0:03 - Introduction to Genetic Concerns
2:00 - Disarming Your Instincts
6:21 - Counter-Signaling in Media
12:10 - Philosophy vs. Probability
16:30 - The Role of Moral Philosophy
18:50 - Cost-Benefit Analysis Unpacked
23:43 - The Limits of Philosophy
In this episode, we delve into the complex interplay between genetic concerns and the desire to have children, addressing a recurrent question from listeners: how can one navigate the challenges of potential genetic issues when considering parenthood? As a speaker who advocates for pro-natalism, I share my understanding of the concerns about passing on genetic issues while also examining the foundational principles of reasoning related to morality and probability.
I explore the distinction between deductive and inductive reasoning, emphasizing that while deductive reasoning offers absolute certainties, inductive reasoning deals with probabilities and likely outcomes. This sets the stage for a deeper conversation on how we gauge risk when it comes to significant life choices, such as starting a family. By providing relatable examples, I illustrate the nuances involved in weighing the decision to have children, especially when the possibility of genetic issues arises.
Throughout the episode, I critique modern media's portrayal of instincts and biases, highlighting how these narratives often undermine our rational decision-making processes. The underlying message is crucial: while society may encourage the disarming of our instincts, our survival and happiness often hinge on acknowledging and respecting them. For example, I touch on how media frequently depicts stereotypical roles, particularly among teenagers, perpetuating misconceptions that can distort our realities and further complicate our decision-making.
The discussion naturally leads to the nature of risk assessment, particularly in contexts where life-changing choices are on the horizon. I emphasize that moral philosophy primarily focuses on absolutes of good and evil, providing clear guidelines for behaviors that are inherently wrong. However, when it comes to personal decision-making regarding risks—such as whether to have children with known genetic issues—these questions fall outside the realm of morality and into the domain of individual judgment and cost-benefit analysis.
I illustrate this by examining anecdotal experiences, sharing insights into how life choices must be informed by personal circumstances and the values we hold. The significance of love and support in enabling individuals to make these difficult decisions is reiterated, as I argue that love acts as a crucial protective factor against dysfunction and despair in life choices.
By the episode's conclusion, I aim to empower listeners with the understanding that while I cannot provide direct answers to their individual dilemmas, I can guide them through the factors they need to consider in their decision-making processes. Ultimately, the responsibility for weighing risks and potential outcomes lies with the individual, and I encourage listeners to approach these important decisions with careful contemplation and self-awareness.
[0:00] Well, good morning, everybody. Hope you're doing well. Stefan Molyneux, from Freedmain.
[0:03] So, a couple of interesting questions have come down the pipe. One is something that I've had recur over the course of the show, and it is this. Somebody says, well, Stef, you're pretty pronatalist, but how do I deal with the possibility that I have genetic issues that could transmit itself to a child? And I find that a very interesting question. I'm very sympathetic to the challenges of that question, of course, right? But it is a very interesting question which brings up the relationship between reason and probability. I don't think there is much of a relationship between reason and probability.
[0:54] So, with regards to moral questions, of course, I mean, I've got this in the art of the argument. My book, the first is deductive reasoning, which is absolute, right? All men are mortal. Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is immortal. And the other is inductive reasoning, which is probabilities. If you see a woman, you know she has 20 cats, right? She lives next door, she's got 20 cats. You see 19 of her cats are white with a dark spot on their chest, all 19 of them. You can assume without 100% proof that the 20th cat is the same, right? She's got a fetish or a preference for that kind of cat, right? So you can't know for sure, but it's likely, right? If you had to bet, right? If you had to bet. I mean, when it comes to pattern recognition, that there's this horrible thing in the modern world. It's truly horrible. The modern world is all about disarming. It's all about disarming the righteous. It's all about disarming the righteous.
[2:00] So you see this all the time.
[2:04] In movies and TV shows, it's the counter signal. It is the anti-reasoning, anti-deductive reasoning. So, for instance, if there's a woman, she wants to catch a bus at midnight, then she sees a guy, I don't know, he's got a swastika carved in his forehead, he seems kind of twitchy, he's dressed like a punk, and so on. And she's got this instinct to not take the bus, right, to wait until this guy leaves, to grab an Uber or a cab or wait or walk or something like that, right? So she's got this instinct to avoid him. And in just about every modern movie and TV show, her instinct is absolutely wrong. It turns out, don't you know, she's just prejudiced. She's got these cliches and these stereotypes in her mind, and it's just wrong.
[3:10] He's really the nicest guy. And you see this all the time, guys with like weird tackle bait hooks on their face, and they're like, you know, really nice and sweet, and they like to help her move and so on, right? So this is the, it's the disarming of your instincts. Like all of your instincts are prejudicial, right? All of your instincts are prejudicial. All of your gut sense is bigotry and so on, right?
[3:38] And what they're doing is they're counter-programming you to disarm you, right? So, if you look at how teenagers are portrayed, this is a constant theme. How are teenagers portrayed? Well, teenagers are portrayed that the nerds are super, super, super nice people. You know, they're kind of disparaged and excluded, and the nerds are just really nice and thoughtful and caring and, you know, like the Anthony Michael Hall thing, right?
[4:14] And the jocks, the athletes and so on, well, they're just mean, terrible, awful, wretched bullies, right? That's just a pretty much a constant of media and has been for, I don't know, I mean, I think Revenge of the Nerds and so on. This goes back to, I guess, Eddie Haskell, who was the rather skeevy friend of the Leave it to Beaver brother. And he was portrayed as pretty, pretty askance, right? And bullies are always just mean and terrible and so on. They're not a reaction to degeneracy or dysfunction or, you know, I mean, if you look at, in my experience, and again, it's just anecdotal, but, you know, anecdotal doesn't mean invalid, right? So, in my experience, the jocks, and I spent a fair amount of time around the jocks because, I mean, I wasn't a jock myself in particular, but I was on the swim team, the water polo team, I was on the cross-country team. I played soccer and squash and tennis and baseball. And, you know, I was never at any particular elite level. I guess I did pretty well in swimming. I was seventh fastest in Ontario back in the day. So, but I wasn't like, you know, the letterman jock, right?
[5:36] But the athlete guys were always really nice. And being an athlete and, you know, it's often associated with higher intelligence. It's often associated with a little bit of conformity, for sure, but it's often associated with, you know, obviously, to be an athlete, particularly in team sports, you need good social skills, and you also need to be able to manage your aggression. So, you need to be aggressive in the game and shake hands afterwards. So, you need to both have aggression and manage aggression. So, there's this counter-signaling that, and, you know, to be honest, if not a little too brutal, do the school shooters come from the football team?
[6:21] Right? Or are they the nerdy, weak, excluded people? So, you're counter-signaled all the time that the purpose of media is to instill disarming anti-instincts in you, in that the pretty girls are cold and mean and nasty, right? That sort of mean girls thing. And the plain girls are nice and thoughtful and lovely and wonderful. And this goes to Clerks, right? The Kevin Smith movie. And I have never found the pretty girls to be particularly nasty. I mean, I do see them as a little aloof for sure, but that's natural because we live in a society where the pretty girls stay pretty for 20 years or more, right? Obviously, right? They stay pretty forever and ever, amen. then. And in the past, like the really pretty girls were supposed to get married off in their teens, have a bunch of babies. And, you know, what's that horrible line from Raging Bull? You ain't so pretty now, right?
[7:27] I don't mean this in any negative way. I'm just saying that beauty was supposed to be like a Lucifer match. A Lucifer match is a giant match that you use in theater so the people in the back can see that you're lighting a match. It was supposed to burn bright and short. That was the purpose of, and this is why the beauty is so intense, is that it's supposed to, you know, you're not supposed to get Botox and face sanding and whatever the hell they do. I saw this one the other day where they put five needles deep into your cheek. It's like it's revolting. You're not supposed to be this biochemical cyborg of plastic surgery into your 50s.
[8:05] So the pretty girls can't be too friendly because the guys take their friendliness as invitations to become attached, right? I remember the prettiest girl in school, a very, very nice woman, a girl, I guess, back in this is in junior high school. She and I became friendly and she went to Florida with her family and I paid her $5 to buy me some shark jaws, because I was really into sharks at the time. And she did. And I did ask her out. And she was very polite about it, and so on. But she didn't want to go out with me. And so not, I mean, I've never found them to be nasty. I mean, certainly not more than the average, right? So all the attractive people are mean and nasty and vicious. And all of the losers, outcasts, and excluded are warm and kind and wonderful, and it's just not true. It's not the exact opposite, but that is not true. That is not true.
[9:11] Consume so much media that their empiricism is propaganda, right? What they think of as real is just other people programming them. It used to be the function of theology, now it is the function of leftist ideology. So, we work with probability, right? If you see a shark in the water, then you probably, like a, not a nurse shark or something, right, but something that's dangerous, like a bull shark or Carcharidon, Carcharious, hey, I told you I was into sharks, a great white shark or something, even a blue shark could be, but something that is very aggressive and will eat a human. If you see a big great white shark in the water, I mean, unless you're literally going shark watching, right, in which case, I hope you're in a cage, but you don't get in the water. Now, you could say, well, but, you know, the odds that the shark is going to eat me a pretty low. I mean, he might have just eaten. But you play these odds, right? Always you play these odds, right? If you're walking in the jungle and a panther is following you, you'd probably be a little nervous. You'd be a little cautious, right? Or very cautious. But you could say, well, he's just curious. I'm sure he's just eaten and he's just curious.
[10:31] Right? It's the old thump in your house in the middle of the night, right? I remember once living in a new house that was settling and it was creaking and growing like the hold of a pirate ship and, you know, the thump in the house, you know, odds are almost certain that it's nothing, but do you take that risk?
[10:48] Now, philosophy has developed deductive reasoning, but evolution has created inductive reasoning because most of evolutionary choices are about inductive reasoning. So, if you want a child.
[11:10] If you meet a woman who's 40 and she hasn't had a period in six months, maybe she lost a bunch of weight or something like that, then you're not going to get a kid out of her. Like, you have to go, because the choices are binary, but the reasoning is inductive, right? Or the instincts are inductive, right? So, if a bear is running towards you in the woods, you're scared. However, you could say, well, the bear is just curious, really curious, or whatever, right? And it could be, probably not, but it could be. But survival means that you have to play the caution side of the deck, right? The caution side of the hand you dealt with. You have to be overly cautious. People who were not cautious died at a higher rate than those who were cautious. Now, those who were too cautious, over-cautious, ended up kind of paranoid and unpleasant, and maybe people didn't mate with them, or maybe they were so stressed that they had heart attacks. I don't know, right? So.
[12:11] Of that is pretty foundational. So, moral philosophy is not about inductive reasoning. Moral philosophy is not about probabilities, because moral philosophy is particular to humanity, to human beings, and yet all animals deal with the question or the problem of probability.
[12:38] So, for instance, if you've ever, I mean, if you have kids, what do kids do? They try to feed squirrels and chipmunks, right? And you can see the chipmunk or the squirrel, if it's a wild chipmunk or squirrel, which I guess they are, peanut excluded RIP. If you see your kids trying to feed the squirrels, you can see the squirrels trying to calculate. They want the food, but they're afraid of getting caught. It's the same thing with birds. I remember being in northern Ontario with my daughter with a plate of french fries and we were trying to feed all the seagulls, right? So the seagulls wanted the french fry, but the seagulls were afraid of being caught. So they are weighing probabilities. I mean, animals as a whole spend a lot of time weighing probabilities, right? A lion chases a zebra. And if the zebra runs really quickly or gets too much of a head start, the lion might run for a few seconds and then calculate, deep in his instinctual sense, his gut, that he's going to expend more energy trying to catch the zebra relative to what he's going to get, right?
[13:48] Or, you know, he's going to risk tripping, the ground is too uneven, you know, if he breaks his leg, that's it for him as a hunter, he's just going to die in agony. So he creeps up close and he weighs the probabilities, well, if I get any closer, they're going to smell me and run away. But if I'm this far away, it's going to be really hard to catch them, you know, all of this kind of stuff, right? So lions, I mean, we can see this all over, all over the place in nature.
[14:17] And so, they're constantly working with the inductive reasoning, so to speak. Now, we wouldn't call it formally that. So, if the woman of your dreams, let's say you want three kids and the woman of your dreams is 35, right? You meet her, she's 35, right? Well, if she's 20, you might still not get your three kids, right? Because a 20-year-old can be infertile, and a 35-year-old could conceivably, bum-bum, get you three kids, right? So, you have to play the odds, though. If you want three kids, you're better off going with the 20-year-old than the 35-year-old.
[15:01] And if you are concerned about, again, this is not medical advice, this is just my vague memory of it, so don't take anything I say with any seriousness at all. But if you're concerned about the genetic health of the fetus, you can get a sample, but that means piercing the amniotic sac, which has risks to the baby. So we all have to weigh these probabilities, right? I mean, I enjoyed and found it important to do politics for many years. And then the cost-benefit changed, and I no longer found it as valuable. Like every time you drive for something that's not essential right like heaven help us heaven above help us my family and we all drove into toronto to go to casa loma now that was not an essential trip at all and we risked dying in a fiery car crash well maybe not fiery because traffic was moving at a snail's pace but that was the reality that this was a non-essential trip and we risked death, in order to see a castle. When you fly, non-essential, right? You understand, right? So we're all weighing these things.
[16:20] Want to gain a lot of muscle, then you may exercise to the point where you get injured, right? So again, so these are, but these are all things that animals do.
[16:30] And because it's things that animals do, it is not the province of moral philosophy. So when people say to me, what risk should I take? That is not the job of a moral philosopher. I hope that this is hopefully not too long a way of explaining why I understand why people ask me this, for sure. I really do. But it's not an appropriate question for a moral philosopher. Because a moral philosopher will tell you good and evil, right and wrong, in absolute terms, right? Rape is absolutely evil and wrong. Theft is absolutely evil and wrong. Assault is absolutely evil and wrong. And murder is absolutely evil and wrong. So, there's no ambiguity there.
[17:18] But in terms of what risks you should take, that is a matter of a cost-benefit analysis. Now, a cost-benefit analysis can lead you to great evil, right? So, amoral or evil or repulsive, morally repulsive men might say, well, I'm not having any luck getting a woman to mate with me, right? So, this evil guy would then choose to rape. Now, does this pass along his genetics? Well, not very well, because the victim, his victim will not want to care for the offspring. But it's a higher chance than zero, and it's zero if you can't get anyone to mate with him, right? So, that's a cost-benefit analysis at a biological level that leads to the great evil of sexual assault and rape.
[18:08] Same thing with theft. A theft is generally pursued by people who are unloved. Because if you're loved, you just ask people for things, right? Freedomain.com slash donate. Show me the love. Show me the love. Right? So no, if you're loved, right? The people who are homeless have burned every bridge in their life, right? There's nobody who wants to take care of them anymore. There's no couch for them to crash on. There's no one who'll give them a job like they, you know, maybe they're addicts or other people with dysfunctions who just nobody left to love them. And so people steal or end up in these kinds of situations because they are unloved. And love is the great shield against these kinds of misfortunes and disasters.
[18:51] So it's like the question that people could ask me and say, well, should I start my own business or should I work for someone else? Right? So, I mean, if you're a male, particularly a white male, you know, you may have some difficulties getting hired, so maybe it's better for you to start your own business, and so on, right? So, I can remind people of the various factors involved, but I can't tell anyone what to do. So, if people have really messed up parents that are putting them down and so on, right? Obviously, it's not immoral, it's not evil to be in contact with abusive people. It may be immoral to put your children under the care, quote, care of abusive people. Like if you have abusive parents and they babysit your kids and they yell at your kids or hit your kids, that could be immoral. Or certainly the hitting, yes, because you're delivering them unto evil. But if you yourself, and I've said this before, like you don't have the right to put your children in abusive situations. But now, you yourself, it's your choice. If you want to spend time with abusive people, I don't recommend it, but it's not a moral question like good and evil. It may be a functionality question, it may be a happiness question, and so on, but it's not a foundationally moral question.
[20:17] Certainly is a question of love. If people care about you and then don't seem to care that you spend time with people who put you down or insult you, well, that's a lack of love, right? That's a lack of love. So I can point out the costs and benefits, right? So I can say, well, if you spend time with abusive parents, that's going to really hamper the quality of the man or woman who's going to date you, right? It's going to affect your self-esteem and your confidence. It's going to have negative effects on things, right? It's like the doctor will tell you, if you keep smoking a pack a day of cigarettes, you're very likely to get sick. Like 50% of smokers die from smoking, right?
[21:02] But he can't knock the cigarette out of your hand all the time. So when people come to me for a moral answer, I will give them the moral answer with great certainty and hopefully some vivacity and, and convinceability. But when people come to me with a cost-benefit analysis, I will point out the costs and benefits, but I won't tell them what to do because the costs and benefits have to be weighed within the mind of each person, right? So should you spend time with abusive parents? Well, let's say that your father is dead, your mother is on her deathbed, and you are going to inherit $10 million, and you are going to devote that to the spread of peaceful parenting. And, you know, does the cost benefit mean that you can go visit your mother a couple of times on her deathbed and not confront her about the wrong that she's done, but instead take the money and do some good with it? You know, given that it's not immoral to go and see your mother on her deathbed, and given that you can do great good with the money, this is not a crime and punishment, Raskolnikov situation, right, which is who kills a porn broker and her sister to get money to, quote, do good, right? So you can see the cost benefit.
[22:18] I can't tell people what to do with regards to cost-benefits. I can tell them what to do with regards to morality, sure, yes, but that's UPB, right? But I can't tell people what to do with regards to weighing costs and benefits.
[22:32] And when you have a cost-benefit, such as I have a genetic disorder that has an X percentage chance of transmitting to my children, should I have children, that is not a moral question.
[22:46] That is... Now, obviously, if it's a 99% chance that your child will die before six months of age, that would be a pretty gruesome thing to go through. And obviously, the odds... I mean, that's an easy decision to make. Not a pleasant decision to make, but it's like, let's, no good, right? If it's a 1% chance that your child might have eczema by the age of 50, well, that's, you know, slightly different cost-benefit and, you know, very different odds and so on, right? So, I can't give you that answer. I think it is important to take all of the factors into consideration, but it's like trying to design policy, government policy based on cost-benefit analysis rather than morality, right? Well, if the government takes $5 million and creates 50 jobs, there's 50 jobs. Ah, yes, but what about of all the jobs that weren't created and so on. It's like, well, how about the government just doesn't take their money in the first place? That's the moral answer, right?
[23:43] But yeah, cost benefits, not the province of moral philosophy. And really, the only job that philosophy can do is not tell you the answer to cost-benefit calculations, but to remind you of the various factors and stakes involved so that you can make a more informed decision. But the decision, of course, finally has to be yours. All right. I hope that helps. Freedomain.com. If you would like to help out, I would really, really super duper appreciate it. Have yourself a wonderful a day. Lots of love. We'll talk to you soon. Bye.
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