comes in—as a way to fix these theories at the root, focusing on the basics of moral reasoning rather than just calling out personal slip-ups.
He ties this to other problems in society, like keeping things clean in medicine to avoid disasters. Bad moral theories, he says, can lead to big failures too. Even if people still do wrong sometimes, a solid moral setup gives a guide toward better choices overall, cutting down on the bad stuff.
Wrapping up, Molyneux goes after Kant's influence, saying it added to moral mix-ups and real-world damage. He pushes for rethinking these theories, spotting and dropping the weak spots that have excused oppression in the past. This could open the door to a fairer society, where everyone lives by the same rules they'd expect from others. For him, better ethics mean people getting along without as much conflict.
2:14 - Moral Theories vs. Individual Actors
7:39 - The Prince and the Categorical Imperative
11:38 - Hypocrisy in Moral Theories
17:00 - Fixing the System
25:40 - Bad Actors and Moral Systems
29:58 - UPB and the Good-Hearted
31:39 - Cursing the Memory of Kant
[0:00] All right. Somebody who writes to me regularly said, the categorical imperative is more logically sound than UPB and was around for centuries. And that couldn't save society. Christianity saved society more than that. So that, of course, is very interesting. Very interesting. So, the categorical imperative is, in general, act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone, right? Act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone. And, I mean, obviously, there's more to it, but that's the, obviously, there's a lot more to it. I mean, Critique of Pure Reason is quite a lengthy tome, and other stuff that Kant wrote is quite a lengthy tome, quite a set of lengthy tomes. But the general idea is that. Act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone, which is basically, how would you like it if someone did it to you? How would you like it if somebody did this to you? X, whatever X is to you.
[1:14] And that is a fine and interesting question. I mean, the first thing that I think of is why? Why? Why should I act as if the principle of my action becomes a general rule for everybody. There's no reason why I must or should act in that way. It'd be nice if people thought about, you know, how would you like it if someone did it to you, sort of the golden rule, do unto others as you would have them do unto you. And it's what we say to kids, right? Oh, you took his toy. How would you like it if he just came along and took your toy, right? And that's fine for little kids. I don't see how it solves the problem of morality at all. See, the problem of morality is not individual bad moral actors. The problem of morality is invalid, self-contradictory moral theories. That is the issue.
[2:15] UPB, of course, does not stop any bullet. It does not stop any pilfering hand and it does not stop any pickpockets at all. But these are not the dangers that we face in the world.
[2:29] The dangers that we face in the world come from invalid, incorrect moral theories.
[2:37] That's the issue that we have to deal with. That's the issue that is tearing us apart. What is taking down the West at the moment is not individual bad actors. You can protect yourself against them. You can move away from them. You can hire security guards. You can be armed. You can have alarm systems. You can hire security. You can do anything to protect yourself against individual bad moral actors, bad dudes, bad hombres. You can do anything. You can band together. You can get neighborhood watch. You can do just about anything. You can improve parenting. You can do tons of things to deal with this bad, individual bad moral actors, right? What you can't win against is generally accepted self-contradictory moral theories like statism. Is Europe.
[3:34] In more foundational or existential danger from pickpockets or statism? Are you worried about somebody stealing your credit card, or are you more concerned with the fact that each one of your children is born into over a million dollars in debt? It is not individual bad actress that we have to foundationally fear in society. It is false, self-contradictory, moral theories.
[4:14] And even Kant himself did not believe his own system. Immanuel Kant did not believe his own system. Act as if the principle of your action becomes a general law for everyone. Great! fantastic immediately let's run that past say the prince, because Kant said hey man you gotta obey the prince whatever the prince says that's social stability that's the good bullshit, absolute stinking steaming wretched horrifying evil blood-soaked bullshit.
[4:53] Oh, act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone. Fantastic. So the prince has the right to tax people. Great. Okay. So everyone has the right to tax people. Look at that. We've just dealt with the categorical imperative. Huh. I wonder if Immanuel Kant was an advocate for a stateless society. Because, you see, the categorical imperative tells everyone that you should act in such a manner that the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone. So clearly, clearly, when Immanuel Kant looked at the state, he said, huh, well, that's interesting. So, the prince has the power to create laws. The prince has the power to declare war. The prince has the power to impose taxes. The prince automatically owns land simply by being born. Ah, well, I suppose those are rights and powers that everyone should be able to exercise. The prince taxes you, you tax the prince. The prince says he owns land by virtue of being born. Oh, look, you get that same rule. You get to own land by principle of being born.
[6:20] The prince gets to declare war. Oh, you get to declare war. The prince gets to run up debt on behalf of others, future taxpayers. Oh, so you get to run up debt on behalf of the prince and his family. Oh, the prince gets to impose trades restrictions and tariffs on trade. Oh, look at that. So does everyone get the ability to impose or repeal tariffs and taxes on trade. The prince gets to impose a sales tax and the prince gets to repeal a sales tax oh, by the law of categorical imperative everyone gets to do that, everyone oh, so the prince imposes a tax on you you just use that same power to both impose and repeal taxes to repeal his tax on you, that's the categorical imperative and he believes none of it none, it's all bullshit and evil blood soaks getting hundreds of millions of people slaughtered absolute fucking bullshit he didn't believe in the categorical imperative at all because he said you had to obey the government no matter what even if the government was unjust even the government, where's the categorical imperative.
[7:40] Oh, I have to obey the prince's edicts, but according to the categorical imperative, the prince also has to obey my edicts. The prince can inflict or repeal edicts upon me. Therefore, by categorical imperative, I can inflict edicts or repeal them on the prince, because he's just another bro, or brony, or bro-ess, sister. You see, he doesn't believe it at all.
[8:12] This is a massive, obvious, suicidally catastrophic moral error. Immanuel Kant didn't believe in the categorical imperative at all, because the categorical imperative would demand no special rights and privileges for anyone, and yet he was a boot-licking, toady-fucking-statist worm-tongue. Now, quick question. This is blindingly obvious, is it not? Blindingly obvious. Act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everybody. Okay, let's just say that that's a valid approach. Then the first and most obvious thing you would do is say that there should be no rights and privileges that cannot be universalized. So if the prince imposes coercion on others or repeals that coercion, then the prince should accept that everyone has that right and therefore he is no longer the prince in any way, shape, or form. You follow?
[9:20] Sorry, this is, uh, it's important to be repetitive. I don't feel that I'm that repetitive. It's like 10 minutes and change to dismantle a central and foundational enlightenment moral fuck-up that has the slaughter and blood and murder of hundreds of millions on its fucking enlightenment-stained hands. It's evil beyond words. There is no language, there are no words to encompass just how evil this doctrine is. And people say, well, but UPB is just like the categorical imperative. All rules are supposed to be universal. The question is, why the fuck didn't Kant make them universal? Oh, he's such a logician. Oh, such integrity. Did you know that he took the same walk every day in the town wherein he lived? And he knows her own. Hypocritical fucking asshole moralists. are the biggest murderers of mankind. And I shit you not, hypocritical, bullshit, lying, cucked, self-contradictory asshole moralists are the greatest enemy of mankind because they are the portal through which the tyrants come. They are the portal through which the Pol Pots, the Salins, the Mao's, the Hitlers, all of them come. I end day if he hadn't been stopped.
[10:47] The false moral theories are the gates and the portals that summon the demons, right? Don't you always have to summon the demons, right? They don't just come on their own. You've got to write things on the ground like a pentagram. You've got to do your rituals. You've got to open a portal, and then the devils come. You see, the moralists are the black-hearted, evil, lich sorcerers who summon the devils that disassemble mankind. Why didn't Immanuel Kant.
[11:20] Take his moral theory to, it's not even a logical conclusion. It's not, well, you know, 12 steps after the categorical imperative, it turns out that you can't give special rights and privileges to individuals because that breaks the entire fucking point of the categorical imperative.
[11:39] All of it is rendered moot, self-contradictory, and evil by continuing to praise the state and praise the prince and demand subjugation and obedience to the prince despite having an entire fucking moral theory called no special rights and privileges to anyone.
[11:59] Do you know what kind of fucking sadist you have to be to inflict that on mankind? And what about all the academics? Well, they're bought and sold by the state. Their brains are on the quivering quivering jelly auction block of government power. They are bought and fucking sold and manacled by the ghost chains of fiat currency and unjust bloody privilege. They are the aristocrats. They cannot criticize the king because the king is the source of their legitimacy and power. How do you reconcile in any sane fucking universe? How do you reconcile? A. Nobody should have any special privileges whatsoever and be the divine right of kings. What an asshole. In a just future society, they will dig up the bones of these people and summon the ghosts of half a billion dead to fucking pee on them. See, the individual actress, while important to their victims, are not important to society as a whole. So what I mean by that is you can get food poisoning. You could get, theoretically, I guess, cholera or something like that.
[13:20] You're infinitely more likely to get these illnesses if the food is rotten and there's no indoor plumbing, right? And the entire system is rotten as a whole, right? If you have water filtration systems, if you have clean plumbing, if you have UV eradication of bacteria, if you boil your water, like all of the, if all of these things were known to the point where you turn on the tap in a first world country, you turn on the tap.
[13:56] Can drink the water without dying. It's a plus. It's a good thing. So, individual bad actors are like people, something gets misstamped on the best before date, something gets sold too late, they get sick, you know, something ends up in the food at a sandwich shop. That happened to me many years ago. I lost a whole day of my life because some sandwich shop produced something that was bad, and these are individual acts of food poisoning, as opposed to everything's fucking rotten, and you're taking your life in your hands every time you take a bite. When people didn't even know they had to wash their hands before putting their hands in people's innards in sort of surgery, and I think it was late in the 19th century when people finally figured out you should wash your hands and not transfer germs, when people thought that washing your hands was bad for you, and people thought that bathing as a whole was bad for you. People thought all of that. People died by the millions.
[15:01] Now, how many people die from simple infections? Well, we've got water purity, we've got good food standards, frozen food, fridges, hand washing, lots of things to make sure we don't die or don't have a significant risk of dying every time we eat. Oh, well, I'm going to die if I don't eat, but I might die if I do eat, right? A few children will die over the first couple of years of life, but not half. See, when people had bad ideas about health and safety and bad equipment, then people died by the hundreds of millions. When people have better ideas about these things, then they don't.
[15:50] What I'm saying is that when you have a terrible system, it's the system that is the problem. When you have a good system, there will be individual exceptions, but the system is not the problem. So, UPB fixes the system. Will there still be individual bad actors? Yes, for sure. But the system is fixed. Will a few babies still get sick and die after childbirth? Yes, but not half. Will there be occasional cases of food poisoning? Sure. Yeah, we've all been through it, right? It's very rare. You don't die, usually. And it's not common. It's not commonplace. I've had maybe, I don't know, I'm guessing maybe three to five instances of food. That's hard to tell, right? Because it'd be a 24-hour bug, right? You know, probably, I don't know, three or four or five instances of food poisoning over the course of my entire life. So UPB says we need to correct the bad moral theories.
[16:55] And people say, well, this, will this make everyone moral? No, but it fixes the system.
[17:04] If you say you should wash your hands to try to avoid getting sick, and certainly before you operate on someone, you should wash your hands. Practice good hand washing. Now, if people don't even know that, they'll get sick a lot more. Ah, but once you tell people that they have to wash their hands, particularly before eating and touching somebody else's innards, does that mean that everyone will? No, some people won't. I'm sure some doctors don't wash their hands when they should. I'm sure 99.9% of them do, but if people don't even know that they need to wash their hands, and you make the proof, and you establish the science, and you.
[17:55] Make the data absolute, and you make it impossible to not know this and to not understand it, and you've got the theory, you've got the practice, you've got the data, you've got the proof, you need to wash your hands. Does that mean that everyone will wash their hands? Not everyone. And can you imagine if you were the first guy to figure out that doctors need to, surgeons, surgeons in particular, need to wash their hands. Doctors, surgeons need to wash their hands. If you were the first person to figure that out, and you were to say, you know, I could say something. I don't know, man. I could say something about it, but I know that it's going to save hundreds of millions of lives over the centuries. I could say something, but, you know, the problem is, you know, I can't guarantee that absolutely everyone is going to wash their hands, so I guess I'll just be silent.
[18:49] Do you get how nuts that is? How crazy it is? How deranged that is? How monstrous that is? True that I have a patient, says a doctor. It's true that I have a patient dying of antibiotics. In fact, the dying of an infection. I should give them antibiotics. But a patient is dying. But I can't guarantee that everyone is going to take their antibiotics at exactly the right time. So I guess I'll just not give anyone antibiotics. Do you see? I don't, obviously, don't understand it. I don't. I do not understand it. Why you wouldn't want to fix the system? You should act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone. First of all, Immanuel Kant didn't believe that at all. So what would I care about a dietician who doesn't follow their own diet? That's the opposite of their own diet. There should be no special privileges for everyone, except for the prince. He should have the power of life and death over tens or even hundreds of millions of people. A billion people, whatever. Yeah, let's give it to the prince and the government in China. And to communism. Yeah, sure. Absolutely. Millions.
[20:09] Billions. This is the moral rule. Asterisk. Also the complete opposite. Come on. Imagine that in physics. This is the rule of physics. Also complete opposite.
[20:24] Everyone should act as if the principle of their action becomes a moral rule for everyone, except for those people with the most power of life and death. They can do whatever the fuck they want, and you should never say no or disobey them. They can kill your family. You should just nod and smile and bob your head and say, yes, sir, no, sir, three bags full, sir, anything you want, do what you will, slaughter my children, ostracize my wife, exile my grandparents, whatever, right? Because the other question is, well, why? What is the reason that we should act as if the principle of our action becomes a general rule for everyone? Certainly, the incentive is to convince other people that they should follow rules while you don't have to follow the rule at all.
[21:11] Most advantageous resource acquisition strategy is to convince everyone else to respect property rights while giving yourself permission to steal. Or in the case of the prince, giving yourself the right to steal. Right? There's no better strategy. If you were the only thief in society, you could just walk around taking stuff and people wouldn't even imagine that you'd stolen it. or that it had been stolen, that, oh, I misplaced it, or the wind took it away, or whatever, right? A magpie. And there'd be no locks, no personal protections, no pins, no passwords. You'd have a very easy time of it. So the best resource acquisition strategy, is to convince others that they should obey all the moral rules while you should not. And that's the source of the prince's power.
[22:07] So Immanuel Kant Could not have served evil Any better If he were Satan himself, Act as if the principle of the action Becomes a general rule for everyone Why? He didn't prove that it's self-contradictory if you don't He just says, well, you're kind of a hypocrite If you convince Other people To follow a rule that you're not following Well, you're a hypocrite a UPB doesn't rely on that because that's bullshit of course there are hypocrites, hypocrisy developed in human society because it's so unbelievably profitable to be a hypocrite, unbelievably profitable to be a hypocrite, to convince other people of moral rules you don't have to follow yourself. And the way you do that is through bribery and threat. You bribe people to agree with you and you threaten people who point out the con. Which is why, despite being an absolute servant of the worst fucking evils on the planet, Immanuel Kant is still an honored moralist in the halls of academia. What, what? Oh, such a deep and wise and predictable moral reasoner.
[23:28] Think if Immanuel Kant had pointed out the evils of the prince, he would be taught anywhere. He's only taught because he serves power, he serves evil, he justifies the slaughter of hundreds of millions and the pillaging of generations. Based upon the wealth and exploitation of the present. Immanuel Kant serves those in power, as does Hobbes, as does, I mean, I've got a whole history of philosophers series, right? And Locke served those newly in power, i.e. the founding fathers in America. So very, very helpful for them, because Locke justified why you overthrow a government and get a new one, which, for the people who want to have their own government, it's a plus. But it's really not that complicated. Thou shalt not steal applies to human beings. The prince is just a human being, therefore he should not steal. It's not complicated.
[24:38] To a kid, nobody should use violence except for the very tallest kid. The very tallest kid can totally use violence. No, that's not fair. No fair. No fair. Why does he get to do it? Right? If the teacher were to say, everyone gets an hour of homework tonight except the redheads. Oh, why? What's so special about being a redhead? Why do they get exempt from the rules? Right you see you follow right it's not complicated kids understand it and for tens of thousands of years adults have pretended not to understand it um i get it you you can get into some serious shit it's some serious blowback i get that i get it but i mean the time has passed now we can we can be honest right let us not talk falsely loud for the hour is getting late.
[25:32] But UPB stomps not one bad actor. In the same way that saying,
[25:37] wash your hands, does not force everyone. Like, when you say wash your hands, giant mechanical arms don't descend from the sky and force everyone to wash their hands. I understand. Just because there are airplanes that go from one end of Canada to another doesn't mean that Terry Fox isn't going to run, or I guess technically hop, from one end of Canada to the other. But you can't just because there are planes and trains and buses and cars and bicycles. You can't, you can't guarantee that there's nobody who's going to walk across the country. Yeah, can't guarantee it. But it's very, very, very much the exception in the same way that even if everyone washes their hands, who's a doctor or at the hospital, it doesn't guarantee that nobody gets post-op infections, but the ones that happen will be very rare. It could be the case that the safety on a gun is faulty, but still, we have safeties on guns, because it lowers the incidence of accidental discharges enormously.
[26:50] So, UPB says that rape, theft, assault, and murder can never be universally preferable behavior. It's logically impossible, it's self-contradictory, it can't happen at all. It's impossible. It is self-contradictory. It cannot occur. It cannot be valid. It cannot be sustained. It cannot be logical. It cannot be moral. It cannot be consistent. They cannot be moral. Again, does that mean that there'll be no evil? No, because there's free will. But what we need with free will, obviously, what we need with free will is better information, Right?
[27:27] Information. If somebody doesn't even know, they don't have a germ theory, they don't have a theory of soap or anything like that. If somebody doesn't even know that washing their hands will help prevent infection before they operate on someone, they don't have the choice to wash their hands, really. I mean, unless they happen to have some OCD fetish for it. So UPB is like saying to surgeons, wash your hands. But they won't all do it. Who cares? Right now, almost none of them do it. After washing your hands becomes a standard, almost all, like one out of 10,000 might not, which saves hundreds of millions of lives over centuries. I don't, it's physics envy, is it? Because, is it to say, well, things have to be absolute? Well, they can't be absolute. The reason we need morality is because people choose badly. The reason we need a science of nutrition is people choose to eat badly, because taste is not a reliable indicator of what is good for you, right? So, act as if the principle of your action becomes a general rule for everyone. Why? Because that's moral, that's good, but there are evil people in the world who are going to be hypocritical, they're going to advocate for morals that they don't follow themselves, right?
[28:48] Already moral, can only be led astray by bad moral theories. If there was a theory of surgery that said dip your hands in animal fecal matter or human fecal matter before you operated, then doctors, even those doctors who, especially those doctors who wanted to do right by their patients, would dip their hands into more fecal matter before operating on people and therefore would cause people to get infected and die. And it was their conscientiousness that would cause them to harm their patients because they had bad information. So UPB is just there to say to people, we are going to remove the bad information you have about morality, and we're going to demand that that which you claim is universally preferable behavior can actually be universally preferable behavior. That's all. That gives people better information. And yeah, it's disorienting. I get all of that. I get all of that. But it's really essential.
[29:48] UPB aims not at individual actors, but at bad moral theories,
[29:52] because bad moral theories program the individual actress to achieve evil while trying to be good. People who just want to be evil, UPB won't touch them. It will, of course, justify self-defense against them, which will eliminate them quite quickly. If people want to do a lot of violent evil and you have the right to weaponry and self-defense, they're not going to last super long, right? So, it doesn't touch individual actors. Like, if there are, of course, occasional surgeons who are just sadists, they just became surgeons because they're sadists and they want to hurt people and this and that and the other, right? Okay. So, they may only pretend to wash their hands because they want to infect their patients. Okay, but that's such a wild exception to the general rule. Most surgeons want to do a good job and don't want to infect their patients and want the healing process to go well, right?
[30:38] People who need the best information. The most conscientious and virtuous among us, if programmed by bad moral theories, become the most evil among us. This is sort of the awful white liberal female situation, right? So, it is removing bad information from the conscientious and good-hearted so they can actually do good rather than serve evil. And Immanuel Kant has them serving evil. And for that, given how powerful he was in terms of logic, for that he can never be held inexcusable. He can never be held excuse-free. His behavior, his writings are absolutely inexcusable. Because if it's not safe, for whatever reason, he chose, right? You could put this in your will, you could put this in the end of your life thing, right? But if, for some reason, he felt it wasn't safe to say what was moral, then he should have shut the fuck up and not hand more weapons to the enemies
[31:35] of mankind to ensure as much human enslavement as inhumanly possible. And for that, well, his memory should be cursed forever and ever. Amen. Freedomain.com/donate. Thank you so much, my friends. I'll talk to you soon.
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